My own darling mother
THE 1890s WERE not so much the ending of a century as the beginning of a new one. This was the observation of the poet Richard Le Gallienne, one of Oscar’s ‘sons’. Looking back in the 1920s, he saw that in the last ten years of the nineteenth century ‘all our present conditions, socially and artistically, our vaunted new “freedoms” of every kind … not only began then, but found a more vital and authoritative expression than they have found since because of the larger, more significant personalities bringing them about.’1 Victorian society was disintegrating as different factions re-evaluated its spiritual, moral and artistic aspects.
In fact, it was as if London had become a huge recruitment fair, with these ‘personalities’ in their respective booths inviting passers-by to join their cause. Amid all the competing schools and philosophies being bandied about, Le Gallienne remembered the ‘mystic looking booth, flying a green flag with an Irish harp figured upon it’, offering talk of ‘Rosicrucianism and fairies’, and then there were the ‘Socialist Clergymen, preaching High Church Anglicanism, and pre-Raphaelite art for the slums of Whitechapel’.
For Le Gallienne, Oscar was assuming a unique place amid such chaos. He was becoming a living synthesis of all the new, emergent ideas, borrowing from everything and combining all in a personality that defied definition. As such, he was becoming perhaps the most potent personality of the era – the individualist.
In contrast to her husband, Constance was by nature a fanatic who would throw herself wholeheartedly into one fad or craze before moving on to another. After her profound commitment to occult mysticism in the late 1880s, in the ’90s Constance moved on from ‘Rosicrucianism and fairies’ to the booth presided over by the socialist clergymen. In her pursuit of Christian socialism she became, according to Le Gallienne, ‘almost evangelical’.
As Oscar pursued individualism and Constance became involved in Christian socialism, the couple that had once been welded together through joint ventures and common interests were now following decidedly different interests. With both jealously guarding their right to their own intellectual freedom, their marriage took on a new shape: they began to lead increasingly separate lives.
Constance’s renewed interest in Christianity was prompted initially by the work of Professor Henry Drummond, whose writings attempted to reconcile a belief in God with Darwin’s science.2 But if it “was Drummond who opened her eyes, the person who sustained this renewed interest in Christianity was Georgina Cowper-Temple, Lady Mount-Temple, the stepdaughter-in-law of Lord Palmerston. The wife of the deceased William Francis Cowper-Temple, Lord Mount-Temple, a Whig statesman and philanthropist, Georgina was not only a significant friend to and patron of many of the great Pre-Raphaelite artists of the day; she had also become well known in public for her campaigning for sanitary knowledge for women. She was an ardent anti-vivisectionist and a promoter of vegetarianism. Bereaved in 1888, by the outset of the 1890s she was looking to fill the hole that her husband’s death left in her life. Constance was a perfect cause.
Constance’s friendship with Georgina Mount-Temple crystallized in the autumn of 1889. Her main point of introduction was through Georgina’s daughter Juliet Latour Temple, with whom Constance had already developed a warm friendship. Her association with Juliet led to an invitation to stay at Babbacombe Cliff in September 1889. She was ‘dreadfully shy about going’, she confided to Emily Thursfield. But she added, ‘Perhaps I shall make my mind to go next week.’3
Constance’s first visit to Babbacombe began a love affair with the place and its elderly owner. Everything about the house held a kind of magic for Constance. Babbacombe Cliff was a temple to Pre-Raphaelitism and full of the most exquisite treasure. Georgina Cowper-Temple and her husband had spent a lifetime building one of the best collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in Britain. To house them they had created a seaside retreat that was in itself an architectural delight. On approaching the house one could see Crow’s Nest, a tower built specifically for people to look out and pretend they were at sea, gazing out from the masts of some ancient ship. Referencing the medieval scenes that Pre-Raphaelite art so often featured, ‘Babb’ also had its own gated archway with mock portcullis.
Once inside, further wonders met the eye. The entrance hall was decorated with tiles designed by William Morris, and its staircase led to a corridor illuminated by stained glass designed by Edward BurneJones. Each room was papered and carpeted by Morris’s famous interior design company, Morris & Co., and then named after the featured design: Marigold or Lily.
Then there was Wonderland, a room at the very heart of the building, designed to be sun-filled all day long, decorated with scenes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was surmounted by a huge vaulted ceiling of turquoise Morris tiles and sported an enormous marble inglenook fireplace.
By June 1890 Constance was meeting Juliet’s mother regularly at Sunday lectures,4 possibly at St Barnabas Church, which was close to both Georgina’s London home at 9 Cheyne Walk and Tite Street.5 By the end of 1890 Constance and Georgina had become so close that Constance was referring to the older woman as her ‘mother’. And when Constance fell ill on Christmas Day, Georgina came to her aid, a gesture that delighted Constance and prompted expressions of friendship so passionate that it is clear Georgina had now surpassed Viscountess Harberton, Lady Sandhurst and even Speranza in Constance’s collection of matriarchs.
‘Beloved Mother, my throat is a little better, but having begun to be wise, I am going to continue, and stay in bed to-day!’ Constance wrote on Boxing Day.
Darling, how beautiful you made my Xmas Day for me, as you do everything that you touch. I had been trying all the morning to feel happy and to be with you spiritually in your communion, and then you came and set the seal to my uncertain efforts, and made even belief seem possible to me. My little room is consecrated to me by your beloved words of peace.6
The following day Constance sent her friend a further note to reassure her that ‘Oscar says I no longer look tired’.7
The timing of Georgina’s arrival in Constance’s life is key. Having given up the secure position he had enjoyed at The Woman’s World, Oscar was pursuing his other literary ambitions, to write more stories and novels and also to write for the theatre. In doing so, he had thrown the Wilde household back into the financial uncertainty that goes hand in hand with a freelance career.
In addition to this, Oscar was spending more time away from Tite Street and his wife. Apart from the socializing that was necessarily linked to his business, and his liking for the theatre crowd which often led to his ‘talking witty nonsense in the dressing-rooms of his friends’ of an evening,8 Oscar was also increasingly combining his passion for young men with that for fine wine and food by using the finest hotels and restaurants in London as the arenas of his flirtations.
Oscar’s late nights out ‘were causing noticeable rows and friction. One associate of the Wildes at the time, the opera diva Nellie Melba, recounted Oscar warning his boys one day that dreadful things happened to naughty boys who made mothers cry. One of them responded by asking what happened to naughty fathers, staying out until the early hours, who made their mother cry far more. Constance’s tears often turned to accusation and anger.
Her own domestic problems came at a time when the wider Wilde and Lloyd families were also buckling under various stresses. Oscar’s brother Willie was still suffering financial difficulties. Still unmarried, and with drink problems, he was considered a drain on Speranza’s limited resources and a general liability. But it wasn’t just her brother-in-law who was a concern: Otho also continued to worry Constance. With his second family he had returned to London, where he had all but given up the notion of a career per se and was attempting to live off the income from John Horatio’s legacy. He had invested in a property development company called the Leasehold Investment Company. But rather than delivering a return, the LIC was running into difficulty.
Constance was in desperate need of both good counsel and maternal affection amid all these troubles. ‘My mother sends me to-day an icy cold letter from Dublin,’ Constance wrote to Georgina. ‘Darling if you saw how she writes, you would not wonder that I turn to you for love, and claim a Mother’s love because I need it so desperately.’9
The two women fell into a close routine that could involve daily visits to one another as well as church visits. They made a point of taking communion together, a ritual that they referred to in their own special code as a ‘tryst’. They embarked on literary projects together, reading Thomas á Kempis and the apocryphal Gospel of St Peter, which had been discovered just a few years earlier, in 1886. At a time when Oscar was arguing that art needed no moral basis, his wife and her friend began scouring Dante for moral lessons that they might apply in their day-to-day lives.
Constance had experimented with the notion of an artistic life in the first couple of years of her marriage, and had become half of an intertwined literary couple in the later 1880s. But at the cusp of the 1890s she became intrigued by the idea of Utopian living, in which one could lead a good, moral, purposeful existence. Georgina told her stories about her friends Laurence and Alice Oliphant, British Victorians who had given up their all and moved to join the Utopian community founded in the United States by the American Thomas Lake Harris. Constance admitted that she would have joined such a community. But Georgina urged her that, rather than seek refuge from unsavoury realities within the walls of an idealistic commune, she should apply some muscular Christianity by going out and doing good deeds. And so Constance began to visit the underprivileged residents of Paradise Walk that, when they arrived in Tite Street, she and Oscar had concealed from view with latticework shutters. Within two or three years of knowing Georgina, the residents of that pitiful place were regularly knocking on Tite Street’s white front door, a fact that must have mortified Cyril and Vyvyan, who remained terrified of the urchins who lurked in the slums.10
In the evenings when she wasn’t dining with Oscar or going to the theatre with him Constance would often dine with Georgina. Even when she did dine with Oscar, she could still find time to drop in on Georgina to read to her before bedtime. On days when they did not see one another, Georgina and Constance wrote to each other instead. Constance, now attending church every day without fail, often made a point of noting particular details of a sermon or service she had attended. Cyril was sometimes tasked with playing postman between the two Chelsea homes.
For Oscar, Constance’s friendship with Georgina could not have been better timed, since it not only provided her with the spiritual and maternal sustenance she craved but also gave him more licence to pursue those social engagements at which his wife’s presence would have been inappropriate. But the extraordinary attention that Constance paid Georgina gave others cause for concern. The stockbroker Frank Sumner, a close friend of Lady Mount-Temple’s, had clearly said something to this effect.
‘Lest Mr Sumner imagine that I am neglecting Oscar, he is dining out!’ Constance told Georgina one day.
And in self-defence I must deny that I ever neglect him, or put him anywhere but first in my life-duties. Oscar has, I am sure, told you what he feels that you have been to me in my life, and he would not be a true husband if he were not grateful to you, and anxious that I should give you what I can, that can be of ever small interest to you … If I had a mother who cared for me, an earth mother, I should most certainly go and see her every day, and why therefore should I not come and see my spiritual mother?11
Mr Sumner’s comments may also have been a disguised signal to Constance regarding not so much her own behaviour as her husband’s. Might he also have been suggesting that she should be keeping more of an eye on Oscar? Society has the habit of blaming wives for their husband’s deviations, and the nineteenth century was no exception.
In 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray had appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine. Just as ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ had done, it drew both praise and harsh criticism. The novel tells the tale of Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man who is the subject of both a painting by, and an infatuation on the part of, the artist Basil Hallward. Dorian, meanwhile, is simultaneously enthralled by the hedonistic life of one of Basil’s older friends, Lord Henry Wotton. Dorian, enjoying the indulgences of his youth, wishes that his portrait might age rather than the real thing, and in doing so inadvertently casts a spell that realizes just this. So while Dorian plunges headlong into a life of debauchery and murder, remaining young and beautiful, his portrait becomes more and more disfigured.
The novel’s focus on male beauty and the indulgence of the senses once again raised eyebrows. Oscar found himself engaging in bouts of public letter-writing to various newspaper and magazine editors whose publications had branded the work immoral. The criticism in the Aberdeen Weekly Journal sums up the general arguments offered against the piece. ‘Characters more fantastic and repulsive than those of Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton were surely never drawn,’ it wrote. The Picture of Dorian Gray ‘leaves a bad taste in the mouth’.12
But it was not so much the criticism as the very public nature of it that must have been difficult for the Wildes. The St James Gazette, as described by Oscar himself, ‘placarded the town with posters on which was printed in large letters: Mr Oscar Wilde’s Latest Advertisement; A Bad Case’. W. H. Smith refused to sell the book.
Oscar may have been useless with money, but he had a nose for commercial success. The very controversial nature of the work provided it with free publicity. ‘Lippincott’s has had a phenomenal sale,’ Robbie Ross wrote to Oscar, congratulating him on the book. ‘80 copies were sold in one day at the Strand booksellers, the usual amount being about three a week in that part,’ he added, noting that ‘of course it is said to be very dangerous’.13
Constance remained wilfully immune to the insinuations that were being made about her husband and his work, and continued an admiration for it that many noted as being close to idolatry. She had a terrific capacity to filter out the worrying comments being made about Oscar and instead to focus on the praise of him, which was in fact equally available. She was also perfectly capable of sifting through his work to find those elements in its complexity that appealed to her, and somehow discard the elements that others considered risqué or controversial. When Georgina read Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s in June 1890,14 one imagines it was Constance who proudly urged her to do so. A little later she delighted in recommending to her friend an excellent review of the novel by Walter Pater in The Bookman.
In spite of her own not inconsiderable successes, and despite the fact that her interests were now diverging substantially from his, Constance never ceased to delight in her husband and remained his greatest fan. In February 1891 she and Oscar dined at the Houses of Parliament as the guests of Sir Hugh Low. Constance’s sense of pride in her husband becomes clear:
I enjoyed my dinner at the House so much – a dinner party in the private room, and Sir John Pope Hennessy & Sir Hugh Low spoke to me in the highest terms of praise of Oscar which is of course always delightful to me. I have never heard anything like the enthusiastic way in which they both of them spoke of his brilliance and charm, and a little reflected light fell also on me, which is not always the case. It is no wonder to me that Oscar likes going amongst people who treat him like this, and who are themselves delightful.15
It was perhaps because of Constance’s continuing pride in him that Oscar took some heed of his wife’s complaints and tears and redoubled his efforts to play the devoted, if somewhat absent, husband. Much of this show of devotion took the form of letters that he began writing regularly to his wife when he was away from her, particularly during the autumn of 1891. The degree of attention Oscar paid to his wife in spite of his sexual adventures with young men is rarely acknowledged. But it is crucial to understanding the commitment that the couple continued to have to one another in the first years of the 1890s.
Tite Street was now regularly empty. Constance was finding London life too busy and demanding, and the industrial smog was dreadful. With Oscar spending more time away from her, she herself got out of town whenever she could. Among what one imagines were many more visits, her letters reveal that in February she went to see the Cochranes in Windlesham while Oscar made a brief trip to Paris. In May she and Oscar were guests of the Grenfell family at Taplow Court. In July, Constance was in Salisbury with Lady Grosvenor. And then in early August she and Oscar were both guests at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, the country home of Lord and Lady Spencer Cowper.
During August and September 1891 Constance’s travels continued. She made trips to Reading to see her friend Mrs Jean Palmer, to Great Berkhamsted to visit her friend Emily Thursfield, and to Brighton, probably to see her mother. After the latter trip she began to crave a country retreat of her own: ‘I would give anything in the world to have a tiny cottage where I could take refuge from London at times when I feel overburdened, and when being 600 feet above the sea would refresh me.’16 And so it was not long before she went to Georgina’s clifftop retreat at Babbacombe, where it seems that she spent a fortnight in September.
Constance would take the boys with her on her longer sojourns to the Palmers in Reading or to Georgina at Babbacombe, where perhaps she felt the children were particularly welcome. But many of the other house parties she attended without the children. Constance often used the Palmers’ ample home as a drop-off and pick-up point, spending a few days with them and then leaving the boys while she continued her country visits before returning to collect them some days later. Otherwise they remained in Tite Street in the care of nurses and governesses.
Perhaps it is little surprise, given its frequent emptiness, that the house in Tite Street was burgled in August 1891, the first of two occasions on which the Wildes were broken into. Valuable items were removed from the glass cabinet in the dining room which held both Oscar’s and Cyril’s silver christening mugs, silver claret jugs that had belonged to Oscar’s father and it seems other heirlooms from Constance’s side of the family. Although extraordinarily Oscar’s family heirlooms were untouched, Constance and the boys lost prized possessions. Cyril’s christening mug had been given to him by his godfather, Walter Harris.17 Harris fortunately provided a replacement for his godson, but Constance lost everything else. Speranza noted at the time that her daughter-in-law looked ‘charming even without her jewels’.18
The burglars were apprehended in November, and their stash, the product of some sixty-five housebreakings, displayed at King’s Cross. Constance dashed down to see if anything had been salvaged from the Wilde household but was dismayed when nothing of theirs had been recovered ‘in spite of the newspapers informing the world that we have recovered all our things’.19
The break-in did not deter Constance from heading to Dorking in the second week of October, to another house party, which included esteemed literary guests such as the writer George Meredith, who lived at nearby Box Hill. Constance described him as talking agreeable nonsense and being ‘very pleasant and genial, though a strange being like all geniuses’.20
She joined this social gathering only after having the distress of saying goodbye to Otho. He and his new, second, family were returning to the Continent, fleeing from mounting debts and various calls on him from the sinking Leasehold Investment Company. Perhaps all too aware of the distress that separation from her brother had caused her, Oscar made sure that he wrote to his wife almost as soon as she arrived on this particular jaunt. ‘I hear this morning from London Oscar that Willie Wilde is married in America to the rich widow who has been longing for ages to marry him!’ Constance reported to Georgina from Dorking. In a very un-Constance-like line, she may well have been quoting from Oscar when she continued: ‘The news has much the same effect upon me socially that poor Mr Parnell’s death has upon me politically – that is, that it is the best solution of a difficulty, and that things in both cases will now right themselves.’21
Constance had forgotten, in relaying this latest news to Georgina, that her husband was not in fact in London while she was away, but was staying in Brighton. There was an arrangement that Oscar would join Constance and her party in time to celebrate his birthday on the 16th. Constance was excited at the prospect of seeing her husband but was disappointed that, after a night of storms over the south coast, he overslept, failed to catch the right train and discovered himself back in London instead.
Whether or not Oscar missed the train to Dorking accidentally on purpose, he made up for his failure to show with more loving letters. ‘He has been so dear in writing to me since I came here,’ Constance assured Georgina, ‘and I have written to him, as I found he did not at all like my not writing to him when I was away before!!’22
The pattern of separation was set to continue into October. Oscar had been writing the play that would become Lady Windermere’s Fan since the beginning of the year. By October it had reduced him to a state of nervous exhaustion, and he was much in need of a break. He informed Constance that he was planning to go to Paris with a friend to recuperate. Quite who the friend was that Oscar was proposing to take with him to Paris is not noted. But it may well have been Oscar’s intention to take Lord Alfred Douglas with him.
Oscar had met ‘Bosie’ Douglas in June that year, as had Constance. Slight, blond and clean-shaven, he was an Oxford student and a Wilde fanatic. A practising homosexual who was himself exploring homoerotic themes in his own writing, he had become passionate about The Picture of Dorian Gray. When he had the good fortune to meet the author of this work, his admiration for Oscar, combined with his stunning looks, presented Oscar with the ideal formula for a new acolyte and lover. Bosie, instinctively controversial, captivatingly attractive and a genuinely talented poet, was just the ticket.
The poet Lionel Johnson made the introduction. The two young men had driven round to Tite Street after lunching with Lionel’s mother in Cadogan Place. ‘We had tea in his little writing room facing the street on the ground floor, and before I left, Oscar took me upstairs to the drawing room and introduced me to his wife,’ Bosie remembered.23
Oscar was instantly smitten. Bosie, however, was not immediately attracted to such an older man. Nevertheless he met Oscar at the Lyric Club, where Oscar presented Bosie with a signed copy of Dorian Gray. Throughout the summer Oscar had continued to pursue Bosie, and the latter had continued to meet Oscar. It may well. have been that Oscar was hoping that the romantic and exciting Parisian scene would be the one that would finally convert this budding, intense, new friendship into something with a sexual dimension.
Dutiful as ever, Constance left Dorking and returned to London in order to see her husband safely off. When she arrived at Tite Street on 22 October, plenty of news awaited her. To her dismay the doctor was recommending that Oscar take a six-week rest cure for his case of bad nerves. On the positive side, however, Oscar had finished his play and sold it to George Alexander at the St James’s Theatre. ‘This is a great pleasure to temper the sorrow at the separation,’ Constance noted.24
Constance’s return to London was brief. Practical as ever, she quickly fitted out the boys with winter clothing. She also made some moves to replace some of the valuables that had been stolen. With £10 from her insurers she bought a George IV silver teapot and sugar tongs. Her friends rallied round too. A Mrs Macpherson contributed a silver cream jug from the same period, and Jean Palmer promised to give Constance teaspoons.
On 23 October Constance took Cyril to wave his father off from Victoria station and was delighted that Oscar left her a copy of his new play to read. There is no mention of ‘the friend’ accompanying him. Perhaps Oscar had dropped his plans to take a companion at the last moment. Perhaps he had overlooked the fact that Bosie would be going back to Oxford for his Michaelmas term.
If Constance and Oscar acknowledged each other’s right to pursue different lifestyles, accepting separation from one another, Constance still missed her husband. In that late October, when Oscar was in Paris and Lady Mount-Temple had not yet returned to London from Babbacombe, Constance began to surfer from depression. Although Constance was not technically alone – after all, she had both her children at home and refers to visits from friends, including the neighbouring Hopes – it was intimacy that she particularly craved. For Constance, Oscar and Georgina were the sole sources of this. With both of them away simultaneously, she felt adrift. ‘I wish you would come back to Cheyne. London is unnatural without you, and I want you dreadfully now Oscar is away too … I can’t live in the quiet by myself, and I am much more dependent than I was on fellowship and sympathy,’ she explained to Georgina.25 Constance’s susceptibility to the blues would plague her for the rest of her life.26
By 26 October, Constance was preparing to leave the capital again, this time heading off to look after Aunt Emily, who had fallen ill. Emily Lloyd had moved to the seaside town of St Leonards after John Horatio’s death. Constance was not looking forward to the trip, complaining to Georgina that she faced a ‘fortnight’s purgatory away from my bairns and all that I love’. Resentful that she faced missing Vyvyan’s fifth birthday, she felt ‘like a flower (a very weedy flower) transplanted into other soil that does not belong to it’.27 When she arrived, Constance discovered she disliked the nurse Aunt Emily had hired and found herself sulkily knitting gloves for both her aunt and Georgina to pass the time.
But now Constance got ill again. She began to suffer from bouts of what she termed rheumatism. It was so severe in her arms that, like her or not, she was forced to ask this nurse to continually rub them for her. This episode of ill health would continue throughout the late autumn and winter months of 1891. She was regularly bedridden.
The one thing she looked forward to during her stay in St Leonards was Oscar’s letters from Paris. ‘Oscar writes in very good spirits from Paris, and never leaves me now without news, which is dear of him after all my grumbles,’ she told Georgina, adding a few days later ‘he really is very good in writing’. Oscar had told her she could read the play – which at this time still had the working title of A Good Woman – to her aunt. ‘I think it very interesting, and hope it is going to be a great success, but one cannot tell unless one has great stage experience, how a play will act.’28
By mid-November Constance had waved goodbye to St Leonards and was back in Tite Street. Instantly her frantic London life resumed. Positive news from Paris buoyed her. Oscar had written to tell her that the French actor Coquelin thought A Good Woman ‘faultless in construction and has recommended him a translator, and when it is translated will help him to get it acted in Paris!’ Further news that her husband was embarking on ‘writing a one-act play in French, and enjoying Paris and French people who are very kind to him seemed to cheer her further’.29
She took Cyril for portrait sittings – almost certainly with Laura Hope, a pastel artist of some renown who is known to have drawn him. She went to political meetings and she dined with the Palmers, who were in town, meeting Jean Palmer’s Catholic father, Mr Craig. As a High-Church Anglican, Constance found Catholicism tempting, as did her husband and many other people moving in Aesthetic circles at the time.30
Once again it was not long before Constance made another excursion out of town, this time in connection with Vyvyan. She was worried about the general health of her younger son and she decided he would do well to stay with the Palmers for a month. Constance’s determination to send a five-year-old away for a month feels brutal. It also adds credibility to Vyvyan’s persistent feeling throughout his life that he was treated differently from his brother. In her letters to Georgina, Constance makes constant mention of Cyril. Vyvyan, by contrast, is rarely mentioned, except to express concerns. In 1891 alone Cyril has his portrait painted and Vyvyan does not. Constance sends Lady Mount-Temple Cyril’s photograph, but no such picture of Vyvyan is offered. Georgina, who kept birds, sends Cyril two canaries, but apparently nothing to Vyvyan. Cyril sees his father off at the station, but Vyvyan does not. Cyril is referred to as his mother’s ‘Lovebird’ in Constance’s letters; Vyvyan is not described in such overtly passionate terms.
Cyril was clearly a deeply affectionate child. When Constance’s aches and pains left her no alternative but to retreat to her bed, Cyril brought her hot-water bottles and proved attentive in a manner that his younger sibling did not and perhaps could not. ‘He is my Dove now just come out of the egg,’ Constance cooed.31 Vyvyan was less demonstrative towards his mother, and generally more difficult.
The nurse who looked after both boys did her best to make up for what she saw as an inequality in their treatment. This did not go down well with Constance at all. Revealing the tougher, intolerant streak in her character, she complained to Georgina on this subject.
I am getting more & more convinced that my nurse is not wise, and my cook tells me that she is ruining that dear little Vyvyan by indulgence, and that I should not allow it. What I am to do? She is so angry now at me sending Vyvyan away from her … She is kind and devoted to the child, but she is uneducated … it is becoming almost a monomania with her to think that every-one but herself is unkind to Vyvyan. She can never love Vyvyan as much as I do. I love him to the full as much as Cyril, but he is not interesting yet, because his soul has not awaked.32
When Constance returned to London, she came up with a plan that addressed the issues she had with the children’s nurse. She sent her to Reading to assist in Vyvyan’s care there. This, of course, left Constance more fully in charge of Cyril during the day. So now her already packed schedule was burdened further. In between visits to St Barnabas, attendances at lectures on Dante at University Hall, sessions with her phrenologist, Rational Dress Committee meetings at Lady Harberton’s and visits to check on Speranza, who had now moved to nearby Oakley Street, she found herself also in charge of children’s tea parties.
At this point Georgina lost patience with Constance. She could see a not very well woman rushing around and pushing herself to the limit. She told Constance to calm down and spend more time at home rather than being either endlessly out and about in town, or dashing up and down the country. Constance did not take kindly to being told some home truths.
‘I have given up heaps of things since you asked me to do less,’ she wrote at the end of November,
and I don’t want to live like a root! I am very well, and everyone says I am looking so well. I can’t imagine what you want me to be like. I do a great deal of needle work and a fair amount of reading, and these things I can only do at home, and I spend dreary evenings by myself after Cyril goes to bed unless I go and see Lady Wilde. You talk to me as if I were never quiet and gadded about and I don’t and I am very cross at your thinking so, and I shall not tell you any more what I do!!!33
Georgina’s concern seems to have focused on the fact that, in being away from home so often, Constance was not only exhausting herself but also contributing to her husband’s absences. Georgina sensed a growing alienation between Oscar and Constance that matched their lack of time together. Georgina, like many women of her generation, believed that women’s domestic duties were paramount. If a wife neglected these, then only she would be to blame if her household began to collapse.
Hurt by Georgina’s criticisms of her, Constance was presented with what she considered proof of the love that still prevailed at the heart of her marriage when another letter from Oscar, who was still in Paris, arrived in the last week of November. If people were saying she was not paying sufficient attention to her husband, Constance was suddenly armed with evidence that, regardless of what they might think, Oscar loved her more than anything else in his life.
On Saturday 21 November 1891 a package arrived at Tite Street addressed to Constance. When she opened it, she discovered that it was Oscar’s second book of fairy tales, The House of Pomegranates, hot off the press. On Oscar’s instructions the publishers had sent Constance the first copy. She discovered the book was dedicated to her in the most loving terms. A day later a letter from Oscar in Paris revealed the full significance of the dedication.
‘The book is dedicated to Constance Mary Wilde, and each separate story to one of his friends,’ Constance wrote triumphantly to Georgina. She then dutifully copied out the private explanation Oscar had given her for the dedication. Her transcription provides one of the few remnants of the letters between Oscar and Constance that have been lost.
‘And now see how the beloved Oscar writes this to me,’ she continued.
I shall not tell others, they would not understand, but you will: ‘To you the Cathedral is dedicated. The individual side chapels are to other saints. This is in accordance with the highest ecclesiastical custom! So accept the book as your own and made for you. The candles that burn at the side altars are not so bright or beautiful as the great lamp of the shrine which is of gold, and has a wonderful heart of restless flame.’34
For Constance this was written testimony of the understanding on which her marriage now operated. Oscar had many claims on his affection and time, but in spite of this Constance remained at the centre of everything, the object of his profound and solid love. It was there in black and white. Joyous, she told Georgina that her feelings towards Oscar were entirely reciprocal.
‘I have a cathedral for Oscar with a Lady-Chapel for the beloved mother, and there I always keep burning my lamp with its heart of restless flame, and there are times when one flies to the Lady-Chapel for sympathy and love, and here I fly now.’
Oscar also sent a copy of The House of Pomegranates to Lady Mount-Temple. In the accompanying note that he wrote, he explained how grateful he was to the elderly lady for the kindness she was showing his wife. ‘You have allowed my wife to be one of your friends, have indeed given her both love and sympathy, and brought into her life a gracious and notable influence, which will always abide with her, and indeed has a sacramental efficacy over her days.’35
In light of the terrible scandal that would engulf Oscar within a few years, and in light of his persistent pursuit of men at this time, it is easy to assume that Oscar’s words were quite hollow. With the letters he clearly dutifully wrote to his wife at this time lost, it is even harder to endorse Constance’s belief that in 1891 her husband still loved her deeply. However, some of his unfinished work also suggests his continuing devotion to Constance in spite of his appetite for adventure elsewhere.
Before writing A Good Woman, or Lady Windermere’s Fan as it would be re-titled, Oscar had begun a play titled The Wife’s Tragedy. It was the beginning of an exploration of adultery with the plot involving a married poet by the name of Gerald Lovel who has an affair with another woman. While adultery was not, of course, an act confined to Oscar, there is perhaps a sense that he drew on his own relationship with Constance to deal with how marriage is not necessarily negated by extramarital affairs. ‘Life is a stormy sea,’ Gerald proclaims in the play, adding, ‘My wife is a harbour of refuge.’ And this was exactly true of Oscar’s life with Constance. They now had different interests and were much apart, but there were still moments when Oscar was grateful for his family life with Constance and the children.
That Oscar still sought such quiet refuge in his deeply private life with Constance and his family is best evidenced by the holiday they took together the following year. On 19 August 1892 Constance wrote triumphantly to tell Georgina that she and Oscar were off to Grove Farm, Felbrigg, near Cromer, ‘where Oscar will write his play and I shall vegetate and do nothing’. This play would be Oscar’s follow-up to Lady Windermere, A Woman of No Importance.
Constance’s sense of triumph was not misplaced. She and Oscar had left the decision to take a holiday by the English seaside far too late, and Constance, having found all the usual hotels and guest houses fully booked, had spent days ‘telegraphing about’ for accommodation.
The prelude to their holiday was a period of increasingly busy professional activity, and an increasingly precarious personal life, for Oscar. In the ten months since Constance had opened the package containing that first copy of The House of Pomegranates the pace of Oscar’s life had accelerated further, as had the controversy surrounding him. Oscar’s sojourn in Paris had extended until late December 1891. He had become intoxicated with the intellectual life of the French capital and had grown bolder in displaying his homosexual appetites in a sexually liberated city. He had forged new flirtatious relationships with young poets and writers such as Pierre Louÿs and André Gide, and had indulged his hunger for experience, whether it was to be found in the ‘lowest dives’ or the most ‘elegant cafés’.36
Not only was his social life acquiring a different dimension, but his professional career had also accelerated. After his return from Paris, Oscar was thrown into rehearsals for Lady Windermere’s Fan, as the play was now called. On the play’s opening night on 20 February, Oscar’s friends flocked to see what would be quickly recognized as a triumph. Constance sat in a box with her aunt Mary Napier and the solicitor Arthur Clifton.
But Oscar’s own performance on the night was indicative of the way in which his persona was changing. No longer the ‘respectable married man’ whom journalists had noted at Constance’s side a few years earlier, he now presented himself as a more challenging figure. After the curtain fell on that first night, Oscar went on stage to be admired by his audience. But the tone he struck, rather than delighting an audience he should have had in his hands, astounded many of them. With his cigarette still alight in one hand and his mauve gloves pressed in another, Oscar complimented the audience on their good taste. It was a joke, of course. But for many the underlying egotism was too rich a taste, particularly when combined with smoking in public – an act considered by those outside the bohemian circles in which Oscar and Constance moved to be impolite and particularly discourteous to women.
The American writer Henry James was among the audience on that first night, and he also noted another distasteful aspect of Oscar’s persona. He was wearing in his buttonhole a strange metallic blue flower. In fact, it was a carnation, dipped in a solution of malachite green dye, which, when absorbed by the flower, turned the white petals a green/blue colour.
But it was not just Oscar who was wearing this deeply unusual coloured flower. In the audience many of the young men to whom Oscar had given tickets were also wearing at his bidding what became known as green carnations. Robbie Ross was there, along with his friend More Adey. John Gray was there too. All were wearing the dyed flower.
In this one gesture the sea-change in his life must have been apparent to many. Once it was Constance who had dressed in outfits to match or complement her husband’s. Once it had been she who had been paraded by him through galleries and premieres. But at the opening of his own play, although Constance was in attendance, it was Oscar’s young male friends who were engaged in his theatrical antics.
After the show Constance and her aunt headed off. Oscar, however, was not staying at home. There were issues with the drains in Tite Street. Constance and Cyril were staying with Georgina Mount-Temple in her home on Cheyne Walk, and Vyvyan had once again been dispatched to stay with the Palmers in Reading. Oscar meanwhile had taken rooms at the Albemarle Hotel. And it was back to this establishment that Oscar went with another young man, the publishing clerk Edward Shelley. For the past few days Shelley and Oscar had been much in one another’s company. Unbeknown to Constance, Shelley not only went to the Albemarle with Oscar that night, but he did not leave.
By May, Oscar’s affair with Shelley had waned, and instead Bosie had once again come into the frame. In the spring of ’92 Bosie was blackmailed and turned to Oscar for help. Oscar immediately sought the counsel of his old family friend the solicitor George Lewis and managed to pay off the blackmailers and extricate Bosie for the sum of £IOO. It was this act of salvage and generosity that finally clinched Bosie for Oscar. By June they were in a sexual relationship with one another, and from this moment Oscar embarked on what would become the most intense and profound love affair he had ever had.
Meanwhile the play he had written during his last trip to Paris, Salome, had gone into rehearsal at the Palace Theatre with Sarah Bernhardt cast in the title role, only to be shut down by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office because of its combination of biblical and sexual content. With controversy once again surrounding him, in early July, Oscar, exhausted and stressed, headed for the German spa town of Bad Homburg, where, conveniently, Bosie was also on holiday. While he was away, the press speculated on whether Oscar would now leave Britain to live permanently in France, a threat Oscar had indeed offered on the banning of Salome.
Constance’s friends rallied around her while Oscar was away. ‘People are very kind to me,’ she told Otho; ‘I dine out, and go to the theatre and enjoy myself.’37 But Constance was troubled at night. The boys had had whooping cough. Constance slept with one or other of them at night, but Vyvyan’s coughing meant a broken night, and if she slept with Cyril he was wide awake by half-past six.
No wonder, then, that by the time Oscar returned to British shores Constance was desperate for a holiday. So on 20 August, after her admirable efforts to find rooms at short notice, Constance and Oscar arrived at Felbrigg with a view to staying there until the end of the first week in September. It was time for quiet recuperation, and time to regain that sense of family which had become diluted by recent activities.
The boys were on holiday together at Hunstanton in Cambridgeshire, and as she settled in, Constance began to make plans for the forthcoming weeks. It is clear that at this stage, although Oscar’s relationship with Bosie had begun in earnest, it had not negated that with his family. Far from it: Constance was still a significant source of solace and calm for him, his sons a genuine font of joy. What is more, she was still very much in charge of arrangements.
‘We are in such a fascinating farm in sweet air and country, 2 miles from Cromer,’ Constance informed Georgina the day after they arrived in Norfolk.
It seems difficult to get from here to Hunstanton, but I shall try and fetch Cyril for a week he will be so happy here with dogs and turkeys, and geese, and ducks and chickens, sheep and cows and all things to delight a child. The only thing I fear is that Oscar will get bored to death, but we have heaps of room and can ask people down to cheer him up … Cromer Church is far off but there is a little old church in the Park about a mile from here where the farm owner has taken me this morning.38
Mr and Mrs Wilde quickly settled into a routine. In the mornings and evenings they would work: Oscar writing A Woman of No Importance and Constance corresponding with the various societies and causes to which she was attached. But then in the afternoon they were together and would often go walking ‘into Cromer where we generally come across some friend to have tea with. It is doing us both so much good, and I am already quite well, I recover as quickly as I get ill.’39
On 25 August, Constance left her husband to his writing and headed over to Hunstanton to see her children. When she arrived, she was disappointed to find them looking paler than she had hoped. Vyvyan was left in Cambridgeshire, and Cyril brought back to Cromer for some good Norfolk air. When mother and child returned to the farmhouse, they discovered that Oscar was so enjoying the rural idyll that he had decided to extend their stay there until 17 September. His morning “writing was going well, and he felt he could finish the play.
‘We go lovely drives all thro’ the bracken and heather – scarcely any gorse – and Oscar thinks of Herrick’s line “a green thought in a green shade”. He says he must have been thinking of a place just like this when it was written,’ Constance informed Georgina in one of many happy letters written across these weeks. She also revealed that Oscar had come across a new pastime. ‘I am afraid Oscar is going to become bitten with golf mania. He played his first game on the links here yesterday and has joined for a fortnight.’40
On the last day in August Oscar’s friend Arthur Clifton joined the party. He had married that summer, and he and his brand-new bride joined the Wildes as part of their honeymoon. And then, a day later, Constance received another telegram informing her that another of Oscar’s friends was on his way for a visit.
‘Having got all our rooms quite full yesterday a telegram comes from Lord Alfred Douglas asking to be put up for a night! I don’t believe that even you have to contrive to put 7 people into 6 rooms. However, fortunately he put it off till to-day, and I think we can manage.’41
The day after Bosie arrived, Constance had to return Cyril to Hunstanton. When she got back to Cromer, she discovered that, far from staying for just a day, Bosie had installed himself for the duration. She didn’t mind too much. The daily golf sessions Oscar began enjoying with Bosie were a source of amusement for her rather than concern. ‘I am becoming what I am told the wives of golfers are called a “golf-widow”,’ she quite happily related to Georgina.
Before everyone went their separate ways, Constance arranged to commemorate these happy days. ‘We are all going to be photographed in a group here tomorrow and if they are successful you shall have a copy.’ She then headed for Babbacombe Cliff to see Georgina, while the rest of the party broke up. Oscar wanted a week alone at the farmhouse to finish his writing.
Some of the photographs from this session still exist. In one, Oscar, looking slim and handsome, stands with his arm on Cyril, while Constance looks down at a book placed on a small garden table. It is an image of contentment and calm. But for Constance, at least, this was her last happy summer holiday with her husband. In Cromer, Constance knew that, in spite of his myriad distractions, her husband remained at some level loyally devoted to her. It was, however, a situation that was about to change. Bosie Douglas would make sure of that.
The moment Constance and the Cliftons left Felbrigg, Bosie conspired to stay. Determined to place himself at the centre of all aspects of Oscar’s life, Bosie suddenly became too ill to travel. This would be an illness that would conveniently place him and Oscar alone together for a whole week.
Constance was quite oblivious to Bosie’s manipulations. ‘I am so sorry to hear about Lord Alfred,’ she wrote to Oscar from Babbacombe, ‘and wish I was at Cromer to look after him. If you think I could be any good, do telegraph to me, because I can still get over to you.’42
Such a telegraph, of course, never came.