ONE DAY, WHEN the Wildes were having dinner at Merrion Square, Sir William asked the three-year-old Oscar to fetch him a book from his library.1 Wilde jumped down from the table and scampered off downstairs to the book-lined room on the ground floor. We can imagine him standing there in the middle of the library, casting his eyes rapidly over the spines in search of the relevant title.
To have been entrusted with this task the young Oscar must have known his father’s collection well. Having the run of that ‘library containing the best literature’ was, he later remarked, vitally important for his early education.2 The collection was comprised of the finest literature of various European cultures in their original languages; it also boasted volumes on subjects as diverse as theology, midwifery, metalwork, astronomy and ornithology. The age, size and provenance of the books were as heterogeneous as their contents. There were folio and octavo volumes which hailed from American, English and continental presses.3 This vast emporium of multi-coloured editions of all shapes and sizes must have dazzled Wilde’s infant eyes.
Speranza also possessed an extensive collection of modern and ancient literature. At Merrion Square she does not appear to have had a room set aside for her books, and they were probably scattered all over the house. The drawing-rooms at No. 1 were, she said, ‘a lumber of books’. She planned to organise the volumes, ‘but’, she told a friend, ‘time and courage failed me – so they are covering the floor’.4 Throughout her life Speranza preferred to leave her books in a state of mild disorder, piling them up from floor to ceiling, or leaving them lying around on the furniture. As the young Wilde played around the house he would have bumped into books at every turn. Perhaps he even incorporated them into his games, as his own children did years later, when they made stilts by strapping books to the soles of their feet. Despite the markedly oral nature of Wilde’s early literary education, his was also an eminently bookish childhood – he grew up surrounded by mountains of books.
As Speranza described herself happiest with ‘a good book and a good fire’5 we can picture mother and son in front of a roaring fire in the nursery at Merrion Square. Young Oscar was probably curled up in her lap, though he would have had to vie for that privilege with his brother Willie and his young sister Isola, who had been born in 1857. As Wilde’s childhood is likely to have been crowded with all the usual incidents of infant disease, such as whooping cough and measles, his mother is also likely to have read to him when he lay ill in bed. In later life Wilde certainly turned to literature for comfort when he was sick.
Wilde would have received his first reading lessons from his mother and his nurse, as well as from the various French, German and English governesses employed to look after and educate the children at Merrion Square. During the 1850s two principal methods of teaching children to read were in vogue. One of these continued the ancient ‘hornbook’ tradition of instruction by emphasising spelling and the learning of letters. The other, known as the ‘whole-word method’, began with the association of entire words with sounds and pictures, thus encouraging the child to go ‘straight from the printed form of a word to its enunciation’.6
Nineteenth-century primers based on the second method focus on the sound of words. Infants are encouraged to learn catchy nursery rhymes such as ‘Wee Willie Winkie’, and rhythmic phrases such as ‘I am not six; but I can bat. A man, an ox, a cat, a fox’. Given his parents’ sensitivity to the oral and aural aspects of literature, as well as the erratic nature of Wilde’s adult spelling,7 it is likely that he was taught with the whole-word method. It is hard to think of a better education for a poet who would savour sound above sense.
From these ‘First Reading Books’ the nineteenth-century child typically progressed to illustrated collections of nursery rhymes and to fairy tales, such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, along with stories by Hans Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Children derive great satisfaction from the clearly defined narrative sequences of these tales, with their archetypal beginnings and emphatic conclusions. The tales offer them templates for ordering their own experience – they learn to construct narratives out of everyday occurrences; to think in stories. This was a mental habit that Wilde undoubtedly acquired as a boy. Years later he told one friend that he instinctively thought in the form of stories, rather than with abstract ideas.8
At some point in his childhood, the young Wilde became an accom plished enough reader to retreat, alone, into a private world of books. There are examples of writers, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who were so enamoured of hearing stories that they deliberately put off learning to read for themselves until as late as six or seven years old. It is not impossible that Wilde was similar. He told a friend that he was never a precocious child, and there is a noticeable dearth of the sort of anecdotes relating to his childhood reading that are so common in the lives of other writers. Given the adult Wilde’s celebrated gift for speed-reading, however, along with the fact that he had two clever and loving parents, the chances are that, like Swift and Dickens, he would have been able to read by himself around the age of three or four.
From that time onwards Wilde probably began to build up in his bedroom, on the top floor of the house, his first collection of books. In a lecture, Wilde described how the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Chatterton had loved, as a boy, ‘to covet the privacy of his little study’, reading there ‘from the moment he waked . . . until he went to bed’.9 This may be an echo of his own experience. If it was, then it must have been an extremely novel one for a boy brought up to associate books with company, and the printed word with the spoken voice. Wilde was no doubt allowed to read in his bedroom before lights out – and this may well be the origin of his lifelong habit of reading in bed. In fact, it would not be at all surprising to learn that mandatory night-time reading was one of the few regulations enforced in the Wildes’ bohemian household.*
And what did young Wilde take to bed with him to read? One of the ‘golden books’ of his childhood was J.W. Meinhold’s 1847 Gothic historical novel Sidonia the Sorceress. Wilde’s mother, who was an accomplished translator of European fiction, produced a celebrated English version of this German book. Wilde would remember it fondly as ‘my favourite romantic reading when a boy’11 and he returned to it at various times in his adult life.12 He must have been a gifted child reader to have perused the novel because it would present insur mountable difficulties to the average infant. Indeed, both its style and content suggest that it was aimed at adults as well as children.
Sidonia is set in the seventeenth-century land of Pomerania. The heroine is the beautiful and eloquent Sidonia von Bork, an outsider, by her lowly birth, to the world of the court, which she is determined to conquer. Her plans to marry a duke are foiled when he learns that she has other lovers of far less exalted status than himself. Ostracised by the court, Sidonia turns to witchcraft. With the aid of Satan she puts a curse of sterility on the Pomeranian royal line, but when her spell is discovered she is burnt at the stake.
Before her demise Sidonia enjoys a series of picaresque adventures. These involve grisly murders, accidental decapitations and premature burials. There is a powerful erotic element in some of the episodes, which is often mixed with violence. The Sorceress has a voracious sexual appetite: she seduces priests and turns her nunnery into a ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’. The sex and violence are mingled with a great deal of comedy. Sidonia is always ready with some quick-witted retort that would not have been out of place in the Wildes’ drawing-room.
In the novel, humour follows hard upon the heels of horror. Reading it, Wilde must have been unsure whether to laugh or scream. Dickens referred to the principle of narrative heterogeneity as the ‘streaky bacon’ style. It was a style the young Wilde learned to love from Sidonia and from the Irish folk tales his parents told him. He would master it himself in works such as Dorian Gray and in plays where he consciously sought to ‘produce tragic effects by introducing comedy’. A laugh, he believed, ‘does not destroy terror, but, by relieving it, aids it’.13
Sidonia haunted Wilde’s adult imagination, and traces of its influence can be found in Dorian Gray.14 Another childhood favourite that he later turned to for inspiration was Melmoth the Wanderer, written by Charles Maturin, Wilde’s great-uncle on his mother’s side, in 1820.
Melmoth, a seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish gentleman, strikes a Faustian bargain with the Devil, exchanging his soul for a hundred and fifty year extension to his life. He soon tires of earthly pleasures, however, and tries to exploit a loophole in his diabolic deal, which allows him to elude his fate if he can find someone willing to exchange places with him. His search for a victim, often among the most wretched specimens of humanity, provides the novel with its chilling and tortuous plot; his failure to do so gives it its tragic end.
At many points Melmoth prefigures Dorian Gray. In one of the opening scenes a portrait of the eponymous hero is destroyed by his ancestor, just as, at the end of Wilde’s novel, Dorian vandalises his own painted image. Melmoth’s descendant hacks the picture to pieces then throws the fragments onto a fire. As he gazes at the flames a terrible voice suddenly comes out of nowhere: ‘You have burned me,’ it bellows, ‘but those are flames I can survive – I am alive, – I am beside you.’
Wilde praised Melmoth as a pioneering work of European Gothic fiction. He admitted, however, that it was stylistically ‘imperfect’ and laughed at its absurdity.15 Yet this is by no means a negative or an inappropriate response to a book that hails from the ‘streaky bacon’ school of writing: the novel exhibits no artistic decorum whatsoever, and Wilde’s fondness for it can be regarded as a glorious example of what one of his acquaintances would call his ‘infallible bad taste’.16
Wilde’s childhood reading, dominated by folk tales, poetry and Gothic fiction, was probably atypical for the period, at least by the standards of middle-class Victorian England. He appears to have been spared the religious fare that formed the staple diet of many English children. There is no record of his having read enormously popular ‘improving’ books such as Mrs Sherwood’s The Fairchild Family. Nor, so far as we know, was he force-fed the pious and mawkish children’s literature of the day, which reached its apogee in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies. Wilde maintained that it was a mistake to ‘think that children are sentimental about literature; they are not: they have humour instead.’17 It was a lesson he may have absorbed from his own youthful experience.
While the Wildes allowed their son the free run of their libraries, many Victorian parents rigorously censored their offspring’s reading, providing for them carefully chosen ‘selections’ from the works of writers such as Alexandre Dumas or George Eliot. Even expurgated novels were forbidden to the children of strict English Protestant families. ‘Never in all my early childhood,’ remembered Edmund Gosse, ‘did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, “Once upon a time” . . . I never heard of fairies.’18
One manual of advice concerning children’s reading articulates the conventional Victorian attitude to boys’ literature. ‘The child soon becomes a boy, and is sent out into the rough world, where all the nonsense about giants and fairies is knocked out of him . . . To suit this hopeful young gentleman, the storyteller writes a boy’s novel: take a boy for hero. Let him run away to sea. Wreck him on the coast of Africa, and land him among hordes of grinning Negroes. This is the boy’s novel; and the boy . . . pronounces it “awfully jolly”.’19
It is almost impossible to imagine such books being foisted on Wilde. His reading experience was, it seems, much closer to that of a number of English and Irish nineteenth-century writers, none of whom were reared in middle-class households. As a boy, the poet Shelley devoured Gothic fiction along with tales of magic and witchcraft; Maturin adored Shakespeare and Thomas Percy’s famous collection of traditional medieval ballads, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The most striking comparison is with Rossetti, who, like Wilde, grew up in a bohemian and distinctly un-English environment – Rossetti’s parents were Italian, and the language of their native country was spoken at home. As a boy, the poet-painter immersed himself in Irish folklore, Gothic fiction and Romantic poetry. Wilde was intrigued to learn of their common literary education when he read a collection of Rossetti’s letters. He was especially charmed ‘to see how my grand-uncle’s Melmoth and my mother’s Sidonia’ had also ‘been two of the books that fascinated his youth’.20
* Wilde made bedtime reading mandatory for his lover Alfred Douglas when he was preparing for his Oxford exams. He drew up a mock timetable for Douglas’s revision studies that included ‘compulsory reading in bed’ between midnight and 1.30. If ‘found disobeying this rule’, Douglas would, according to the timetable, be ‘immediately woken up’.10