Proem

There was a great pressure for admission. The body of the court was filled with barristers in their wigs and gowns. The galleries and passages were densely crowded with the public and the press. No libel case had so excited the town in a generation. Fashionable society was abuzz. The newspapers headlined the story in their largest type. The name of Wilde had been enough to assure huge interest; the lurid revelations of the opening days’ evidence had increased that interest to a new pitch. And more was expected to follow. The potent mix of celebrity, sex and scandal would be brought to the boil. Counsel might complain at the prejudicial reporting of the morning papers, but the chief justice brushed all objections aside.1

The scene was the Court of Common Pleas in Dublin, on 17 December 1864. The ‘great libel case’ occasioning such intense interest had been brought by an attractive young woman of literary pretensions, Mary Travers, against Lady Wilde, the celebrated wife of Dublin’s leading eye-and-ear doctor, Sir William Wilde. It marked the culmination of a fourteen-month campaign of vilification, annoyance and aggravation against the parents of the ten-year-old Oscar Wilde.

Mary Travers, daughter of the eccentric professor of medical jurisprudence at Trinity College Dublin, had been, since her late teens, a patient of Dr Wilde’s, as well as a friend of the family. The doctor had taken a lively interest in her well-being and development, and perhaps something more. He had accompanied her to exhibitions, bought her clothes, lent – or given – her small sums of money, encouraged her literary ambitions, advised her on her reading, invited her to family meals and included her on family excursions. If there was an element of infatuation in all this, Dr Wilde had – at the beginning of the 1860s – tried to break the connection, perhaps unsettled by signs of Miss Travers’ increasingly unstable temperament. Twice he offered her money so that she might join her brothers in Australia. On both occasions she took the money but failed to make the voyage.

She became, instead, ever more demanding of Dr Wilde’s attention, and increasingly resentful of his wife’s refusal to engage. Alive to slights, she convinced herself that both the Wildes were determined to insult and humiliate her. But, according to her own account, the gravest insult occurred in October 1862. During a consultation in Dr Wilde’s surgery, while he was examining the mark of a burn on her neck, she lost consciousness – perhaps choked by her bonnet strap. Coming round, she found Dr Wilde distraught and apologetic. She also found – so she claimed – that, during her period of unconsciousness, she had been ‘violated’.

This discovery did not, however, terminate her relationship with the Wildes. She continued to see the doctor and to write to his wife, but with ever-growing intemperance and hostility. She put garlic into the surgery soap-tray at Merrion Square as part of a series of planned ‘annoyances’. She continued to expect money, writing to the doctor on one occasion, ‘if you do not choose to send it promptly as usual, see what will happen’. She wrote a barbed review of Lady Wilde’s latest book, piqued at the success it was enjoying. She threatened suicide, and sent a mocked-up press cutting announcing her own death.

And then, in October 1863, she printed a pamphlet entitled Florence Boyle Price: or A Warning – a barely fictionalized record of her various complaints, with the Wildes figuring as the overweening ‘Dr and Mrs Quilp’ – he with ‘a decidedly animal and sinister expression about his mouth’, she ‘an odd sort of undomestic woman’ inclined to spend ‘the greater portion of her life in bed’. The tale of how the doctor had used chloroform – concealed in ‘a handsome scent bottle’ – to subdue the young Miss Price in order that he might have his way with her, was told with the lurid relish of a penny dreadful. A thousand copies were produced.

The pamphlets were widely circulated in Dublin. The Wildes strove to ignore the attack, and for a while it appeared that they had weathered the storm. But the elevation of Dr Wilde to a knighthood at the beginning of 1864 fired Miss Travers’ ire and resentment. In April of that year, with Sir William due to give a public lecture at the Metropolitan Hall on ‘Ireland Past and Present’, Miss Travers arranged for a troop of newsboys to distribute the pamphlet (together with extracts from some of Sir William’s letters to her) outside the venue. One rang a hand-bell, hired from a local auctioneers; all carried placards emblazoned with the names of Sir William and his wife. Miss Travers directed operations from the seclusion of a cab, parked nearby.

From then on the campaign became unceasing. A letter appeared in Saunders’s News-Letter – signed ‘Inquirer’, but written by Miss Travers – feigning an innocent concern about the events of the evening, and suggesting a legal solution: ‘A number of boys were selling a pamphlet, and through curiosity I purchased one in which [Sir William’s] name most disreputably figured. Can it be possible the occurrence therein related took place? If untrue, the knight ought to take action and punish the offender. The pamphlet is six months in circulation and its accuracy has not been questioned.’2

Scurrilous verses alluding to Sir William’s supposed sexual improprieties – and his several illegitimate children – began to be published in the Dublin Weekly Advertiser; others were pushed through the letterbox at 1 Merrion Square. When Lady Wilde fled down to Bray, Miss Travers tracked her there. She engaged the local newspaper boys to parade along the esplanade, directly outside the Wildes’ house, again carrying placards and offering the pamphlet for sale. Harassed to the limit of her endurance, Lady Wilde wrote to Miss Travers’ father:

Sir – You may not be aware of the disreputable conduct of your daughter at Bray, where she consorts with all the low newspaper boys in the place, employing them to disseminate offensive placards, in which my name is given, and also tracts, in which she makes it appear that she has had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde. If she chooses to disgrace herself that is not my affair; but as her object in insulting me is the hope of extorting money, for which she has several times applied to Sir William Wilde, with threats of more annoyance if not given, I think it right to inform you that no threat or additional insult shall ever extort money for her from our hands. The wages of disgrace she has so basely treated for and demanded shall never be given to her. Jane. F. Wilde.

Although Professor Travers replied to the letter, he did not destroy it; and his daughter, finding it among his papers, at once grasped its potential. She had become fixed on the idea of getting Sir William into court, and this seemed an opportunity. Taking the letter to a firm of Dublin solicitors, she instructed them to bring a libel action against Lady Wilde – claiming that such phrases as ‘disreputable conduct’, ‘consorted with all the low newspaper boys’, ‘intrigue’ and ‘wages of disgrace’, traduced her character and her chastity. And although Lady Wilde was the author of these slurs, Sir William was listed as the co-defendant in the action, since husbands – at that date – were held to be legally responsible for their wives’ civil misdemeanours. Miss Travers demanded £2,000 in damages.* The Wildes, it seems, sought to compromise the matter out of court, but Miss Travers was implacable. Forced to fight, they instructed their solicitors to enter a defence of justification and privilege.3

An extraordinary array of legal talent was deployed on both sides. Miss Travers was to be represented by Sergeant Armstrong, the leading figure of the Irish Bar, supported by Mr Heron QC and the brilliant Isaac Butt QC (an old friend of the Wildes), as well as by two juniors. Lady Wilde engaged Sergeant Sullivan (a future lord chancellor of Ireland), together with two supporting QCs and two further juniors. The trial began on Monday 12 December, and lasted six days.

Miss Travers had the opportunity to air her grievances in open court. She told, in compelling detail, of Sir William’s attentions to her, his letters (sometimes cajoling, sometimes railing), his desire that she should call him ‘William’, his attempt to embrace her, his contrition when she objected. Led by her counsel, she described the incident in October 1862, when she had lost consciousness in Dr Wilde’s surgery. She reported his frantic imprecations when she had come to: ‘Do be reasonable, and all will be right,’ he had, apparently, pleaded. ‘I am in your power… spare me, oh, spare me… strike me if you like. I wish to God I could hate you, but I can’t. I swore I would never touch your hand again. Attend to me and do what I tell you. Have faith and confidence in me and you may remedy the past and go to Australia. Think of the talk this may give rise to. Keep up appearances for your own sake.’ And she informed the hushed courtroom, that – yes – during her period of unconsciousness, she had been ‘violated’; or, as Sergeant Armstrong glossed it, she ‘went in to the room a maid, but out a maid she never departed’.4

These were the details feasted upon by the press and the public. But there was much that was incoherent in Miss Travers’ testimony, and much that was odd about her behaviour. Sergeant Sullivan did his best to point up these inconsistencies: her failure to mention the alleged rape at the time, her inability to recall the exact date of the incident, her continued relationship with Sir William after the event, her uncertainty as to whether there had been any further ‘transactions’ of a similar sort. But no direct denial could be made, as Sir William – despite his nominal status as co-defendant – had been advised not to go into to the witness box.

Instead it was left to Lady Wilde, dressed in black (as a show of mourning for her brother, recently deceased in America), to give an account of Miss Travers’ campaign of harassment. Cross-examined by Isaac Butt, her performance was assured. Perhaps too assured. She adopted a lofty disdain towards Miss Travers and her claims. She refused to countenance the notion that Sir William had had ‘an intrigue’ or ‘underhand sort of love affair’ with the plaintiff. She showed a turn of humour. Having been quizzed about the mock death notice that Miss Travers had sent her, she remarked, ‘I think I saw her next in August 1863, after her death.’ It drew a laugh from the public gallery, but rather shocked the jury. Although Butt tried to draw her into a discussion upon the supposed immorality of the German novel that she had recently translated, the judge stopped that line of questioning.

For some onlookers at least there would have been a spice of dramatic irony in this courtroom duel. The married Isaac Butt, for all his assumed tone of moral indignation, was (like Sir William Wilde) known to have fathered several illegitimate children. And, though he might seek to portray Lady Wilde as cold and unfeeling, it was rumoured that he had had a dalliance – if not an affair – with her in the years before her marriage. But in the theatre of the Four Courts everyone had their role to play.

There was a ‘general expectation’ that the case would be settled in favour of the Wildes.5 The judge, in his address to the jury, emphasized the oddities of Miss Travers’ behaviour in relation to the supposed rape, suggesting that, given her continued friendship with Sir William, it might be reasonable to conclude ‘that if intercourse existed at all it was with her consent, or certainly not against her consent… and that the whole thing is a fabrication’.

But this had to be set against the eloquent summing-up delivered by Isaac Butt on the Friday afternoon – described in the press as ‘one of the most powerful appeals ever addressed to a jury in Dublin’.6 He portrayed Miss Travers as an isolated and vulnerable young woman callously treated by the proud and powerful Wildes. Sir William, in refusing to give evidence, had not played ‘the part of a man’ – and Butt was ‘sorry an Irish gentleman should have acted so’. Lady Wilde’s attempts to rise above Miss Travers’ baiting (and Isaac Butt’s questioning), were set down as heartlessness – unworthy of a mother, a wife, a woman or a Christian. That she should have responded to Miss Travers’ account of a suicide attempt with the terse rejoinder ‘the intelligence has no interest for Lady Wilde’, called forth a torrent of rhetorical mock-indignation: ‘Oh! Shame on genius! Oh! shame on the heart of a woman; shame – shame above all on the heart of an Irishwoman.’

Such emotive appeals – for all their obvious theatricality – had their effect. The jury, after several hours’ deliberation, found for Miss Travers – although they undercut the force of their verdict by awarding her only a farthing’s damages, rather than the £2,000 she had sought. The Wildes, nevertheless, were burdened with the costs of the case – which were ‘expected to be very heavy’.7

The extraordinary week-long drama was at an end. In its combination of salacious detail and impassioned advocacy it was deemed – outside of Ireland – to have been a peculiarly Irish spectacle. ‘Irishmen are impetuous and demonstrative,’ declared The Times of London, ‘and forensic eloquence is such a characteristic of their race that we can readily believe it to have been powerfully displayed even in a cause like this; but Englishmen will probably wonder how so much interest could have been excited or so much professional energy employed.’8

* Although it is difficult to fix exact equivalents between old and current monetary amounts, most late nineteenth-century sums should be multiplied by between 80 and 100 to give an idea of their value at the time of writing.