11

A dark bitter forest

THE SUMMER OF 1893 was peculiarly hot. The signs of an imminent heatwave began to emerge in the spring. In April residents of Coventry sweltered in 26.7° sunshine, while Cambridge reached an astonishing 28.9°, record temperatures for the time of year that remain still unbroken today. Between 4 March and 15 May not a drop of rain fell on Mile End in the East End of London, still the longest recorded run of consecutive dry days in the UK. By June local papers and magazines were celebrating the potential bounty that such a shift in the climate might produce for the nation’s gardeners, naturalists and foragers. Butterfly enthusiasts would have more luck than usual if they took their nets out, since some varieties, such as the Duke of Burgundy, with its golden spots and white-tipped wings, were exceptionally producing second broods in the warm weather. There was almost certain to be a bumper crop of early mushrooms, the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times announced to its readers – just as long as some heavy rains came to break the heat. And such downpours were indeed delivered as the summer reached its peak. In August, Preston in Lancashire saw the heaviest shower ever noted, when 32 mm of rain fell in just five minutes.

London’s fashionable men responded to the heat by discarding the customary waistcoats that were worn in the summer months in favour of a new craze for colourful bandanas or cummerbunds. Women, meanwhile, could take to the beach in the swimming suits that were now available for them, with their long knickerbocker legs and tabard tops. By October that year these were publicized further in the hit musical A Gaiety Girl, in which the female chorus was clad entirely in bathing attire.

But the heat had its tragic consequences too. Businesses began to suffer, not least the West End theatres. After calls by the public for the installation of electric fans to cool the insufferably hot auditoria, twenty-three venues eventually just closed. Far more serious than loss of business was loss of life. London’s mortality rates increased significantly over the previous year. And there were sad accidents too – none more awful, perhaps, than the tale of young Emil Goth. This eleven-year-old boy took tickets at the Jubilee Public Baths in Betts Street in London’s East End. That August the baths were swamped by hot working men who wanted to cool off, and the newspapers reported that consequently the officials supervising the bathing establishment were ‘taxed to their utmost’ – so taxed indeed that they failed to notice that on closure of the baths one day an exhausted Emil removed his own hot, sweaty clothes and jumped into the pool. He was unaware that the large, nine-inch drain had just been opened to empty the pool. The huge amount of water pouring into the drain took Emil with it, sucking him down into the great underwater pipe, where his tiny body lodged in its bend. He had drowned long before anyone was able to extricate him.

Since June, Oscar had been renting a cottage at Goring-on-Thames, a very picturesque riverside village between Reading and Oxford. Although better than broiling in London, even at Goring there was no escape from the heatwave. ‘It is so fearfully hot that I can do nothing at all not even think,’ Constance wrote to Georgina Mount-Temple.¹

For Constance, the holiday in Goring could not have been more different from the modest stay in Cromer of the previous year, with its country drives and golfing expeditions. The stifling temperatures meant that she and Oscar were limited in the activities they could pursue. Tennis was out of the question, and croquet was just about all they could cope with. Constance described herself as being ‘cross and horrid’, not least because of the terrible Old Testament thunderstorms that were keeping her awake at night. ‘The heat is so great here, and last night God’s thunder-angels woke me and I had visions of his Splendour in the lightning flashes,’ she told Georgina.²

Storms were catching the holidaymakers out during the day too. One day when Arthur Clifton’s family visited, Constance and Clifton’s wife, Marjorie, went boating, only to be caught in a downpour. The two women had got ‘drenched to the skin, a lake was formed in the boat and pools of water in which ducks might have swum on our laps’, Constance related.

The cottage was close to the home of the comic actor and author George Grossmith and his wife, who became regular visitors with their children. They would join in the croquet tournaments and on two occasions at least participated in evening ‘theatricals’. But the local Grossmith family were far from being the only guests. Most of the other guests were there at the invitation of Bosie Douglas. He was playing host at Goring, and as a result there came a constant stream of his friends, whom he was indulging with the utmost extravagance.

Bosie’s bacchanalian court was kept supplied with champagne and luxury foods ordered and delivered from London’s finest food halls, again at Bosie’s behest. The bills for these decadent indulgences were, however, being paid out of the Wilde coffers, newly replenished after a change in fortune. Lady Windermere’s Fan had proved a financial triumph for Oscar. It is estimated that he had probably received £3,000 in royalties. In early 1892 Constance had also come into a legacy when Aunt Emily finally expired in St Leonards, leaving her £3,000. And then a year later her other aunt, Carrie Kirkes, died, leaving a further bequest of £5,500.

The sense of abandon extended beyond those who were guests at Goring. Unlike the relatively simple holiday in Cromer, where Constance had arranged just one cook to attend to their needs, eight servants had been engaged for Goring. Although in the past Oscar had always left the appointment of servants to Constance, this time it was Bosie who had chosen the staff for Goring. Harold Kimberley, the butler, had once served Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Walter Grainger was a young man Bosie had got to know in Oxford, who had been invited down to become the underbutler. These, along with the parlour maids and cooks, proved a riotous crew. With the strange, stifling, oppressive and intermittently stormy weather, nature merely contributed to the equally stifling and stormy atmosphere within the cottage itself. Everyone was tense. Sometimes the staff would get drunk on the left-over champagne. ‘More scenes in the house here,’ Constance confided to Lady Mount-Temple, ‘and I shall not be sorry to leave, for they worry me. All such excellent servants and yet they cannot get on together.’³

It was not just the servants who were being badly behaved at Goring. After his years of courteous devotion to his wife, Oscar had suddenly changed. Apparently, for the first time ever he was being rude to her in public. And after his years of telling her his plans and proposed movements, now he was declining to inform her of his whereabouts.

‘I cannot make out whether it is my fault or Oscar’s that he is so cold to me and so nice to others,’ Constance wrote in despair to Georgina, adding, ‘He is gone to Birmingham to see his play acted there tonight. His butler knows his other plans and I know nothing. Darling, what am I to do?’⁴ Later she informed Georgina that ‘Oscar is, I believe, up in London and returns to Goring tomorrow but now I am going to be mother to my children and leave my wife-hood to brood in darkness until sunshine comes again.’⁵

The simple fact was that Constance was no longer the heart of the Wilde household. She was no longer the cathedral of her husband’s devotion, nor was she any longer considered a calm harbour of refuge for him. During the course of a year she had been usurped. Since their holiday in Cromer just a year earlier, Oscar had effectively entered into a new marriage, with Bosie Douglas. The fact he had not bothered to tell his wife of this extraordinary shift in his affairs was only just beginning to dawn on the woman who had always chosen to see the best in the man she married. In less than twelve months she had lost her husband. Although she scarcely comprehended it, the likelihood of the ‘sunshine’ returning any time soon was remote.

Things had really begun to change soon after Cromer. This holiday had persuaded Constance that being away from London was a good thing, both for her and for Oscar. She began to look for a country retreat for them. In October 1892 Constance attempted, but failed, to raise a £3,000 mortgage in order to buy a country house of her own. Although this was after her legacy from Aunt Emily, one can only assume that a substantial amount of those monies had gone on paying existing debts. Constance had been helping Speranza financially, and she was also repaying debts to Otho, whose own precarious financial situation left him little choice but to call them in. Otho’s business affairs were crashing.

‘I wonder if you have heard there has been another call on the Leasehold Investment,’ Constance informed her brother that October. ‘Your secretary has told Mr Hargrove that they intend to call up every penny and then the shares will be lost. I’m fiercely afraid that this means swallowing up all your profits, Mr H says that you should have evaded your last call so they might not find out your address.’⁶

Otho did, in fact, finally heed the family solicitor’s advice. Within months he had dropped his family surname in favour of his middle name, Holland. Constance meanwhile worked with Hargrove to get what fortune he had left settled on Mary, his second wife. Thus, living in Switzerland under an assumed name, Otho Lloyd Holland, as he now was, began a long evasion of his creditors.

Throughout the autumn of 1892 the chasm between Oscar and Constance widened. Their social circles became more and more different. Through Lady Mount-Temple, Constance reignited her passion for Pre-Raphaelitism. She began associating with the now aged painters who still survived from this group. So while Oscar was exploring the company of a group of younger men to whom he was now extravagantly offering silver cigarette cases as tokens of his love and affection, Constance was forming friendships with more elderly people, for whom she had a real sympathy.

In her letters Constance talks about visiting Little Holland House throughout 1892. This was the Kensington home of the painter George Frederic Watts, a great friend of Georgina’s. Constance found herself acting as a messenger and courier between the seventy-fiveyear-old Watts and her similarly aged friend. She took the painter some ‘spirit drawings’ from Georgina, and by return reported back to Georgina on the state of Watts’s health. That August he was ‘suffering from eczema in the foot that was mosquito-bitten the other day’.

Watts had painted Georgina Mount-Temple, and Constance now found herself in his home looking at the photograph of the original that Watts kept. ‘Your face was there in the gallery,’ Constance assured Georgina. It was no doubt in good company since Watts had also famously painted the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson, whose memorial service Constance would dutifully attend at St Paul’s Cathedral in October 1892.

Another person with whom Constance socialized at Little Holland House was Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, the son of the Pre-Raphaelite photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. They spent an afternoon looking through an album of photographs together. Many Victorian photographs were staged, presenting moments from literary or biblical narratives. One such in Henry Cameron’s collection, a depiction of the Prodigal Son, haunted Constance. She thought it ‘the most touching and the most exquisite, abandonment of grief and misery, and … abandonment of love given and received’.⁷

Cameron and Constance had known each other for some time, certainly since 1889, when he had photographed Cyril wrapping his arms around his mother’s neck with tender abandon, and had also taken a portrait of Oscar. It may well have been Constance’s friendship with Cameron that inspired Constance herself to take up photography during the forthcoming year, but not before she returned to him with another commission. On her return to London from Cromer she took Cyril to have his solo portrait taken by Cameron. Vyvyan, it seems, was once again excluded from this experience.

Despite her disappointment in not securing a country retreat of her own, Constance’s desire to get away from London remained, and so in November she rented Babbacombe Cliff from Georgina Mount-Temple, with a view to staying there for three months, until 17 February. After a very cold journey Constance and Cyril arrived at the clifftop house on 17 November 1892.

‘My own darling,’ she wrote to Georgina, ‘I arrive at this sad sweet house … it seems more wonderful than ever to me that you should have let me have it … I had to part from husband and brother today and mother last night, so do not scold me if I seem sad.’ The next day she continued, ‘Bab is looking very well after much rain … I intend hiring a piano that the drawing room may look as it did with you, and I am going to try to teach Cyril to sing … and now I am going to meet Vyvyan. The air is so lovely and soft here, that I think he will be cured almost immediately … Cyril sends you feather from pigeons.’⁸

While she waited for Oscar to join her, Constance passed her time reading Dante’s Inferno and making the house ready. She filled the rooms with branches of bayleaves that the gardener, Mr Hearne, had cut from the garden. The boys were boisterous. Cyril managed to run into Mrs Hearne, the housekeeper, and cut his face under the eye.

Every day Constance and the boys expected Oscar, and every day his arrival was delayed. Originally due to join his family at the end of November, he eventually turned up on 3 December after a brief trip to Paris. He came armed with tin soldiers for the children.

Within two days snow had descended on the house and its gardens, and Oscar was wrapped up in bed. He was ill and in retreat at the doctor’s behest. His high living was reaping consequences. His nerves were in tatters, and one presumes he was suffering the effects of his massive appetite for alcohol and cigarettes. Lack of sleep was almost certainly also a contributing factor, since Oscar had fallen into the habit of staying up into the early hours.

‘I fear darling, that exile from London comes nearer & nearer,’ Constance informed Georgina, ‘and Oscar has been so ill last week that again the doctor says he must not live in London.’⁹ One wonders whether this advice was given as part of a wider concern for the company the patient was now all too noticeably keeping in the metropolis.

For a while the family settled into a routine of domestic bliss. Mr Hearne, who was also the local coast guard, agreed to take Cyril round the coast. Constance visited the Turkish baths to soothe her aching arms and legs. Oscar fed the pigeons, ‘who are so cheeky now that they come flying if the window is opened to see whether it rains. They sit in rows along the branches of the fir trees now and look so pretty.’¹⁰ And he began to tell his wife and children stories.

‘Oscar has found a book that interests him of supernatural stories – he told me last night a story that I think would interest you. It happened to a cousin of his, Mrs Walker, one of Father Maturin’s sisters, an entirely unimaginative person,’ Constance related to Georgina. The Maturins and Wildes were related on Oscar’s mother’s side. Charles Maturin was a relative of Speranza. He had made his name earlier in the century as an author and playwright. Oscar was an admirer of his novel Melmoth the Wanderer. ‘Father Maturin’ was the novelist’s grandson, a controversial High-Church figure with papist leanings.

Father Maturin’s sister ‘had a little boy who died when he was a child’, Constance continued,

and when he was very ill was taken to Eastbourne where he lay in bed in the drawing room looking out of a window at the sea. One day they noticed a dove which kept fluttering up and down outside the closed window, and which attracted the child’s attention and pleased him. At about 3 o’clock in the afternoon he died, and a few hours afterwards the dove was found dead on his breast, tho no one knew it had got in, and the window was still shut. So the boy and the dove were buried together. What do you think the white dove was? We are so surrounded with the supernatural; I wish I could have some experience of it.¹¹

During their extended residence at Torquay, Constance and Oscar took a break at the end of December to attend to other matters. Cyril and Vyvyan were left at Babbacombe in the care of their French governess and the Hearnes. First stop for the Wildes was London. Constance spent New Year’s Eve with friends in De Vere Gardens in Kensington, probably because the bulk of the servants had been let go at Tite Street. Constance was house-hunting in London now. Oscar did not share his wife’s desire to leave the metropolis; regardless of what the doctors were suggesting, London life was key to him.

So Constance now sought a larger family home in Chelsea. The lease on Tite Street was coming up for renewal in June, and Constance probably felt there were many reasons to be moving on from it. ‘I expect to be very busy while I am in London,’ she had told Georgina earlier, ‘for I want to look for a small abode for Lady Wilde, and also for something for ourselves, for I quite agree with Aunt Carrie. Oscar will never live out of London, & I shall live alone in exile if I take a house in the Country. And we must settle on something or we shall be turned out on the street next June!’¹²

In fact, Constance’s stay back in London was short. As 1893 got under way, rather than reopen Tite Street, Constance headed to Witley to see her friends the Lathburys. She then returned to Babbacombe briefly in mid-January with Oscar and Robbie Ross, before heading on to Plymouth to stay with the Walkers, those cousins of Oscar’s who had featured in his story about the boy and the dove. Another quick return to Babbacombe to see the boys was merely a prelude to a trip to Italy with her aunt Mary Napier and cousins Eliza and Lilias. They would be en route for the Continent in the last week of January.

If Constance and Oscar’s relationship had survived their respective travels in the first two years of the decade, Constance made a fateful mistake in assuming it could survive similar separations going forward. She had not counted on the influence of his latest best friend. In leaving for Italy in early 1893, Constance left Oscar to his own devices at a time when his relationship with Bosie Douglas was just beginning to take on new depths. Her departure provided the moment in which Oscar’s infatuation with Bosie, and the latter’s extraordinary power over the older man, really cemented.

In fact, Oscar’s delayed arrival at Babbacombe had something to do with Bosie. Oscar’s friendship with the young lord had led to several other new acquaintances. Through Bosie, Oscar had become friendly with a young homosexual called Maurice Schwabe, and through Schwabe, Oscar and Bosie had got to know Alfred Taylor. Taylor, a good-time guy and committed homosexual, lived in Little College Street in Westminster, where he held soirées and procured ‘renters’ – young male prostitutes – for his friends. In the autumn of 1892 Taylor had introduced Oscar to one Sidney Mavor, a twenty-year-old who had ambitions to go on the stage. He was one of those youths who were given a silver cigarette case by Oscar. Meanwhile on 18 November, when Constance was filling the house in Babbacombe with bayleaves, Oscar and Bosie were having tea in Little College Street, meeting Schwabe’s latest conquest, a young cockney renter called Fred Atkins. That evening all five men – Bosie, Oscar, Taylor, Schwabe and Atkins – dined in town.

Oscar was becoming consumed by this new circle of homosexual men. The notion of his ‘sons’ had taken on an entirely new dimension. The ease of sex with ‘renters’ was a temptation he seemed unable to resist.

On 21 November in Babbacombe, Constance was in the depths of reading Dante’s Inferno. She felt in the midst of a crisis. ‘I feel every word of it true to me. I am approaching the middle of the path of my life, and I am lost in that dark bitter forest. I certainly was asleep when I entered it and I know not how I entered it or when!’ she wrote to Georgina. ‘And then comes my bane the leopard of envy that pursues and torments me so much … And you darling Mother must be my Virgil and seeing me weep have pity on me and guide me right … You haunted me so last night that I thought you were in my room in spirit, winging me to get up and see the sunrise.’¹³ Oscar, by contrast, had decided to whisk Fred Atkins off to Paris for a few days.

And now, in January, Oscar’s socializing with Bosie and the Taylor set continued. Bosie had come across a replacement for Atkins, a young unemployed clerk called Alfred Wood, who was living in Taylor’s rooms. Within days, while Constance was conveniently out of the way on her trip to Witley, Oscar began taking Wood back to Tite Street.

In late January, Oscar went back to Paris, almost certainly in connection with the publication of his play Salome, which was imminent. Constance had a ‘delightful peep at Oscar in Paris’ on her way to Italy. Oscar informed her there ‘that he would like to stay on at Bab till March and write his play for Mr Hare … The children will come home on the 17th and this will be better for Cyril to go to school and for Oscar to be alone.’¹⁴ The play Constance alludes to was An Ideal Husband. That Oscar would be writing this alone at Babbacombe was not, however, how things turned out.

Constance made Turin by 2 February. The journey was difficult, and her ‘neuralgia’ returned, felt this time in her head and back. In spite of her discomfort, she had enjoyed watching Europe unfurl, ‘looking so wonderful in its garb of snow’ from the windows of her warm wagon-lit. Two days later she and her party were in Florence, having taken in Pisa en route. Aunt Mary Napier and her daughter went on to Naples with the plan to rejoin Constance later in Rome, but Constance was far from alone in Florence. There was her other cousin, Lilias, who was also travelling with her. But then there was also a raft of friends who, like Constance, had chosen to escape wintry London in favour of Italian sunshine. Laura Hope was in Florence, as was Miss Cunninghame Graham. The George Wyndhams, relatives of Bosie, had a villa, and Constance’s old schoolfriend Bessie Shand was staying with them. Robbie Ross’s mother was not far from Florence, and the artist John Rodham Spenser Stanhope and his family were also there. Constance’s days were packed. Alongside a rigorous schedule of sightseeing that she set for herself, she also enjoyed a whirlwind social diary.

Constance took a Kodak camera with her to Italy and began to photograph everything. Kodak had introduced a portable camera that took roll film in 1890, and in the following year they had developed daylight-loading film, ideal for tourists unable to access a dark-room. Constance’s cousin Lilias, who was her companion in Florence, found the process of taking Kodaks tiresome. Constance preferred the company of her cousin Lizzie Napier, who had happily trudged the streets of Pisa with her.

My cousin Miss Napier (who is not with me here but has gone on to Naples with her mother) is much more ‘sympathetique’ to me than Lilias and is ready to wander about and look for odd churches and wait while I take kodaks and I am looking forward to being at Rome with her. We saw the Duomo, the Campanile, the Battisteria (where I saw a funny little bambina Anna christened) the Campo Santo a wonderful little church on the banks of the Arno, Santa Maria Delia Spina and an old church of St Paolo that Lizzie and I found in the afternoon. Don’t you think that is good for half a day?¹⁵

Constance was not just taking photographs of buildings. She was also photographing some of the art around her, as well as exploring her own artistic talent. ‘I hope you liked the two scrappy photographs I put in for you yesterday,’ she wrote to Georgina. ‘They were meant to be sunbeams.’¹⁶

Florence must have wooed Constance into a false sense of security. In a bizarre way the holiday did nothing but reinforce the social wealth her life and career with Oscar had brought. The people she was mixing with were a reflection of the friendships and interests they had built together. These cultural pioneers were not restricted to living in London; they could live in the greatest artistic cities of Europe if they wished. She began to persuade herself that she and Oscar might actually leave Tite Street and take up residence in the magical city of Florence too:

Don’t be surprised if you hear of my flitting here … I love Florence with a passionate love and yearning as I have never loved any place before, only people. Still I don’t know whether I shall get Oscar out here, though he does speak of it as a possibility, and to me it seems more than a possibility, a delightful future to look forward to.¹⁷

While Constance continued her education in Florentine art and culture, back at Babbacombe Bosie and a colleague, Campbell Dodgson, had joined Oscar. Bosie had been sent down from Oxford for failing his exams, and Dodgson was supposed to be tutoring him. Far from the solitary, studious atmosphere Oscar suggested in a letter to Georgina (‘Babbacombe Cliff has become a kind of college or school, for Cyril studies French in the nursery, and I write my new play in Wonderland, and in the drawing room Lord Alfred Douglas – one of Lady Queensberry’s sons – studies Plato with his tutor’¹⁸), in fact the three men were having something of a riot.

After Dodgson left Babbacombe, Oscar wrote to assure him that ‘I am still conducting the establishment on the old lines and really think I have succeeded in combining the advantages of a public school with those of a private lunatic asylum.’ As a memento he added a brief prospectus for Babbacombe School, as follows:

Headmaster – Mr Oscar Wilde

Second Master – Mr Campbell Dodgson

Boys – Lord Alfred Douglas

Rules

Tea for masters and boys at 9.30am

Breakfast at 10.30

Work 11.30–12.30

At 12.30 Sherry and biscuits for headmasters and boys (the second master objects to this)

12.40–1.30 work

1.30 lunch

2.30–4.30 compulsory hide and seek for headmaster

5 Tea for headmaster and second master, brandy and sodas for boys

6–7 work

7.30 dinner

8.30–12 Ecarté, limited to five-guinea points

12–1.30 compulsory reading in bed …¹⁹

Now the house in Tite Street was burgled for a second time. This time nothing was taken. Which raises the question, just what were the burglars looking for? By associating with ‘renters’, Bosie and Oscar were laying themselves open to blackmail. Having also slept with Alfred Wood, Bosie gave him a suit of clothes, overlooking the fact that there was a compromising letter from Oscar in the pocket. Within a month Wood would attempt to blackmail Oscar with the letter. It’s tempting to speculate that he may well have been behind the break-in at Tite Street a little earlier, looking for more compromising material against the fêted Mr Wilde.

Oblivious to the double life her husband was now leading, after Florence Constance headed for Rome. On 19 February she got up at the crack of dawn and attended Jubilee Mass at St Peter’s. ‘The enthusiasm of thousands of people waving hats and handkerchiefs in that enormous building while the beautiful “Papa” was carried through the nave and round the Tribune, she explained to Georgina. ‘I was glad to have the dear old man’s blessing.’

‘Oscar writes to me every day & must be written to every day,’ Constance also stated, adding later that ‘Oscar has quite made up his mind to spend next winter in Florence.’²⁰ Although a regular exchange of letters with one another had gone on during their periods of separation across the two previous years, now that Oscar’s life was becoming so geared around Bosie Douglas, Constance’s revelation that she and Oscar were still writing regularly seems surprising. Many accounts of Oscar’s life have failed to recognise how much his wife remained in his thoughts. The fact is, however, that in the spring of 1893, Oscar was still torn between Bosie and Constance.

Although enthralled by him, Oscar’s relationship with Bosie was ambivalent. While he was hooked on Bosie, at another level Oscar understood how damaging the affair was. It was not just the money he was spending on Bosie and his circle, nor the danger that the ‘renters’ they shared presented, but Bosie’s personality was twisted and difficult. Demanding and hedonistic, greedy and selfish, Bosie Douglas also had tantrums that wore Oscar down. In fact, when Bosie left Babbacombe Cliff, Oscar said he was ‘determined never to speak to you again, or to allow you under any circumstances to be with me, so revolting had been the scene you had made the night before your departure’.²¹

His letters to Constance were Oscar’s last attempts to throw a lifeline back to his formerly stable family life. But it was one growing weaker and weaker. Oscar was increasingly under Bosie’s power, and, although she clearly did not know it, every day Oscar was with Bosie diminished the bond between him and his wife. Despite the elder man’s resolution to break with his young love and acolyte, he was weak. Later Oscar would recall to Bosie that after the scene at Babbacombe ‘I consented to meet you, and of course I forgave you. On the way up to town you begged me to take you to the Savoy. That was indeed a visit fatal to me.’²²

Returning from Devon at the beginning of March, Oscar took a suite at one of London’s most expensive and prestigious hotels. He and Bosie had adjoining rooms. The renters continued to come and go. Constance was meanwhile beginning to make her way back from Rome. She stopped in Florence again, now with the express purpose of looking at apartments. She was quite certain that she and Oscar would be back there together the following September and October. Earnest and hungry for knowledge as ever, she made sure that, when not viewing rooms, she was continuing to see every splendour of Florentine art still available to her. She had with her Ruskin’s guidebook Mornings in Florence and attempted as best she could to follow his recommendations.

‘I went with St C²³ to Santa Croce yesterday,’ she faithfully reported to their mutual friend, ‘not at sunrise as he thinks right, but armed with an opera glass and studied … the Giotto St Francis. When I come back to London I shall read nothing but Italian Art; nothing can exceed the vastness of my ignorance about it all.’²⁴

Full of the joys of Renaissance art she may have been, but when Constance’s feet touched British soil again on 21 March, she was mortified. Oscar was not waiting for her in Tite Street. He was staying at the Savoy with Bosie. The house in Tite Street, full of unopened post, felt as if it had been deserted. Whatever sweet nothings he had written to her while she was abroad, Oscar no longer seemed interested in seeing his wife now she had returned home.

Some of Oscar’s friends began to feel disenchanted with him in the spring of 1893. Oscar and Bosie presented new behaviours that the old established circle of Wilde admirers – even the homosexual ones – found not only unpalatable but dangerous. John Gray, the original model and dedicatee of Dorian Gray, terminated his friendship with Wilde. And the man to whom Wilde dedicated Salome, Pierre Louys, also ended their relationship, not least because he witnessed what he considered Oscar’s shameful treatment of Constance.

After their stay at the Savoy, Oscar and Bosie moved on to the Albemarle Hotel, no doubt telling Constance that it was important to be close to the rehearsals for A Woman of No Importance, which were now under way at the Haymarket Theatre. Louys visited Oscar and Bosie in their hotel rooms. Constance came round to deliver some post to her husband. When she complained that he no longer came home, Oscar announced for all to hear that he no longer remembered his address. He did so without an ounce of guilt. Constance left in tears, and Louÿs was horrified.

A Woman of No Importance opened in April. As the press reported, the opening night was conspicuously well attended, with ‘Mr Balfour … in a stage box, accompanied by Mr George Wyndham and the Countess Grosvenor, while in the corresponding box on the opposite side was Lord Battersea with Mr Alfred Rothschild’. The stalls were glittering with celebrities drawn from artistic and literary circles: ‘Lord Randolph Churchill and Lady Sarah Wilson, the Marquess and Marchioness of Granby, the Earl of Arran, M. Henry Rochefort, Mr and Mrs Chamberlain, Mr and Mrs Shaw Lefevre, Mr Alma Tadema, Miss Florence Terry, Mr Justin H. McCarthy, and Miss Jenoure, Mr Swinburne, and of course Mr Wm Wilde represented his brother.’²⁵

Constance is not mentioned in the press as one of the celebrity attendees, but given that she and Oscar had attended a reception at the New Gallery just six days earlier, it seems unlikely that Constance would have missed the opening of her husband’s second play, in spite of the recent personal difficulties between the two.

The audience applauded the play, but this time there were hoots and hisses at the author when, clad in a white waistcoat with lilies in his buttonhole, he came to bathe in their praise. It was not just Oscar’s close friends who were noticing a change in his attitude and behaviour. The general public, it seems, had picked up on the rumours about his personal life, and his scandalous relationship with Bosie Douglas. As if in acknowledgement of this, the actor–manager responsible for the production, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, announced, as he took his curtain call, that he was ‘proud to have been connected with such a work of art’, a statement that raised applause, one imagines, from the large number of Oscar’s invitees in the audience.

In spite of the souring of his public profile, Oscar suddenly found himself the recipient of £100 a week. This income could not have come at a better time for a family still generally outliving their means. But to Constance’s dismay the much-needed income did not seem to improve matters. Rather than plough it back into family finances, Oscar was spending it on a new lavish lifestyle, on Bosie Douglas, on hotels and, unbeknown to her, on rent boys.

And so as the hot summer of 1893 got under way, Constance had lost any sway she had formerly held over her husband. Oscar was out of her control and totally captivated by Bosie. While Oscar had resisted Constance’s former suggestions that they should buy a property out of town, at Bosie’s suggestion he now took a year’s lease on the property in Goring and began a pattern of spending that, with the rental, cost the Wildes some £3,000. As a result, not only was Constance snubbed, but the likelihood of the proposed autumn in Florence was also greatly diminished.

Although she and Cyril joined Bosie and Oscar in Goring in June, Constance and her son were an odd adjunct to the heady goings-on. Antics at the house were causing something of a stir in the village. One day the local vicar called to discover Oscar and Bosie wearing nothing but towels, larking on the lawn and turning a hosepipe on one another in the stifling heat. The new governess, Gertrude Simmons, whom Constance had employed to replace the French governess the boys had had at Babbacombe, also felt uncomfortable. One evening, during a firework display at a local regatta, she spotted Oscar with his arm around the boy employed to look after the boats.

‘I very much wish that Oscar had not taken the Cottage on the Thames for a year – things are dreadfully involved for me just now,’ Constance moaned to Georgina.²⁶ It was the first of many complaints she would now begin to share with several of her female friends. If Constance had been in denial about her husband up to this point, it seems that the truth was now dawning on her. In August she visited Mrs Lathbury in Witley again and clearly confided some of her fears and troubles.

‘Mrs Lathbury has given me what I believe to be very good advice, and the advice that she always gives me, I shall try & follow it for 6 months and let you know the result,’ Constance rather gnomically relayed to Georgina after the visit.²⁷

Despite the year’s lease that he had taken, by September Oscar had done with Goring. He “was exhausted by his three-month stint with Bosie and needed to escape. He fled to Dinard in Brittany, where he spent the end of August and the first week of September. ‘I required rest and freedom from the terrible strain of your companionship,’ Oscar would later write to Bosie.²⁸

Some accounts place Constance and the boys with Oscar in France. But in fact her letters suggest that she stayed in England, moving between London and Goring. After returning from Witley, she entertained guests at Goring in Oscar’s absence, including her friend the painter Henriette Corkran. On 1 September she dashed to pick up Vyvyan in London and returned to Goring with him. Whereas Cyril and Governess Simmons had been resident in Goring for most of the holiday, Vyvyan had been with the Palmers again for the summer.

Constance’s continuing habit of moving Vyvyan from pillar to post in this period begins to feel like the actions of a woman who was not only neurotic about her younger son’s health but had in fact lost the capacity to cope with the responsibility of a second child. Vyvyan was ‘sweet and affectionate but so extraordinarily wilful and wayward that he gets more and more difficult to manage’, Constance claimed.²⁹

Vyvyan could not stay by the Thames in the current climate, Constance wrote to Georgina. After just a few days with his brother there began a new search for another household that could take on the youngest member of the Wilde family. Initially Constance wrote to the Burne-Joneses in Rottingdean to see if they would have him. When the reply came that there was no room immediately in their household, he was dispatched to Brighton to stay with Constance’s mother.

When Oscar returned from France, he settled up his bills in Goring and returned to London life. On 9 September or shortly thereafter Constance and Cyril also returned to London to greet Oscar, and, after a fortnight in Brighton, Vyvyan moved to nearby Rottingdean where, finally, room had become available for him in the Burne-Jones household.

Constance left town to settle Vyvyan in with the Burne-Joneses and stayed a few days there herself. Her marital problems were now being widely discussed and it’s clear that the Burne-Joneses had their own advice to offer too. ‘I have taken Vyvyan to Rottingdean and Mrs Burne-Jones is going to look after him. As for Mr Burne-Jones I am quite in love with him! He sent his love to you and said that I was to tell you how I had last seen him – and this was wheeling his two grandchildren in their perambulators to save the nurse trouble,’ Constance related to Georgina. ‘[H]e asked me if I had any religion to help me, and I said that no-one could get on without it. This family life is so beautiful, Mr & Mrs Burne-Jones, Margaret & the husband and babes!! There I am going off again into dreams of what might be, wrong and foolish of me.’³⁰

By 28 September, Constance was on her way back to London but was dismayed that Oscar failed to meet her at the station, a courtesy that he had always extended to her in the past. In later years Bosie Douglas would ardently deny that his relationship with Oscar caused the deterioration of the Wilde marriage. He conceded that relations between the couple had become ‘distinctly strained’, noting that Oscar was now ‘impatient’ with Constance ‘and sometimes snubbed her, and he resented, and showed that he resented, the attitude of slight disapproval which she often adopted towards him’. With the most appalling lack of self-scrutiny, however, Bosie would claim that ‘to try and make out that this had anything whatever to do with me is simply dishonest and untruthful.’³¹

There is no doubt that Oscar and Constance’s marriage hit its lowest point to date during that summer of 1893. And regardless of his inability to take responsibility for it, there is also no doubt that Bosie was largely the cause. And yet the sad truth is that Constance also helped exacerbate matters by allowing the chasm growing between her and her husband to widen. Her almost relentless absence from Tite Street at a time when everyone else around her could see Oscar courting very real danger is hard to explain, except perhaps in terms of her fleeing from a situation that she did not wish properly to confront. Constance was going out of her way now to avoid her husband. From Rottingdean she had attempted to negotiate a brief stay with Georgina in Babbacombe at the end of the month. If Georgina could not take her, she would have to return home to Tite Street, ‘but for reasons that I will explain when I see you I would rather not go there!’³²

Constance wrote a short children’s story at around this time, and perhaps in it there is some clue to the approach she took to her husband. Entitled ‘The Little Swallow’, Constance’s story was published in late 1892. It may have well been inspired by the pigeons that she often fed during her sojourns at Babbacombe, since it begins with an image of children ‘looking at the birds eating the crumbs that nurse has thrown out in the snow to them’.

As the children watch the birds eating crumbs, their mother tells them another story about a ‘little bird’, this time ‘a tiny swallow’. The swallow is discovered on the ground by a young girl called Beatrice. It is spring and the ‘little swallow had tried to fly too soon, and so it had fallen down, and could not get back to its nest’. Beatrice nurses the swallow; she ‘picked it up and kissed it’. The swallow grows big and strong and soon learns to fly around inside Beatrice’s house. But one day, when Beatrice is out, someone opens a window and the swallow flies away, ‘singing for joy at the fresh air and bright sunshine’, and the child is heartbroken. Beatrice thinks she will never see the bird again, but then to her delight one evening the swallow comes back and visits her as she sits in an open window. Ever since then ‘he has come twice every day to get his food quite regularly … and Beatrice is very happy again’.³³ Perhaps Constance felt that, in exchange for his freedom, Oscar, like the swallow in her story, would always return to the domestic security his wife essentially provided him.

At the end of September, Constance went into a religious retreat at the convent of St John the Baptist at Clewer, Windsor. She was en route to Eton, which she was considering as a school for Cyril. The convent was part of a wider High-Church religious community in the area. It was associated with the Society of St John the Evangelist, the first Anglican religious community for men to be established since the Reformation.

But Constance had specific associations with Clewer. Father Maturin, Oscar’s relative, had also taken a retreat with the Society of St John the Evangelist in the 1870s. Two of his sisters, Fidelia and Johanna, were now members of the convent, and Constance almost certainly went to see them and to seek some answers to her troubles within the austere atmosphere in which they lived. ‘Last night I was put ignominiously to bed and dosed with bromide and this morning I feel pretty bad!’ she related to Georgina.³⁴

Shortly after this she went to stay with the Thursfields at their home in Great Berkhamsted, before going on to spend some time in Leighton Buzzard with the medium Sarah Wagstaff, a homoeopath and clairvoyant who had treated and assisted both John Ruskin and Georgina in medical and spiritual matters, and who would have almost certainly been recommended by the latter to Constance. Cyril accompanied her on her travels while Vyvyan was still with the Burne-Joneses. At Leighton Buzzard Constance once again sought advice on how best to cope with and manage her domestic situation. And finally it seems that she was told some home truths.

‘Just back from Leighton Buzzard and have been district visiting since and am so tired. Mrs “Wagstaff has been so kind and helpful about the children and other things. When I see you, I will tell you, but it is too “intime” to write,’ Constance informed Georgina on her return to London on 9 October.³⁵ She picked up the thread again the next day, revealing that ‘What Mrs Wagstaff told me in trance has not comforted me, but it is best to know the truth and I know that I of my own power can do nothing. I must pray for my boys and when they are older teach them to pray & to struggle.’³⁶

Otho would always deny that his sister knew about Oscar’s homosexual adventures, right up until his trial. But in the aftermath of what was to come he was keen to protect Constance’s moral reputation. Constance’s determination to pray for her boys surely indicates that finally she admitted the likelihood that Oscar’s friendship with Bosie was more than just that, and that her sons might one day be susceptible to similar sexual predilection.

Amid their rapidly deteriorating relationship Oscar and Constance still had moments of intimacy, but they were few and far between. Constance was becoming increasingly tempted by Catholicism, an inclination that had been nothing but intensified by her recent visit to Rome and her introduction to the Maturins. Oscar too from his earliest student days had always been attracted to Rome. In October 1893 the couple found themselves alone at Tite Street and began to discuss the matter.

I have been having wonderful talks with Oscar lately and I am much happier about him. But he thinks that it would be ruin to the boys if I became a ‘Cat’. No Catholic boy is allowed to go to Eton or to take a scholarship at the University … imagine my surprise to find that Oscar goes to Benediction at the Oratory sometimes & other things that he does surprise me more still! He will not go himself with me there, but he would like me to go & burn candles at the Virgin’s altar and offer up prayers for him. Remember that I can never broach these subjects to him myself and it may be years before he speaks to me again like this, but I shall not forget that he has these moods, and last evening he said a great deal to me. I shall go to the Oratory tomorrow and I shall burn a candle for Oscar and one for Mother.³⁷

Perhaps Constance failed to pick up that Oscar’s request to offer prayers for him might have been, if not a direct plea for help, something close to an admission from him that he was now in deep trouble. Bosie had in fact left Oxford University in June, having refused to sit his exams. During the holiday in Goring, Oscar had tried to help his lover as best he could and had suggested Bosie translate Salome, which Oscar had written in French, into English, and share something of the credit when the work was published in its English edition. But a terrible crisis had occurred when, by the end of August, it was apparent to Oscar that Bosie’s translation was less than good. Throughout September the two had argued over the book’s proofs, with Bosie rejecting Oscar’s corrections and Oscar refusing to accept a second-rate version of his work.

‘After a series of scenes culminating in one more than usually revolting, when you came one Monday evening to my rooms accompanied by two male friends, I found myself actually flying abroad next morning to escape from you,’ Wilde would later recall, ‘giving my wife some absurd reason for my departure, and leaving a false address with my servant for fear you might follow me by the next train.’³⁸ The incident was particularly painful and embarrassing for Constance, since it coincided with a major family event. Her cousin Lilias was getting married to one Henry Bonar, who worked in the consular service in Japan. Oscar was naturally expected to attend the ceremony.

‘Yesterday I made the acquaintance of my new cousin Henry Bonar … he had a godmother Constance and after her is called Constant, so … we made friends over the beautiful name. I do love my name so much, and think it one of the most beautiful names in the world; don’t you? I think that one should have beautiful names given to one and that then one should try and live up to them.’³⁹ So began Constance in that day’s letter to Georgina, before revealing rather desperately: ‘I am unhappy because Oscar is not at all well, and had to fly off yesterday morning to Calais to meet a friend there; he declined to go to Paris to the friend so they agreed to meet halfway. I have got a Liberty dress for the wedding and Oscar is not here to see it!’⁴⁰

Constance’s reference to Oscar’s health in the same breath as mentioning his unexpected departure for France is intriguing. Her letters of this period are full of references to him being ‘unwell’. It’s tempting to see Constance’s references to Oscar’s health as some form of unconscious euphemism for his homosexuality. Just as some medics considered it a curable illness, it’s just possible that Constance was discussing possible ‘cures’ for her husband’s condition with her close female friends, such as Mrs Lathbury.

If Constance had resolved to accept her husband’s homosexuality, whether its source was an illness or no, she was not prepared to absolve him of poor conduct. Constance was furious when Oscar announced he would not attend Lilias’s wedding. When he returned to London the next day, he was still smarting from what had clearly been a fiery row between the two of them.

‘Oscar is back in town but not with me,’ Constance confided to Georgina. ‘I hope he comes back tonight – all my old misery over again and another fiasco.’⁴¹