WHEN WILDE CAME down from Oxford to London in early 1879 he was the complete intellectual article. The books that he brought with him to the English capital – Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the Dialogues of Plato, and the works of his mentors, Mahaffy and Pater – had shaped his vision of the world. These volumes took their place on the shelves of the apartments he rented in London between 1879–85, no doubt with many other golden books from his youth. A number of his parents’ works, such as his father’s Irish Popular Superstitions and Lough Corrib, would have been there, along with the novels of Balzac and Disraeli. These personal classics, which had formed Wilde’s personality, also formed the core of his adult library.
Wilde took his books with him when he moved between his various London residences. His addresses sound so aristocratic that they must have inspired great confidence in the tradesmen he dealt with. There was Keats House, Chelsea, which Wilde himself christened after his favourite rhymer; 9 Charles Street, Grosvenor Square; and Thames House, Salisbury Street, just off the Strand. His apartments were, however, actually rather inexpensive and bohemian in character, and he shared them with friends. Descriptions of their interiors remind us of his undergraduate rooms at Magdalen. He adorned them with Pre-Raphaelite paintings and countless orna ments, and always had a plentiful supply of tobacco and alcohol on hand to serve the hordes of actresses, poets and painters who dropped in to catch up with all the gossip.
Some of Wilde’s books would have been set out on shelves; others were probably left in untidy piles on the floor. Disorder seems to have been the keynote of his bachelor libraries: one friend was horrified to find a precious volume among a lot of rubbish.1
In the years 1879–85, Wilde’s life altered rapidly and radically. In imitation, perhaps, of his hero Lucien de Rubempré, he attempted to cause a sensation in literary and social circles with his volume of verse Poems (1881) and his dandified attire. Like Disraeli, he kept himself in the public eye and in the papers, with his witty epigrams and his extravagant public gestures, which included (or so he made people believe) walking down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand.
Such strategies succeeded in turning Wilde into a media celebrity, famous for being famous as much as for his oracular proclamations on art. These pronouncements did, however, establish him as the popular spokesman of the Aesthetic movement. In 1882 he embarked on a lecture tour of America, during which he attempted to convert the country to the Aesthetic creed. He encouraged people to surround themselves with objects of beauty and to dress exquisitely, and he advocated the foundation of local art schools. On his return to England he lectured on art in the provinces. The press coverage his lectures received, not all of which was flattering, turned him into a household name.
After the failure of his two dramas, Vera (1880) and The Duchess of Padua (1883), to reach the stage, Wilde settled down into a fairly conventional routine of lecturing, book reviewing in the national press, and domesticity. In 1883 he fell in love with a Dublin girl called Constance Lloyd whom he described as a ‘grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair’.2 The following year he married her. Given Wilde’s undergraduate fascination with homosexuality, and the possibility that, even at this early date, his interest in it was not purely theoretical, this may seem surprising. There can be little doubt, however, that he was genuinely enamoured of Constance, so it is likely that Wilde was attracted to both women and men at this time. Only later would his passion for his own sex dominate his emotional life.
Constance gave birth to two boys whom Wilde cherished: Cyril was born in 1885 and Vyvyan in the following year. At the beginning of 1885, the Wildes moved into 16 (now 34) Tite Street, Chelsea, which became known as the ‘House Beautiful’ because it exemplified many of Wilde’s Aesthetic theories regarding design and decoration. The interior was devised by the renowned theatre designer and architect E.W. Godwin; Wilde was involved at every stage of the enterprise. Apart from his childhood house at Merrion Square, this would be Wilde’s only ‘home’ as he was fairly nomadic during every other phase of his life. Within the house, three rooms were exclusively his: the bedroom on the top floor, the smoking room on the first, and the library on the ground floor.
The white front door of No. 16 opened on to a grey-white hall with a bright yellow ceiling. A white silk curtain hung down in front of the staircase that went up to the first floor. The library was immediately to the right of the hall, at the front of the house, overlooking Tite Street. Its bay windows are so close to the street that it is easy to see into the room from the pavement. Alfred Douglas would refer to the room as ‘little’. By any standards other than a lord’s, however, the library was sizeable, occupying half of the ground floor (the rest of the floor was taken up by the dining-room). The library’s ceiling was as high as those of most late Victorian houses, and there was a dado rail at five feet six inches up the wall. The room faced east, in accordance with the view of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who held that libraries ought to make the most of the morning sunshine for reading and warmth – advice that many Victorian architects followed.3
Originally the walls were ‘to be distemper dark blue’ with the upper part of the walls above the wooden rail, along with the cornice and ceiling, painted a pale gold colour, and the rail itself in golden brown.4 These specifications were altered during the initial stages of the work and the room became a harmony of yellow and red, with buttercup yellow walls and shiny lacquered red-brown woodwork.
Wilde seems to have been responsible for the transformation from golden brown to red: ‘Don’t you think,’ he asked his architect, ‘a vermillion band in the front room . . . would do?’5 He may also have been behind the decision to paint the walls yellow, which was, for him, the happiest of colours. ‘You have yellow walls!’ he exclaimed on a visit to a friend’s house, ‘so have I – yellow is the colour of joy.’6
The words that Wilde inscribed, in red, blue and gilt above the library’s doorway were highly appropriate for the works he would compose there. The inscription read:
Spirit of Beauty! tarry still awhile,
They are not dead, thine ancient votaries,
Some few there are to whom thy radiant smile
Is better than a thousand victories.
These lines, from Wilde’s poem ‘The Garden of Eros’, articulate that sincere devotion to beauty that colours so many of his works. In consciously drawing on another writer – Shelley, who coined the phrase ‘Spirit of Beauty’ – they are also typical of the echo-filled and highly allusive writings that Wilde penned in the room. Above the inscription there was a series of painted sunflowers and flame-coloured aureoles.7
In the spring and summer time, the morning sun poured into the room from the large bay window, reflecting the shiny gilt lettering on the spines of Wilde’s books. Like his mother, however, Wilde was not fond of excessive light, and there were times when he blocked out the sun’s rays by pulling a glass bead hanging across the window or by placing in front of it a large wooden screen decorated in a Moorish pattern. According to Wilde’s son Vyvyan, screens were used in many of the rooms at Tite Street, making the interiors dark, exotic and ‘mysterious’.
Wilde may have preferred to have artificial light in the library. He maintained that the ‘soft light’ given off by lamps and wax candles was ‘the best to read by’ and ‘very much prettier and healthier than gas’.8 The idea of concentrating light in libraries by the use of circular mirrors also appealed to him, so it is probable that various glasses were strategically positioned around the room. Wilde loved the way artificial light played upon the interrupted surfaces of a ceiling, so it is unlikely that his library’s ceiling was smooth. An additional play of light was provided in winter by the flames of a coal fire, which was framed by an ornate russet oak fireplace, situated on the wall opposite the door. (It was removed from the house during renovation in the 1950s and given to Magdalen College, where it was installed in an undergraduate room very close to Wilde’s former residence on the Kitchen Staircase9).
An eight by seven foot Persian carpet dominated the floor. A large piece of old oriental embroidery hung on one of the walls and a black sheepskin rug lay in front of the fire. An antique sofa covered in moreen probably faced the fireplace; there were also three beautiful chairs: a Chippendale mahogany corner chair, an antique Italian ivory inlaid elbow-chair and a large easy chair with two horsehair cushions. Perhaps Wilde selected one of them to read in according to the book, or to his mood.
Curiously, given Wilde’s aversion to conventional Victorian interior decoration, the general impression is one of typical nineteenth-century heaviness, profusion and clutter. The room contained, among other things, an antique carved oak chest, a four-tier enamelled red ‘whatnot’, several antique brass lamps and brackets, a Chinese lantern, two Japanese masks, a bronze flower, a bronze lobster, an antique pier glass and a nest of Japanese baskets.10 Most of Wilde’s friends described the library as ‘Eastern’, ‘Turkish’ or ‘Moorish’ in character, on account of all the hangings, lanterns, baskets and ottomans.
The library of a nineteenth-century aesthete had to be beautiful, both for its own sake and also because it was the room in which literary beauty was solemnly worshipped. Wilde shuddered with revulsion at the idea of taking up ‘a volume of Keats . . . in a library furnished as most are’ – that is, with appalling taste. You would, he said, have to make an enormous spiritual jump, before achieving ‘the proper frame of mind to appreciate his poetry’.11
Wilde, aged 27, reclining with a book.
The aesthete regarded his library as a chapel dedicated to beauty, in which the rarest and choicest of art works, both literary and visual, could be assembled in perfect harmony. That is why Dorian Gray’s library contains, among other exquisite items, Venetian satin covers, tables of dark wood encrusted with nacre, pearl-coloured octagonal stands and an ebony Florentine cabinet. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the art critic and poisoner who was the subject of Wilde’s essay ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison’, filled his library with artistic objects from every culture and epoch. Wilde imagines the arch-aesthete lying there in the midst of his Greek vases, colourful gems, exquisitely bound books and antique bronzes, entranced by the magic and mystery of beautiful things.
Wilde once said that he required Chippendale near him in order to write. The jest may well have been serious, because, as noted, his library contained a chair in that style.12 The Japanese embroidered silk gown he kept there may also have acted as a literary inspiration, reminding him, perhaps, of the legendary cowl that Balzac had worn during his furious fits of composition. Wilde evidently believed that his surroundings directly influenced the style of his writing: he once asked a friend to bring him some Queen Anne furniture to help him write a mock Restoration drama.13
Wilde was certainly inspired to write by the most precious item of furniture in the library – a writing-desk formerly owned by the historian, philosopher and essayist, Thomas Carlyle. Wilde’s mother was a friend and admirer of the ‘Sage of Chelsea’, and it is likely that she had encouraged her son to read him as a boy. Wilde’s letters display an intimate knowledge of Carlyle’s oeuvre, and he knew many of his favourite Carlylean passages by heart. Speranza introduced her son to Carlyle on a visit to the author’s Chelsea home in 1879 and, on that occasion, Wilde may have caught a glimpse of the desk that would become the centrepiece of his library. It is not known how or when Wilde acquired it, but he probably picked it up from the antique dealer who sold some of Carlyle’s effects after his death in 1881. Wilde worshipped the desk as a relic of one of his literary heroes; he also believed that it possessed talismanic qualities. As Carlyle was a prodigiously industrious author, even by Victorian standards, Wilde hoped that it would be a fetish against idleness, one of his great temptations, and prompt him to put ‘black upon white . . . black upon white’.14
The library was the ideal theatrical backdrop to Wilde’s writing, creating just the right mood for his daily literary performance. In the morning, having first dressed with extreme care, he would descend the stairs and enter the beautiful room. After donning, perhaps, his Balzacian gown, he lit a cigarette and sat down at Carlyle’s desk. He was now ready to begin his work, or rather his ‘play’ as he liked to call it.
The writing-desk was probably placed in front of the window.15 Made of mahogany, it had a rising slope and a drawer in which Wilde must have placed the expensive notebooks he used to write in. On top, his paperknife and Indian brass inkstand were on permanent display.16 As Wilde was a chain smoker, he made room on the desk for his ‘silver match box frames’, and the large biscuit tin full of cigarettes that he carried with him around the house. The porcelain bowl that served as an ashtray would also have found a place there. Wilde famously called the cigarette ‘the perfect type of perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?’ Smoking was a pleasure he took very seriously indeed. He purchased as many as 300 expensive gold-tipped cigarettes at a time from high-class tobacconists, and even had them make up a special batch with his own name written on them.17
A waste-paper basket stood beside the desk. Into this Wilde consigned ‘discarded manuscripts . . . and gaily-coloured [cigarette] boxes’.18 It was also the final resting place of reviews of his own writings: ‘two hundred and sixteen criticisms of Dorian Gray,’ he claimed, ‘ . . . have passed from my library table into the wastepaper basket.’19
The scent of tobacco dominated the room, pervading the books and the furniture; it was balanced by the dusty, musty odour of the volumes themselves, as well as by the flowers that Wilde placed all around. He liked to arrange roses and violets in bunches; single lilies and narcissi stood in Venetian glasses. The faint smell of alcohol would also have been perceptible: decanters containing Wilde’s favourite drinks of claret, hock and brandy were set out on a sideboard, along with champagne tumblers and goblets for his yellow and purple wine.
Only a few pictures hung on the walls, but that is hardly surprising given the amount of space taken up by the bookshelves. There was a painting by the nineteenth-century French artist, Adolphe Monticelli, a picture by the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Simeon Solomon, Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing of the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell and a Japanese painting of children at play.
The most striking work in the room was a cast of the famous bust of the god Hermes, which had been fashioned by the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles (see p. 108). Wilde thought that Greek sculptures created a pure and noble atmosphere in the rooms they adorned and that casts of men were particularly suited to libraries.20 He may even have believed that his cast of Hermes would magically influence his writing. Just as the Greeks had ‘set in the bride’s chamber the statue of Hermes . . . that she might bear children as lovely as the work of art she looked at’ in the moment of conception, so too may Wilde have hoped to conceive lovely literary children in the presence of his cast.21
Aubrey Beardsley’s portrait of Mrs Patrick Campbell, which hung in Wilde’s library.
The bust was part of Praxiteles’ celebrated masterpiece, Hermes with the Infant Dionysus, in which the god is depicted carrying the child deity. Wilde placed this archetypal icon of classical male beauty on a red-lacquered tripod near his writing-chair. It was probably to the right of the ground floor window, within touching distance of the desk. The plaster of the cast did not, alas, ‘retain the beauty and transparency of the original’, which was, according to Wilde, ‘like ivory lit by the sun’. Viewing it on his visit to Greece in 1877, he had been convinced that ‘the spirit of the god still dwelt within the marble’.22
Hermes was the Olympian god of orators, wits and poets, and the inventor of the lyre. He was also the deity of liars and thieves. In most legends he is depicted as a cheeky trickster, who becomes embroiled in scrapes out of a love of mischief and extricates himself from them through marvellous eloquence, a prodigious gift for telling stories and a genius for playing the lyre. This was the god whose shadow was cast across Wilde’s writing-desk.
