Life is such a mournful mystery.
Letter from JANE ELGEE to John Hilson1
The trial of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Taylor opened on 26 April 1895, in a gloomy courtroom at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, which was housed at the time in a dispiriting building adjacent to Newgate Gaol. Both men faced counts of gross indecency and conspiracy to procure the commission of acts of gross indecency, although the conspiracy charges were later withdrawn. They had been charged in accordance with Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, commonly referred to as the Labouchère Amendment, which contained no definition of gross indecency and, as a result, outlawed a broad spectrum of homosexual behaviour that was considered less serious than sodomy but was easier to prove. It was regularly exploited by blackmailers.
Women were exempt from such ludicrous strictures. In 1921, the House of Commons voted in favour of an ‘Acts of Gross Indecency by Females’ clause being added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Frederick Macquister, the Tory MP who proposed this extension, contended that lesbianism, which he saw as an abnormality of the brain, threatened the birth rate, debauched young girls and induced neurasthenia and insanity into British society. His clause got through the House of Commons but was not ratified by the House of Lords, whose members believed that silence and secrecy was a preferable approach. Insisting that the vast majority of women had no knowledge of these practices, the Lord Chancellor decried the notion that ‘the taint of this noxious and horrible suspicion’ would be imparted to thousands of naive women.2 As a result, no such restrictions were ever enforced.
Damaging evidence was presented against Oscar during three committal hearings and a subsequent trial. In exchange for their testimony, several witnesses for the prosecution were offered immunity, and a number were rewarded handsomely by Queensberry, and possibly the Crown.3 Bosie, who appeared to misconstrue the issue at hand, offered to take the stand and testify to the irrationality of his father’s behaviour; this was no longer of relevance of course. He sailed for France once Edward Clarke convinced him that his presence in court would damage Oscar’s case.
One by one, each witness for the prosecution attempted to seal Oscar’s fate. Charlie Parker claimed that he and his brother William had been procured by Taylor for Oscar’s pleasure, and that Oscar had performed an act of sodomy on him. Alfred Wood admitted to committing ‘an act of grossest indecency’ with Oscar at his Tite Street home.4 Fred Atkins informed the court that Oscar had taken him to Paris as his secretary and ‘made improper proposals’, an irrelevancy since this incident, which was not prohibited under French law, was beyond the jurisdiction of the English courts, a point later acknowledged by trial judge Justice Charles. Edward Clarke exposed all three men as disreputable blackmailers. When Edward Shelley, a more credible witness on paper, took the stand, he came across as neurotic and slightly unhinged.
Several women offered rather flimsy evidence against Oscar. Jane Cotter, a chambermaid at the Savoy Hotel, testified that she had called the attention of the housekeeper to peculiar stains on Oscar’s bed sheets. She also claimed to have seen ‘a boy of eighteen or nineteen years of age’ in his room.5 Lucy Rumsby, who let a room to Charlie Parker, insisted that Oscar had once called for him there. Margery Bancroft, a neighbour of Parker’s, thought she might have seen Oscar. She recognised him, she said, because he had been pointed out to her previously. Ellen Grant, Taylor’s former landlady, admitted that, although she had never seen Oscar, her tenant had spoken to someone he referred to as Oscar. Sophia Grey, another of Taylor’s landladies, testified that Oscar had visited him, but admitted that he had stayed for just a few minutes.6
Oscar, looking careworn and dishevelled, took the stand and denied all charges. Clarke’s defence rested on the supposition that only a madman, or an innocent one, would have proceeded with the libel action against Queensberry when confronted with the details of his ‘justification’ defence. When prosecutor Charles Gill asked Oscar to comment on Bosie’s poetry, specifically the ‘love that dare not speak its name’, he used the opportunity to describe the splendour and legitimacy of the ‘great affection’ an older man might feel towards a younger, finishing with a rousing justification:
It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.7
Oscar’s bold declaration was greeted with loud applause, interspersed with isolated hissing, from the public gallery.
On day six, the jury retired, only to return after three hours and forty-five minutes deliberation to inform the court that they were unable to reach a verdict on the charges against Oscar.8 This collapse and subsequent press coverage provided an opportunity for the Crown to end the matter, but a retrial was requested instead. At that point, Clarke applied, successfully, for his client to be released on bail of £5,000, half of which was put up by Oscar himself, the remainder being provided jointly by the Reverend Stewart Headlam and Bosie’s brother, Lord Douglas of Hawick. Headlam, a pioneer of Christian socialism and member of the Fabian Society, knew Oscar only slightly and was motivated by a strong sense of justice. He regarded Oscar’s decision to stay for the trial as a declaration of honour and contended that he had been judged harshly by the press and the public in advance of due process. Inevitably, his stance attracted a degree of opprobrium.
Oscar was released on bail on 7 May 1895, and headed for the out-of-the-way Midland Hotel adjacent to St Pancras Station, where a suite of rooms had been reserved in his name. Almost immediately, he was asked to leave by the manager, who had been threatened by Queensberry’s heavies. This pattern was repeated at a number of establishments. Near midnight, Oscar arrived at his mother’s Oakley Street home in a state of utter exhaustion. Willie answered his brother’s knock: Oscar came ‘tapping with his beak against the window-pane,’ he claimed, ‘and fell down on my threshold like a wounded stag’.9 When Robert Sherard arrived from Paris to lend his support, he described the ‘poorly furnished room, in great disorder’ that Oscar was given:
He was lying on a small camp-bedstead in a corner between the fireplace and the wall … His face was flushed and swollen, his voice was broken, he was a man altogether collapsed.10
Yet, even in extremis, Sherard noted that his friend was as kind and gentle as ever.
While Oscar was at Oakley Street, Jane remained confined to her room; her bed, if Robert Sherard is to be believed. By then, the once glorious Speranza had dwindled to a ‘pathetic, faded old lady’, a shadow of her former self.11 Her ‘glorious dark eyes’ had lost their lustrous shine and she had abandoned all interest in the wider world.12 Throughout her life, Jane’s disposition had swung from high exuberance down to debilitating lassitude. She entered her final months confronting the certainty that the glittering future she had envisaged for both her talented sons was fatally compromised. Succumbing to a profound melancholy, she scrawled a note in her untidy handwriting: ‘Life is agony and hope, illusion and despair – all commingled, but despair outlasts all’.13
On the rare occasions when she ventured out, Jane had taken to wearing ‘a double white gauze veil drawn close like a mask over her features’.14 Three years earlier, she had given up her celebrated ‘At Homes’, telling Oscar that she was ‘too weary of life’.15 Although she revived them sporadically, attendance had thinned to a trickle of faithful habitués and Oscar rarely came. Her newfound seclusion contrasted starkly with the social whirl she had enjoyed for much of her life, yet it echoed the isolation she had embraced as a girl who devoted her time to writing.
By now, arthritis had crept into her fingers, twisting them out of shape and impeding her handwriting, which had been ‘a marvel of unsightliness’ at the best of times.16 It mattered little: demand for her output had dried up and her poems and essays were being returned by uninterested editors. Even her publishers, Ward and Downey, no longer wished to hear her ideas for the books she might write. With no income from writing and no rent from Moytura, all Jane had to live on was her annual Civil List pension of £70, which she had secured with Oscar’s help. Little wonder she advocated the government exempt ‘the race of the gifted from taxation’.17
Early in 1893, Jane’s precarious finances had been thrown into crisis. As 146 Oakley Street was subsiding and needed extensive repairs, she was obliged to relocate to number 26 for two months. Afterwards, she was horrified to receive a summons from the letting agent, seeking compensation for damage he attributed to her. Dreadfully upset, she dashed off a twelve-page letter detailing the poor condition of number 26 when she had taken occupancy. Particularly poignant was her insistence that, since there had been no traffic through the hall, she could not have damaged the hall mats.18 This was a far cry from the days when dozens of London’s boldest and brightest inhabitants attended Lady Wilde’s ‘Saturdays’. In the end, Oscar settled the agent’s bill, possibly because he was anxious to avoid a costly and embarrassing court case. Jane was effusive in her thanks, declaring him: ‘Best & most generous of sons!’19 They had always been close: ‘Come home with me,’ he had told a friend, years earlier, ‘I want to introduce you to my mother. We have founded a Society for the Suppression of Virtue’.20
As a result of Mrs Frank Leslie stopping her allowance, Jane was utterly destitute by March 1894: ‘I am in dreadful financial difficulties,’ she told Oscar, ‘& have literally not a shilling in the world’.21 With his own finances creaking under the weight of a hedonistic lifestyle, Oscar claimed that a contributory factor to his lack of funds was the requirement that he maintain his mother’s household as well as his own; in truth, what assistance he offered her was erratic and she was often obliged to beg when a bill fell due.
In April, Jane tendered her resignation from the Irish Literary Society, an organisation she had helped found just two years earlier. Although she pleaded ill-health, it seems likely that she could no longer afford the subscription. Aware of her straitened circumstances, fellow members, an illustrious group that included W. B. Yeats and Charles Gavin Duffy, the Society’s first president, made her an honorary member. Her note of thanks expressed regret that ‘very uncertain health’ would prevent her from attending ‘Lectures and Receptions illustrated by so many distinguished representatives of Irish genius’.22 Evidently, Jane was not without influence amongst the Irish community in London.
In Ireland, coverage of Oscar’s trial in quality newspapers like The Irish Times, while comprehensive, was discreet and non-sensationalist in deference to Jane’s standing. The high regard in which she was held by her compatriots persuaded T. M. ‘Tim’ Healy MP, former parliamentary correspondent for The Nation and the man who would become first Governor-General of the Irish Free State, to intervene in an attempt to save her son. When petitioning the Solicitor General, Frank Lockwood, to desist from proceeding with a second trial, Healy explained: ‘I wished the mother should be spared further agony’. In response, Lockwood sighed and admitted: ‘I would not but for the abominable rumours against __ [Rosebery]’.23
Several of Oscar’s supporters called on him at Oakley Street, including one veiled woman who brought a bouquet of violets, the symbol of faithfulness, and a horseshoe for luck. She was later identified by Lawrence Irving, son of Henry, as Ellen Terry. Another woman who was exceptionally generous at this time was Adela Schuster, daughter of Leo Schuster, a wealthy Frankfurt banker who was director of the Union Bank of London and Chairman of the London and Brighton Railway. Adela and Oscar are thought to have met late in 1892. He took to calling her ‘Miss Tiny’, and sometimes ‘the Lady of Wimbledon’, a reference to the fact that she lived in some style in that leafy suburb.
From the outset, Adela was effusive in her admiration for Oscar’s work. On reading Lady Windermere’s Fan, she told him: ‘It so enchanted and electrified me … it is admirable, it is perfect’.24 In a letter to their mutual friend More Adey, she described the ‘real affection’ she felt for Oscar and her ‘immense admiration for his genius’, adding:
I do and always shall feel honoured by any friendship he may show me … Personally I have never known anything but good of O … and for years have received unfailing kindness and courtesy from him – kindness because he knew how I loved to hear him talk, and whenever he came he poured out for me his lordly tales & brilliant paradoxes without stint and without reserve. He gave me of his best, intellectually, and that was a kindness so great in a man so immeasurably my superior that I shall always be grateful for it.25
In Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, Frank Harris described how Adela offered assistance to Oscar when it was needed most:
… a very noble and cultured woman, a friend of both of us, Miss S—, a Jewess by race tho’ not by religion, had written to him asking if she could help him financially, as she had been distressed by hearing of his bankruptcy, and feared that he might be in need.26
Once she realised that Oscar was ‘in uttermost distress’, Adela sent him a check for £1,000, ‘declaring that it was only inadequate recognition of the pleasure she had had through his delightful talks’.27 In order to evade his voracious creditors, Oscar entrusted this money to Ernest Leverson, an arrangement that lead to great disharmony between them.
When Ernest and Ada called to see Oscar, they were horrified by his reduced circumstances and palpable unhappiness. Their offer to take him into their home was accepted with gratitude but, before he arrived, they offered a month’s wages to any servant who wished to avoid scandal by leaving their employment. Each in turn declared their intention of remaining and all agreed to keep his presence a secret: ‘I never believed a word against Mr Wilde,’ declared Ada’s old nurse, Mrs Field, ‘He’s a gentleman, if ever there was one’.28 The coachman alone was given holidays, as it was feared that he might indulge in loose talk in the public houses he frequented.
Oscar remained upstairs in the nursery, which had been allocated to him, until six o’clock each evening, when he would emerge for dinner immaculately dressed and with a flower in his lapel. Afterwards, he chatted with Ada for hours. ‘When we were alone,’ she remembered:
… he would walk up and down the room, always smoking a cigarette, talking in the most enchanting way about everything except his trouble. Sometimes he would improvise prose poems, like those published in his works. Once he asked for writing things, to note down one of these improvisations. I could not find any. “You have all the equipment of a writer, my dear Sphinx, except pens, ink and paper”.29
When Constance called to speak with her husband, they were left alone for two hours: ‘I loved her very much,’ Ada wrote, ‘and was grieved to see her leave in tears’.30 Afterwards, she discovered that Constance had pleaded with Oscar to take flight but he had ignored her. Ada too believed Oscar should leave England before his second trial, but when she sent up a note to that effect, he returned it, chastising: ‘That is not like you, Sphinx’, before turning the conversation to books.31
Ada noted the ‘look of immovable obstinacy’ that crossed Oscar’s face whenever there was any suggestion of flight, writing:
Nothing on earth would induce him to leave, though he knew that every facility was given to him. His mother told him it would be dishonourable for him to leave. Moreover, he never expected anything in his life to turn out badly.32
Before leaving for the Old Bailey on the morning of 22 May, Oscar turned to Ada and asked in a faltering voice: ‘If the worst comes to the worst, Sphinx, you’ll write to me?’33 Two years would elapse before she saw him again.
Alfred Taylor was tried first and found guilty on two counts of indecent acts with the Parker brothers but not of procuring. Sentencing was deferred until Oscar had been tried. He faced eight counts of gross indecency: four with Charles Parker, two with persons unknown in the Savoy Hotel, one with Edward Shelley, and one with Alfred Wood at Tite Street. Once again, Edward Clarke did as well as he could, exposing several witnesses as blackmailers, characterising Shelley as a neurotic and violent young man, proving that the chambermaid at the Savoy could recognise no one without her glasses, and demonstrating that Wood could not corroborate his presence at Oscar’s home.
Yet, although the evidence was far from overwhelming, the jury took just two hours to find Oscar guilty on all counts save that in relation to Shelley. Summing up, Mr Justice Wills described the case as the worst he had ever tried: ‘People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame,’ he declared, ‘and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them’.34 He sentenced both men to two years imprisonment with hard labour, a punishment that was, in his opinion, totally inadequate under the circumstances.
On hearing this, Oscar turned pale and seemed on the point of fainting. Several people sitting close by heard him murmur: ‘And I – May I say nothing, My Lord?’ Some of those present had the decency to cry ‘shame’ in protest at the fact that Oscar had been convicted of acts deemed crimes under English law just ten years earlier, acts that were not prohibited in most European countries, among them France. Once he was transferred to Pentonville Prison, Oscar was stripped of his personal possessions, immersed in a vat of disinfected water, dressed in a prison uniform marked with broad arrows to signify that he was the property of the Crown for the duration of his sentence, shorn by the prison barber, and ushered into a spartan cell containing a bed of bare wooden planks and a bucket that required slopping out each morning. His fall was swift and brutal.
In Pentonville, Oscar was treated as an ordinary prisoner and allowed no communication with the outside world. His health deteriorated rapidly and he developed the symptoms of fatigue, malnutrition and chronic diarrhoea, a catastrophic combination that caused rapid weight loss. When R. B. Haldane, a member of the Home Office Committee investigating prisons, visited him on 12 June, at the urging of Margaret Brooke, Ranee of Sarawak, he was shocked by this decline and organised a transfer to Wandsworth Prison where conditions might be marginally more tolerable.
In Wandsworth, Oscar was visited by Otho Holland, who warned him that Constance was being advised to obtain a divorce, an eventuality that Oscar was anxious to avoid. The contrite letter he wrote in an attempt to dissuade her was treated as an affront by Bosie, who told Ada Leverson:
I am so upset and perplexed by it all. It seems to me quite inconceivable that he should prefer to correspond with his ‘family’ than with me without some very strong reason of which I know nothing.35
In the same letter, he declared: ‘I really wish Oscar and I were both dead’.
As Oscar grew increasingly disillusioned with Bosie, who he had taken to calling ‘Douglas’, he developed a new closeness with Constance, who had decided that her husband was ‘weak rather than wicked’.36 Sherard had seen Oscar the previous month and had found him deeply depressed yet stoic. Determined to repair the relationship between Oscar and Constance, Sherard warned Oscar that Bosie planned to publish some of his love letters in Mercure de France, an act that would jeopardise any rapprochement with his wife. When Oscar learned that Bosie planned to dedicate a book of poetry to him, he asked Robbie Ross to prevent this. Ultimately, a rather self-serving article entitled ‘Introduction to my Poems, with some remarks on the Oscar Wilde case’ appeared in La Revue Blanche on 1 June 1896.
Bosie’s crass attempts to publish Oscar’s letters against his wishes could not have contrasted more markedly with the good wishes sent by Adela Schuster. When she suggested, through More Adey, that Oscar might resume his stories, he wrote:
I was greatly touched by the extract from the letter of the Lady of Wimbledon. That she should keep a gracious memory of me, and have trust or hope for me in the future, lightens for me many dreadful hours of degradation or despair.37
The enduring tribute he paid to her in De Profundis is both moving and profound; she was, he wrote:
… one of the most beautiful personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy and noble kindness to me both before and since the tragedy of my imprisonment have been beyond power of description: one who has really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden of my troubles more than anyone else in the whole world has: and all through the mere fact of her existence: through her being what she is, partly an ideal and partly an influence, a suggestion of what one might become, as well as a real help towards becoming it, a soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea, one for whom Beauty and Sorrow walk hand in hand and have the same message.38
What a pity Oscar did not receive such staunch support from Willie, who could be insensitive in his defence. When George Bernard Shaw approached him to discuss the circulation of a petition for Oscar’s release, Willie, showing little enthusiasm, allegedly quipped: ‘Oscar was NOT a man of bad character: you could have trusted him with a woman anywhere’.39 Oscar’s monstrous fate contrasted sharply with the lofty ideals his mother had clung to when she counselled him to stand firm and defend his good name. The consequences of this appalled her and hastened a decline that was already well underway.
In his memoir Son of Oscar Wilde, Vyvyan Holland recollected that, when he was a very small boy, Jane seemed ‘a terrifying and very severe old lady sitting bolt upright in semi-darkness … while the sun shone brilliantly outside’.40 He recalled her being ‘dressed like a tragedy queen, her bodice covered with brooches and cameos’. Although she was kind-hearted, Jane was formidable and Vyvyan protested whenever Constance proposed a visit to her home. Long after his grandmother’s death, he lived for a time on Oakley Street, and experienced a ‘sense of foreboding’ every time he passed her former home.41
In reality, Jane was exceptionally fond of her daughter-in-law and her two young grandsons. Her warm affection radiates from the regular letters she wrote to Constance, a woman she relied on for friendship and financial support. Naturally, she was desperately unhappy when Constance informed her that she was separating from Oscar and intended to change her name, and that of her sons, from Wilde to Holland: ‘I do not like the idea of the boys changing their names,’ Jane complained. ‘It would bring them much confusion’.42
In June 1892, with characteristic wit, Jane had christened her home ‘Oakley Hermitage’ in recognition of her unwillingness to leave it.43 Oscar’s Lady Windermere’s Fan was the toast of London at the time; his mother devoured the reviews and assured him that she was immensely proud of him, but she never saw a single one of his plays. Her increasing reluctance to venture outside was matched by her determination to suppress any rogue shafts of daylight that might filter in. She had always favoured candlelit gloom, regardless of the season or time of day. Now, thick velvet curtains in a deep vermillion shade were drawn permanently across her windows.
Desperately sad and devoid of her legendary garrulousness, Jane retreated to her gloomy bedroom and refused to admit anyone outside of her immediate family. In August 1895, when Ernest Leverson sent word of Oscar’s circumstances, she thanked him but explained that she was very poorly and confined to her room. Such isolation obliged the trickle of well-wishers who continued to call on her to drop inadequate words of comfort through her letterbox instead, where they joined the demand notices for rates and taxes that arrived from the Chelsea municipal authorities. At least Jane’s rent was being paid out of Adela Schuster’s £1,000.
Oscar was declared bankrupt in November 1895 and the two hearings he was obliged to attend at the London Bankruptcy Court were hideously humiliating. In September, he had been taken from Wandsworth Prison by public transport, handcuffed and guarded by two policemen. Although he was jeered at by passers-by, Oscar’s spirits were lifted by Robbie Ross, who waited outside the courtroom and raised his hat as he passed. As a result of his bankruptcy, he was increasingly dependent on Adela’s largesse. As well as supporting Jane, her money paid for Lily Wilde’s confinement when she gave birth to her first child, Oscar’s only niece, Dorothy Ierne Wilde, who was born on 11 July 1895.
In return for this kindness, Lily had written to the governor of Pentonville Prison asking that Oscar be given her fondest love, and that he be assured his mother was ‘wonderfully well’, although this was far from true. Two months after Dorothy’s birth, Lily visited Oscar in the prison infirmary at Wandsworth; she was shocked by the deterioration in his health. Jane’s health was declining rapidly too. Towards the end, Oscar was the only person she wanted to see. She watched for a letter with a prison postmark: ‘I thought that Oscar might perhaps write to me after the three months,’ she lamented, ‘but I have not had a line from him, and I have not written to him as I dread my letters being returned’.44
In November 1895, while Oscar was being transferred to HM Prison Reading, he was made to stand on the central platform at Clapham Junction, handcuffed and dressed in prison garb ‘for the world to look at’.45 He carried hideous memories of being ‘surrounded by a jeering mob’. Two months later, in January 1896, Jane, desperately ill by then, wrote to Henry B. Isaacson, the irascible governor of HM Prison Reading, asking that Oscar be allowed to visit her at home.46 Since Isaacson, whom Oscar, using a borrowed phrase from Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius’, described as a ‘mulberry-faced dictator’, refused her this comfort, she never again saw the son who, decades earlier, she had predicted would ‘turn out something wonderful’.47
During the dark days of January 1896, as winter drew to a close, Jane caught a chill and could not summon the resources to fight it: ‘How can people weep at Death?’, she once asked her friend John Hilson; ‘To me it is the only happy moment of our miserable, incomprehensible existence’.48 On 3 February 1896, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde died of ‘acute bronchitis’. Willie mourned her passing: ‘My dear mother was more than a mother to me,’ he told More Adey. ‘She was the best and truest and most loyal friend I had on earth’. He described her death: ‘Her end was perfect peace,’ he wrote. ‘She was quite conscious up to an hour before her passing’. He also broached the subject of Oscar’s imprisonment and the effect it had on his mother:
It is useless to disguise from you and Oscar’s friends that his sad fate saddened her life. With all his faults and follies he was always a good son to her, and even from the prison walls managed to help and assist her, as he always did when he was among us all. This much will stand to his credit.49
Three days later, on the afternoon of 6 February 1896, the remains of Jane Wilde were taken by hearse to the sprawling cemetery at Kensal Green. According to Henriette Corkran, her friend ‘loathed the idea of being buried in a London cemetery, perhaps near some common tradesman’. She had hoped instead that her body would be ‘thrown in the sea, or buried near a rock on some wild coast’.50 In the end, she had no say in the matter and was interred in plot 147 in a remote part of the cemetery; this plot, unmarked for decades, was later classified as a public grave. Her funeral expenses were paid by Oscar via Ernest Leverson, out of the money donated by Adela Schuster.* In accordance with Jane’s instructions that she ‘be buried quite privately and for no one to come to her funeral’, only Willie and Lily were there to mark her passing.51
A sympathetic obituary in The Athenaeum paid tribute to Jane, declaring: ‘Under the mark of brilliant display and bohemian recklessness lay a deep and loyal soul and a kindly and sympathetic nature’.52 The Freeman’s Journal lauded her as ‘almost the last of that brilliant circle of poets and writers who, fifty years ago, gave to the “Young Ireland” movement a world-wide celebrity’.53 She was described in the Virginia Enterprise as ‘a brilliant woman who had contributed much to literature and social life in England and Ireland’. Paying tribute to her as ‘a confirmed woman’s rights woman’, that newspaper lauded the movement she had inaugurated with Lady Henry Somerset, ‘the object of which was to secure from the crown honorific distinctions and titles for women, similar to those bestowed upon men for notable deeds’.54
A fortnight passed and Oscar remained unaware of his mother’s death. As Willie was certain that his brother had no desire to see him, Lily and he contacted Constance and suggested that she might travel from Italy, where she was staying with Margaret Brooke, to deliver the dreadful news. Although she was debilitated by health issues of her own by then, she visited Oscar on 19 February; a full sixteen days after Jane had died. It would be the last time they met. Although Oscar was devastated by the news, he acknowledged Constance’s generosity, writing:
My wife, at that time kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should hear the news from indifferent or alien lips, travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irremediable a loss.55
Oscar swore that he had received portents of bad news in the hours before Jane’s passing. He reacted with horror when a warder killed a spider while sweeping out his cell, declaring that he now expected to hear ‘worse news than any I have yet heard’. On the night Jane died, Oscar insisted that he heard the cry of the banshee.* Later, he told Vincent O’Sullivan that Jane had appeared to him in his cell, dressed in outdoors clothes. When he asked her to remove her hat and coat, and to sit down, she shook her head sadly and vanished. He was to dream of her several times afterwards, telling Robbie Ross:
My dream was that my mother was speaking to me with some sternness, and that she was in trouble … I quite see that whenever I am in danger she will in some way warn me.56
In De Profundis, Oscar likened his fall, and Jane’s sorrow, to the crucifixion of Jesus in front of his mother, Mary: ‘Her death was so terrible to me,’ he admitted, ‘that I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame’.57 He regretted besmirching her name:
She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured not merely in Literature, Art, Archaeology and Science, but in the public history of my own country in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.58
Prison life took a terrible toll on Oscar’s health. In a chilling aside, Major J. O. Nelson, the humane but pragmatic man who succeeded Isaacson as governor of HM Prison Reading, remarked to Robbie Ross: ‘He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years’.59 Oscar lasted his full sentence and survived for three and a half years more, outliving Constance by almost three years.