2

The Jester and the Joke

‘He’s a deuced sight cleverer than they think.’

charles reade

The world, clearly, was not yet alight. Indeed by the close of his first year in London, notwithstanding an advertised connection with Lillie Langtry, and the fading glory of his Newdigate poem, Oscar Wilde was perhaps best known for being less well known than his friends and supporters thought he should be.

Nevertheless the tide was beginning to turn. Wilde was working hard – at fostering connections and following up invitations. With no regular employment, he had, as one ungracious observer put it, nothing else to do but ‘trot round London and jump down people’s throats’. He strove to make himself agreeable, and succeeded.1 He was helped by the fact that conventional society– once closed, aristocratic and partisan – was beginning both to broaden and to open up. Although there were subtly graded hierarchies within the so-called ‘upper ten thousand’, and many of the ancient landed families continued to hold themselves aloof, old divisions were gradually eroding and new money was finding a place. Different political creeds were allowed to mix at receptions and dinners. The professions were gaining access to fashionable drawing rooms. Artists might be admitted. Even the stage was sometimes allowed. A few advanced hostesses (wealthy if not actually aristocratic) led the way, throwing open their houses ‘to everyone who was interesting and distinguished’.2 Wilde benefited from this new mood: if he was not yet ‘distinguished’ he was undeniably ‘interesting’.

Women, moreover, liked him, and women ruled society. It was they who drew up the dinner party guest lists and sent out the invitations. Men might consider Wilde ‘effeminate’ and ‘affected’, they might resent the way professional beauties treated him as a favourite, they might joke about him in their smoking rooms, but they found themselves welcoming him into their homes. Their wives appreciated Wilde’s flow of conversation, his depth of culture, his intelligence, his views on interior decoration and opinions on dress; they welcomed his flattery and they enjoyed his good humour.3 He improved their parties. To sit next to Wilde at dinner was accounted a treat. One aristocratic lady who encountered him at ‘a Huxley dinner’ soon after he left Oxford, considered that she had ‘never met so wonderful and brilliant a creature’.4*

Women were charmed, too, by Wilde’s fondness for children. The seven-year-old Violet Maxse, daughter of Mrs Cissie Maxse, was just one of many young girls whom he enthralled with tales and jokes.’5 Older girls found him equally engaging. His perceived ‘effeminacy’ made him attractive, rather than otherwise, to the opposite sex. Laura Troubridge and one of her sisters ‘both fell awfully in love’ with him, thinking him – as Laura recorded in her diary – ‘quite delightful.’6 Wilde certainly welcomed such admiration. He induced Gussie Greswell to bring the Troubridge girls to his Salisbury Street tea parties in exchange for introducing Gussie to Sarah Bernhardt.7

But if Wilde enjoyed female attention, he made few efforts seriously to follow it up. The memory of Florence Balcombe continued to linger. Julia Constance Fletcher, whom he admired so much, had suffered a disappointment in love, and seemed out of reach. With Francesca (Frankie) Forbes-Robertson he achieved a special rapport, but it was the basis for an enduring friendship rather than a romance. The tragic death of Leonard Montefiore did bring Wilde close to Leonard’s sister, Charlotte. And, according to family tradition, he even proposed to her. But she, despite a genuine fondness, turned him down, eliciting the scrawled response, ‘I am so sorry about your decision. With your money and my brain we could have gone so far.’8

Wilde, for the most part, preferred the more distant glamour of the great. When the celebrated Polish-born actress Helena Modjeska arrived in London, from America, early in February 1880, he elected himself her champion.9 He introduced her to important people, composed a poem to her beauty, talked up her productions, arranged for her the use of Frank Miles’s studio so that she could have her portrait painted, acted as one of her ‘henchmen’ when she was running a stall at a charity bazaar, proposed adapting a play for her, and ‘translated’ her Polish poem ‘Sen Artysty’ (‘The Artist’s Dream’) into English, for publication in Routledge’s Christmas Annual. And he made her laugh; she was delighted with his description of her achievement in making an English society audience cry when reciting a poem to them in incomprehensible Polish, as having ‘tickled with [her] voice the tendrils of their nervous system’.10 Though swept up by his enthusiasm, she remained somewhat bemused by her young champion: ‘What has he done, this young man, that one meets him everywhere?’ she inquired. ‘Oh yes, he talks well, but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act – he does nothing but talk. I do not understand.’11

Of all the subjects upon which Wilde talked it was art that proved the most important, and the most useful in advancing his name. Having failed to establish himself as a newspaper art critic, a tenured academic, a successful writer or a travelling tutor, he became a sort of cultural chaperone, a self-elected arbiter of taste, squiring fashionable women around art galleries and exhibitions.12 Women were interested in art, or thought that they should be. And in 1880 they were particularly interested in Aesthetic art. For so long the taste of a small initiated coterie, Aestheticism was finally achieving a social vogue. It was a vogue that Wilde both contributed to and benefited from. Anyone who had visited his rooms at Salisbury Street knew that he was a devotee. And he soon became a conspicuous figure, at the Grosvenor and the Royal Academy, not merely looking at the pictures himself, but pointing them out to ‘a herd’ of eager female ‘worshippers’, and ‘explaining his theories to willing ears’.13

Wilde’s knowledge and taste were widely admired. The novelist Charles Reade cautioned those who dismissed Wilde as a poseur that ‘he’s a deuced sight cleverer than they think… He knows a lot about art and nearly everything about painting.’ Reade recounted how he had run across the ‘airy young gentleman’ at the Royal Academy one morning – and witnessed him ‘spot, with unerring accuracy, every picture worth looking at. It’s true there were not many; but such as they were he spotted ’em.’14 Wilde’s humour was enjoyed too. He greatly amused one young listener with his statement that there was ‘really no objection to be urged’ against the rather conventional pictures gathered at the Royal Academy, ‘except that they are not paintings, and are not art at all’.15

Wilde, all the while, sought to enhance his own Aesthetic credentials by drawing closer to the circles of the Pre-Raphaelites – the precursors and creators of the movement. He was taken up first by the painter and poet William Bell Scott, a great friend of both Rossetti and Swinburne – and ‘one of the so-called Fathers of Pre-Raphaelitism’. Scott’s wife was a serial promoter of ‘promising young men’ and thought that in Wilde – ‘a wonderful young Irishman just up from Oxford’ – she had found a new tyro. At one of her ‘afternoons’ – at Bellvue House on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea – Wilde met the Alfred Hunts and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Violet.

Mr Hunt he admired as a delicate water-colourist and fringe member of the Pre-Raphaelite group, and Mrs Hunt (a popular novelist) too, but Violet he admired most of all; with her mass of auburn hair, her large eyes and expressive mouth, she was – as Ellen Terry put it – ‘out of Botticelli by Burne-Jones’.16 Wilde became a friend of the family, inviting them to his Salisbury Street tea parties, visiting them at their Chelsea home and initiating a flirtation with Violet (‘the sweetest Violet in England’).17 He encouraged her to write, and if he did not actually propose, he flattered her with the (half-recycled) line, ‘We will rule the world – you and I – you with your looks and I with my wits.’18

Wilde also came to know Arthur Hughes, another Pre-Raphaelite painter. He spent happy Saturdays at the Hughes family’s welcoming home at Wandle Bank, on the southern outskirts of London. There would be dancing in the studio, cheerful suppers and long walks through the meadows to the little river Wandle. Other regular guests included the Tom Taylors, the Sickerts and the actor Corny Grain.19 Wilde delighted the family; one of the three Hughes daughters, the ‘farouche’ eighteen-year-old Agnes, thought him ‘the most amusing, comprehending and kindly’ of all the friends who visited. He told them ghost stories and amused them with his extravagances. He used to drive all the way down from London in a hansom cab: ‘Such vulgar things, dear Agnes, and soh useful!’ Sometimes he brought friends with him: one he announced as ‘such a gifted boy – he’s painted his coal scuttle white, and it looks soh lovely!’ Wilde, for his part, was impressed by the ‘soft, flowing’ Aesthetic dresses that Agnes made for herself, in ‘clear colours and just off the ground’.20

It was perhaps through the Hughes family that Wilde came to know Edward Burne-Jones at this time.21 Certainly when Sarah Bernhardt returned to London, in June 1880, Wilde arranged for the star-struck painter to meet her. And then, building up the web of connection, he sought Burne-Jones’s assistance in getting access to the collection of Pre-Raphaelite pictures owned by William Graham; not for himself, but on behalf of the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was also in town that summer painting a portrait of Henry Irving.22

Wilde’s most significant new connection, however, came from outside the cultural sphere. George Lewis was a forty-seven-year-old criminal and divorce lawyer: Jewish, wily, discreet, and with a growing reputation for taking on those cases ‘where the sins and follies of the wealthy classes threaten exposures and disaster’ – and keeping them safely out of court. The Prince of Wales employed him when dealing with his mistresses. As a result Lewis had come to know Lillie Langtry, and it was perhaps through her that Wilde met him.† Lewis, however, was not only a fixer, he also loved to bring people together, to make useful connections, to launch interesting schemes. He and his astringently vivacious second wife were establishing a remarkably vital meeting place for painters, politicians, writers and lawyers at their opulent house on Portland Place. For a ‘young man with a future’ it was the place to be.23

And Wilde remained convinced that he did have a future. It was during 1880 that his public profile began to change. Aside from occasional mentions in the World, the spread of his reputation had – up until then – largely depended upon word of mouth. Now a new element entered the equation: Punch. The comic weekly of middle-class humour and middle-class prejudice had been mocking the ‘Aesthetic Craze’ for the previous five years – in skits, parodies and, most particularly, in the cartoons of Gerald du Maurier. Indeed for many people, du Maurier’s drawings, featuring such imaginary denizens of ‘passionate Brompton’ as the ‘tender young bard’, the Hon. Fitz-Lavender Belairs, the precious art critic, Prigsby, and the loose-robed, wildly-coiffed, Burne-Jones-profiled, Mrs Cimabue Brown – defined the movement. And as Aestheticism became both more prevalent and more fashionable, du Maurier intensified the attack. At the beginning of 1880 he added two new figures to his cast.

On 14 February Punch published ‘Mutual Admiration Society’, a du Maurier cartoon depicting ‘the poet, Jellaby Postlethwaite’, accompanied by ‘the painter, Maudle’, arriving at one of the Cimabue Brown’s receptions and receiving a warm encomium from his hostess: ‘Oh, look at his grand head and poetic face, with those flowerlike eyes, and that exquisite sad smile! Look at his slender willowy frame, as yielding and fragile as a woman’s.’ She describes him as ‘the great poet’ – though an accompanying note adds that he is ‘quite unknown to fame’.

Du Maurier did not intend Wilde as the specific subject of this caricature. His ‘Aesthetic’ characters were stock ‘types’ (even if it was said that Mrs Cimabue Brown was partly based on Alice Comyns Carr, wife of Joe, manager of the Grosvenor Gallery). Self-regarding versifiers were not uncommon in the period. And the lean, bent figure of Postlethwaite did not look anything like Wilde, even if he was clean-shaven and longish-haired.24 Nevertheless Wilde’s growing reputation as a poet and Aesthete – extolled by enthusiastic friends, but largely ‘unknown to fame’ – meant that some people did make a connection. And this connection was not broken over subsequent weeks, as the ‘intense’ yet languorous Postlethwaite became a recurring figure in du Maurier’s Aesthetic pantheon.25

Wilde recognized an opportunity. He not merely encouraged the idea of a link, he insisted upon it. Ignoring the lack of physical resemblance, he claimed that he was, in fact, the model for Postlethwaite. By taking the generalized ridicule of du Maurier’s caricature, and accepting it as a personal tribute, Wilde was seeking to draw a bright clear beam of attention on to himself. Punch had a wide circulation and a deep influence. If Wilde could become identified in the public mind with the Aesthetic ‘Postlethwaite’, he might assume Postlethwaite’s position as Aestheticism’s exemplary poet – perhaps even its exemplary figure.

The position, after all, was vacant. By 1880 the acknowledged figureheads of the Aesthetic movement were still the old-established Pre-Raphaelite coterie of Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris and Burne-Jones, with the additions of Godwin and their one-time friend Whistler. For a press that increasingly desired to frame issues in terms of personalities this was proving a drawback. Almost all these figures had withdrawn from public view or become respectable. With the exception of Whistler, none of them now even evinced any notable ‘eccentricity of costume or manner’.26 Rossetti was a virtual recluse. Swinburne had retired to Putney. Morris was taken up by business and politics. Burne-Jones, though his art was regularly lampooned, shied away from all personal publicity. Godwin was too busy. The press needed a new face, a new personality – a living embodiment of Aestheticism. Wilde – by projecting himself as the model for ‘Postlethwaite’ – might claim that role.

This was an original idea, and a bold ploy for a young man to adopt at the outset of his career. To most serious-minded Victorians, engaged in the high calling of the Arts, the notion of welcoming ridicule and accepting satire was incomprehensible. Wilde, though, thought differently. With what one of his contemporaries described as a ‘keen insight into his age’ he understood that ‘the curiosity one raises is one of the ingredients of fame’.27 And it mattered little how such curiosity was piqued. He had, since his schooldays, always been prepared to subvert his own pretensions with humour. If he had often made fun of himself, this was a merely a case of extending the privilege to others. He, of course, insisted on his own complicity in the game. He made a point of seeking out du Maurier and being civil to him, even offering (so he said) to sit for the artist so that he might be able to get a better likeness. He refused to be affronted by any of the jokes made at his expense, affecting only an Aesthetic concern for the artistic quality of the cartoons. He let it be thought that he actually supplied du Maurier with material for his drawings.28

Du Maurier, for his part, found himself swept along. He did begin to borrow from Wilde. On 17 June, Postlethwaite (in his fourth Punch appearance) was depicted sitting alone at a café table, on which stood a lily in a vase: to the waiter’s inquiry, ‘Shall I bring you anything else, Sir?’, he replies, ‘Thanks, no! I have all I require, and shall soon be done.’ The notion of an Aesthetic poet being sustained by contemplating a flower carries an echo of Wilde’s remark to May Harper that he had once ‘lived upon daffodils for a fortnight’. And it seems likely that du Maurier was re-using some version of this Wildean comment.29 There was an even clearer debt when, a few months later, du Maurier depicted an ‘Aesthetic bridegroom’ (looking passably like Wilde) together with his ‘intense bride’, contemplating their ‘six mark’ Chinese teapot, with the caption: ‘Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it.’ The recycling of Wilde’s celebrated Oxford mot was recognized – and commented on – by many.30

Whistler, back in London from Venice towards the end of the year, and encountering Wilde and du Maurier together at an exhibition, asked, ‘I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?’ The remark was calculated primarily as an insult to du Maurier (a contemporary and one-time friend of Whistler’s) but it did also reflect the growing congruity in the popular imagination between the Aesthetic ‘Postlethwaite’ and the Aesthetic Wilde.31 And during the course of 1880, as ‘Postlethwaite’ became more like Wilde, Wilde became more like ‘Postlethwaite’.32 With remarkable ‘clearsightedness’ he set about projecting ‘the character’.33 He amplified his persona. His mannerisms became more flamboyant, his postures more languishing, his talk more studiedly affected. Perhaps he even used the key Aesthetic terms (as recorded in Punch) – ‘consummate’, ‘utter’, ‘supreme’, ‘too-too’. Certainly he developed his gift for shocking conventional expectations, treating serious things lightly and frivolous things gravely. But he did even more than this. Stepping well beyond Postlethwaite’s role as a ‘poet’ (a role that, after all, he had barely achieved himself), Wilde sought to become the very essence of Aestheticism – ‘to embody’, as one friend put it, ‘in the eye of his fellow men a conception of life founded on the worship of beauty’. His own life, he seemed to declare, was ‘a work of art’.34 It was a vision for which he found an increasingly receptive audience.

His sayings – which imposed Aesthetic criteria upon every aspect of life – soon became part of the capital’s social currency. He ‘amused all London’ with his assertion (adapted from another of his Oxford mots) that both Henry Irving’s ‘legs are distinctly precious, but his left leg is a poem’.35 It was repeated that, when he saw a blossoming almond tree in the front garden of a London house, he exclaimed, ‘I should like to be invited to this house simply to meet that almond-tree; I should even prefer it to a tenor voice.’ An anecdote went the rounds about Wilde refusing to take some medicine on account of its being ‘a dingy brown’ colour. The chemist promptly replaced it with a bottle of beautiful ‘rose-red’ liquid and some pills that ‘shone like gold’, which Wilde was delighted to ingest. He recovered from his illness, though not before confessing that he would hate to be really robust.36 When he remarked imperturbably to a group of street urchins, who were making fun of him, ‘I am glad to afford amusement to the lower classes’, the press reported it.37

Other popular anecdotes included him coming down to breakfast, while staying at a country house, looking pale; asked if he were ill, he replied, ‘No, not ill, only tired. The fact is, I picked a primrose in the wood yesterday, and it was so ill, I have been sitting up with it all night.’38 His concern for primroses was also supposed to have led him into a Jermyn Street florists; he requested them to remove several bunches of the flower from the window. Asked how many bunches he wanted to have, he replied, ‘Oh I don’t want any, thank you. I only asked to have them removed from the window because they looked so tired.’39 Much of this, of course, was apocryphal. The story that he paraded down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand – although it may have carried some memory to his floral gifts for Lillie Langtry – was essentially an invention. But, as he remarked, with mock pride: ‘Anyone could have done that.’ He had achieved ‘the great and difficult thing’ of making the ‘world believe that [he] had done it’.40 The world – encouraged by Punch and ‘Postlethwaite’ – was growing eager to believe. But although such stories spread Wilde’s fame, it was not always clear whether the audience was being invited to laugh with Wilde for his wit, or laugh at him in his folly.

He, though, was not concerned. He chose to see a useful tension in the discrepancy. The gap between the calculated exaggerations of his public persona and the patent intelligence of his private self offered further scope to bemuse and confound. As one journalist was obliged to admit, ‘if you light upon Postlethwaite [i.e. Wilde] alone, and take him off his guard, and discuss with him any subject which is not cognate to art, you may or you may not be astonished to find what a shrewd, sensible, practical fellow he is’.41 On other occasions Wilde might abruptly abandon his affectations to achieve a sudden and disarming intimacy. Asked to take the Swedish opera diva Christine Nilsson in to dinner, he, making some graciously stilted compliment, drew the retort, ‘Look here Mr. Wilde, Mme. Christine Nilsson will put up with no such stuff. This is all put on, and there is nothing in it but nonsense.’ To which he deftly responded, ‘Thank you. You are the first sensible woman and true friend that I’ve met.’ After that, according to La Nilsson, they got on famously.42

There were other tensions, too, in Wilde’s Postlethwaitian pose. In the popular imagination and the pages of Punch, ‘Aesthetes’ were supposed to be etiolated, weary, and consumed by the hopelessness of existence. Wilde, over six feet tall and well built, retained conspicuous appetites for food, life and, indeed, lawn tennis;‡ his utterances were invariably leavened with humour and intermingled with ‘happy phrases of native wit’, and, though his poems might flirt with despair, his general outlook on life was buoyed with infectious optimism. But these discrepancies, enjoyed by some, were ignored by most.43 Only the earnest and kindly American Charles G. Leland mistook Wilde’s occasional poetic posturing for real ‘pessimism’, and vowed to bounce him out of ‘all morbid nonsense’ and transform him into ‘a clear-headed, vigorous, healthy, manly writer’.44

Wilde – in his distinct Postlethwaitian persona – was becoming an increasingly visible public figure, ‘impossible to ignore’ at fashionable occasions, artistic and theatrical.45 He lent his support to an all-male undergraduate production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (in Greek) at Balliol that June; his friend Walter Parratt composed the music, while Rennell Rodd was one of the chorus.46 Later in the year, when the company gave three well-publicized performances in London, Wilde hosted a tea party for the cast, inviting friends to meet ‘Clytemnestra’ (F. R. Benson) and ‘Cassandra’ (George Lawrence) along with some of the ‘Argive elders’.47

The party was held in a new setting. In the summer of 1880 Wilde and Frank Miles moved into 1 Tite Street, the ‘unpretentious’ three-storey red-brick ‘studio house’ designed for Miles by Godwin. It was a distillation of up-to-date Aesthetic elements – light interiors, sparse furnishings, bare boards, and ‘balconies and other accessories to meet the taste of [Miles as] a lover of flowers’ – all set on the most distinctively artistic street in London’s most avowedly Bohemian suburb.48 Godwin had now designed four houses in Tite Street. Whistler’s ‘White House’ stood on the other side of the thoroughfare – even if Whistler no longer owned it.

Wilde relished his new abode. The house, he told Mrs Hunt, was ‘very pretty’, even if the address was ‘horrid’. To improve the latter point, the property was renamed ‘Keats House’.49 There was scope to continue the entertaining traditions of Salisbury Street. Miles’s new model, Sally Higgs, an elfin teenage beauty ‘of the Rossetti type’, became a beguiling figure at their elegant ‘studio teas’, robed in a kimono, a teapot in one hand, a lily in the other.50 Living up to his creed of excess, Wilde decorated his own room with a determined disregard for economy. He overspent on a new desk, explaining to Norman Forbes-Robertson, ‘I couldn’t really have anything but Chippendale and satinwood – I shouldn’t have been able to write.’51

Wilde was busy with literary schemes. His hopes of a parallel academic career, having met with little encouragement, seem gradually to have faded. The translation work for Macmillan was not followed up. And although he did announce plans to ‘bring out… some essays on Greek Art’ the only piece to come to fruition was an unsigned review for the Athenaeum of Professor Jebb’s entries on Greek history and literature in the Encyclopedia Britannica.52 Poetry remained Wilde’s main concern, even if it was sometimes less obviously Aesthetic than might be expected. Following the example of Swinburne, he addressed not only the passions but politics too. ‘Ave Imperatrix’, a long, patriotic but questioning ‘Poem on England,’ which appeared in the World, attracted considerable attention.53 The work, composed amid the setbacks of the Afghan War, gave an overview of the glorious achievements of the British empire framed as a narrative not of military triumph, but of Christ-like sacrifice; and beyond the sufferings of the moment it looked forward to a national resurrection as a republic. Wilde considered that the poem held a special place among his writings; he told one friend, ‘I was never touched by anything not tangible and visible but once, and that was just before writing “Ave Imperatrix”.’54 He was justly proud of the work, sending a copy to the painter G. F. Watts.55 Among the various tributes it received were a parody in Truth and a letter from a mess of British officers in Afghanistan, impressed by the ‘truth and beauty’ of its references to that country.56 To build upon its success, Wilde reiterated his political preference for the ‘State Republican’ (provided it could be achieved without the violent ‘kiss of anarchy’) in another poem for the World – the sonnet ‘Libertatis Sacra Fames’.57

A more determinedly Aesthetic venture was PAN, a satirical weekly, of which he was ‘installed as the poet’. It was printed on ‘bilious’ green paper, and Wilde’s first contribution, a villanelle beginning, ‘O Goat-foot God of Arcady… This northern isle hath need of thee!’, provoked a parodic response (printed in the Whitehall Review) starting, ‘Commissioner of Lunacee… Oscar Wilde hath need of thee.’58

Some of these modest literary achievements were mentioned in an article on Wilde that appeared in the August issue of Biograph and Review, a popular monthly that profiled figures from the worlds of politics, religion and the arts. The entry on ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde’ – compiled by a friendly hand – gave a glowing account of his family background, university career and literary prospects, as well as quoting several of his sonnets, and getting the year of his birth wrong (either through journalistic incompetence or misinformation from the subject they gave it as 1856, rather than 1854).59 Another fashionable paper – Fact – responded to the Biograph piece with a long article suggesting that Wilde, for all his talent and potential, scarcely merited such treatment, yet.60 In the self-referential world of 1880s journalism, Wilde’s very unworthiness of publicity could become a source of additional publicity.

* There were occasional missteps. Wilde disgraced himself by accepting an invitation to dinner from a ‘Mrs Smith’ and then – on receipt of a better invitation, which offered the chance to meet Robert Browning – writing to his hostess ‘grieved’ that he was unable to keep the engagement as he found he ‘had to go North that evening’. The Browning dinner was an intimate affair at the house of some friends who lived near Regent’s Park. Wilde and Browning were deep in conversation when – to Wilde’s horror – ‘Mrs Smith’ was announced. Having received Wilde’s second letter, she had not proceeded with plans for her own dinner party. She was not amused to discover Wilde ensconced. ‘Is this what you call “Going North”?’ she remarked. But, although she threatened never to speak to him again, by the end of the evening Wilde had soothed her ruffled feelings, and ‘they were as great friends as ever’.

† Lady Augusta Fane records a, doubtless apocryphal, anecdote that has Wilde calling on Lewis and being shown into a room where several women were waiting. He complains to the manservant, ‘This is the room for women with a past. I want the room kept for men with a future.’ The mot, however, certainly reflects Wilde’s sentiments, and could be a distant echo of something he did say.

‡ In the summer of 1880 he was still cutting a dashing figure, playing tennis with Willie and the spirited Davis sisters, on a ‘lumpish lawn’ in the public gardens behind the Davis family home, dressed ‘in a high hat with his frock-coat tails flying and his long hair waving in the breeze’.