2

Terribly bad taste

IN THE SECOND half of the nineteenth century Hyde Park had become a pleasure ground surrounded by the palaces of the rich. It was in one such palace that, by the age of twenty, Constance Lloyd found herself resident.

Grandpa Horatio’s house at Lancaster Gate was enormous and imposing. Built as part of an ambitious scheme in the mid-1850s around the newly built Christ Church, it was one of a row of huge houses, set back from the road and overlooking Hyde Park, that had been described as the most handsome terrace in the whole of London.¹ John Horatio was a man who had made his mark, and his address was testimony.

From her new home Constance would have seen the full anatomy of London life. Early in the morning, from half-past seven, the so-called ‘Liver Brigade’ would be out riding. Taking their constitutional gallop, shaking the liver ahead of the day’s toil, London’s top judges, barristers, surgeons and millionaires would be seen clad in silk hats and black hunting coats, breeches and shining patent boots. When they had headed off for the City and Inns of Court, nursemaids in their smart grey flannel uniforms would emerge with perambulators, and governesses would march smart children up and down.

Sometimes Constance would get a sight of a protest, since the park remained the arena for political manifestation since the great Chartist and reformist protests of the 1840s, 50s and 60s. And then in July she would have witnessed the municipal gardeners lay out thousands of potted palms and semi-tropical plants that would transform the park for its ten-week ‘summer season’ into something altogether more exotic.

But prestigious and well located though it was, Constance did not much enjoy ioo Lancaster Gate. Over-sized for its occupancy of three, it was an austere and un-homely place for a modern young woman to live and, as she later told Oscar, she never felt more than a guest there. Although Constance adored her grandfather, her aunt Emily was old-fashioned and disapproved of many of her ambitions. Nevertheless, beneath Constance’s quiet exterior lay a determined soul. Perhaps not quite the ‘smouldering volcano’ that her mother had alleged, but certainly someone with her own strong mind, who was not prepared to toe the line just for the sake of convention. And so Constance pursued her interests as best she could.

She began to display an increasing passion for art and culture, most specifically the visual and decorative arts. Constance makes much mention of the controversial Grosvenor Gallery in her letters in the early 1880s. This was a temple to contemporary art in New Bond Street, designed as an Italian palazzo. The art lovers who worshipped there would pass through its imposing Palladian entrance salvaged from the demolished church of Santa Lucia in Venice, before entering a huge room adorned with a blue coved ceiling on which James McNeill Whistler had painted the phases of the moon and a sprinkling of golden stars. Below a green velvet dado, red silk walls punctuated by Ionic pilasters rescued from the old Italian opera house in Paris displayed the best avant-garde art money could buy.

But the Grosvenor was more than just a gallery: it was also the social nexus for the alternative, Aesthetic, liberal-minded set and was particularly women-friendly. Since its inception it had garnered a reputation for supporting, among others, ‘feminist’ artists, many of whom would go on to become firm friends of Constance and Oscar. Painters such as Emily Ford, Louise Jopling, Evelyn de Morgan and Henrietta Rae had their work shown here. They, like Constance, would have enjoyed the gallery restaurant, which specifically catered for ladies lunching unchaperoned, as well as its library and club, which had a dedicated ladies’ drawing room.

Oscar, who even at university in Oxford was aligning himself with the Aesthetic group of poets and painters, had of course made a point of getting invited to the opening of the Grosvenor in 1877, and years later he summed up its enduring cachet in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘You must certainly send it [the painting of Gray] next year to the Grosvenor,’ Wilde’s Lord Henry Wooton urges the painter Basil Hallward.

The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have either been so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.²

Constance dashed to the Grosvenor on occasion to meet friends, although there is a sense that she did so with some secrecy. In one letter to Otho she confided that ‘as Grand Papa was in the City and Auntie at Windsor, I rushed off there in a hansom and … lunched there’.³

At the Grosvenor, Constance met like-minded friends and solicited introductions to some of the contemporary artists she so admired. One man whose friendship she cultivated in 1881 was the sculptor Richard Belt. Constance’s fascination with Belt, a controversial figure, suggests a susceptibility to men whose character and profession placed them with at least a foot in the demi-monde.

In 1879 Belt had won a prestigious competition to create a monument to Lord Byron, and in 1880 Constance would have seen his huge bronze seated figure of the poet unveiled close to Hyde Park Corner. Just after it was unveiled, an article in Vanity Fair suggested that, far from being by Belt, the statue had in fact been farmed out by him to foreign assistants, as had all the output of his studio since 1876. The source of this libel was another sculptor, Charles Lawes, whom Belt had once assisted and whom he promptly sued. This national scandal was in full swing when Constance and Belt began seeing one another. She visited his studio, had dinner with him and began to make her own investigations into this man, whom she clearly found fascinating and with whom she obviously shared some social connections.

‘Miss Emily A is going to take me to see the Pennants in Westminster next Wednesday in order to ask them about Mr Belt,’ she wrote to Otho.

[T]he H’s had not heard of the libel and are most deeply interested in it and of course having heard of his talents when quite a boy, don’t believe a word of it … I’ve told Auntie that I am going but she does not remember the connection. Mr Belt, I daresay you will remember, was in Mr T’s school, and it was he who first discovered his talents.⁴

Belt won his libel case, and Lawes was faced with £5,000 worth of damages. Just five years later, however, in another scandal involving the sale of fake diamonds to aristocrats that could easily have formed part of the plot of one of Oscar’s plays, Belt was convicted of fraud and sent to gaol.⁵

It was not just art and its colourful characters that Constance also found herself drawn to. The Aesthetic movement had generated a new level of appreciation for the decorative arts, and craft skills such as embroidery, enjoying heightened status and recognition, became recognized outlets for female talent in the 70s. In 1872 the Royal School of Art Needlework had been established to provide suitable work for gentlewomen. The leading Aesthetic artists of the day supplied designs for the attendees of the school to work. Above and beyond this institution, the arts-led interior design practice of Morris & Co. – where William Morris’s own wife, Jane, and daughter May took an active role in supervising and commissioning the needlework – had given embroidery a new aspect. No longer a pastime where ladies produced their samplers in the drawing room, art needlework was now fashionable and for public consumption, considered a vital contribution to modern interiors.

Constance, embodying this moment, explored her own needlework skills. Her staunchly Christian aunt Carrie marshalled Constance’s help in decorating the new high school for girls in Baker Street. This school was the philanthropic project of Mr and Mrs Francis Holland. A notable clergyman, Holland raised money and bought the site at 6 Baker Street and erected a modest building that could be converted into warehouses should the school fail. The great and the good from the local Christian community dived in to decorate the plain whitewashed walls in the weeks before the school opened in October 1878.

Constance prepared a series of embroideries to run the length of the school’s ‘Ambulatory’. She spent days working the words ‘Hearken unto me, O ye children, for blessed are all they that keep my ways. Hear instruction to be wise’ on blue sham leather, carefully stitching each letter in a gothic script some five inches high in black, red and gold. Constance’s love of art needlework never left her. Years later she presented Otho with a fire screen that she had ‘embroidered on blue Morris linen in pink and green silks’ and mounted in a Liberty ash frame that was stained green.⁶

For her efforts for the new girls’ high school Aunt Carrie took Constance to meet the great Francis Holland himself, but Constance performed poorly, ‘simply shaking with fright’ throughout the interview, despite the fact that Holland was charming and full of fun. ‘I do think I am the greatest donkey that ever lived I am so afraid of people,’ she noted afterwards.⁷

Eventually, however, distance from her mother and the benign effect of her grandfather’s kindness allowed Constance to blossom. Slowly her sense of humour, her intelligence and her love of life began to surface, and her shyness began to recede. The girl who had found herself unable to speak in front of Francis Holland began to transform into a sharp, opinionated woman with a quirky sense of fun.

‘In a discussion she was surprisingly quick at detecting the flaw and weak point in any reasoning,’ Otho recollected. ‘She could carry her own in an argument well, and always had the courage of her opinions,’ along with a ‘quiet humour and a sense of the ridiculous’.⁸

Constance’s natural interest in the arts reflected that of her grandfather, who had a keen interest in painting and something of a collection. Once Constance was out of her mother’s reach, John Horatio’s influence’s in this sphere began to be felt. A year after her mother wed, she found herself on a tour of Wales with her grandfather, Aunt Emily and Otho, staying for a few days in the Royal Oak Hotel, Betws-y-Coed.⁹

The small village of Betws had become an artists’ colony in the mid-nineteenth century, with several eminent painters resident in the area and others flocking to capture the surrounding Conwy Valley. And when it wasn’t painters, it was art enthusiasts, the fashion-conscious and intellectuals who were also holidaying there, hoping to soak up the painterly spirit that prevailed and perhaps secure a work of art too. Constance would have thumbed through the visitors’ book at the Royal Oak and seen the sketches left there by the many artists who had stayed there before her, some of whom were the country’s leading landscape painters.

Constance was fired up by the artists she encountered. She delighted in meeting the well-known landscape painter Frederick William Hulme, who was a regular visitor to the village, and while in Betws her grandfather bought a picture of Pont-y-Pair from another painter, named Stevens.

Constance flourished in this artistic atmosphere, and although her stay at the Royal Oak was relatively short, her newly emerging conversational skills managed to make an impression on another cultural tourist, Henry Fedden, a Bristol sugar merchant. He and Constance got along swimmingly.

I was so sorry to leave Betws, I had just begin to feel at home there, and I had made a friend whom I need not say I have been teased to any extent about, because he was, well, a he! Mr Fedden. He was married tho’ and lives at Bishop Stoke about 4 miles from Clifton … He has asked them to let me come and stay with him & his wife, which of course I should like to do immensely.¹⁰

Constance’s desire to visit the Feddens in Bristol was granted a few weeks later. In October she found herself installed in their comfortable home in Stoke Bishop, just outside the city, and thus began what would prove a very formative visit for her. The Feddens had a strong appetite for culture. They took Constance to concerts and soirées; they visited a loan exhibition; in the evenings Constance played the piano and Henry Fedden sang, and afterwards they would listen to his wife reading.

During her stay Constance was taken aboard the training ship Formidable, anchored in the Bristol Channel. This marvellous old fighting ship was Henry Fedden’s philanthropic project. He, along with other Bristol businessmen, had leased it from the Admiralty and had turned it into a training vessel, not for privileged children but for street urchins. The Formidable could take up to 350 ‘lost boys’ and train them up into seamen, who could then find useful employment on one of the many commercial vessels that passed through the city’s port.

Mary Fedden was also an impressive character. She was involved in the Ladies’ National Association, and from time to time the Feddens’ home hosted this group’s meetings, at which various speakers discussed how women might also provide constructive action in the war against poverty and injustice.¹¹

This cultured, inspirational and mutually supportive couple presented for their young guest a model of an ideal, modern marriage that stood in stark contrast to the unhappy, selfish and separate lives her parents had lived together. What is more, the kind attention that Henry Fedden, in particular, had paid to her and the personal interest he had taken in her must have also persuaded Constance that, far from being unattractive and doomed to spinsterhood, romantic opportunities could one day be available to her.

In fact, by 1879 Constance had already had some luck in love. She was becoming close to Alec Shand, the brother of her friend Bessie. According to Otho, Constance was even briefly engaged to him,¹² although it seems that this was a fact kept between themselves, since her extant letters reflect nothing other than secrecy and some elaborate lying where Alec is concerned. ‘I am rather disturbed in mind about something,’ a 21-year-old Constance wrote to Otho.

I got Tennyson’s ‘Princess’ in the Summer for Alec, who wanted a copy, and did not pay for it. They have unfortunately sent in the account to Aunt Emily in a bill of hers and fearing so the questioning I said I had got it for you. I suppose you will be angry but I do not think you will be asked about it. I will go with you and pay it the first day you’re in town, and then you can say it is paid, if you are asked.¹³

It seems that Alec returned Constance’s token of affection with much of the same, sending Constance ‘a beautiful bound edition of Tennyson’, which he left with Bessie to pass on. Spoilt for choice suddenly by men bearing gifts, Constance discovered that the devoted Henry Fedden had already given her that very edition, and so it was returned to Bessie with a request for Alec to find a different gift. The poetical works of Keats was presented instead.

But although by 1879 Constance was at last coming out of her shell and enjoying the attentions of men, she had not yet caught the eye of Oscar Wilde. For the moment his sights were trained elsewhere. While Constance had been getting on with her studies, Oscar had managed to secure a reputation at Oxford for being something of a poet and critic. In his final year he had won the Newdigate Prize for poetry with his poem ‘Ravenna’ and had had poems and articles published, mainly in the university and Irish press.

Swept up by the Pre-Raphaelite legacy, just like Constance, Oscar was writing under the influence of the poets of that movement, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Rossetti. He saw an intense devotion to beauty in their work. And this cult of beauty was endorsed in the critical writings of Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance had a formative influence on him. In the conclusion to these studies Pater essentially argued that in a world in flux, beauty provides a fixed, refined aesthetic that could supersede the transient world and, in so doing, offer the onlooker a form of higher experience.

Pater was a Fellow and tutor at Brasenose College whom Oscar met in the Michaelmas term of 1877. Pater’s theories about the importance of beauty were expressed not only in his written work but also in his own domestic environment. Mary Ward, the wife of The Times’s art critic, Humphry Ward, lived opposite Pater in Oxford and described his ‘exquisite’ house in her memoirs, where ‘the drawing room was decorated with a Morris paper; spindle legged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates and pots, bought, I think in Holland … engravings if I remember right from Botticelli; a few mirrors, and very few flowers, chosen and arranged with “simple yet conscious art”.’¹⁴

Oscar’s own college rooms declared his similar allegiance to Aestheticism. He too looked to contemporary designers such as William Morris and furnished his rooms simply, incorporating antique blue china and beautiful art prints.

Aesthetic taste could extend to any field in which beauty, its object, could be applied. It didn’t stop with fine art, literature or interiors. Floristry could have an Aesthetic aspect. Lilies and sunflowers were the Aesthetic flower of choice. Japanese or Chinese artefacts were admired. And, of course, fashion was Aestheticism’s route into the mainstream.

Alongside the ‘ugly dresses’ that Constance made up from her Liberty fabrics, some ladies took Aesthetic dress to new extremes. The actress Ellen Terry, associated with the movement through her relationship with the Aesthetic architect Edward Godwin, wore Japanese kimonos. Aesthetic men wore their hair long in the tradition of painters like Rossetti, and their dress seemed to incorporate anything from the long Middle Eastern robes that painters such as William Holman Hunt wore to the loose velvet jackets with which Swinburne became identified. But the dress adopted by the male aesthete was considered ‘effeminate’ by the uninitiated. For his airs and graces Oscar was taunted by his college peers. One prank, with the aim of removing and breaking Oscar’s furniture, ended in the pranksters themselves being thumped and thrown out by Oscar, single-handed. Another attempt to ‘duck’ him in a college fountain also failed.

Oscar left Oxford at the end of 1878 with ambitions to become a poet and critic. With the Newdigate Prize under his belt and a double first to boot, he moved to London and installed himself in rooms in Salisbury Street, off the Strand, in the home of his friend the painter Frank Miles. Miles had ‘a curious old-world house looking over the Thames … with antique staircases, twisting passages, broken down furniture and dim corners’.¹⁵ But the well-connected, moneyed and charming young artist had already created there a nexus for the bohemian set, with everyone from the poetess Violet Fane, Ellen Terry and James McNeill Whistler to Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris dropping by. Oscar was the perfect addition.

London was a new exciting arena for the young graduate. When Oscar arrived, the metropolis was quite literally newly aglow. Electric lights were being tested in galleries, and for the first time the Embankment and Holborn Viaduct were illuminated at night. And the cultural scene was sparkling too. In almost every cultural arena there were exciting new developments.

The great actor of the moment, Henry Irving, having just opened a refurbished Lyceum Theatre under his own management, was performing his tour-de-force Hamlet opposite Ellen Terry’s Ophelia; Lord Leighton, an Aesthetic painter of ‘effeminate subjects’,¹⁶ had just been elected as the president of the Royal Academy of Arts; and the whole nature of contemporary art was under scrutiny as Whistler went head to head with the great critic John Ruskin in a groundbreaking libel case. Ruskin had seen a series of paintings by Whistler entitled ‘Nocturnes’ and ‘Symphonies’, which today can been seen as the clear forerunner to abstraction. But for Ruskin, far from being a new, exciting development, Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket represented the work of a ‘coxcomb’ who was asking ‘two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ – a criticism that Whistler considered worthy of court.

With the arts in a moment of change and debate, there were rich pickings for a budding young critic. But compared with the territories Oscar had vanquished before, London was vast. It must have dawned on him quickly that fulfilling his dreams of a literary career amid this noisy bustling city, where the competition was fierce, would be much harder than winning over editors of the university and Irish presses. Oscar understood that to rise above the noise of the city he must shout loudest. He amplified the attitudes and activities that he had rehearsed in Oxford. Within months he managed to cast himself as not just a follower of the Aesthetic fashion but as its embodiment.

Once Oscar was in residence in Salisbury Street, he and Miles began inviting people to join them for ‘Tea and Beauties’. In their bohemian rooms Miles would display his latest portraits of society belles and Oscar would entertain as only he could, with his rolling, golden voice pouring out wit and stories. Miles had persuaded the supermodel of her day, Lillie Langtry, to pose for him, and his delightful sketch of her had earned him a tidy income when, in reproduction, it became something of a best-seller. She had become a friend of Miles’s and was soon also on Oscar’s arm.

During his university days Oscar’s romantic attentions had been trained for two years on Florence Balcombe, a Dublin girl and future actress whom he adored. But by 1878 he had found himself usurped in her affections by another Dubliner, the writer, theatre manager and future creator of Dracula, Bram Stoker. She married Bram that December, to Oscar’s great distress. Now the high-profile Mrs Langtry, who seemed more than happy to adopt Oscar as her mascot, went some way to easing this disappointment.

But it was not just Lillie Langtry with whom Oscar regularly flirted. He was also showing public devotion to the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. In May 1879 he travelled to Folkestone to meet Miss Bernhardt as she arrived in England. In a gesture that guaranteed press attention, as she stepped foot on British soil, Oscar threw at her feet the armful of lilies he had brought to greet her. He was becoming a study in self-promotion. The following month he wrote a sonnet to her that was published in The World. A month after that his poem ‘The New Helen’ in praise of Miss Langtry appeared in Time.

Laura Troubridge, then a young, aspiring artist but who would one day marry Adrian Hope and become Constance’s neighbour in Tite Street, witnessed the frisson that surrounded Oscar in those early days in London. Her cousin Charles Orde, known as ‘Tardy’, was friendly with the young Mr Wilde. ‘To tea with Tardy’, Laura wrote on 30 June 1879. ‘Met Oscar Wilde, the poet. Both fell awfully in love with him, thought him delightful.’ Then in July:

To the National Gallery, saw Sarah Bernhardt there, had a good stare at her. Met Tardy and went together to tea at Oscar Wilde’s – great fun, lots of vague ‘intense’ men, such duffers, who amused us awfully. The room was a mass of white lilies, photos of Mrs Langtry, peacock feather screens and coloured pots, pictures of various merits.¹⁷

Lillie Langtry remembered that, ‘on his arrival from Oxford, Oscar had longish hair and wore an outfit that spoke of bohemian credentials: light-coloured trousers, a black frock coat, brightly coloured waistcoats with a white silk cravat held with an amethyst pin and always carrying lavender gloves.’ But as Oscar’s charm worked its magic on London society and, as Langtry observed, he ‘began to rise in the life of London, and his unconscious peculiarities had become a target for the humorous columns of the newspapers, he was quick to realise that they could be turned to advantage, and he proceeded forthwith to develop them so audaciously that it became impossible to ignore them’.¹⁸

Before long Oscar had grown his hair longer than anyone else, and his buttonholes were more unusual. And his outfits became even more outrageous. Caricatures of him in the press quickly became animated on stage. By the end of 1880 a satire on Aestheticism called Where’s the Cat opened at the Criterion Theatre, in which Oscar clearly provided the inspiration for the character of the Aesthetic writer Scott Ramsay. The actor playing Ramsay, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, modelled his performance on Oscar. Then came another play, The Colonel, in which another Aesthete, called Lambert Stryke, was again played in Wildean manner.

In early 1881 the Punch cartoonist George du Maurier was running weekly caricatures of two Aesthetic types, the poet Maudle and the painter Jellaby Postlethwaite. Maudle transfigured over the weeks into Oscuro Wildegoose, Drawit Milde and Ossian Wilderness, and was teased for his interest in lilies, the Grosvenor Gallery and blue china.

And so within two years after arriving in London, Oscar had landed the city. Despite his limited output in print, by 1881 Oscar’s fame was secured when the great painter and social observer William Powell Frith captured him at the Royal Academy summer show amid the great and the good. A lily in his lapel, the young Wilde, tall, long-haired and not yet showing the weight that would define his later years, stands notebook in hand, surrounded by a group of admiring women. To the right of the canvas the figure of George du Maurier is depicted looking on. To the left a woman wearing a loose, puff-sleeved Aesthetic outfit with a sunflower pinned to her breast gives us some sense of the figure that Constance too must have cut at this time.

In the same year that Frith immortalized Oscar in paint, the masters of popular music Gilbert and Sullivan confirmed Oscar’s celebrity with the production of Patience, an operetta in which an Aesthete was presented in the character of Bunthorne. Bunthorne’s costume took Aesthetic dress to new extremes. He wore a loose velvet jacket, knee breeches, silk tights and patent pumps. These extremes of dress were ones that soon became associated not with the fictional Bunthorne but with the man Wilde.

The Lloyds must have looked on with a mixture of bemusement and disapproval at the progress of their family friend. Conventional and upright, the inhabitants of 100 Lancaster Gate would not have considered wearing one’s hair long and becoming the target of ridicule the best credentials. But then again, Oscar’s Oxford contemporary Otho was hardly turning out as they had hoped.

For one thing, Otho had become embroiled in a court case that captured the public’s imagination. A report in the Daily News for 22 March 1879, under the headline ‘The Alleged Frauds upon the Charitable Public’, gives an idea of the case’s appeal. It describes the accused Vernon Montgomery and Ethel Vivian in the dock, amid an unusually packed and rowdy courtroom. Much of the crowd comprised young professional men, attracted by the impressive appearance of the bottle-blonde Miss Vivian, who was parading in the witness box in ‘a light silk dress of fashionable make’.

The prosecution alleged that Montgomery and Vivian placed advertisements in The Times purporting to be on behalf of an embarrassed girl in need of financial assistance. When charitable individuals responded to the advert, Montgomery entered into a correspondence that invited donations.

However, far from being a genuine lady in distress, prosecution witnesses identified Miss Vivian as in fact a Miss Wilmore, a Pimlicobased prostitute for whom Montgomery was almost certainly a pimp. In her defence, Miss Vivian protested from the witness box, much to the obvious mirth of the courtroom, that, far from being her pimp, Montgomery (who was using the moniker Viscount de Montgomery) was in fact a ‘poet’ whom she had met at the Promenade concerts, and that she had subsequently left Pimlico to live with him in his ‘country house’ near Maidstone.

To the horror of some constituents of his Lloyd and Napier relatives, Otho found himself appearing in court as a witness for the prosecution. He was one of the charitable individuals who had responded to The Times advertisement. In what was evidently an act of utter naivety, Otho sent Miss Vivian £5, a not insignificant sum. To the continued mirth of those watching proceedings, Otho noted that, although he acknowledged the fraud, he did not regret his donation to a woman who, regardless of her means of soliciting it, was indeed a subject for charity. Like many of those in the courtroom that day, Otho Lloyd presented as a man too easily turned by a pretty face.

Leaving aside his rather embarrassing susceptibility to the charms of young women and lack of financial acumen, Otho was beginning to concern the family more generally. Despite having won a scholarship to Oxford, he was lackadaisical in his approach to his studies and was soon failing key exams. Constance had made a huge emotional investment in her brother. Unable to pursue a career herself, her natural ambition was bound up in his achievements. As she saw the potential for such achievements slip away, Constance was genuinely distressed.

My Dearest boy, I am so terribly disappointed that you’re being plucked, perhaps the more so that Francis has passed his examination, and I think in all probability Charlie his. It cannot but force itself upon my mind, seeing Grand Papa’s disappointment, almost unspoken it is true, but scarcely for that the less, that you have not worked or that you have worked only indolently, as we are both only too inclined to do. Do dear boy try to make up this future year and work steadily and try to attain the honours that I know with study you have the capability of attaining … Do not think I am lecturing you. You know that all my ambition, all my future hopes are bound up in you and it is really a keen disappointment to me to find that you have none for yourself and it is not only that, but also that it is Grand Papa’s money that is being spent and if you do not profit by your college career it is wasted, is it not so? Is there any possible way by which I can help you? Remember that ignorant as I am, I will do anything in my power, or learn anything by which I could afford you any possible assistance.¹⁹

With Otho’s prospects foundering, Constance must have felt all the more keenly what potential suitors might offer her in terms of success and achievement. Despite now having several men ‘in various stages of devotion’, none of them was right. In fact, all of them were, for different reasons, utterly wrong.

In the summer of 1880 Constance, her aunt and grandfather travelled to the coast ahead of a family holiday in Holland. Constance’s Irish uncle Charlie Hemphill and her cousin Stanhope joined the party briefly before it sailed. Constance thought this was nothing more than a social get-together, made possible by the fact that two branches of the family fortuitously found themselves close to one another during their respective travels. She suddenly discovered, however, that Stanhope, whom she had known since his boyhood, had long been holding a torch for her, and the whole meeting had been engineered for a very specific purpose.

‘I’ve been so terribly horrified and frightened that I cannot get over it,’ she wrote to Otho.

Did it ever in your wildest dreams enter your head that Stanhope cared for me? I went out for a long walk yesterday with him and Uncle Charlie and we two stayed behind to pick some berries, and he informed me that he had come to ask me to be his wife. I do hope no one will ever again propose to me, for it is horrid. He said that he had wished to speak to me in Dublin and also in London when he was last there, and he would have waited now to test my feelings but that our going away tomorrow had hurried him on. It was so dreadful. I could but refuse him and he came again this morning to get a final answer, and looked as white as a sheet and frightened me so and yet I could not do anything else, could I? He would insist that I cared for someone else, and I assured him I did not. I have sent him away, and I don’t want to marry, and I do hope nobody else will ever ask me. I am shaking all over still with fright. Tear up this letter.²⁰

With poor Stanhope dispatched, it was not long before another admirer was buzzing around the Lloyd household. As London warmed up under the June sun of 1881, a Mr Fitzgerald began to hover. Despite his admirable persistence, he got short shrift. ‘Mr Fitzgerald came … deep sigh, and requested to escort me somewhere this week,’ Constance informed her brother. ‘It ended finally in his arranging to come to Devonshire Terrace tomorrow and take Mama, Ella, Tizey and myself to the Fancy Fair at the Albert Hall. Poor man. I hope I shall meet someone I know and then I’ll get rid of him. I left Zena and him to have a long conversation together but he made his way over after a time and I couldn’t get rid of him.’²¹

Three days later the hapless Fitzgerald, failing to take a hint, tried his luck once more, as Constance once again relayed. ‘Mr Fitzgerald was with me the whole afternoon and to my horror … went to the Arbuthnots²² at home in the evening. I positively loathe him now. Isn’t it horrid? He came last Monday and asked to be allowed to escort us on Wednesday, so I couldn’t get off it.’²³

Mr Fitzgerald’s timing was poor. Unbeknown to him, his attentions were in competition with those of someone in whom, unlike himself, Stanhope and presumably the now defunct Alec Shand, Constance found herself passionately interested. Like Henry Fedden, whom she found so enthralling, this other suitor was cultured, and, like the fascinating Mr Belt, he was artistic and rather risqué. The man was none other than the newly famous Oscar Wilde.

It was Constance’s Irish grandmother who engineered an opportunity for Constance and Oscar to become properly acquainted in the early summer of 1881, somewhat by default. Grandma Atkinson’s intention was to do a little matchmaking on behalf not of Constance but of her young aunt Ellena. ‘Ella’ Atkinson came to stay with her sister Ada Swinburne-King at Devonshire Terrace in the early summer of 1881. She was twenty-eight and still unmarried. Grandma Atkinson, well acquainted with Lady Wilde, suggested that Oscar, just a year Ella’s junior, might come to tea during her stay. Lady Wilde was only too happy to oblige.

When Sir William Wilde died, Lady Wilde had been left in financial difficulty. Although the gross estate left by the surgeon was some £20,000, he had had debts, and since a substantial £2,000 was left to each of his three sons, William, Oscar and Dr Wilson, Lady Wilde was left with a sum that was quickly deemed not enough to live on in style in Merrion Square. Given both her sons’ ambitions to seek careers in London, the decision was made that she would move to the capital, where she and Willie, Oscar’s older brother, would combine their resources. And so in 1879 Speranza decamped to rented accommodation in Ovington Square, just off the Brompton Road, the plan being that Willie would take a house for himself and his mother once he had succeeded in securing a staff job on a national newspaper. Speranza was devoted to both her sons and, with them both now in London with her, securing a good match for them had become a priority.

At the tea party in Devonshire Terrace, held specifically for Ella’s benefit, Otho recounts that Constance was ‘one of the party too and was introduced for the first time to Oscar’.²⁴ The spark of attraction between the two must have been instantaneous. By 7 June, Oscar had paid a visit to one of Aunt Emily’s ‘at homes’ in Lancaster Gate in order to see Constance again. Constance, suddenly all too aware of the celebrity attached to her new beau, found herself ‘shaking with fright’, something Oscar could scarcely have failed to spot. Nevertheless he persisted, begging her to visit his mother at the earliest opportunity.

Although the Irish side of the family were on very warm terms with the Wildes, the Lloyd clan in London held the notorious Oscar in general disapproval. ‘Grand Papa I think likes Oscar,’ Constance conceded to her brother, ‘but of course the others laugh at him, because they don’t choose to see anything but that he wears long hair and looks aesthetic. I like him awfully much but I suppose it is very bad taste.’²⁵

Bad taste or no, Constance was determined. Despite or perhaps because of her past abuses, she had built up a steely resolve. Oscar’s request to see Constance again as soon was possible was a ‘little request I need hardly say I have kept to myself’, she confided to Otho.

Constance’s attraction to Oscar in these very early days reveals an aspect of their relationship that would remain fundamental to their later marriage. With Constance, Oscar dropped his public mask. As Constance revealed to an Otho who, less persuaded by the Aesthete, had obviously been relating something of Oscar’s college history to her, ‘I can’t help liking him because when he’s talking to me alone, he’s never a bit affected and speaks naturally excepting that he uses better language than most people. I’m glad they didn’t duck him, though you would have enjoyed it.’²⁶

Shortly after this encounter, Constance and her mother paid a return visit to the Wildes in Ovington Square. Speranza had resumed her Saturday salons, which had become famous in Dublin society. Like her son, Speranza loved aristocratic society, and in London she did her best to attract the great and the good to her drawing room, along with Irish friends and literary folk. At that meeting the flirtations continued, with Oscar talking to Constance ‘nearly all the time excepting when his Mother seized on him for somebody else. The room was crammed.’²⁷ On this occasion Oscar asked Constance to go to the theatre with him to see Othello.

Othello was playing at the Lyceum and was creating a sensation, thanks to its unusual proposition that the lead roles of Othello and Iago were being alternated between the famous American actor Edwin Booth and Britain’s greatest stage star, Henry Irving. But more than this, Ellen Terry was starring as Desdemona. And this, Oscar must have known, would delight Constance.

Terry was, as the papers were reminding their readers that summer,

something else besides a graceful, refined and tenderly emotional actress. She has the pre-Raphaelite facial angle, the pre-Raphaelite chest bones, the pre-Raphaelite eyes and lips. She is … justifiably dear to the dramatic but is doubly dear to the aesthetic heart.²⁸

What better, then, than to take Constance to the most talked-about show in town, with the possibility of introducing her afterwards to a heroine? Oscar, already aspiring to become Miss Terry’s recognized male counterpart, the High Priest of Aestheticism, had of course already made a point of getting to know both Irving and Terry personally.

Given her family’s general suspicion regarding her latest beau, it was probably not just the social protocol of her time that encouraged Constance to present the theatre invitation as coming from the mother rather than the son: ‘He [Oscar] or as I put it to the family, Lady Wilde has asked me to go to see Othello some night,’ Constance wrote to her brother Otho in June 1881. ‘Auntie looked aghast when I told her … I know she’ll try and prevent me going and I shall be in a fury if she does.’²⁹

It is not clear whether Constance managed to secure her exeat, but the fact that her suitor managed to see the production is evidenced by a note he sent to William Morris’s daughter May, in which he included autographs of the full cast of that particularly celebrated production.³⁰

As the love affair accelerated, barely a day went by when Constance wasn’t either discussing or seeing Oscar. At a dinner with her sculptor friend Mr Belt, Constance sought his ‘opinion of Oscar Wilde and yesterday got Oscar’s opinion of him’. This, Constance noted, was ‘the sort of thing I thoroughly enjoy’.³¹

By 10 June, Oscar had begun the process of inveigling himself with the elder Lloyds. He had taken Constance and her grandfather to see an exhibition by the Russian Romantic artist Ivan Aivazovsky at the Pall Mall Gallery. He specialized in seascapes, which Constance decided amounted to ‘Poetry as well as painting on the canvas’. And it seems that even John Horatio was impressed:

Grand Papa wants to buy the Moonlight scene on the Black Sea, price 700 guineas, which Auntie says is absolute folly but that Auntie has a soul above art, one that considers shillings and pence. She did not see the force of my argument that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. I told Grand Papa he might take it out of my money and leave me the picture instead for I never have seen anything I should like more, but he has no will of his own and Auntie will of course overrule him.³²

Although John Horatio did not buy a major seascape, he did not return empty-handed from his excursion with Oscar and Constance that day. And, like his granddaughter, he proved himself more than capable of being a little sly when it came to dealing with Auntie Emily. Two major watercolour exhibitions were also on close to the Aivazovsky show at the Pall Mall Gallery. At 5 Pall Mall the Society of Painters in Water Colours had a selling exhibition, while at 53 Pall Mall the Institute of Painters in Water Colours was also exhibiting. It seems that after seeing the oil paintings by the great Russian, Constance, Oscar and John Horatio wandered through some of the other shows, and the temptation proved too much for the wealthy old man: ‘However, he has actually bought 3 water colours of Aglaia Walton’s for the drawing room for a 100 guineas,’ Constance gleefully wrote to her brother, ‘and he wrote and sent the money without even telling Auntie that he had made up his mind to it. She said he’s mad.’³³

Within just days of meeting Oscar, Constance had become so keen to continue seeing him that, rather than attend social invitations, she found herself staying in on the off chance of a visit from him. If ever there was someone Constance could see herself marrying it was Oscar, and she was going to make sure that she engineered every possible opportunity to realize this ambition.

‘Aunt Mary has got a dance on Wednesday evening,’ she told Otho, ‘but I don’t think I shall go to it, because the Wildes are coming to see Mama … some Wednesday and I want to be there when they come.’³⁴