Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

by Franny Moyle

  Oscar’s own background held similar, greater, scandals. Oscar’s father, Sir William Wilde, was a self-made man. The son of a doctor, he became a highly esteemed and pioneering eye and ear surgeon, as well as a recognized scholar and statistician who had written widely not only on medical issues but also on archaeology and folklore. His decision as a young man to set up a free clinic to treat Dublin’s poor had provided him with the publicity and experience to become Ireland’s leading specialist in his field and had subsequently delivered him his fortune and title. But when Oscar’s father married his mother, the fiery poet and Irish nationalist Jane Elgee, known as Speranza, he already had at least three illegitimate children in tow. One, who went under the name of Henry Wilson, became a doctor and practised with his father. Sir William’s two illegitimate daughters Emily and Mary Wilde were brought up by relatives. But it was not his premarital aberrations that were considered Sir William’s scandal. Rather, it was an incident that happened during his marriage.

  In the very year that Oscar was born, 1854, Sir William began an affair with Mary Josephine Travers, the nineteen-year-old daughter of one of his medical colleagues, Dr Robert Travers. Although they may have known each other socially, Miss Travers was also a patient of Wilde’s. Their relationship was a long and relatively open one and resulted in another illegitimate child.9 But after almost a decade, when Wilde ended the relationship, to his horror Miss Travers suggested that their affair had begun with a rape, carried out while, as his patient, she was anaesthetized. Although Travers did not attempt a court action based on her accusation, she began a letter-writing campaign, sending letters to Merrion Square as well as to local newspapers.

  Travers’s campaign heightened when, shortly after Wilde’s knighthood, she published a scurrilous pamphlet, a cautionary tale about a girl raped by her doctor, barely concealing her own and Wilde’s identities as Florence Boyle Price and Dr Quilp respectively. The whole of Dublin was scandalized, not least because Travers’s coup was to publish the pamphlet under Speranza’s name. Speranza wrote to Dr Travers, accusing his daughter of orchestrating the campaign ‘in which she makes it appear that she has had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde’. Wilde’s wife also alleged that Travers was attempting to extort money and referred to ‘wages of disgrace’.10

  In an event that Oscar would have been wise to have remembered when he faced his own weirdly similar trials, Travers now saw her opportunity to ruin her former lover by dragging the business into court and thus into the public arena and press. She sued Speranza for libel and in giving evidence revealed every detail of her affair with Wilde. Everything was reported. It became a national sensation.

  The jury found in favour of Miss Travers, but awarded her just a farthing damages. But of course, the costs of the case had to be paid by the Wildes, and these were considerable. After the trial Wilde retreated to his country home, Moytura House in Galway, and pursued archaeological investigations there while Speranza, an indomitable character, faced Dublin’s society alone with the boys. Sir William Wilde never properly recovered from the incident. He died in 1876. Constance’s great-uncle Charles Hare Hemphill walked behind the coffin as part of the cortège that took the body to Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery.

  Constance’s father had met his own demise two years earlier, in 1874, from pulmonary disease. On Sunday 5 April that year The Era announced the death in its column dedicated to Freemasonry:

  The death of Br Horace Lloyd occurred on Monday last at his residence in Kensington, at the age of forty six. He had long been a distinguished Freemason and taken a prominent part in the affairs of the Craft … Latterly, however, his health failed, … but it was not suspected at that time that his sickness was ‘unto death’. He did not however recover and … breathed his last on the 30th.

  Constance was just sixteen. Her father’s death would have a dramatic and devastating effect on her own life, and heralded another scandal that Constance, barely out of childhood, would have to face. This was not the kind of public scandal that had threatened her grandfather’s and father’s reputations. It was a private scandal, concealed by the family, but for that none the less shameful. This time it centred on the disgraceful behaviour of her mother.

  After the death of her husband Ada Lloyd began to abuse her daughter. Behind the respectable white stuccoed façade of the villa in Sussex Gardens the teenage Constance suddenly found herself taunted, threatened and beaten by a woman who had turned from being uninterested and cold to downright cruel. Otho remembered the barrage of suffering his sister faced. It ranged from ‘perpetual snubbing in private and public sarcasm, rudeness and savage scoldings’ to physical violence that included ‘threatening with the fire-irons or having one’s head thumped against the wall’. No teenager could go through this ‘without some mark on the character being left’, Otho later recalled.11

  Being made the butt of jokes in public and then slapped and threatened in private scarred Constance’s personality and confidence. As a young woman she developed a pathological shyness when in public and a tendency to irritability and short-temperedness at home. The ‘cruelty and contempt’ Constance suffered in ‘place of the care she ought to have received … fostered a natural irritability which I am sure she tried to overcome but never could entirely, but she would be sorry presently and would not be too proud to say so’, Otho remembered. ‘There is no question she was markedly critical, and was irritated by little annoyances which many another would have hardly noticed.’12

  The damage was not merely emotional. If she already had something of a weak constitution, physical abuse did little to improve it. ‘I went to see Mr Morgan yesterday,’ Constance revealed to Otho in the summer of 1878, ‘and he said that I was very weak indeed, with scarcely any pulse … He has given me tonic pills, … and also ordered me to lie down and sleep every day after lunch all of which Mama pooh poohed and declared it was only indigestion; she asked me if it was her cruel treatment of me that made me weak?!’13

  One can only speculate why Ada became so cruel and abusive, but it’s likely that sexual jealousy lay at the heart of it. Ada was still only in her thirties when her husband died. Although Horace Lloyd left a legacy of £12,000, which was made over in his will entirely to his wife, the supplementary income from his legal practice died with him, and Ada must have realized that to maintain her current high standard of living she must remarry.

  Putting her life with Horace behind her, Ada moved to 1 Devonshire Terrace, Hyde Park, and began her quest to attract a new husband. It would become a search plagued by her own insecurities. She was clearly terrified of growing old. In the 1871 census she declared her age as thirty-five, but when the census called again a decade later, according to the figure given to the census official, Ada had only aged five years. How irritating it must have been for this relatively young widow to have a beautiful and much younger daughter who might deflect the attention of potential suitors from her.

  And Constance was beautiful, with her unruly chestnut hair, brunette skin and large eyes. One story goes that she was once attending an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the Royal Academy and overheard the man in front of her remark that pouting lips such as Rossetti painted are never encountered in real life. But when the man turned and caught sight of Constance he was ‘taken aback’ and ‘silenced’ by the real-life Rossetti he suddenly saw before him.14

  Constance’s brother, Otho, could do little to help with the situation at home. After being away at school in Bristol most of the time, in 1876 he went to Oxford University with a ‘demy’ scholarship to Oriel College to study Classics. Here Otho became the first of the Lloyd siblings to become friendly with Oscar Wilde, who, also a Classical scholar, had gone to Magdalen College two years previously.

  On hearing the news that Otho would be joining the university, Speranza dropped Oscar a line, urging him to look Otho up. But in fact it was in Dublin’s Merrion Square that they first met, in 1877, ‘my grandmother having s
ent me to call on the Wildes’.15 Oscar amused Otho by recounting how he had just been on a trip to Greece and, returning to Oxford a fortnight late, ‘was nearly sent down by the authorities’. Thereafter Otho and Oscar saw one another from time to time in Oxford, although it would be a little while before Otho’s sister had the pleasure of Oscar’s acquaintance.

  Meanwhile, in 1878, Constance’s fortunes encountered another dramatic shift when Ada Lloyd finally attracted an appropriate suitor in the form of George Swinburne-King, a man with some private means who also held a position in the accounts department of the Admiralty. A widower, he was a charming man and clearly thought he could take on the fiery yet insecure Adelaide. Constance sensed that matrimony might be on the cards and on 3 September wrote to Otho, who was staying with their grandmother in Dublin, to reveal her suspicions:

  Miss Constance Lloyd present her compliments to Mr Otho Lloyd & begs to inform him that he has a sister still living … She also begs to give him a little hint that there is a ‘Steparex’ on the Tapis who may turn into something definite this day (this last hint is strictly private).16

  Her instincts were corroborated by a proposal. In a subsequent letter Constance found herself outlining the challenging dynamics and potential conflicts that the proposed Lloyd/Swinburne-King union presented, not least because Mr Swinburne-King had a daughter Eliza, known as Tizey.

  everything nearly came to a smash … so there was no good in writing till I knew how it was all going to end. I think it is all right but I do think that Mama should have more trust in a man she is going to marry. It drives me simply wild to hear her always wondering whether he likes her … and whether he has been colder the last two days, & whether he was not out of spirits at such & such a moment … and my greatest fear is the (I fear almost inevitable) jealousy of Tizey … am not sure she is not even a little jealous of me. Mr SK is charming really & devoted to M if she would only see it. We spent yesterday afternoon and evening at Ealing where they have a dear little tiny cottage and I like him very much … she (Tizey) is apparently not clever but takes an interest in dress and wants us two to be always dressed alike so you need no longer groan over your sister’s ugly dresses. We are of course going to be dressed alike for the wedding our idea being Peacock Blue Dresses with … puffy sleeves & outer jackets to match … The colour of course depends eventually upon mama’s dress, which we must not interfere with but I think she is inclined to a navy blue silk.

  I tell you Mr King’s idea about me. We were talking about mesmerism & I said I cd mesmerise grandpapa, upon which he turned to Mama & said ‘how strange. I should have thought it required someone with a strong will and not a gentle girl (!!!) like Constance’. ‘Oh Constance has got a very strong will, wait till you know her better’ from Mama … he does not know the smouldering volcano beneath.

  … I confess to you that I wld rather there had been no daughter as I think it will hamper all my actions & I shall never be able to go to the College to see all my friends there, & there will be a fuss every time I go to Lancaster Gate & leave Tizey.17

  Apart from indicating the oppressive conditions under which she was living, this letter gives a telling snapshot of Constance at the age of twenty. Her interest in spiritualist experiments such as mesmerism is already apparent. Apart from her known college friend Lucy Russell, who was the younger sister of the barrister, financier, property developer and railway entrepreneur James Cholmeley Russell, Otho lists her ‘friends’ during this period as including Bessie Shand, whose brother Alexander (or Alec) went on to become a writer on philosophy and metaphysics. Then there was Mary Moore, the daughter of the Revd Daniel Moore, and Clara Monro, daughter of the famous mental physician Dr Henry Monro, who consulted at St Luke’s Hospital. One can imagine the opinion and zest formed amid this group of privileged, educated, upper-middle-class young women.18

  The reference to Otho groaning over her ‘ugly dresses’ alludes to her emerging enthusiasm for Pre-Raphaelite or ‘Aesthetic’ dress. Indeed the description Constance gives of the outfits she and Tizey might wear for Ada’s wedding, in peacock blue with puffed sleeves, sound particularly ‘Pre-Raphaelite’.19 This development in Constance’s taste and appearance was never wholly approved of by Otho, who, like other members of his family, never much identified with or saw the appeal of Aestheticism.

  As a self-confessed Pre-Raphaelite – a term that by the 1880s was interchangeable with ‘Aesthete’ – Constance was carrying a torch whose flame had been lit in the 1850s by a group of women associated with the founding Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters. Women such as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, the wives respectively of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, designer and socialist William Morris, had modelled for the Pre-Raphaelite artists, wearing loose, flowing gowns.

  But it was not just their depiction on canvas that sparked a new fashion among an intellectual élite. Off canvas these women also established new liberties for women that some twenty years later were still only just being taken up by a wider female population. They pioneered new kinds of dresses, with sleeves either sewn on at the shoulder, rather than below it, or puffed and loose. While the rest of the female Victorian populace had to go about with their arms pinned to their bodies in tight, unmoving sheaths, the Pre-Raphaelite women could move their arms freely, to paint or pose or simply be comfortable. The Pre-Raphaelite girls also did away with the huge, bell-shaped crinoline skirts, held out by hoops and cages strapped on to the female undercarriage. They dispensed with tight corsets that pinched waists into hourglasses, as well as the bonnets and intricate hairstyles that added layer upon layer to a lady’s daily toilette.

  Their ‘Aesthetic’ dress, as it became known, was more than just a fashion; it was a statement. In seeking comfort for women it also spoke of a desire for liberation that went beyond physical ease. It was also a statement about female creative expression, which in itself was aligned to broader feminist issues. The original Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood lived unconventionally with artists, worked at their own artistic projects and became famous in the process. Those women who wore Aesthetic dress in their wake tended to believe that women should have the right to a career and ultimately be enfranchised with the vote.

  The flagship store of Aestheticism was Liberty’s of London. By 1875 the brainchild of Arthur Liberty had opened in Regent Street and offered London’s avant-garde set the opportunity to buy the best craft furniture and the finest oriental goods. It also specialized in ‘art fabrics’ which were made up into those loose-fitting, puffed-sleeved Aesthetic dresses, many of which were then worn at the bohemian Grosvenor Gallery. Constance was a regular at Liberty’s. Her letters note deliveries from the store and also the fact she bought Otho a brown tie there, a gesture that it is unclear whether he appreciated, given his apparent reservations about Aesthetic wear.

  And so Constance, with ‘her ugly dresses’, her schooling and her college friends, was already in some small degree a young woman going her own way. Moving away from the middle-class conventions of the past, where women were schooled by governesses at home, would dress in a particular manner and be chaperoned, Constance was already modern.

  The letter she wrote to Otho in the autumn of 1878 includes another important insight, and that is about money. ‘I want to know if you got your – £10 from grandpapa’, Constance continued,

  & if they told you the money arrangements. Grandpapa is going to make you quite independent of Mama & to give me an allowance of how much I know not yet. He will not give Mama a farthing, at which she is rabid. Would God I were independent too; I wld far rather work for my daily bread than have my mother make a compliment of keeping me in food and lodging. She says it is grandpapa’s duty to keep the children of his only son and she says that his keeping you is no compliment as if he did not she is no longer bound to keep you, & you would have to leave Oxford & take a Clerkship. A nice look-out for the son of Horace Lloyd & for me with abilities like yours too!20

  With marriage for Ada
on the horizon, the Lloyd family had been thrown into an ugly financial war. On Horace’s death, Grandpa Horatio had agreed to supplement Ada’s income to the tune of £400 per year, on the understanding that she was also supporting the children. With a new husband on the scene, Horatio was proposing withdrawing this allowance to his daughter-in-law. In retaliation Ada was refusing to support her own children. John Horatio was evidently less keen to see his grandchildren having to earn their own keep than their mother, and so had been forced to work out a plan to cater for them, as Constance began to outline to Otho. They would ultimately inherit a portion of his estate: ‘by Grandpapa’s will, having reached 23 we become possessed of the 4th share divided between us. Supposing Mama does not marry … we each give her half until her death, when it of course comes back to us.’21

  Towards the end of September details had been finalized of further respective annual allowances that their grandfather was prepared to make. Constance, ecstatic to be financially independent of her mother at last, provided Otho with more information on her grandfather’s proposals. Her ability to maintain something of a dry sense of humour amid this domestic turmoil speaks volumes for Constance’s inner resilience, which would serve her well in years to come.