BETWEEN 1891 AND 1895, Wilde penned the four social comedies that established him as one of the most famous playwrights of his day, and earned him the large bags of ‘red and yellow gold’ he had always coveted. The plays were largely written away from his Tite Street library, in various country holiday homes Wilde rented. He began Lady Windermere’s Fan in the Lake District in the summer of 1891; A Woman of No Importance was composed in Norfolk the following year. In 1893, the greater part of An Ideal Husband was completed at Goring-on-Thames; the following summer, sunny Worthing provided the backdrop for the composition of Wilde’s masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest.
Perhaps Wilde chose this itinerant lifestyle because it reminded him of his nomadic bachelor years. It certainly offered him relief from the domestic hearth. Family life had become increasingly irksome to him since the centre of his emotional and social life had shifted towards Alfred Douglas. At his country residences, and in the rooms he periodically took at a number of high-class hotels such as the Savoy, Douglas was installed as his semi-permanent guest. The couple invited numerous young men of their acquaintance to come and stay with them. Yet again, given a choice between two alternatives, Wilde contrived to select both1 – he now had two homes, his family household in Tite Street, and the hotels and holiday residences where he entertained his homosexual friends.
Wilde took books with him everywhere on his travels, carrying them in small suitcases which had a strap on the outside especially designed to hold books.2 He seems to have enjoyed reading on trains, which was just as well, because he spent a great deal of time aboard them. In the 1880s he used the railways to travel the length and breadth of the country on his English lecture tour. On those journeys he grappled with the complexities of German grammar with the aid of dictionaries and literary works; he may also have passed the time reading Trollope, whose works he mischievously described as ‘admirable’ only for ‘rainy afternoons and tedious train journeys’.3 Wilde alleviated the boredom of his American odyssey of 1882 by a far more efficacious means: he devoured the writings of the art critic John Ruskin and countless ‘paper-bound, yellow-covered’ French novels, perhaps relishing the sharp contrast between those old world productions and his new world surroundings.4
On one of his English train trips Wilde read another sort of yellow book – The Yellow Book, in fact. Wilde bought the famous 1890s Decadent literary and artistic magazine before boarding a train, but on the journey it failed to engage his interest. ‘Before I had cut all the pages,’ he said, weaving a witty anecdote out of the episode, ‘I threw it out of my carriage window. Suddenly the train stopped and the guard, opening the door, said “Mr. Wilde, you have dropped ‘The Yellow Book.’” What was to be done?’5 Wilde was compelled to read on; the only pleasure the experience afforded him was that of pronouncing the magazine ‘horrid and not yellow at all’; it is, he declared, ‘a great failure. I am so glad.’6
Wilde made himself at home in his hotel rooms and country residences by lining them with volumes from his Tite Street library. There was a whole batch of his books in his and Douglas’s rooms at the Cadogan Hotel, Knightsbridge.7 These volumes often served professional purposes. A friend who visited Wilde at Goring-on-Thames, where he wrote An Ideal Husband, said that he surrounded himself with copies of the plays of the contemporary comic dramatists Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Pinero. Wilde’s comedy bears distinct traces of their influence, and he may have used their works as models.8 Perhaps he also wrote in the presence of their plays as a way of motivating himself to surpass them. When he first turned his hand to the social comedy Wilde boasted that he could pen one in less than three weeks: ‘It ought not to take long,’ he remarked, ‘to beat the Pineros and the Joneses.’9
From the autumn of 1892, Wilde rented rooms at 10 St James’s Place, Piccadilly, ostensibly in order to work undisturbed.10 Yet it was also a convenient place to which he and Douglas could invite their countless lovers, as well as the numerous rent boys they were introduced to by their friend, the pimp and ex-Marlborough School boy, Alfred Taylor. They often visited Taylor’s rooms in Westminster, where booze and boys were always in plentiful supply. Occasionally the prostitutes and their clients dressed in drag and conducted mock marriage ceremonies. Wilde and Douglas also entertained Taylor’s boys in fashionable West End restaurants.
Perhaps it was Douglas’s exalted social status that encouraged Wilde to be so reckless. Though not untouchable in Victorian society, lords were excused much. They could certainly get away with more than an Irish lord of language who caricatured the English aristocracy in his plays and ridiculed the vulgarity of its middle class. Yet it would be wrong to blame Douglas entirely for Wilde’s rash behaviour, which was of a piece with the public and political nature of his life and art. He may have felt impelled to challenge, through his actions, Victorian protocol and the false and hypocritical values that underpinned it. Having said that, Wilde’s sexual excesses were also a compulsive habit. ‘I deliberately went to the depths in search for new sensations,’ he said, ‘Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both.’11
The rent boy and former valet Charlie Parker described Wilde’s pied-à-terre at St James’s Place. ‘The sitting room was a sort of library,’ he said. ‘There were a good many books about.’12 Wilde probably transferred some of his working library there from his Tite Street study, which was no longer the nucleus of his writing life.
Wilde’s truancy from home distressed his family. On one occasion, when he had been away from Tite Street for a more than usually prolonged period, Constance turned up unannounced at the Savoy where he was staying with Alfred Douglas, ostensibly to deliver his post, but really to implore him to return home. Wilde tried to make light of the matter by saying that he had been absent from their house for so long that he had forgotten the address; Constance, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, did both.13
Although Wilde’s library was no longer his special writer’s den, it continued to feature prominently in the drama of his life. On one portentous occasion in 1893, Wilde’s manservant Arthur entered the room to inform his master that a young man called William Allen was at the door, craving an audience. Having been shown in, Allen, a rent boy of Wilde’s acquaintance, explained that he had come to return one of Wilde’s letters in which he had extravagantly professed his love for Alfred Douglas. ‘A very curious construction,’ Allen commented menacingly, ‘can be put on that letter.’ He had, he said, been offered £60 for it from a party hostile to Wilde, but being a decent sort of fellow, he preferred to first offer Wilde the opportunity of buying the letter back for the same sum.
‘If you take my advice,’ Wilde responded, ‘you will . . . sell my letter. I myself have never received so large a sum for any prose work of that length; but I am glad to find that there is someone in England who considers a letter of mine worth £60.’ Allen was bewildered by Wilde’s reply and left the house in a state of some embarrassment.
Five minutes later Wilde was disturbed again, this time by a different rent boy, Robert Clibborn, who offered the incriminating letter to Wilde for free. ‘There is no use,’ Clibborn complained, as he handed over the soiled epistle, ‘trying to “rent” [i.e. blackmail] you as you only laugh at us.’ Noticing how grubby the letter was, Wilde reprimanded the boy: ‘I think it quite unpardonable,’ he said, ‘that better care was not taken of this original manuscript of mine.’ Clibborn apologised, and Wilde gave him a sovereign. Escorting the boy to the front door, Wilde told him that he was leading a ‘wonderfully wicked life’. ‘There is good and bad,’ Clibborn said, ‘in every one of us’ – a remark that impressed Wilde so much that he called the young man ‘a born philosopher’.14*
The incident conveys something of the delight Wilde derived from the danger the boys brought into his life, and the bravado with which he confronted that danger. After the encounter Wilde continued to play with fire, no doubt because he was supremely confident that he would never get burnt. And there is no reason to suppose that he ever would have been, had ‘class’ not entered the play in the form of Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, or ‘Q’ as Wilde called him. Wilde’s downfall and imprisonment did not come about on account of his ‘homosexual’ relations with rent boys: they were a consequence of his foolish attempt to take on a marquess in court.
Q was a very dangerous man to challenge. Hot-tempered, belligerent and fond of histrionic public outbursts, he was the inheritor of an ancient name, and a peer of the realm, who could pull rank whenever the occasion required it. His relations with his son had never been amicable; after Bosie’s spec tacular failure at Oxford and his refusal to pursue a career, they became openly hostile. Bosie’s intimacy with Wilde, which Q interpreted in a less than Platonic light, pushed the relationship between father and son to breaking point.
In April 1894 Q wrote a letter to Bosie, in which he characterised the friendship as ‘loathsome and disgusting’. He threatened to cut his son off without a penny if it did not cease immediately. Bosie, who had inherited his father’s cantankerous temper, replied with the telegram: ‘WHAT A FUNNY LITTLE MAN YOU ARE’.16 Over the ensuing weeks, the quarrel raged on and Wilde found himself caught up in a virulent family feud. Later he described himself as the ‘catspaw’ in Bosie and Q’s ‘ancient hatred’ of each other.
The danger of Wilde’s position was made painfully clear to him when, on the afternoon of 30 June 1894 at around four o’clock, Q visited Tite Street unannounced, in the company of a burly bodyguard. Arthur showed them into the library, then went upstairs to inform Wilde, who was (as usual) dressing. On entering the room Wilde found Q standing by the window. Wilde moved over to the fireplace but Q ordered him to sit down. ‘I do not allow anyone to talk like that to me,’ Wilde replied, ‘in my house or anywhere else.’
Q accused him of ‘disgusting conduct’, a charge which Wilde flatly denied. He then walked over to Wilde and began gesticulating uncontrollably and cursing violently. The bodyguard had to intervene to ensure that his master stopped short of assault. ‘If I catch you and my son together again in any public restaurant,’ Q shouted, ‘I will thrash you.’ Wilde displayed remark able fortitude throughout, and even had the equanimity to make a joke about the famous rules for boxing which Q had established. ‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot at sight.’ With that he ushered Q and his sidekick out of the room, and told Arthur never to admit them again.17
Wilde was shaken by the confrontation, and not only, perhaps, because of its aggressive character. Q’s visit had brought violence and vulgarity into Wilde’s palace of art: brutal reality had knocked down the door of his ‘Holy of Holies’ and marched straight in. When Wilde later compared Q’s campaign of aggression against him to a ‘foul thing’ assailing a ‘tower of ivory’, it is not impossible that he had this encounter, and his library, in mind.18
Q’s campaign intensified and became public. It culminated with the infamous card he left at Wilde’s club in February 1895 with the words ‘To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite [sic]’ written on it in his barely legible hand. It was Q’s ‘booby trap’, and Wilde walked right into it by prosecuting him for libel.
Wilde’s foolhardy decision was certainly influenced by Douglas, who urged him on out of a desire to see his father humiliated. Wilde may have felt, too, that Q’s card placed him in an intolerable social position. It is also possible that, as a magus of the word, convinced of his power to effortlessly alter ‘the minds of men and the colours of things’ through language, Wilde genuinely believed that he could captivate a jury. Whatever ‘vulgar’ facts Q’s defence might adduce to justify the charge that Wilde ‘posed’ as a sodomite, he would weave, out of his magical words, a far more compelling reality.
But alas, when the Queensberry trial opened on 3 April 1895, the paradoxical and philosophical language Wilde employed in his defence was thoroughly worsted by the mundane language of the law. Q and his team of private detectives had the facts on their side, having bribed several rent boys to testify against Wilde. The testimonies of the boys (or rather the mere knowledge that they existed) proved far more persuasive than Wilde’s witty and winged words. He withdrew from the case two days into the trial, partly to prevent this evidence coming to light and also because it was obvious that he was fighting a losing battle. Where he had hoped to be the author and hero of a clever comedy, Wilde found himself the protagonist of a tragedy that was thoroughly Greek but far from gracious. Hubris had provoked the wrath of the Gods, and Doom entered the stage with running feet.
The suspicion remains, however, that Wilde did not perform his role unwillingly. All of his life he had felt a strong premonition of impending disaster. That sensation had been nurtured by encounters with palm readers, one of whom had informed him that he had ‘the left hand . . . of a king, but the right . . . of a king who will send himself into exile’.19 This presentiment seems to have been strong on the eve of the trial. When a friend advised him to withdraw from the proceedings he demurred. ‘That would be going backwards,’ he said. ‘I must go as far as possible . . . Something must happen . . . something else.’20
Did Wilde purposely fulfil his ‘destiny’? Certainly, the way his life conforms to the contours of a Greek tragedy cannot be entirely coincidental. Replete with portents, hubris, a wailing chorus of devoted friends and the bloody intervention of destiny, Wilde’s biography might have been written by Aeschylus; or, rather, penned by Wilde himself, using the great dramatist as his model. In this way he achieved his ambition of turning his life into a work of art.
In Wilde’s tragedy, the Home Secretary, his erstwhile friend Herbert Henry Asquith, played the part of Doom. On the very afternoon that the libel case against Queensberry collapsed, he decided to issue a warrant for Wilde’s arrest. Asquith was not legally bound to do so and his haste was extraordinary – Wilde’s friend, Lord Henry Somerset, had tactfully been given ample time to leave the country in similar circumstances. It seems likely that Q made a deal with the Liberal government of the day. In exchange for Wilde’s head, or so the theory goes, Q offered the cabinet his silence on a potentially embarrassing matter – the Prime Minister Lord Rosebery’s love affair with another of his sons, Drumlanrig, Bosie’s elder brother. Other aspects of the trial seem to support this hypothesis: the names of ‘exalted persons’ were deliberately kept out of the proceedings, and it was not thought necessary to call Alfred Douglas into the witness box.21
At around 6.30 p.m. on 5 April, Inspector Richards of Scotland Yard tracked Wilde down to room 53 of the Cadogan Hotel. ‘We have a warrant here, Mr Wilde, for your arrest for a charge of committing indecent acts,’ Richards announced as he entered the room, in which there were several half-packed suitcases which bore witness to Wilde’s vacillating resolve to flee the country. ‘Where shall I be taken?’ Wilde enquired. ‘To Bow Street,’ came the reply.
Wilde, who had been drinking heavily, rose unsteadily to his feet, perhaps with the aid of Robbie Ross who was there with him.22 He asked Richards if he might bring along with him a yellow book that was lying on the hotel bed. The inspector assented and, when Wilde emerged on to Sloane Street from the hotel’s portico, he was observed carrying the tome. ‘Arrest of Oscar Wilde,’ read one newspaper headline the following day, ‘Yellow Book under his arm.’
The volume was erroneously reported in the press to have been the Decadent magazine The Yellow Book. Later scholars have claimed that it was actually Aphrodite, an erotic novel by Pierre Louÿs,23 but that book was not published until 1896. The volume’s yellow cover strongly suggests that it was a French novel – and how fitting if it had been either Balzac’s A Harlot High and Low or Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black. The heroes of those golden books of Wilde’s youth are both condemned to prison on account of their inordinate pride, and for want of powerful allies.
The yellow book kept Wilde company that night in the cells at Bow Street police station, where he slept badly. He would spend a few nights there before being transferred to Holloway prison to await his trial, fixed for 26 April, on charges of ‘gross indecency’ and ‘sodomy’. The latter indictment was particularly serious: until 1861 sodomy had been a capital offence; after that date, men were still sentenced to life imprisonment for it. Fear of the draconian law is rumoured to have prompted an exodus of around six hundred homosexual gentlemen, who fled England for France on the evening of Wilde’s arrest.24 A couple of days later Robbie Ross absconded to the continent on the insistence of his mother; Douglas courageously chose to remain.
Soon afterwards, Constance left Tite Street to seek refuge in the country, taking Cyril and Vyvyan with her. A few weeks later mother and sons left England for the continent, where they lived under the name Holland, a family name of Constance’s. Meanwhile, Wilde’s two comedies, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, continued to play to packed houses in the West End. In the interests of propriety, however, the author’s name was removed from the playbills.
* The episode captures something of the pleasure Wilde took in the unpretentious company of working-class youths. They were, in his eyes, refreshingly unfettered by Victorian convention, both morally and intellectually. Wilde’s fondness for the motley fellowship of former music-hall comedians, grooms and bookmakers’ assistants-turned-whores which congregated at Alfred Taylor’s rooms, doubtless appalled the Pooterish jury at his trials in 1895. The barristers who cross-examined him expressed their stern disapproval in words that might have been borrowed from Earnest’s Lady Bracknell. ‘The valet and the groom,’ one suggested, were hardly the right sort of people for a gentleman to consort with. Wilde replied that he ‘didn’t care twopence what they were. I liked them.’15 The transcripts of Wilde’s trials indeed suggest that he was condemned for his social solecisms as well as for his ‘offences’ against sexual ‘morality’.