Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Jane Elgee’s father died when she was three. Within six years, her older sister and brother made advantageous marriages and left home. She lived with her mother and came of age at 34 Leeson Street, in a middle-class neighborhood located south of Dublin’s Grand Canal. A lonely girl, she found solace in reading and teaching herself foreign languages. Fortunately, her widowed mother had family money to provide home tutoring.

  In her twenties, she was drawn into politics through the Young Irelander poets, who had aligned themselves with Charles Gavan Duffy’s Nation. Between 1846 and 1848, she published poetry there, under the nom de plume of John Fanshawe Ellis, later signing herself “Speranza,” Italian for hope. (Her notepaper bore the motto Fidanza, Speranza, Costanza.) Speranza saw herself as “the acknowledged voice in poetry of all the people of Ireland.”

  In 1849, while Duffy was arrested for sedition and awaiting trial, she wrote two editorials (“The Hour of Destiny” and “Jacta Alea Est,” or “The Die Is Cast”), which declared—a bit prematurely—that Ireland was at war with England. She admitted authorship of “Jacta Alea Est,” but Duffy was tried anyway. In court she may—or may not—have stood up in the gallery and proclaimed: “I, and I alone, am the culprit, if culprit there be.” Four juries failed to convict Duffy. The Nation was suppressed, and the wounded Young Irelanders dispersed. Speranza’s fleeting arc from unknown poet to political celebrity ended, but she retained her pseudonym.

  Unmarried at Twenty-Eight—and with no burning desire to find a husband—Speranza decided to translate books and poetry. Some accounts claim she mastered twelve languages, but the record shows fluency in Italian, French, and German; her translations of Russian, Turkish, Spanish, and Portuguese poetry for The Nation demonstrated an ability to look words up in a dictionary. Her first major translation (she would do six from 1849 to 1863) was Johannes Wilhelm Meinhold’s sadomasochistic seventeenth-century fantasy, Sidonia the Sorceress. The poet Edmund Gosse observed how “this German romance did not begin to exist until an Irishwoman revealed it to a select English circle.”

  The novel’s heroine, Sidonia von Bork, Abbess of the Convent of Marienfliess, tortures geese, whips young men, and dances on coffins. She fascinated Dante Gabriel Rossetti as well as his Pre-Raphaelite colleague Edward Burne-Jones, who painted her portrait in 1860. Speranza said she did the translation only for money and refused to have her name on the title page. Even so, Sidonia established her reputation, and her next project was Alphonse de Lamartine’s Pictures of the First French Revolution.

  Wilde said that Lady Duff-Gordon’s translation of Meinhold’s The Amber Witch and his mother’s Sidonia were his “favourite romantic reading when a boy.” Certainly Sidonia and Melmoth were literary legacies worthy of emulation. In both novels, paintings compete as characters, not an original concept but one Wilde used ingeniously in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. and ominously in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Melmoth, the portrait of the ancestor who bargained with the devil to live 150 years without aging is hidden in an old lumber room, similar to the nursery where Dorian Gray conceals his picture when it becomes grotesquely disfigured.

  Speranza lived the intellectual and unromantic life of a spinster; she translated French and German books, wrote poetry, attended lectures and concerts, and cared for her ailing mother. She would have been a commonplace figure had she not embarked on a secret correspondence with a young man met during a trip to Scotland in 1847. They wrote to each other for fifteen years. Only fifty of her letters survive, and his identity remains a mystery. She was clearly infatuated with this Scotsman—her letters are candid about love and marriage but lacking the intimacy of the postal flirtations between Ellen Terry and George Bernard Shaw or George Sand and Gustave Flaubert.

  In one letter she describes her ideal mate as “a Baronet of £5,000 a year with the Athenian’s soul and your good heart.” She flirts a bit: “I don’t care for a friendship unless fringed with—not quite love perhaps—but something that is always on the point of becoming so,” and shares her fantasies: “In love I like to feel myself a slave—the difficulty is to find anyone capable of ruling me. I love them when I feel their power.” Lord Henry similarly observes in Dorian Gray: “I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else.… We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters all the same. They love being dominated.”

  Jane shocked guests at her salons with offhand comments about sin being the only thing worth living for, but such talk was a mask, a calculated performance. Her recent biographer Joy Melville maintains that her “sense of morality was strong, and not being a woman with a strong sexual nature she was not tempted to stray.” Except in letters. After corresponding for three years, her Scotsman wrote that he planned to marry. “Do forgive me if I am not very enthusiastic,” she wrote him in 1850. “I shall have to wait ten years now I suppose before your ardour is sufficiently cooled down to find a rational opinion on any point literary or psychological.” And she bitterly noted, “I hate men in love, the heart holds but one at a time.”

  The following year, her mother died. She could live either alone, which would be considered improper, or with relatives. Instead she married, but not with the thought of being a traditional wife. Her brother observed that “Jane has some heart, she has good impulses, but the love of self is the prominent feature of her character.” When Oscar inherited this love of self, he transformed it into the first celebrity art form.

  Blessed with a tenacious nature, William Robert Wills Wilde could find scientific wisdom in a nursing porpoise or a mummified dwarf. The plaque at One Merrion Square in Dublin distinguishes him as an “aural and ophthalmic surgeon, archaeologist, ethnologist, antiquarian, biographer, statistician, naturalist, topographer, historian, folklorist.” On another level, he was an unabashed sentimentalist who played Pygmalion to young Galateas, enjoying (like his son) being the older, cultured man who tutors the unsophisticated.

  Oscar’s father was born in March 1815 in the village of Kilkeevin near Castlerea, in the western county of Roscommon; his Irish ancestors were merchants, farmers, and clerics. His father, Thomas Wilde, was a kindly man, a physician who treated the poor and billed the gentry. Trained in his image, young William learned to dress head wounds after blackthorn fights and to set broken arms, and, as he matured, he developed that rare talent of being able to put patients at ease. When it was time for formal schooling, he put on his one good suit, hefted a suitcase weighted with books, and made his way to Dublin.

  The physicians there were among the best in Europe and included William Stokes, often credited with the creation of the first stethoscope: a rolled-up sheet of paper. This technique allowed doctors to listen to the heartbeat without getting too close to the stench. Medical students had a steady supply of cadavers stolen from paupers’ graves. Any prick with a dissecting knife led to infection, sometimes amputation of fingers. Bleeding, blistering, and purgation were used to treat most diseases. There were no anesthetics except hot baths and tobacco-smoke enemas (surgical anesthesia was introduced in 1846 at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital); if patients did not faint, they were strapped down, and the surgeon who cut the fastest was considered the best. A bloodstained coat was a badge of honor.

  In the midst of his studies, William Wilde was asked to accompany a recovering patient on an eight-month cruise to the Holy Land. He was only twenty-two when he boarded the 130-ton topsail schooner yacht Crusader on September 24, 1837, and sailed to Madeira, Algiers, Sicily, Egypt, Rhodes, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine, and Greece—a voyage that led to an international reputation outside medicine. The winter seas were rough, and he was frequently seasick, but not too indisposed to dissect porpoises flung onboard. He published his findings on how these mammals nurse their young and turned his diary into a two-volume book.

  Most compelling was Egypt.* Few Europeans had traveled there since Napoléon occupied the country from 1798 to 1801. Following withdrawal of the French Army, ancient
Egyptian sites were unprotected and easily plundered. Like many who came after him, Wilde found the thrill of illicit acquisition irresistible. During a tour of Sakara, he discovered a looted tomb with the mummified remains of a young male dwarf scattered on the sand. He salvaged the torso to bring back to Dublin, then wanted to add some embalmed ibises, the sacred, long-legged, white wading birds. When the guide led him to the tomb with urns of desiccated ibises, Wilde had forgotten the lantern. They decided to go on in the dark, crawling through the blackness. “I do not think in all my travels,” he wrote, “I ever felt the same strong sensation of being in an enchanted place so much as when led by this sinewy child of the desert through the dark winding passages.” Together they dragged six urns into the light.

  A fearless risk taker, Wilde was determined to scale the pyramid of Chephren at Giza, second in size to the Great Pyramid of Cheops. This meant a 707-foot ascent up the side over a forbidding slippery face, a climb that discouraged all but a handful of travelers. Two guides pushed and pulled until Wilde made it to the six-foot-square peak. As he looked down from 471 feet at his friends waving their hats and cheering, he was overcome with euphoria. “I began to think something wonderful had been achieved,” he wrote in Madeira, “and some idea of my perilous situation broke upon me.”

  Returning to Ireland, Wilde published an article in the Dublin University Magazine advocating removal of Cleopatra’s Needle to England.* Founded independently of Trinity College in 1833, and affectionately called DUM, the publication attracted the important Irish writers of the early and middle Victorian periods. The editor was Isaac Butt, a champion of Home Rule and future chief prosecutor for the Mary Travers libel trial that would tarnish Wilde’s reputation.

  William Wilde’s appearance was undistinguished. To many he looked ordinary, like most of the men seen walking along Sackville Street every day. But women observed the short, scruffy figure with pale mischievous eyes and a mustacheless beard emphasizing a wide, sensuous mouth differently. He had charisma, charm, and a gift for storytelling in a land with a proud oral tradition. Seventy-year-old Maria Edgeworth, who first used social realism in her novel The Absentee to expose English landlords, became his patron. She encouraged Wilde to study abroad, to take a physician’s Grand Tour, and provided letters of introduction, and probably some financing. Wilde went to Moorfields Hospital in London—then as now a center for ophthalmology—spent six months in Vienna, visited Munich, Prague, and Dresden, studied at Heidelberg, and in Berlin worked with Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach, one of the pioneers of plastic surgery.

  He returned a trained specialist burnished with continental patina, a notebook filled with medical hypotheses, and useful ideas such as writing the patient’s temperature and pulse rate on a slate, using flour and water, the early form of chalk. Wilde opened a surgery at 15 Westland Row, at the back of Trinity College; his mother and sister, Margaret, kept house for him. He started writing what became a guide to Austria’s literary, scientific, and medical institutions, still a valuable reference work. DUM praised it as “another of the many instances of how agreeable a book can be made on apparently the least amusing topics, by a clever man, particularly when that clever man is a clever physician.” With his appointment as editor of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, a publication with the contemporary prestige of The Lancet in England or the Journal of the American Medical Association in the United States, Wilde moved from son of a rural doctor to prominence in Dublin’s medical and intellectual circles. What he lacked was an income to match this position.

  This would have been the appropriate time for William Wilde to marry and prosper as a private physician to the rising middle class, but he could not ignore those Dubliners who slept on St. Stephen’s Green or begged outside the Shelbourne Hotel. Following his father’s charitable example, he founded a hospital for the destitute. Once Oscar proudly told a friend how his father had built St. Mark’s “when he was only twenty-nine and not a rich man.”

  As an eligible bachelor, the young doctor should have been attending balls and parties, but that would have taken time away from his patients and his writing—and he wrote every day, often into the evening. His one indulgence was the theatre, where he became infatuated with Helen Faucit, Ireland’s leading actress, known for her Antigone at the old Theatre Royal. But he had little patience for the courting process demanded by beautiful and famous women and probably concealed his admiration. That there were intimacies was known only by his acknowledgment of three illegitimate children.

  A son, christened Henry Wilson, was born in 1838, at the time Wilde was exploring Egyptian tombs. Wilde educated him, took him into his surgery, and made him an heir to his estate. Two daughters, Emily and Mary, born in 1847 and 1849, were adopted by his eldest brother, the Reverend Ralph Wilde, and grew up as Wildes. By taking responsibility for his out-of-wedlock children, Wilde was being a proper Victorian, and in no way was his situation unusual or shocking. It did seem, however, that he wanted to avoid the responsibilities of marriage. Repeatedly, Oscar used the caprices of birth in his plays. “A family is a terrible encumbrance, especially when one is not married” appears in Vera, his first.

  Speranza and Wilde could not have known each other very long before they wed. They may have met when she reviewed his book The Beauties of the Boyne and Blackwater in The Nation. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell says that she does not favor long engagements. “They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.” Speranza was thirty and Wilde was thirty-six. She needed a home and respectability after her mother’s death. And it would have been reckless for Wilde to conceive more children outside marriage. She accepted the existence of his thirteen-year-old son and two young daughters. At their age, it mattered less whether the proposal was motivated by passion, intellectual kinship, or resignation. Speranza might have broached the question. Lord Henry tells Dorian that “it is always the woman who proposes to us, and not we who propose to women.”

  The wedding ceremony on November 14, 1851, in St. Peter’s Church, Dublin, was attended by a small gathering, as the bride was still in mourning and, to judge from the dispatch to Scotland, more submissive than aroused. “For myself I died long ago—the old original Ego that you used to know,” she wrote. “I love and suffer—this is all I am conscious of now and thus at last my great soul is prisoned within a woman’s destiny—nothing interests me beyond the desire to make him happy—for this I could kill myself.”

  Speranza brought to the union not only Kingsbury money but influential friends such as William Rowan-Hamilton, the astronomer and mathematician, and the poet Aubrey De Vere. The couple moved up the street to 21 Westland Row, a Georgian terrace house with a fanlight and wrought-iron balconies. Wilde’s mother and sister stayed on as part of the household. The front room on the ground floor was the surgery; the first-floor drawing room had the usual clutter of overstuffed chairs with antimacassars, flickering gas lamps, and heavy mahogany furniture.

  The year of his marriage, Wilde was appointed census commissioner, with the arduous task of compiling the first statistics on the incidence of deafness, blindness, and eye and ear diseases. He traveled throughout Ireland, accumulating medical histories as well as regional tales of superstitions, legends, and charms. Irish Popular Superstitions was published in 1852 and expanded thirty-five years later by Speranza in Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. Without Wilde’s ability to tease the past from his patients, a bygone oral history would have vanished.

  The Wildes were members of the generation for whom the discovery of Irish history and its literature came as a revelation. “If ever there was a nation that clung to the soil, and earned patriotism by the love of the very ground they walk on,” Oscar’s father wrote, “it is (or we may now write was) the Irish peasantry.” Like other scholars who worked to preserve the old traditions, he believed that the Irish language should be cultivated by th
e upper classes. In his book on Lough Corrib, he warned that “spoken Gaelic is hourly dying out” and predicted that in twenty years it would cease to be used. But Gaelic survived and still is heard in parts of the west of Ireland.

  Speranza held that the “Saxon basis is the rough block of the nation, but it is the Celtic influence that gives it all its artistic value and finish.” But Oscar grew up seeing only creativity suffocated. During his American tour he told an audience: “With the coming of the English, art in Ireland came to an end, and it has had no existence for seven hundred years. I am glad it has not, for art could not live and flourish under a tyrant.” He concluded, “I am Irish by race, but the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.”

  Dublin was changing. Since the union of 1801, when the aristocrats departed for London, the middle class, particularly physicians, lawyers, scientists, and academics, had forged new alliances, taking up residence around the Georgian squares. But Westland Row, where the Wildes started their family, was outside this orbit. Impatient and ambitious, they planned to improve their rank and address.