A literary couple
Mrs Oscar Wilde entertains ‘in a cream-tinted dining room, of which walls, furniture, and all things are in unison’ – even the guests, who are of course the crème de la crème of society.1
Constance’s ‘at homes’ were famous. From the moment Constance and Oscar moved into Tite Street in 1885 the great and the good had come to see the avant-garde interiors, meet the beautiful wife and, of course, hear Oscar entertain the room. ‘To my mother’s receptions came people of such widely different interests,’ Vyvyan remembered, noting attendees including ‘Henry Irving, Sir William Richmond, R A, Sarah Bernhardt, John Sargent, John Ruskin, Lillie Langtry, Mark Twain, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, John Bright, Lady de Grey, Ellen Terry and Arthur Balfour. All the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was constantly in attendance.’2
Ever the collector, and impressed by fame and success, Constance made sure that she captured the signatures of some of her visitors in an autograph book. Those she solicited provide an interesting insight into her own character and passions.
The first entry in the book, even before Oscar’s own dedication, is from Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American poet and physician, friend of Longfellow and liberal reformer, who had championed the rights of women and blacks to attend university. Oscar’s own contribution to the pages, written in June 1886, apart from being intended as an expression of his love for his wife for all subsequent signatories to see, seems to contain a very private message about the deeply intimate nature of their mutual understanding.
As a prelude to my lay
From a poet to a poem –
This is all I say.
Yet if of these fallen petals
One to you seems fair,
Love will waft it, till it settles
On your hair.
And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.3
After Holmes and Oscar, Constance made sure that Walter Pater provided his signature for her along with Jimmy Whistler, the painter W. B. Richmond and the critic and poet Theodore Watts. The latter, contributing a poem called ‘Baby Smiles’ in the summer of 1886, had obviously met an infant Cyril during his visit. Watts offered a rather saccharine and flattering observation that
… a sight I saw outshine all other –
Saw a woman kiss a lovely child –
Saw the lovelier smile of her, the mother,
When ‘baby’ smiled.4
the liberal politician and campaigner for parliamentary reform John Bright presented a much more sombre thought a few months later. He reminded Constance that ‘In Peace sons bury their Fathers – In War Fathers bury their sons’.
Constance treated her twice-monthly ‘at homes’ as a theatrical exercise where scenery and costume were meticulously planned. She spent much time and effort in finding new surprising ways of decorating Tite Street to impress and please her guests, and the combination of this attention to detail with celebrity attendees quickly made Mrs Oscar’s parties a matter of national news. In July 1887 the Lady’s Pictorial took delight in listing those who attended one particularly successful party. Apart from family, including Aunt Mary Napier, Constance’s mother, Mrs Swinburne-King, and Speranza, the Wildes managed to gather under one roof aristocrats such as Lady Nevill, Lady Ardilaun and Lady Monckton, alongside theatrical celebrities such as Mr and Mrs George Alexander and Mr and Mrs Bram Stoker, and artists such as Walter Crane and Waldo Story.
‘Roses were the only flowers used for decoration,’ the Lady’s Pictorial noted; ‘the hostess looked most picturesque in a lovely gown made with a bodice and train of dark green silk and outlined with small gold beads; long hanging sleeves from the shoulder lined with dark green, worn over tightly-fitting sleeves of gold gauze, completed this very charming and picturesque attire.’
Anna, Comtesse de Brémont, remembered the cachet that an invitation to Constance’s ‘at homes’ carried. ‘I was not prepared for the crush of fashionable folk that overcrowded the charming rooms of the unpretentious house in Tite Street,’ she wrote.
There was an air of brightness and luxury about it … A smart maid opened the door and I found myself in the wide hallway towards the dining room. There tea was served in the most delightfully unconventional manner from a quaint shelf extending around the wall, before which white enamelled (Chippendale) seats – modelled in various Grecian styles – were placed … I presently found myself sitting in one of the white Greek seats, drinking tea out of a dainty yellow cup that might have been modelled on a lotus flower, and being talked to by a young poet.
On finding Oscar in the smoking room, she was duly introduced to Constance, who was wearing ‘an exquisite Greek costume of cowslip yellow and apple leaf green. Her hair, a thick mass of ruddy brown, was wonderfully set off by the bands of yellow ribbon, supporting the knot of hair low on the nape of the neck, and crossing the wavy masses above the brow.’5
In such circumstances it seems that Constance produced an event at which ultimately her husband could perform. The Comtesse noted that, once Oscar took the floor, Constance would slip back into the general hubbub of the event, mixing among the crush, ‘a rapt expression of love and pride on her face; while her eyes were magnetised, on her husband’s inspired features’.
Oscar did not underestimate Constance’s ‘at homes’ as a recruitment ground for The Lady’s World. His tactics are revealed in his letter to Helena Sickert, the sister of the painter Walter Sickert and a writer, lecturer and campaigner for women’s rights. First he wrote to her and invited her to write an article for his new magazine, and then he followed this with an invitation: ‘My wife is at home the first and third Thursdays in each month. Do come next Thursday with your mother and talk over the matter.’6
It’s hardly surprising that Constance’s autograph book also reflects the notable women who graced her living room en route to their contribution to The Lady’s World. Mary Braddon, the author of the best-selling novel Lady Audley’s Secret, and the American poet and critic Louise Chandler Moulton penned little epigrams and notes of affection for their hostess. The South African novelist and women’s rights campaigner Olive Schreiner made her mark. The writer John Strange Winter (real name Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Stannard) wrote a strange little note in blank verse that reminded Constance that
There are lions & there are tiger-
Cats, but the balance is pretty
Evenly kept between them:
Man is not all lion; woman is not all tiger-cat.7
Constance must have felt inspired by these successful literary women with whom she now associated, not least because she had been progressing her own literary ambitions. Even during the personally difficult years of 1886 and 1887 Constance had exploited the literary opportunities that life within the Wilde circle brought, probably motivated as much by their financial mess as anything else.
While she was on honeymoon, Speranza had promised Constance that Willie Wilde was going to use his influence to get Constance appointed as a special correspondent for a women’s weekly magazine. It was no idle pledge. While Oscar was a drama critic for The Dramatic Review and other periodicals, Constance was writing drama reviews of the plays they saw together for the Lady’s Pictorial. These were all written anonymously. But on at least one occasion a beneficiary of Constance’s comments wrote to Oscar, suspecting his authorship and thanking him for his kind words. The amateur singer and social phenomenon Georgina Weldon was flattered that in an account of Henry Irving’s Merchant of Venice she had been described as ‘radiant and young looking as ever’.8 Oscar was forced to confess: ‘The little note in the Lady’s Pictorial on the Irving Benefit was written not by me, but by my wife.’ This ‘little note’ was an article that stretched to close to a thousand words.
By June 1888 Constance was noted as one half of a ‘literary couple’ attending a gathering of ‘Literary and Artistic Society’ at the Royal Institute Gallery. But this literary acclaim was not down to her journalism alone. Although she had not realized the ‘practical Romance’ she had discussed with Otho, she began to write children’s stories.
In 1887 Oscar had his first short stories published. ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, inspired by the amateur fortune-teller Edward Heron Allen, is the story of a young man who becomes the subject of a self-fulfilling destiny after a chiromantist (or palm-reader) called Mr Podger foresees a murder in the lines on his hand. Oscar’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ also reflects the fascination for other-worldly phenomena that prevailed in society at the time, and which held a particular fascination for Constance.
While Oscar was busy negotiating the publication of these stories, Constance was approached to write a children’s story for The Bairn’s Annual, a publication produced by the Leadenhall Press and edited by the writer Alice Corkran. Corkran’s Irish family were established friends of Speranza’s and by default Oscar’s. Alice’s sister the society artist Henriette had painted Constance’s portrait two years earlier.9
For the third edition of The Bairn’s Annual, released in November 1887 ready for the Christmas market, Constance wrote a story called ‘Was It a Dream?’ Her contribution provided instant publicity for the annual. ‘The Bairn’s Annual … contains tales and poetry for children in every way worthy of the Leadenhall Press,’ noted Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper in its ‘Books of the Day’ column, adding: ‘among the contributors being Mrs Oscar Wilde’.10
The Leadenhall Press had built a reputation for publishing high-quality illustrated books and children’s books, many of which were facsimiles of eighteenth-century editions. The firm was run by Andrew Tuer, who had a particular sympathy with the Aesthetic and liberal-minded set in which Constance moved. In addition to his children’s literature, he published work by the feminist writer and poet Emily J. Pfeiffer, whom Oscar invited to contribute to The Lady’s World. Pfeiffer’s book was illustrated by none other than Edward Burne-Jones and Jimmy Whistler. Speranza’s friend Anna Kingsford had written a Theosophical text, The Perfect Way, which was also published by Tuer. A passionate collector, Tuer had his own impressive stash of antiquarian books, which often provided the source of his company’s facsimile reproductions. His own collection of Japanese stencils also allowed him, in collaboration with Liberty & Co., to produce a facsimile stencil book, enabling those Aesthetes who could not afford the services of a Godwin or Whistler a DIY alternative.
‘Was It a Dream?’ stands out among the other stories that Corkran assembled in The Bairn’s Annual of 1887. Tonally it is quite different. The book generally features jungle animals, witches, moral tales of nursery tiffs and adventures featuring brave children. Constance’s story, by contrast, takes art and dreaming as its subject matter. These preoccupations place it firmly as an ‘Aesthetic piece’. Dream-like, somnambulant paintings were the mainstay of the movement’s painters, such as Edward Burne-Jones. The adoration of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ was articulated by the philosophers of the movement such as Walter Pater and, of course, Oscar himself.
Another aspect of the story that secures its claim to being part of the Aesthetic tradition is its fascination with Japan. ‘Was It a Dream?’ is about a Japanese fan, an object that could well have come from A. B. Ya’s store at the ‘Healtheries’, or which could have travelled back with Mortimer Menpes from his own travels in that country.
In Constance’s story the fan, decorated with a painted stork ‘flying daintily’ across it, is hanging in an imaginary nursery. One night the stork is magically brought to life by an angel who has come to bestow ‘sweet dreams’ on the nursery’s two infant occupants. In the sleepy atmosphere that Constance conjures, where the children slumber ‘with flushed faces and tossed golden hair on their downy pillows’, the little stork complains to the angel, ‘I am fastened here for ever; and though the sky is always blue, and the almond blossoms are always pink … I still long once more to see the dear home where I was born, and the wife who was given to me, and the little ones who came after I left, and whom I have never seen!’11
The angel releases the painted stork with the aid of a magic pink feather plucked from her wings. With this empowering feather attached to its head, the stork is able to leave the fan in which it is imprisoned and fly to its homeland, on condition that it returns before the two sleeping children wake.
Constance provides a highly visual, painterly and idealized description of the Japan to which the stork flies. There was plenty of reference material in her own home in Tite Street and other neighbouring Aesthetic homes that she could have drawn on. Not only had the Japanese fanatic Mortimer Menpes given Vyvyan some of his etchings of that country as a christening present, but his own nearby Chelsea home was an hommage to the East. Interestingly, the little girl in Constance’s story shares the same name as Menpes’ own child: Dorothy. If this was not enough inspiration, in August 1886 Otho had given Oscar a book on Japanese art, which Oscar described in his thank-you note as ‘by far the best book on Japanese Art that I know’, and one can imagine Constance studying this ardently before putting her own pen to paper.
Constance describes vistas of ‘grey-tiled houses’ that ‘nestle in and out of the hill-side, each with its almond trees and its tiny rockery garden’, a ‘little stream with gold fish in it’ and ‘merry little girls clad in the richest rainbow hues, with eyes bright as stars, and smooth black hair dressed in butterfly fashion’.
The painted stork flies from one artefact into another. In the Japanese workshop in which he himself was painted he finds another fan depicting ‘a mother-stork and all her little ones’, and this, he concludes, is his wife and family. For ‘many hours’ the stork talks to his family, and when the evening comes he realizes that he does not want now to return back to the ‘fog and the cold’ of England. However, a little Japanese girl who can conveniently see him and understands the magic of the moment begs him to return to England to the children there, and then bring them back to Japan with him so she might play with them.
And so, because ‘the child looked at him so piteously and her smile was so winsome’, the stork cannot ‘bear to refuse her’. But when he re-enters the nursery in London, the magic spell is broken. The angel’s feather becomes dislodged from the stork’s head, his power to weave between real and imagined worlds is suddenly gone and the stork simply adopts his former place, back in the fan, finding himself once more flying across ‘the blue sky with pink almond blossoms round him’.
Constance was delighted with the story and sent it to Otho. Typically for a woman who had a tendency to clumsiness, she managed to send her own copy of the book by mistake, one in which she had written an inscription, perhaps to Oscar or the boys. ‘I found that I’ve sent you my copy,’ she wrote to Otho. ‘Will you either send it back when you have read it, and I will send you the other, or if you like better, cut the inscription out and send it. Tell me what you think of the story.’12
Constance’s first foray into fiction proved successful. The publicity her involvement in The Bairn’s Annual solicited was quickly recognized. ‘I have today got an offer for another story and if it appears I shall send it to you,’ she informed her brother. Quite what this subsequent tale was is unclear. If it was another single story, this author has not tracked one published in 1887 or ‘88. But what is certain is that within a year of ‘Was It a Dream?’ Constance wrote an entire children’s book, There Was Once.
This was for a different publisher, Ernest Nister. Nister came from Nuremberg, at that time the centre of the toy and colour printing industries, and he had built a considerable reputation as a publisher and printer of highly coloured children’s pop-up books. He ventured into the British market in 1888, with an approach to the children’s publishing that was different from that of the more ‘artistic’ and refined Leadenhall Press. In contrast to the grey, understated jacket of The Bairn’s Annual, books from the Nister stable had brightly coloured sentimental images of plump girls and boys holding fat little puppy dogs or playing together. It was an altogether more commercial and mass-market proposition.
Constance must have been one of the first authors Nister signed in the UK. She was in good company, alongside writers such as Edith Nesbit and the then very popular and prolific Mrs Molesworth.
There Was Once saw Constance re-tell a series of traditional nursery favourites that included the tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer and The Three Bears – in which, incidentally, Constance wrote about ‘Silver Locks’ not the ‘Goldilocks’ we are more familiar with today.
‘There was once, my children, a little girl who loved to coax her grandmother to tell her stories. She was not a fairy grandmother, but she could tell beautiful fairy stories,’ Constance explained to her readers. ‘The little girl is grown up now, and the dear grandmother is gone, but there are still children who love the old fairy stories, so the little girl has written them out for you just as they were told to her.’
Although the thrilling short stories that Oscar published in 1887, with their intrigues reflecting the fashion for spiritualism, could have offered little inspiration for the whimsical tales of magic and dreaming that his wife wrote for children, there is undoubtedly a sensibility in Constance’s choice of imagery and poignant tone that resonates with a set of fairy stories that Oscar would publish the following May, The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
While he did not publish them until 1888, Oscar had been telling fairy stories for years. He had been rehearsing ‘The Happy Prince’ as far back as 1885, when he had related the tale to a group of Cambridge undergraduates when he and Constance went to visit Harry Marillier.13 Apparently this was one of the first instances in which he tried out his tale of a statue of a Happy Prince standing high in an old town who sees nothing but unhappiness around him. Recruiting the services of a little swallow, the Prince asks the bird to pluck the jewels embedded in him and deliver them to the needy around him. The little swallow does so, but in carrying out this service to the Happy Prince he is delayed in his return to Egypt to such an extent that he misses his chance for migration. The swallow, now in love with the Prince, pays the ultimate price for his sacrifice. At the end of the story, when the statue is stripped of its former glory, the pair kiss each other once on the lips before the little bird falls down dead at the statue’s feet.
Oscar’s verbal storytelling could be almost mesmerizing. According to a friend of Harry Marillier, Mrs Claude Beddington, on the night Constance showed her moonstones to Harry and Douglas Ainslie, Oscar went on to invent a tale about the fairies and sprites that lived in the heart of the stones. Oscar ‘wove fantastic legends of the mystical life within the cloudy shimmer’, related Mrs Beddington, ‘and when the youth went to bed that night he had a dream of the moonstone people which was all verse and which seemed to him the loveliest music he had ever heard’.14 Instances such as this could not have failed both to inspire and to inform Constance’s own endeavours.
Constance may well have been inspired by Oscar, but he was certainly reliant on her assistance when it came to his literary endeavours, at the very least at a practical level. At the outset of their marriage Speranza had suggested that Constance could be the sort of wife who might work alongside her husband, correcting his proofs. Certainly Constance did provide some assistance in Oscar’s career. She often visited his publishers on his behalf when he was away, and would provide useful translation services for him. Oscar put into practice Constance’s skills as a linguist a few years later, when he asked her to translate some Dutch reviews for him.15 But there is compelling evidence that she also worked with him in an even closer capacity.
Only in 2008 did a manuscript come to light that suggests just how closely the Wildes may have worked on certain projects. In that year Lucia Moreira Salles, a collector, gave the Morgan Library in New York a beautiful red leather-bound volume of letters and manuscripts. The whereabouts of this bound collection had been a mystery to Wilde experts for over half a century, and on examining it they realized that it contained a draft of Oscar’s story ‘The Selfish Giant’, published as part of Oscar’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which, although signed by Oscar, is written entirely in Constance’s hand. The manuscript, written in ink, has some pencil corrections by Oscar that also differ from the final published version in certain details of grammar and expression.16
The question, of course, is whether Constance, at a time when she was writing children’s stories herself, was in fact the author of the story and subsequently gave it to Oscar. Is the manuscript evidence of a genuine collaboration? Or is it simply an instance of Constance providing some secretarial support, writing up a fair copy from Oscar’s initial draft for his publishers?
Tantalizingly, there are several aspects of the text that suggest that the manuscript may reflect collaboration. Even if the general plot of the story is not Constance’s own, some of the telling of it may be. Oscar’s storytelling in The Happy Prince and Other Tales is intricate and embellished. It incorporates images that feel surprising and unique, and are combined with brilliantly detailed observation. His characters, even with the minimal amount of dialogue, have crisp, characterful voices. He provides moments of vividly imaged back-story that give his fantasy realm terrific depth, but above all his narrative is woven with witticisms and comments intended to raise a smile with adult readers just as much as children. Oscar would later say that his stories were intended as ‘studies in prose, put for Romance’s sake into a fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy’.17 All in all, his narrative techniques add up to something very vivid, rich and sharp but also very witty.
This deftness and knowingness in the storytelling are missing in ‘The Selfish Giant’. This story, by contrast, relies on a much more traditional narrative voice apparently directed more fully at children. The imagery employed, although very similar to that in ‘The Happy Prince’, tends to be blunter and less embroidered. In fact, the narrative voice and broad-brush imagery in ‘The Selfish Giant’ are arguably closer to Constance’s style in ‘Was it a Dream?’
So could it be that Oscar told the story to Constance and that she then rewrote it from memory for him? The final, published version of the story shows amendments to this manuscript that Oscar must have made, some of them rather significant in the way they alter the story’s meaning.
If this seems like a possible explanation for the Morgan Library manuscript, then one other conundrum remains. The story of ‘The Selfish Giant’ divides into two portions, the final section of the tale being overtly Christian and featuring a Christ-like child, bearing the stigmata, which revisits the giant at the moment of his death.
This Christianization is uncharacteristic of Oscar. It seems to contrast with the tale of self-sacrifice in ‘The Happy Prince’, which is more secular in tone, suggesting a personal, sensual love between the statue and the bird. And the clear Christian message seems at odds with a man who would go on to write that, far from being moral, art is ‘useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way … A work of Art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it.’18
And so, one wonders, was this last portion of the story of ‘The Selfish Giant’ of Constance’s invention? One of the more significant changes between the manuscript version of the story, in Constance’s hand, and the final published version seems to be an attempt to tone down an overtly Christian message. In Constance’s handwritten manuscript the child with the stigmata explains to the giant that his wounds were ‘done many years ago that all men might be saved’. By the time this line was published it had been rewritten, as ‘these are the wounds of love’.19
When Oscar’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales and Constance’s There Was Once were published in the same year, their reputation was cemented not only as a celebrated literary couple but as a uniquely suited one. Oscar and Constance had apparently successfully embraced the inclusion of children into the concept of artistic marriage.
‘Novels are, comparatively speaking, easy work,’ explained The Weekly Irish Times.
But to be in sympathy with children, to know what will please them, and be capable of putting yourself sufficiently in their place … demands students of juvenile nature for the work. Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde possess charming children of their own, and they have utilised their acquaintance with the infant world in giving to it some delightful fairy tales, which even the elders must appreciate. The Happy Prince and Other Tales … is one of the happiest works which Mr Oscar Wilde has ever produced; while Mrs Wilde’s fairy tales, also published recently … are a charming reproduction of the old stories, familiar to our childish days.20
Constance went on working with Nister until 1895. After There Was Once she contributed versions of Jack and the Beanstalk to Favourite Nursery Stories, and A Long Time Ago. In Nister’s A Dandy Chair she wrote a story called ‘The Little Swallow’. Cosy Corner Stories was a serial publication to which Constance contributed at least two stories across two different editions, one of which was called ‘Far Japan’.
This last is heavily reminiscent of ‘Was It a Dream?’ and it is tempting to consider that it may well have been written at around the same time, even if it was published considerably later, in 1895. The story, beautifully illustrated, tells of a little girl called Isola, who on her birthday is given two gifts ‘that have come all the way from that beautiful land of flowers, Japan’. One gift is a doll with ‘almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair, dressed just like the real Japanese children in soft stuffs and gay colours. She has been told its name is Ai.’ The other gift is ‘a Japanese fan – with a garden painted on it – such quaint trees with a river running through them, and over the river an arched rustic bridge’. As Isola falls asleep, she thinks how delightful it would be ‘to be a little Japanese girl and see Japan’, and sure enough she dreams that she is dressed in a kimono like Ai and in a garden just like that painted on the fan.
Isola wants to see more of Japan than the garden surrounding her, and so she sets off and crosses one of the bridges leading out of the garden. But when Isola reaches the end of the bridge, ‘there was nothing there, for she had got to the end of the fan! So down she fell with a bump, and woke to find herself safe in bed with Ai in her arms.’21
If Constance’s and Oscar’s careers were taking somewhat similar paths, with them both writing reviews and children’s stories, the overlap in their professional activity would continue. It was not long before Constance would become a contributor to her husband’s magazine.
In November 1887 Oscar launched The Woman’s World. He had altered the proposed name of the publication from ‘The Lady’s World’, a title both he and his feminist contributors considered far too vulgar for a magazine that ‘aims at being the organ of women of intellect, culture and position’.22
The magazine was a careful mixture of conventional and adventurous elements. Like other magazines, it offered its readers a mix of features, a serial story and travel articles. The inaugural issue opened with a piece about pastoral theatre from a theatre producer and friend of Whistler, Janey Sevilla Campbell. Annie Thackeray, daughter of William Makepeace, wrote a historical item about an influential lady of the past, ‘Madame de Sévigné’s Grandmother’. The serial, ‘The Truth about Clement Ker’, is a mirage of assumed identities, purported to be written by one Geoffrey Ker. When this was bound and sold as a novel a year later Ker was revealed to be none other than the popular author George Fleming (the pen name of Julia Constance Fletcher). An anonymous piece on ‘The Oxford Ladies’ Colleges’ was offered by ‘a member of one of them’. And Oscar himself offered ‘Literary and Other Notes’, in which he reviewed the month’s notable publications by women.
But filleted in between these perhaps more traditional items there were indeed more pioneering pieces that positioned the magazine as liberal, if not mildly campaigning. Eveline Portsmouth offered a piece on ‘The Position of Women’. In an article that carefully navigated a path between the most advanced feminist thinking and more conventional beliefs on the role of the sexes, Countess Portsmouth noted
Marriage … is ceasing to be the only goal for girlhood. New resources are at hand and eagerly sought. Fresh possibilities are born, and in a widening horizon a wholesome and hopeful spirit is awakened. The workwomen of our large towns are those on whom all burdens fall most heavily … but they are also stirred by the movement that is passing over other women, and may soon give it great impetus. The higher class of women … are eager to use their faculties. With an increasing number a life of pleasure is losing is importance … but it is in the middle class that the greatest change has taken place: there, not only the excellent education attainable by them, but the consideration of health and enjoyment put into the scale weighs heavily … the present type of girl [is described] as altogether different to that [of] … forty years ago, owing to her finer physical and mental qualities.23
Constance’s first article for the magazine appeared in the July issue. Here she did her bit for rational dress by looking at ‘Children’s Dress in this Century’. Condemning the over-fussy, cumbersome and uncomfortable outfits that she saw children being squeezed into in the 1880s, she pointed out that the simple, loose clothes worn at the beginning of the nineteenth century had been far more ‘rational’ in terms of comfort.
Compared with the ornate and convoluted writing styles of many of the other contributors, by July 1888 Constance’s journalism had attained a clear, succinct and personal aspect. Her scholarly inclination is also evident in an article that she has clearly thoroughly researched.
‘At the beginning of this century the dress of English women possessed at least one merit, that of simplicity – simplicity of material, simplicity of form, simplicity of colouring,’ she wrote. ‘All these three things combined to render it a most charming costume … and the children’s dress was equally simple, giving us the pretty costumes of which Kate Greenaway has made such a charming study … There is no doubt that the costume is at once light and graceful, the only drawback being that it is quite unsuited for our winter.’
Constance went on to remind her readers of the dangers of ‘our rains, our fogs, and our treacherous winds’ to children, and to promote the benefits of wool as a material that should be used more in clothing in British climes.
Constance’s focus on wool chimed in with the latest thinking in the health movement. At around the same time as the ‘Healtheries’ was promoting healthy living and dress in London, in Stuttgart the zoologist and physiologist Dr Gustav Jaeger was developing his Sanitary Woollen System, which sought to encourage people to use wool in all domestic textiles, from their clothing to bedding. In a series of lectures in which he expounded purportedly scientific theories that wool allowed the skin to breathe properly, he encouraged people to wear wool next to their skin as a healthier alternative to vegetable-based fabrics.
Jaeger’s theories, much discussed by a nation in the midst of a health debate, held sufficient appeal to encourage one entrepreneur, a grocer called Lewis Tomalin, to acquire a licence to open a clothing store in London under Jaeger’s name in 1884. Within year the company had a West End branch at Oxford Circus.
Oscar is noted as having shopped at Jaeger, and it follows that Constance was a customer too. Her sons were also undoubtedly subject to the craze for wool, as per her advice to her readers: in terms of styles of uniform for little boys, she points out that ‘At present it is the Navy that is predominant, and it is a very sensible dress. The woollen under vest, the blue blouse for winter, the white one for summer, and the blue serge trousers are very good dress for a boy. He is warmly clad and his limbs are free for movement.’
Constance continues: ‘Nothing can be more charming than the rough, thick, Irish claddagh cloths and coarse flannels, with their beautiful vegetable dyes, for outdoor garments, while for indoor wear we have the most lovely woollen materials in every range of exquisite colour.’
For girls Constance recommended ‘The Kindergarten costume introduced by the Rational Dress Society’, which ‘consists of woollen combinations; woollen stays – to button, not to lace – woollen stockings kept up by suspenders fastened onto the stays; a divided skirt either buttoned on to the stays or made with a Princess bodice; and a smock-frock overall’.
Despite the appeal of Constance’s journalism (her contributions were well publicized in the classified ads for The Woman’s World), she wrote only two pieces for Oscar, both on dress.24 This is almost certainly because, just months after Oscar took up his position as an editor, Constance also found herself at the helm of a publication.
Throughout 1887 Constance’s involvement in the Rational Dress movement had deepened, and her confidence in public was mounting. In February 1887 she presided over a meeting of the Rational Dress Society in Westminster Town Hall. It was an event to which, the press noted, only women were admitted, and at which Constance gave an introductory speech. After Viscountess Harberton had spoken, a number of women who were sitting on the platform, including Constance, modelled the divided skirt for interested onlookers. Showing how the item could be combined with elegance, Constance wore her divided skirt as part of a costume of striped cheviot wool, trimmed with blue fox and ornamented with birds’ wings.
In the month that Oscar launched The Woman’s World Constance once again caught the attention of the press as she attended the annual meeting of the RDS at the Westminster Palace Hotel. Now one of the most prominent leaders of the movement and noted as such, her literary successes and associations suggested Constance as the natural editor for the society’s gazette. At first Constance declined to be called the publication’s editor per se, and promised only to see the publication launch. The gazette duly went on sale in April 1888, at a cost of 3d per issue. It was published by Hatchard’s in Piccadilly, and thus began Constance’s relationship with a publishing house that in the fullness of time would have more significant personal ramifications for her. Despite her agreement to be a launch editor only, she ended up running the publication for all of its relatively short, two-year life.
The gazette could not have been more different from The Woman’s World. A fraction of the size, more like a pamphlet in its dimensions, nevertheless its voice was loud, clear and unrelentingly campaigning. It was a political instrument for change and it set out its stall, in every issue, in no uncertain terms.
‘The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movement of the body, or in any way tends to injure health,’ the pamphlet declares. ‘It protests against the wearing of tightly fitting corsets, of high-heeled or narrow toed boots … It protests against crinolines or crinolettes … The maximum weight of underclothing (without shoes) approved of by the Rational Dress Society, does not exceed seven pounds.’25
The Rational Dress Society was attempting many things. Not just a campaigning body, it sold rational outfits and produced paper patterns. All these were available from the society’s depot at 23 Mortimer Street. The need for money to support such initiatives put added pressure on Constance, who was tasked with turning the gazette into a commercial proposition and securing a solid base of subscribers.
It was a tall order. Hatchard’s only managed to raise sufficient advertising revenue in the first issue to support a print run of 500. Constance quickly found herself in a Catch-22 situation, with too low a circulation to attract more advertisers and not enough advertisers to support an increased print run. Her letters indicate her unrelenting and thankless schedule of letter-writing to prospective subscribers in addition to her editorial duties. There was also an endless to-ing and fro-ing to Hatchard’s, passing on the suggestions from RDS members of enterprises that might be prepared to buy space. Her work was complicated by the necessity of running editorial issues past the RDS committee. The committee’s initial decision to deny prospective contributors by-lines was a constant thorn in the side of someone attempting to attract high-profile contributors.
During her editorship of the RDS gazette Constance tackled many issues. She oversaw articles on the ‘Dangers of Women’s Dress’, she debated the term ‘Dress’, she commissioned a piece on ‘Why Women Age Rapidly’, which suggested that the inhibition of the lungs by tight lacing had much to answer for, and was constantly reminding her readers of the various forms of rational dress available, including the two most popular types of divided skirt, the Harberton ‘which is narrow … and has a narrow box pleat round it’, and the Wilson, ‘which is about a yard and a half wide round each leg’.26 She also related news of pioneering women who chose to wear men’s clothing ‘in the exercise of their profession’, and published reviews on the more feminine ‘trouser dresses’. ‘Those who have worn these dresses have testified … to the delightful sense of freedom that results from the removal of petticoats.’27 She was also careful to remind her readers of the genuine tragedies that still occurred to women wearing what Constance termed ‘portable firetraps’. She recounted the story of Rosina Williams, aged thirty-six, from Camberwell, who ‘was in the front room in a basement when a spark set her clothing alight’, and of Eliza Dixon, aged fifty-five, who, when linen on a clothes horse began to burn, attempted to extinguish the blaze but herself caught fire.28
Interestingly, the fascination that Japan held for Constance and many of her Aesthetic contemporaries was also reflected in the magazine. Members of the RDS were concerned to learn that many Japanese women were adopting Western dress, and ‘were anxious that they should first know that those who have studied the subject hold that there is great need of improvement in certain particulars’. The Japanese question was one that the RDS actively pursued. By the April 1889 edition of the magazine Constance was able to inform her readers that the RDS committee had met Mr Shimada, the Japanese editor of the Daily News, ‘who had undertaken to ventilate the questions raised by the Rational Dress Society in the columns of the Japanese paper’. Constance adds that ‘Letters have also been received from a lady doctor in Russia, requesting admission to the Society … This Lady states that the subject of Rational Dress is exciting much interest in her country.’
By mid-1888 the appetite for politics that her involvement with the RDS had sparked in Constance was fully ignited. If the first four years of her marriage had been essentially ‘artistic’, the years to come would be ‘campaigning’. What, alas, she could not have foreseen was that as she pursued further rights and a higher profile for her own sex, her and Oscar’s paths would begin substantially to diverge. The interests of The Woman’s World had aligned Constance and Oscar both socially and professionally. But this alignment would prove brief. Oscar would soon succumb to different temptations and ambitions, ones that would quickly alienate him from the world in which his wife would continue to invest.