People do not as a rule object to a man deserving success, only to his getting it.
ADA LEVERSON on Oscar Wilde1
During his darkest days, Oscar depended on the practical and emotional support offered by a woman he befriended in 1892. Oscar met Ada Leverson at a party in the home of Margaret ‘Meta’ Crawfurd, whose husband Oswald, editor of the illustrated weekly periodical Black & White, was having an affair with Violet Hunt.* At the time, he was basking in the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan and mulling over the plot of A Woman of No Importance; Ada almost certainly inspired Mrs Allonby, a female dandy and one of the wittiest and most recognizably Wildean characters in any of his plays. Since Oscar’s name was on everyone’s lips, Ada knew him by reputation: ‘Everyone was repeating his mots,’ she recalled. ‘Society at the moment was enthusiastic about the rarest of human creatures, a celebrity with good manners’.2 Yet, she was unprepared for the reality: ‘Old legends heard in the schoolroom still hung like a mist over Oscar Wilde when I met him,’ she wrote:
I was half surprised not to see him ‘wan and palely loitering’ in knee-breeches, holding that lily on the scent of which he had been said to subsist. But he had long given up the ‘aesthetic’ pose of the eighties …3
They had much in common. Born on 10 October 1862 to Zillah and Samuel Beddington, Ada, the eldest of their nine children, demonstrated an early passion for literature and shared Oscar’s enthusiasm for the poetry of John Keats. Like Oscar, she was an accomplished linguist; her enlightened but authoritarian father, a prosperous wool merchant, had arranged for her to be instructed in Latin and Greek as well as the more commonplace French and German. The Beddingtons placed a high value on the acquisition of knowledge but Ada found family life stifling. Aged nineteen and in defiance of her father’s wishes, she married Ernest Leverson, aged thirty-one and the son of a prosperous diamond merchant, in a bid to find some measure of independence. Although unrelated, the cynical observation imparted by Oscar’s Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray summed up their disappointing alliance: ‘Men marry because they are tired,’ he declared, ‘women, because they are curious. Both are disappointed’. Samuel Beddington had good reason to object to his son-in-law. Leverson was a compulsive gambler and philanderer who had neglected to mention a daughter, Ruth, who was being raised in a convent in Paris while her father courted Ada.
Ada and Ernest had little in common and theirs was not a particularly successful coupling. Yet Ada embraced her fate with good humour, deciding that it was: ‘better to have a “trying” husband than none’.4 She had an exceptionally clear-eyed view of Victorian marriage, accepting that it was imperative for a woman but offered no real advantage to a man: ‘Marriage is not his profession, as it is his wife’s,’ she declared. ‘He is free in every way before marriage, tied in every way afterwards – just the reverse with her’.5 Oscar would surely have endorsed this view. Her life was blighted by tragedy when her infant son George died of meningitis in 1888. A daughter, Violet, was born eighteen months later.
Ada was witty and exceptionally clever but she lacked confidence. Although she contributed anonymously to publications including Black & White, The Yellow Book and Punch, she seemed content to act as a muse to others until late in her life. Grant Richards, who would publish the novels she wrote between 1907 and 1916, saluted her as:
… the woman whose wit provoked wit in others, whose intelligence helped so much to leaven the dullness of her period, the woman to whom Oscar Wilde was so greatly indebted.6
Robert Ross described her as ‘a friend to whom Oscar Wilde owed, and gave, the homage of his intellect’.7 She lauded him as chief among the ‘many devoted friends’ who remained loyal to Oscar.8
Ada and Oscar took to each other immediately. He enjoyed sparring with her and she adored his flamboyance, recognising him as a ‘spectacular genius’, endowed with ‘superb vitality’. In Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde, published three decades after his death, Ada described him as: ‘The most soft-hearted, carelessly-generous and genial of men’.9 Yet, recognising his tendency to take ‘a short-sighted joy in living for the moment’, she feared that, for all his brilliance, his character was blighted with ‘a fatal want of judgement’.10 Even when Oscar’s popularity seemed universal, Ada realised that the conventional classes longed for his downfall. Her own words express this best:
“To meet Mr. Oscar Wilde” was put on the most exclusive of invitation cards, yet every omnibus conductor knew his latest jokes. If he were caviar to the general he was gentleman’s-relish to the particular. His greatest pleasure was to amuse the mob, to frighten the burgess and to fascinate the aristocrat. With his extraordinary high spirits and love of fun, he appealed to the lower classes; his higher gifts enchanted the artistic and such of the great world as wanted to amuse themselves; and with the sincere artist he was most himself. But the lower-middle classes never liked him, always distrusted him and disliked his success. People do not as a rule object to a man deserving success, only to his getting it.11
Oscar was in the habit of sending Ada dozens of telegrams. Dubbing him ‘a master of the wire as a literary medium’, she declared her intention of bringing out The Collected Telegrams of Oscar Wilde. He never wasted a clever improvisation, she noted, whether his own or someone else’s. On occasion, her wit matched his: ‘Nothing spoils a romance more than a sense of humour in woman and the lack of it in a man,’ she quipped. He purloined this for an exchange between Lord Illingworth and Mrs Allonby in A Woman of No Importance.12
Dozens of wags wished to emulate Oscar’s sparkling wit. Ada detested the ‘plethora of half-witted epigrams and feeble paradoxes by the mimics of his manner’.13 Yet, both regarded skilful parody as a form of homage: ‘One’s disciples can parody one,’ Oscar insisted, ‘nobody else’. He listed the ingredients of a worthy parody: ‘a light touch, and a fanciful treatment and, oddly enough, a love of the poet whom it caricatures’.14 Ada had each in abundance and delighted in parodying Oscar’s work, displaying an uncanny talent for sending up any hint of pomposity. She populated her high-spirited pastiche ‘An Afternoon Party’, published in Punch in 1893, with several of his most recognisable characters: Salomé, Mrs Arbuthnot, Lady Windermere, Lord Illingworth and Lord Henry Wotton. They are joined by Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Sardou’s Dora, Brandon’s farcical Charley’s Aunt, Pinero’s Mrs Tanqueray and others Oscar had been accused of plagiarising. A passage delivered by Princess Salomé is pitch-perfect:
I think it is mayonnaise. I am sure it is mayonnaise. It is mayonnaise of salmon, pink as a branch of coral which fishermen find in the twilight of the sea, and which they keep for the King. It is pinker than the pink roses that bloom in the Queen’s garden. The pink roses that bloom in the garden of the Queen of Arabia are not so pink.15
Oscar adored this, and her ‘New Year’s Eve at Latterday Hall’. Of this, he enthused:
Your sketch is brilliant, as your work always is … It is quite tragic for me to think how completely he [Dorian Gray] has been understood on all sides!16
Of ‘Overheard Fragments of a Dialogue’, Ada’s imagined conversation between Lord Illingworth and Lord Goring, Oscar declared: ‘Your dialogue is brilliant and delightful and dangerous,’ adding: ‘No one admires your clever witty subtle style more than I do. Nothing pains me except stupidity and morality’.17 Of their matched temperaments, he quipped: ‘Everyone should keep someone else’s diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine’.18 Ironically, at least one of Ada’s parodies in Punch reached a far wider audience than Oscar’s original work. While his poem ‘The Sphinx’ was brought out in a beautiful, limited edition numbering just two hundred copies, her parody, ‘The Minx’ reached 30,000 readers of Punch, drawing attention to his less widely known original.19 Ada transformed Oscar’s student interrogation of the inscrutable sphinx into a society newspaper interview with a sphinx who answered back.20 Oscar approved: ‘I delight in your literary minx,’ he declared and he dubbed her ‘Sphinx’, occasionally adding the adjective ‘gilded’.21
Although he enjoyed them, Punch editor F. C. Burnand felt somewhat uncomfortable that Ada’s parodies were rooted in affection for their target: ‘… I don’t want to revive any “cult” of him,’ he warned in November 1893, ‘it seems for the general public the “craze” which this illustrates is a bit out of date’.22 For a time, Oscar suspected that Ada was the author of The Green Carnation, published anonymously in September 1894. In truth, this biting if uncannily accurate portrait of Oscar’s relationship with Bosie was far too cruel and damaging to have come from Ada’s pen, and she is almost certainly satirised as ‘Mrs Windsor’.
The creator of the dissolute ‘Esmé Amarinth’ and ‘Lord Reginald (Reggie) Hastings’, instantly recognisable as Oscar and Bosie, was English journalist and satirist Robert Hichens, who had garnered much of the material for The Green Carnation when he spent time with Bosie in Egypt. Such was the public fascination, and for the most part repulsion, at the novel’s frank treatment of what they regarded as wanton immorality that Oscar felt obliged to deny authorship in the Pall Mall Gazette, describing the book as ‘middle-class and mediocre’; he was snubbed in public nonetheless.23
Ada always enjoyed the company of witty and exuberant gay men. Although she was fond of Constance, she encouraged Oscar to bring his young lovers to dinner at her home. She remembered Bosie with fondness.* Of him, she wrote:
Very handsome, he had a great look of Shelley. Not only was he an admirable athlete, he had won various cups for running at Oxford, but he had a strong sense of humour and a wit quite of his own and utterly different from Oscar’s. His charm made him extremely popular, and he wrote remarkable poetry. Nor was Oscar indifferent to the romance of his ancient Scottish lineage.24
Although neither Bosie nor Constance was present, Ada was among the ‘distinguished audience’ that attended the opening performance of The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James’s Theatre on 14 February 1895. Her lovely tribute to that brilliant night, confirms that she saw no reason to believe ‘the gaiety was not to last, that his life was to become dark, cold, sinister as the atmosphere outside’.25 There had been a ferocious snowstorm that day and the street was blocked with carriages as patrons stepped down into a bitterly cold wind. These inclement conditions did nothing to deter the ‘Wilde fanatics’ who treated the arrival of his audience as an essential part of the performance. Describing how they ‘shouted and cheered the best known people,’ Ada recalled that ‘the loudest cheers were for the author who was as well-known as the Bank of England’.26
Oscar, recently returned from Algiers where he had holidayed with Bosie, appeared suntanned and prosperous, and had dressed with what Ada described as ‘elaborate dandyism and a sort of florid sobriety’.27 His outfit included the following: a coat with a black velvet collar, a green carnation blooming at the buttonhole; a white waistcoat, from which he had hung a large bunch of seals on a black moiré ribbon watch-chain; and white gloves, which he held in his hand, leaving his beloved large green scarab ring visible to all. On any other man, Ada admitted, this ensemble might be taken for fancy dress, but Oscar ‘seemed at ease and to have the look of the last gentleman in Europe’.28
Flamboyant as ever, Oscar declared lily of the valley to be the flower of the evening ‘as a souvenir of an absent friend’ – Bosie that was, not Constance – and those gathered sported delicate sprays of that lovely flower. Ada declared:
What a rippling, glittering, chattering crowd was that! … they were certain of some amusement, for if, by exception they did not care for the play, was not Oscar himself sure to do something to amuse them?29
His play did not disappoint. Irene Vanbrugh, who played Gwendolen Fairfax, confirmed that it ‘went with a delightful ripple of laughter from start to finish’.30 She admired Oscar’s ‘charm of manner and his elegance’ during the short time she knew him: ‘No one was too insignificant for him to take trouble to please,’ she recalled, ‘and I felt tremendously flattered when he congratulated me at one of the rehearsals’.31
As the curtain fell, Oscar stepped forward and was greeted with an ovation. He stood smoking while he waited for the applause to subside; the evening was a triumph. When The Importance of Being Earnest was published in 1899, Oscar dedicated a presentation copy:
To the Wonderful Sphinx, to whose presence on the first night the success of this comedy was entirely due, from her friend, her admirer, who wrote it, Oscar Wilde.32
Yet, that night, a dangerous drama was unfolding elsewhere in the vicinity of the theatre. The Marquess of Queensberry, who had grown increasingly frantic in his efforts to stop Bosie seeing Oscar, had taken to threatening restaurant and hotel managers with beatings if he discovered the couple on their premises.
That night, he planned to make a public protest by throwing a grotesque tribute, a bouquet of rotting vegetables, onstage. Oscar was tipped off and foiled his nemesis by persuading George Alexander to revoke Queensberry’s ticket and organise for a cordon of policemen to surround the theatre. Thwarted, Queensberry hung around outside for hours, muttering with fury, before delivering his monstrous bouquet to the stage door. Four days later, on 18 February, Queensberry called at the Albemarle Club, where Oscar and Constance were members, and left his infamous card for all to read: ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite [sic]’. Ten days elapsed before Oscar received this incendiary communication. ‘I don’t see anything now but a criminal prosecution,’ he told Robbie Ross; ‘My whole life seems ruined by this man’.33 Egged on by Bosie, he decided to prosecute Queensberry for libel.
As was increasingly his habit, Oscar was not living at home at the time. On returning from Algiers, he had taken up residence at the Avondale Hotel in Piccadilly. From there, he sent a note to Constance advising her that he would call that evening to discuss an important matter. Although he signed off, ‘Ever yours, Oscar’, the couple had drifted far apart by then. Increasingly debilitated by poor health, Constance had returned that day from a recuperative month with Lady Mount-Temple in Torquay. She knew her husband had been overseas, but had no idea where and had asked Robbie Ross to inform him that she was desperately short of money. Realising that she would miss the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest, she also asked for newspaper accounts of what she expected would be another triumph.
That evening, after what must have been a desperately unhappy couple of hours with his wife, Oscar headed to the Avondale to discuss the best course of action with Robbie Ross, who was growing increasingly hesitant. When Bosie joined them, he urged Oscar to confront his accuser head-on. The following morning, since George Lewis was unavailable, all three headed for Holborn to consult with solicitor Charles Humphreys, who had been recommended by Ross. Oscar assured Humphreys that there was no truth in Queensberry’s allegation and they accompanied him to Great Marlborough Street Police Station where a warrant was issued for Queensberry’s arrest.
With two plays running concurrently in West End theatres, Oscar was undoubtedly the most successful playwright in London, yet he could not afford to mount this prosecution. While audiences flocked to his plays, the manager at the Avondale had confiscated his luggage for non-payment of his bill. When this lack of resources caused Oscar to hesitate, Bosie, who was determined to exact revenge, removed this obstacle by assuring him that his mother and older brother, who had suffered for years at the hands of his father, would fund the action. As Lady Queensberry and her son Lord Douglas of Hawick were out of the country, Oscar was obliged to borrow £500 from Ernest Leverson.
Ada Leverson’s final parody of her friend’s work, ‘The Advisability of Not Being Brought up in a Handbag: A Trivial Tragedy for Wonderful People’ appeared in Punch on 2 March 1895, the day the Marquess of Queensberry was arrested at Oscar’s instigation. Queensberry was taken from Vine Street Station to Marlborough Police Court, where he was charged with libel. Bosie made sure to alert the press. Ominously, during the committal proceedings, George Lewis announced that his client would plead justification. Humphreys testified that Oscar, a married man beyond reproach, lived contentedly with his wife and two sons. Sydney Wright, porter at the Albemarle Club was called to describe the note, which Queensberry insisted read ‘posing as a somdomite’ rather than ‘ponce and somdomite’, a far graver accusation but one that would have been more difficult to prove. At the end of this process, Queensberry was committed for trial and released on bail of £1,500. Lewis returned his brief.
That evening, Queensberry called a press conference, insisting that his actions were contrived to bring matters to a head. In advance of his trial, he engaged Edward Carson QC, Oscar’s old acquaintance from Trinity College, Dublin, and set about compiling a solid defence by hiring private detectives to nose out incriminating evidence. He found little to bolster his defence until he was approached by Charles Brookfield, a disgruntled actor and playwright with a small part in An Ideal Husband, who appeared to have developed a morbid jealousy of Oscar’s success. In 1892, Brookfield had lampooned Lady Windermere’s Fan in a burlesque titled The Poet and the Puppets. Now, he took it upon himself to pass on to Queensberry’s legal team the names of Alfred Taylor and several of his associates; men who could testify to the illegality of Oscar’s lifestyle.
While Queensberry gathered damning evidence, Oscar and Bosie left on an ill-advised trip to Monte Carlo. There, Bosie refused to discuss the case and spent his time gambling at the casino, an activity that held absolutely no interest for Oscar and one he could ill-afford. Constance, who was not privy to her husband’s whereabouts once more, asked Robbie Ross to inform him that she had been forbidden to walk in advance of an operation intended to alleviate her persistent lameness and had gone to stay with her aunt Mary Napier. Kind-hearted as ever, she took the trouble to express concern about Jane’s well-being and to organise for someone to look in on her. She even offered to defer her surgery should Oscar wish to return home in advance of the trial: ‘We are very worried just now’, she confessed to novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes.34
Oscar appeared to share little of Constance’s concern. He returned to London full of swagger, having told Ada Leverson that he was ready to ‘fight with panthers’.35 Apparently unwilling to accept responsibility for their fate, he and Bosie had their palms read by Mrs Robinson. Afterwards, Oscar sent Ada a telegram: ‘We have been to the Sibyl Robinson,’ he declared. ‘She prophesied complete triumph and was most wonderful’.36 Ada recognised his ebullience as entirely characteristic: ‘Generally he was extremely optimistic,’ she confirmed, ‘firmly believing in the palmist’s prophecy of triumph’.37 Yet, Oscar’s joviality was punctured when he met Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw at the Café Royal and both advised him to abandon the case, flee abroad and take Constance with him. Left to his own devices, he might have been persuaded, but his resolve was bolstered by Bosie, who arrived late and reacted to the suggestion with disgust, accusing Harris of being a poor friend to Oscar. Both men stormed out with the result that Oscar, who had persuaded Harris to testify to the literary worth of Dorian Gray, never called on him. Harris had been willing but had warned him that no jury in England would give a verdict against a father who was attempting to protect his son.38
On 1 April, two days before the case against Queensberry opened at the Old Bailey, Constance dined conspicuously with Oscar and Bosie. Afterwards, all three occupied a box at the St James’s Theatre to watch The Importance of Being Earnest. This offstage performance was part of a carefully contrived plan intended to portray Bosie as a family friend who enjoyed Constance’s endorsement. During the interval, Oscar went backstage to see George Alexander, who was playing Jack Worthing. Alexander too urged him to drop the case and flee. As they left, Bosie noticed that Constance was ‘very much agitated’ and when he turned to wish her goodnight he saw tears glistening in her lovely eyes.39 Although neither realised it, that was the last time they would meet.
On the morning of 3 April 1895, Oscar, carefully yet flamboyantly dressed, arrived at the Old Bailey in a hired carriage and pair.* He took his seat in the packed and stifling courtroom and listened as the unwitting Sir Edward Clarke QC prosecuted the case on his behalf. Clarke had only recently been made aware of the list of young men with whom Queensberry was accusing Oscar of having consorted, so his focus was on justifying his client’s literary work and the letters he had written to Bosie. In the run-up to the trial, Clarke had issued a warning:
I can only accept this brief, Mr. Wilde, if you assure me on your honour as an English gentleman that there is not and never has been any foundation for the charges that are made against you.40
In response, Oscar, who was an Irishman of course, swore that Queensberry’s allegation was ‘absolutely false and groundless’. Armed with this assurance, Clarke portrayed Oscar as a family man who enjoyed an artistic friendship with Bosie and was also on intimate terms with the young man’s mother, a woman who had received harsh treatment at the hands of her belligerent former husband.
Having been lulled by the gentle questioning put to him by his own counsel, Oscar was flummoxed when Edward Carson opened his cross-examination by wrong footing him for lying about his age under oath. Carson proceeded to probe Oscar’s attitude towards various avant-garde literary works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel he portrayed as being indicative of unwholesome predilections. This line of questioning, though rapid-fire and tortuously tricky, seemed harmless enough and led to several witty exchanges. When Carson turned his attention to blackmail and enquired as to the nature of Oscar’s relationship with several young men it became clear that Queensberry planned to mount a vociferous defence. Carson was clearly well-informed. Particularly damning was his theatrical flourishing of the gifts Oscar had presented to young Alphonse Conway: a cigarette case, a silver-topped cane, a book and a photograph inscribed ‘Alfonso Conway from his friend Oscar Wilde’.
Oscar and Bosie had planned to dine triumphantly with Ada Leverson that evening, but they were rattled by Carson’s line of questioning and realised that victory was not certain. They sent their regrets, assuring her: ‘Everything is very satisfactory’; nothing could have been further from the truth.41 On the second day, Carson continued in the same vein and there was little Clarke could do to salvage Oscar’s credibility in response. Opening for the defence, Carson insisted that Queensberry, his client, was motivated by a determination to rescue his son from the clutches of this degenerate man. He listed the names of ten men he planned to put in the witness stand in order that they might testify to the lewd acts Oscar had coerced them into performing. Realising that all was lost, Clarke advised his client to withdraw from the prosecution.
On day three, 5 April 1895, the courtroom was packed with reporters and voyeuristic members of the public who had queued for hours to gain admittance. Carson had continued his opening speech for twenty minutes or so before Clarke signalled his desire to confer with his opposite number. Afterwards, he announced his client’s intention of withdrawing and submitting a verdict of not guilty. He had hoped this verdict could be limited to the literary element of the evidence presented, but Queensberry refused to allow this. As directed by Mr Justice Collins, the jury returned a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict and awarded costs against Oscar, a decision that was greeted with raucous cheering from the public gallery. While Queensberry left in triumph, Oscar slipped out a side door, in little doubt, surely, that the danger he faced was grave.
Oscar attempted to explain his actions to a largely unsympathetic press as a gallant attempt to protect Bosie from having to testify against his father. Queensberry, feeling utterly vindicated, issued a warning: ‘If the country allows you to leave, all the better for the country!’ he declared, ‘But, if you take my son with you, I will follow you wherever you go and shoot you!’42 He ensured this would not be necessary by having his solicitor, Charles Russell, send the witness statements he had gathered to Director of Public Prosecutions, Hamilton Cuffe. Rather than return home, Oscar sent a note to Constance urging her to admit no one but the servants to his bedroom or study, and to speak only to friends. It was left to Robbie Ross to call on her and break the devastating news. Desperately distressed, she pleaded with Ross to persuade Oscar to flee. Convinced at last that this was necessary, Ross rushed to the Cadogan Hotel in Slone Street, where Oscar was drinking himself into a stupor, but to no avail. The debate as to whether Oscar Wilde was shocked into inertia or determined to defend what he characterised as the devotion of an older man for a younger that was rooted in intellectualism, rages to this day. In a letter to Bosie, written from Ada Leverson’s home, he told his young lover:
I decided that it was nobler and more beautiful to stay. We could not have been together. I did not want to be called a coward or a deserter. A false name, a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me …43
Yet, W. B. Yeats speculated that he might have left had his mother, veteran of an earlier libel action, not declared:
If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you again.44
Within hours of receiving Queensberry’s damning dossier, Cuffe convened an extraordinary meeting with the Attorney General, the Solicitor General and the Home Secretary, who was at that time H. H. Asquith, husband of Oscar’s friend Margot. It was Asquith who insisted that Oscar should be stopped wherever he was found. By five o’clock that evening, warrants had been issued for the arrest of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Taylor. Although he was tipped off by a sympathetic reporter from The Star, Oscar refused to flee and was arrested shortly before 6.30 p.m. He was taken to Bow Street Police Court, where he was charged under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. Refused bail, he was remanded, first in Bow Street, then in Holloway Prison, for the three weeks preceding his trial, which was scheduled for 26 April 1895.
Oscar contacted the Leversons from his prison cell:
Dear Sphinx and Ernest,
I write to you from prison, where your kind words have reached me and given me comfort though they have made me cry, in my loneliness.
Of his motivation for taking the libel case, he explained: ‘I thought but to defend him [Bosie] from his father. I thought of nothing else’.45 Since she hated scandal, it took courage for Ada to stand up publicly for Oscar. She had once expressed a sentiment that was a close reversal of a famous quip of his: ‘I am not afraid of death but I am of scandal, of which I have a special horror,’ she wrote. ‘The idea of being talked about is one of which I have a weak terror’.46 Wretched and dreadfully lonely, Oscar opened his heart to her. At times, his desperation was heart-wrenching: ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he cried; ‘My life seems to have gone from me. I feel caught in a terrible net. I don’t know where to turn’.47 During these dark days, while lamenting his separation from Bosie, he never lost sight of the importance of Ada’s friendship, assuring her:
… you will always remain in a niche of a heart – half broken already – as a most dear image of all that in life has love and pity in it.48
With Oscar in Holloway and Constance finding some comfort at the home of her aunt Mary Napier, it was left to Robbie Ross to remove valuable or potentially compromising letters and manuscripts from the couple’s deserted Tite Street home. The near-complete manuscript of La Sainte Courtisane was entrusted to Ada. Meanwhile, Mary Napier, who was desperately worried for her niece, confided in Adrian Hope, her nephew by marriage. Laura, his wife by then, recorded their encounter in her diary:
A most trying visit from Mrs. William Napier in a most frantic state about her poor niece Constance Wilde as the whole verdict has gone against her monstrous husband – the whole episode most terrible.49
Although she had been cruel in the past, Laura felt desperately sorry for Constance, who she described as ‘the most miserable woman in London’. Her diary reveals that Bosie turned up the following day to ask Hope if he would post bail for Oscar. He refused, as did theatre managers George Alexander and Lewis Waller. Having extracted a promise from her son that he would leave for France, Robbie Ross’s mother, Eliza, agreed to contribute £500 towards Oscar’s defence, and to keep an eye on Jane, whose health was failing fast.
Constance was determined to protect her children from the opprobrium that their father’s arrest had attracted, and removed them from their respective preparatory schools. Vyvyan, aged eight, stayed with her while Cyril, almost ten, was sent to relations in Ireland. It was too late to protect him from the unfolding tragedy; a placard announcing the arrest of his father had excited his curiosity and, once he reached Ireland, he had access to newspapers that revealed the details of the case in a most lurid and sensationalist fashion. As she had so often in the past, Constance sought refuge in Lady Mount-Temple’s home at Babbacombe. From there, she wrote a heart-wrenching letter to Mrs Robinson, the palmist who had offered false hope to Oscar: ‘What is to become of my husband who has so betrayed and deceived me and ruined the lives of my darling boys?’ she asked. Yet she felt great sympathy for Oscar and closed by lamenting: ‘What a tragedy for him who is so gifted’.50 Robinson’s reply, promising better days ahead, although well-intended, was hopelessly optimistic and wholly inaccurate.
Although he had been so ruinously misled, Edward Clarke offered to waive his fee and lead Oscar’s defence, which was just as well, since Oscar could not have afforded him. Sensing that there was little likelihood of their accounts being settled, his many creditors were pressing for a sale of his property. Queensberry forced the issue by demanding immediate payment of his costs, which amounted to £600. A bankruptcy sale of Oscar and Constance’s possessions was held at their Tite Street home on 24 April, two days before the opening of Oscar’s first trial. Many items were pilfered during the ensuing melee; these included Oscar’s poignant letters to Constance, which she kept in a blue leather case. Several irreplaceable manuscripts also disappeared. Those items that were sold achieved far less than their true value. One Irish-born publisher gave an account of proceedings to Robert Sherard:
I went upstairs and found several people in an empty room, the floor of which was strewn, thickly strewn, with letters addressed to Oscar mostly in their envelopes and with much of Oscar’s easily recognisable manuscript. This looked as though the various pieces of furniture which had been carried downstairs to be sold had been emptied of their contents on to the floor.51
The sacking of the Wildes’ Tite Street home was a terrible humiliation. Ada believed that many of those in attendance that day delighted in Oscar’s downfall:
It was already well known that Oscar had bitter enemies as well as a large crowd of friends … And if his chief enemy was eccentric, many of his jealous rivals were quite unscrupulous.52
Oscar’s prized books, numbering around two thousand volumes, were bundled together and offered at knockdown prices, making just £130.53 Whistler sent representatives to buy back a number of his works for less than £40. The nursery was raided and toys belonging to Cyril and Vyvyan were sold, a loss that caused them great distress. In all, the sale raised just £230.
Ernest Leverson was present that day and managed to acquire a full-length portrait of Oscar by Harper Pennington for £17. Oscar joked about the corrupting influence this work might have on visitors to the Leversons’ home, writing:
I was quite conscious of the very painful position of a man who had in his house a life-sized portrait, which he could not have in his drawing-room as it was obviously, on account of its subject, demoralising to young men, and possibly to young women of advanced views.54
Public opprobrium was swift and brutal: Oscar’s name was obliterated from the programmes and posters for The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James’s Theatre, although George Alexander claimed his intention was to keep the play running, since Oscar needed the money.* His name did remain on the programmes for An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket, and at the Criterion, where it transferred. Within weeks, both plays were taken off. In America, English-born actress Rose Coghlan,* who Oscar had once suggested as a possible lead in Vera, was staging the first American production of A Woman of No Importance, and playing the part of Mrs Arbuthnot herself. When news of Oscar’s arrest reached her, she ended the run and denounced him from the stage, declaring:
This is the last time I will ever present that piece, I cannot take Wilde’s name off the bills without breaking my contract, and I shall simply drop the play entirely.55
Oscar’s books were removed from the shelves of bookshops and libraries. Little did those who wished to obliterate all trace of him realise that they were contributing to his lasting renown.