IMMEDIATELY AFTER MOVING into Tite Street Wilde instructed his builder, Mr Sharpe, to make several alterations to the library, one of which was to ‘provide and fix [a] new brass keyhole to [the] new bookcase’.1 This was perhaps the large bookcase Wilde placed to the right of the fireplace, in which he locked away his precious copies of the ‘Greek Classics’.2 In the room there was also an ‘enamelled red open bookcase’ and a ‘walnut wood revolving bookcase’.3
Victorian bookcases were designed to hold larger quarto and folio-sized books at the bottom, along with periodicals, prints and papers. The spaces between the shelves became progressively smaller as they went up, so that the top shelf held the smallest books. As it was considered important to have all books within easy reach, Wilde’s bookcases would not have been particularly high. They were probably placed a little away from the wall, and well clear of the water pipes, in order to keep the books at just the right temperature.
Wilde owned around two thousand volumes. If this seems a meagre estimate for a man as ostentatiously over-educated as Wilde, we should remember that he was a writer, rather than a collector or a scholar, and that his was a working library. The figure was, in any case, hardly inconsiderable by Victorian standards. Both Edward Fitzgerald, the celebrated Victorian translator of the Persian poet Omar Khayyám, and Sir William Wilde, amassed around only eight hundred volumes over the course of lives significantly longer than Wilde’s.
Wilde probably grouped some of his books by genre, language and subject. His French novels and his volumes of Shakespeare criticism were certainly placed together. Given the design of typical Victorian bookcases, however, the size of the books is likely to have been the most important factor in determining their position.
The volumes Wilde happened to be reading at a particular time were probably piled up on the floor around a divan or on top of his writing-desk. If he shared the typical Victorian gentleman’s horror of having his books handled by servants, he would have tidied them up himself at the end of each working day; otherwise he may have given strict instructions that they were to be left untouched.4
Wilde liked the colour of interiors to be harmonious. ‘Colours resemble musical notes;’ he declared, ‘a single false colour or false note destroys the whole.’ Most nineteenth-century libraries were offensive to his fastidious aesthetic sensibility because of the discordant notes provided by the motley colours of the volumes. Unlike the books of previous centuries, Victorian publications were, he complained, ‘bound in all manner of gaudy colours’ and modern bookbinding was, in consequence, ‘one of the greatest drawbacks to the beauty of many libraries’.5 Richer, or perhaps more dedicated, bibliophiles overcame the problem by having all their books beautifully rebound in buckram or morocco.6 Wilde thought the idea expensive and impractical – ‘you can’t,’ he said, ‘have all your books rebound.’ ‘The only thing left,’ he concluded, ‘is to have curtains to hide them out of sight.’7 Wilde does not seem to have followed his own precept, how ever, as visitors to his library remarked on the visibility and prominence of his books. On entering the room one journalist was struck by the abundance of ‘books, periodicals, manuscripts . . . on all sides’.8
The books on Wilde’s shelves offered to his eye a carnival of incongruous colours. The nineteenth-century English novels he possessed came in orange, yellow, cobalt blue and garish green. Their bulky Victorian bindings produced a harsh counterpoint to the dainty, and sometimes deceptively chaste-looking, white covers of the slim volumes of verse he owned. The books were also of vastly varying sizes. His Cyclopaedia of Costume was a gargantuan red folio volume. In contrast, some of his books of poetry, such as the blue anthology Book-Song, were of tiny duodecimo size.
Variety was also the salient characteristic of the cityscape that met Wilde’s eyes whenever he raised them from his work. Although he often blocked out the view from the window, given his curiosity and artistic interest in modern life, there must have been times when he drew back the screen to gaze out at Tite Street. He would have often seen there the horse-drawn omnibus that stopped right in front of the house, as well as countless hansom cabs passing by. He must, too, have frequently viewed dockers on their way to and from work on the Thames, at the bottom of Tite Street, and children heading off to play in the nearby Royal Hospital Gardens.
Chelsea was far more bohemian then than it is now. In those distant days, journalists, clergymen, artists, and even writers could afford to live there.9 Right behind Tite Street ran the ironically named Paradise Row – ‘one of the most forbidding of Chelsea’s slums with wretched, filthy back-yards, from which the sounds of brawling rose nightly’.10 When the fighting got out of hand ‘a procession would form and walk up [the Row], along Cheyne Place and down to Tite Street to the casualty ward of the Victoria Hospital for Children’, directly opposite the Wildes’ home.11
Rich and poor, old and young, artists and lawyers, the healthy and the sick: this was the pageant of London life that paraded before Wilde’s library window. No wonder he was reluctant to simplify or moralise about the world in the works he penned there. He preferred instead to express life’s bewildering and invigorating diversity and complexity in inherently ambiguous and indeterminate forms such as the dialogue and the drama.
Variety was also the keynote of the natural world outside Wilde’s window. The light of dawn cascaded into the room when he drew back the screen in the mornings, suddenly illuminating the resplendent colours of the spines of his books. Sunset was reflected in the windows of the buildings opposite, an effect Wilde captured in Dorian Gray. Dorian looks out from his library and sees that ‘the sunset had smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite. The panes glowed like plates of heated metal. The sky above was like a faded rose.’12 For once the arch-anti-realist may have gone directly to life for inspiration.
Wilde also followed the progress of the seasons from his desk. In the spring he was moved to rapture by the sight of the lilac blossoms and his beloved laburnum, which hung its dusty gold over the black cast-iron railings of Tite Street.13 In the tree-lined garden of the children’s hospital opposite his window he saw the leaves turn from lush green to burning red in the autumn, and the flowers retire beneath the earth to sleep with the coming of the winter.
The sound of the fighting in Paradise Row was clearly audible in the house.14 Noise also came from the Thames wharves. The din created by the dockers was indeed so loud that Carlyle, who had lived only a few streets away from Wilde, constructed a library at the top of his house in order to escape it. Even there, he continually complained about the racket. To make matters worse, Wilde’s library was situated directly above the kitchen and the servants’ quarters, and muffled sounds would have reached him from below. Reverberations also filtered down from the first-floor drawing-rooms whenever Wilde’s boys played there; he heard them on the staircase too, where they often engaged in sword fights.
Vyvyan described the library as his father’s ‘Holy of Holies . . . in the vicinity of which no noise was to be made’; it had, he said, to be ‘passed on tiptoe’.15 When their father was inside, the boys were never permitted to enter ‘except by special invitation’; when he was absent it still had ‘a sort of “A” certificate to it, in that we were forbidden to enter it unless accompanied by an adult’.16 Perhaps Wilde even went so far as to request his manservant, Arthur, to put on felt slippers whenever he walked near the room, just as he had asked his servant at Oxford to wear them because of his horror of creaking floorboards.
Many Victorian gentlemen regarded their library as ‘a kind of shrine remote from the interruption of servants, wife and children’.17 If this idea seems a little stuffy for Wilde, it should be remembered that in the mid-1890s he rented a room away from his home ‘in order to have the opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruptions inseparable from my own household’.18 The library was the one room where a gentleman might ‘be at home with himself’.19 It was a museum dedicated to his personal history, containing books purchased in every period of his life, and a perma nent exhibition of his taste. ‘A library,’ as a famous contemporary bibliophile put it, ‘should be [a man’s] portrait.’20 The library was, too, a sort of secular equivalent of the Catholic confessional. Here a man sat alone, meditating on his life, chronicling his thoughts in the diary or the letters he penned there.
Wilde imbibed some of these conventional nineteenth-century attitudes. The library served him as a retreat from the rest of the house; it was also a symbol of his personal history as its contents bore witness to the various stages of his life and literary career. Likewise, Wilde clearly subscribed to the notion that a book collection is expressive of character – throughout his works he conveys a great deal about the temperament of his fictional creations by giving us a peek at their bookshelves.