Mary Fedden was also an impressive character. She was involved in the Ladies’ National Association, and from time to time the Feddens’ home hosted this group’s meetings, at which various speakers discussed how women might also provide constructive action in the war against poverty and injustice.11
This cultured, inspirational and mutually supportive couple presented for their young guest a model of an ideal, modern marriage that stood in stark contrast to the unhappy, selfish and separate lives her parents had lived together. What is more, the kind attention that Henry Fedden, in particular, had paid to her and the personal interest he had taken in her must have also persuaded Constance that, far from being unattractive and doomed to spinsterhood, romantic opportunities could one day be available to her.
In fact, by 1879 Constance had already had some luck in love. She was becoming close to Alec Shand, the brother of her friend Bessie. According to Otho, Constance was even briefly engaged to him,12 although it seems that this was a fact kept between themselves, since her extant letters reflect nothing other than secrecy and some elaborate lying where Alec is concerned. ‘I am rather disturbed in mind about something,’ a 21-year-old Constance wrote to Otho.
I got Tennyson’s ‘Princess’ in the Summer for Alec, who wanted a copy, and did not pay for it. They have unfortunately sent in the account to Aunt Emily in a bill of hers and fearing so the questioning I said I had got it for you. I suppose you will be angry but I do not think you will be asked about it. I will go with you and pay it the first day you’re in town, and then you can say it is paid, if you are asked.13
It seems that Alec returned Constance’s token of affection with much of the same, sending Constance ‘a beautiful bound edition of Tennyson’, which he left with Bessie to pass on. Spoilt for choice suddenly by men bearing gifts, Constance discovered that the devoted Henry Fedden had already given her that very edition, and so it was returned to Bessie with a request for Alec to find a different gift. The poetical works of Keats was presented instead.
But although by 1879 Constance was at last coming out of her shell and enjoying the attentions of men, she had not yet caught the eye of Oscar Wilde. For the moment his sights were trained elsewhere. While Constance had been getting on with her studies, Oscar had managed to secure a reputation at Oxford for being something of a poet and critic. In his final year he had won the Newdigate Prize for poetry with his poem ‘Ravenna’ and had had poems and articles published, mainly in the university and Irish press.
Swept up by the Pre-Raphaelite legacy, just like Constance, Oscar was writing under the influence of the poets of that movement, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Rossetti. He saw an intense devotion to beauty in their work. And this cult of beauty was endorsed in the critical writings of Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance had a formative influence on him. In the conclusion to these studies Pater essentially argued that in a world in flux, beauty provides a fixed, refined aesthetic that could supersede the transient world and, in so doing, offer the onlooker a form of higher experience.
Pater was a Fellow and tutor at Brasenose College whom Oscar met in the Michaelmas term of 1877. Pater’s theories about the importance of beauty were expressed not only in his written work but also in his own domestic environment. Mary Ward, the wife of The Times’s art critic, Humphry Ward, lived opposite Pater in Oxford and described his ‘exquisite’ house in her memoirs, where ‘the drawing room was decorated with a Morris paper; spindle legged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates and pots, bought, I think in Holland … engravings if I remember right from Botticelli; a few mirrors, and very few flowers, chosen and arranged with “simple yet conscious art”.’14
Oscar’s own college rooms declared his similar allegiance to Aestheticism. He too looked to contemporary designers such as William Morris and furnished his rooms simply, incorporating antique blue china and beautiful art prints.
Aesthetic taste could extend to any field in which beauty, its object, could be applied. It didn’t stop with fine art, literature or interiors. Floristry could have an Aesthetic aspect. Lilies and sunflowers were the Aesthetic flower of choice. Japanese or Chinese artefacts were admired. And, of course, fashion was Aestheticism’s route into the mainstream.
Alongside the ‘ugly dresses’ that Constance made up from her Liberty fabrics, some ladies took Aesthetic dress to new extremes. The actress Ellen Terry, associated with the movement through her relationship with the Aesthetic architect Edward Godwin, wore Japanese kimonos. Aesthetic men wore their hair long in the tradition of painters like Rossetti, and their dress seemed to incorporate anything from the long Middle Eastern robes that painters such as William Holman Hunt wore to the loose velvet jackets with which Swinburne became identified. But the dress adopted by the male aesthete was considered ‘effeminate’ by the uninitiated. For his airs and graces Oscar was taunted by his college peers. One prank, with the aim of removing and breaking Oscar’s furniture, ended in the pranksters themselves being thumped and thrown out by Oscar, single-handed. Another attempt to ‘duck’ him in a college fountain also failed.
Oscar left Oxford at the end of 1878 with ambitions to become a poet and critic. With the Newdigate Prize under his belt and a double first to boot, he moved to London and installed himself in rooms in Salisbury Street, off the Strand, in the home of his friend the painter Frank Miles. Miles had ‘a curious old-world house looking over the Thames … with antique staircases, twisting passages, broken down furniture and dim corners’.15 But the well-connected, moneyed and charming young artist had already created there a nexus for the bohemian set, with everyone from the poetess Violet Fane, Ellen Terry and James McNeill Whistler to Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris dropping by. Oscar was the perfect addition.
London was a new exciting arena for the young graduate. When Oscar arrived, the metropolis was quite literally newly aglow. Electric lights were being tested in galleries, and for the first time the Embankment and Holborn Viaduct were illuminated at night. And the cultural scene was sparkling too. In almost every cultural arena there were exciting new developments.
The great actor of the moment, Henry Irving, having just opened a refurbished Lyceum Theatre under his own management, was performing his tour-de-force Hamlet opposite Ellen Terry’s Ophelia; Lord Leighton, an Aesthetic painter of ‘effeminate subjects’,16 had just been elected as the president of the Royal Academy of Arts; and the whole nature of contemporary art was under scrutiny as Whistler went head to head with the great critic John Ruskin in a groundbreaking libel case. Ruskin had seen a series of paintings by Whistler entitled ‘Nocturnes’ and ‘Symphonies’, which today can been seen as the clear forerunner to abstraction. But for Ruskin, far from being a new, exciting development, Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket represented the work of a ‘coxcomb’ who was asking ‘two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ – a criticism that Whistler considered worthy of court.
With the arts in a moment of change and debate, there were rich pickings for a budding young critic. But compared with the territories Oscar had vanquished before, London was vast. It must have dawned on him quickly that fulfilling his dreams of a literary career amid this noisy bustling city, where the competition was fierce, would be much harder than winning over editors of the university and Irish presses. Oscar understood that to rise above the noise of the city he must shout loudest. He amplified the attitudes and activities that he had rehearsed in Oxford. Within months he managed to cast himself as not just a follower of the Aesthetic fashion but as its embodiment.
Once Oscar was in residence in Salisbury Street, he and Miles began inviting people to join them for ‘Tea and Beauties’. In their bohemian rooms Miles would display his latest portraits of society belles and Oscar would entertain as only he could, with his rolling, golden voice pouring out wit and stories. Miles had persuaded the supermodel of her day, Lillie Langtry, to pose for him, and his delightful sketch of he
r had earned him a tidy income when, in reproduction, it became something of a best-seller. She had become a friend of Miles’s and was soon also on Oscar’s arm.
During his university days Oscar’s romantic attentions had been trained for two years on Florence Balcombe, a Dublin girl and future actress whom he adored. But by 1878 he had found himself usurped in her affections by another Dubliner, the writer, theatre manager and future creator of Dracula, Bram Stoker. She married Bram that December, to Oscar’s great distress. Now the high-profile Mrs Langtry, who seemed more than happy to adopt Oscar as her mascot, went some way to easing this disappointment.
But it was not just Lillie Langtry with whom Oscar regularly flirted. He was also showing public devotion to the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. In May 1879 he travelled to Folkestone to meet Miss Bernhardt as she arrived in England. In a gesture that guaranteed press attention, as she stepped foot on British soil, Oscar threw at her feet the armful of lilies he had brought to greet her. He was becoming a study in self-promotion. The following month he wrote a sonnet to her that was published in The World. A month after that his poem ‘The New Helen’ in praise of Miss Langtry appeared in Time.
Laura Troubridge, then a young, aspiring artist but who would one day marry Adrian Hope and become Constance’s neighbour in Tite Street, witnessed the frisson that surrounded Oscar in those early days in London. Her cousin Charles Orde, known as ‘Tardy’, was friendly with the young Mr Wilde. ‘To tea with Tardy’, Laura wrote on 30 June 1879. ‘Met Oscar Wilde, the poet. Both fell awfully in love with him, thought him delightful.’ Then in July:
To the National Gallery, saw Sarah Bernhardt there, had a good stare at her. Met Tardy and went together to tea at Oscar Wilde’s – great fun, lots of vague ‘intense’ men, such duffers, who amused us awfully. The room was a mass of white lilies, photos of Mrs Langtry, peacock feather screens and coloured pots, pictures of various merits.17
Lillie Langtry remembered that, ‘on his arrival from Oxford, Oscar had longish hair and wore an outfit that spoke of bohemian credentials: light-coloured trousers, a black frock coat, brightly coloured waistcoats with a white silk cravat held with an amethyst pin and always carrying lavender gloves.’ But as Oscar’s charm worked its magic on London society and, as Langtry observed, he ‘began to rise in the life of London, and his unconscious peculiarities had become a target for the humorous columns of the newspapers, he was quick to realise that they could be turned to advantage, and he proceeded forthwith to develop them so audaciously that it became impossible to ignore them’.18
Before long Oscar had grown his hair longer than anyone else, and his buttonholes were more unusual. And his outfits became even more outrageous. Caricatures of him in the press quickly became animated on stage. By the end of 1880 a satire on Aestheticism called Where’s the Cat opened at the Criterion Theatre, in which Oscar clearly provided the inspiration for the character of the Aesthetic writer Scott Ramsay. The actor playing Ramsay, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, modelled his performance on Oscar. Then came another play, The Colonel, in which another Aesthete, called Lambert Stryke, was again played in Wildean manner.
In early 1881 the Punch cartoonist George du Maurier was running weekly caricatures of two Aesthetic types, the poet Maudle and the painter Jellaby Postlethwaite. Maudle transfigured over the weeks into Oscuro Wildegoose, Drawit Milde and Ossian Wilderness, and was teased for his interest in lilies, the Grosvenor Gallery and blue china.
And so within two years after arriving in London, Oscar had landed the city. Despite his limited output in print, by 1881 Oscar’s fame was secured when the great painter and social observer William Powell Frith captured him at the Royal Academy summer show amid the great and the good. A lily in his lapel, the young Wilde, tall, long-haired and not yet showing the weight that would define his later years, stands notebook in hand, surrounded by a group of admiring women. To the right of the canvas the figure of George du Maurier is depicted looking on. To the left a woman wearing a loose, puff-sleeved Aesthetic outfit with a sunflower pinned to her breast gives us some sense of the figure that Constance too must have cut at this time.
In the same year that Frith immortalized Oscar in paint, the masters of popular music Gilbert and Sullivan confirmed Oscar’s celebrity with the production of Patience, an operetta in which an Aesthete was presented in the character of Bunthorne. Bunthorne’s costume took Aesthetic dress to new extremes. He wore a loose velvet jacket, knee breeches, silk tights and patent pumps. These extremes of dress were ones that soon became associated not with the fictional Bunthorne but with the man Wilde.
The Lloyds must have looked on with a mixture of bemusement and disapproval at the progress of their family friend. Conventional and upright, the inhabitants of 100 Lancaster Gate would not have considered wearing one’s hair long and becoming the target of ridicule the best credentials. But then again, Oscar’s Oxford contemporary Otho was hardly turning out as they had hoped.
For one thing, Otho had become embroiled in a court case that captured the public’s imagination. A report in the Daily News for 22 March 1879, under the headline ‘The Alleged Frauds upon the Charitable Public’, gives an idea of the case’s appeal. It describes the accused Vernon Montgomery and Ethel Vivian in the dock, amid an unusually packed and rowdy courtroom. Much of the crowd comprised young professional men, attracted by the impressive appearance of the bottle-blonde Miss Vivian, who was parading in the witness box in ‘a light silk dress of fashionable make’.
The prosecution alleged that Montgomery and Vivian placed advertisements in The Times purporting to be on behalf of an embarrassed girl in need of financial assistance. When charitable individuals responded to the advert, Montgomery entered into a correspondence that invited donations.
However, far from being a genuine lady in distress, prosecution witnesses identified Miss Vivian as in fact a Miss Wilmore, a Pimlicobased prostitute for whom Montgomery was almost certainly a pimp. In her defence, Miss Vivian protested from the witness box, much to the obvious mirth of the courtroom, that, far from being her pimp, Montgomery (who was using the moniker Viscount de Montgomery) was in fact a ‘poet’ whom she had met at the Promenade concerts, and that she had subsequently left Pimlico to live with him in his ‘country house’ near Maidstone.
To the horror of some constituents of his Lloyd and Napier relatives, Otho found himself appearing in court as a witness for the prosecution. He was one of the charitable individuals who had responded to The Times advertisement. In what was evidently an act of utter naivety, Otho sent Miss Vivian £5, a not insignificant sum. To the continued mirth of those watching proceedings, Otho noted that, although he acknowledged the fraud, he did not regret his donation to a woman who, regardless of her means of soliciting it, was indeed a subject for charity. Like many of those in the courtroom that day, Otho Lloyd presented as a man too easily turned by a pretty face.
Leaving aside his rather embarrassing susceptibility to the charms of young women and lack of financial acumen, Otho was beginning to concern the family more generally. Despite having won a scholarship to Oxford, he was lackadaisical in his approach to his studies and was soon failing key exams. Constance had made a huge emotional investment in her brother. Unable to pursue a career herself, her natural ambition was bound up in his achievements. As she saw the potential for such achievements slip away, Constance was genuinely distressed.
My Dearest boy, I am so terribly disappointed that you’re being plucked, perhaps the more so that Francis has passed his examination, and I think in all probability Charlie his. It cannot but force itself upon my mind, seeing Grand Papa’s disappointment, almost unspoken it is true, but scarcely for that the less, that you have not worked or that you have worked only indolently, as we are both only too inclined to do. Do dear boy try to make up this future year and work steadily and try to attain the honours that I know with study you have the capability of attaining … Do not think I am lecturing you. You know that all my ambition, all my future hope
s are bound up in you and it is really a keen disappointment to me to find that you have none for yourself and it is not only that, but also that it is Grand Papa’s money that is being spent and if you do not profit by your college career it is wasted, is it not so? Is there any possible way by which I can help you? Remember that ignorant as I am, I will do anything in my power, or learn anything by which I could afford you any possible assistance.19
With Otho’s prospects foundering, Constance must have felt all the more keenly what potential suitors might offer her in terms of success and achievement. Despite now having several men ‘in various stages of devotion’, none of them was right. In fact, all of them were, for different reasons, utterly wrong.
In the summer of 1880 Constance, her aunt and grandfather travelled to the coast ahead of a family holiday in Holland. Constance’s Irish uncle Charlie Hemphill and her cousin Stanhope joined the party briefly before it sailed. Constance thought this was nothing more than a social get-together, made possible by the fact that two branches of the family fortuitously found themselves close to one another during their respective travels. She suddenly discovered, however, that Stanhope, whom she had known since his boyhood, had long been holding a torch for her, and the whole meeting had been engineered for a very specific purpose.
‘I’ve been so terribly horrified and frightened that I cannot get over it,’ she wrote to Otho.
Did it ever in your wildest dreams enter your head that Stanhope cared for me? I went out for a long walk yesterday with him and Uncle Charlie and we two stayed behind to pick some berries, and he informed me that he had come to ask me to be his wife. I do hope no one will ever again propose to me, for it is horrid. He said that he had wished to speak to me in Dublin and also in London when he was last there, and he would have waited now to test my feelings but that our going away tomorrow had hurried him on. It was so dreadful. I could but refuse him and he came again this morning to get a final answer, and looked as white as a sheet and frightened me so and yet I could not do anything else, could I? He would insist that I cared for someone else, and I assured him I did not. I have sent him away, and I don’t want to marry, and I do hope nobody else will ever ask me. I am shaking all over still with fright. Tear up this letter.20
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