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

by Franny Moyle

  With poor Stanhope dispatched, it was not long before another admirer was buzzing around the Lloyd household. As London warmed up under the June sun of 1881, a Mr Fitzgerald began to hover. Despite his admirable persistence, he got short shrift. ‘Mr Fitzgerald came … deep sigh, and requested to escort me somewhere this week,’ Constance informed her brother. ‘It ended finally in his arranging to come to Devonshire Terrace tomorrow and take Mama, Ella, Tizey and myself to the Fancy Fair at the Albert Hall. Poor man. I hope I shall meet someone I know and then I’ll get rid of him. I left Zena and him to have a long conversation together but he made his way over after a time and I couldn’t get rid of him.’21

  Three days later the hapless Fitzgerald, failing to take a hint, tried his luck once more, as Constance once again relayed. ‘Mr Fitzgerald was with me the whole afternoon and to my horror … went to the Arbuthnots22 at home in the evening. I positively loathe him now. Isn’t it horrid? He came last Monday and asked to be allowed to escort us on Wednesday, so I couldn’t get off it.’23

  Mr Fitzgerald’s timing was poor. Unbeknown to him, his attentions were in competition with those of someone in whom, unlike himself, Stanhope and presumably the now defunct Alec Shand, Constance found herself passionately interested. Like Henry Fedden, whom she found so enthralling, this other suitor was cultured, and, like the fascinating Mr Belt, he was artistic and rather risqué. The man was none other than the newly famous Oscar Wilde.

  It was Constance’s Irish grandmother who engineered an opportunity for Constance and Oscar to become properly acquainted in the early summer of 1881, somewhat by default. Grandma Atkinson’s intention was to do a little matchmaking on behalf not of Constance but of her young aunt Ellena. ‘Ella’ Atkinson came to stay with her sister Ada Swinburne-King at Devonshire Terrace in the early summer of 1881. She was twenty-eight and still unmarried. Grandma Atkinson, well acquainted with Lady Wilde, suggested that Oscar, just a year Ella’s junior, might come to tea during her stay. Lady Wilde was only too happy to oblige.

  When Sir William Wilde died, Lady Wilde had been left in financial difficulty. Although the gross estate left by the surgeon was some £20,000, he had had debts, and since a substantial £2,000 was left to each of his three sons, William, Oscar and Dr Wilson, Lady Wilde was left with a sum that was quickly deemed not enough to live on in style in Merrion Square. Given both her sons’ ambitions to seek careers in London, the decision was made that she would move to the capital, where she and Willie, Oscar’s older brother, would combine their resources. And so in 1879 Speranza decamped to rented accommodation in Ovington Square, just off the Brompton Road, the plan being that Willie would take a house for himself and his mother once he had succeeded in securing a staff job on a national newspaper. Speranza was devoted to both her sons and, with them both now in London with her, securing a good match for them had become a priority.

  At the tea party in Devonshire Terrace, held specifically for Ella’s benefit, Otho recounts that Constance was ‘one of the party too and was introduced for the first time to Oscar’.24 The spark of attraction between the two must have been instantaneous. By 7 June, Oscar had paid a visit to one of Aunt Emily’s ‘at homes’ in Lancaster Gate in order to see Constance again. Constance, suddenly all too aware of the celebrity attached to her new beau, found herself ‘shaking with fright’, something Oscar could scarcely have failed to spot. Nevertheless he persisted, begging her to visit his mother at the earliest opportunity.

  Although the Irish side of the family were on very warm terms with the Wildes, the Lloyd clan in London held the notorious Oscar in general disapproval. ‘Grand Papa I think likes Oscar,’ Constance conceded to her brother, ‘but of course the others laugh at him, because they don’t choose to see anything but that he wears long hair and looks aesthetic. I like him awfully much but I suppose it is very bad taste.’25

  Bad taste or no, Constance was determined. Despite or perhaps because of her past abuses, she had built up a steely resolve. Oscar’s request to see Constance again as soon was possible was a ‘little request I need hardly say I have kept to myself’, she confided to Otho.

  Constance’s attraction to Oscar in these very early days reveals an aspect of their relationship that would remain fundamental to their later marriage. With Constance, Oscar dropped his public mask. As Constance revealed to an Otho who, less persuaded by the Aesthete, had obviously been relating something of Oscar’s college history to her, ‘I can’t help liking him because when he’s talking to me alone, he’s never a bit affected and speaks naturally excepting that he uses better language than most people. I’m glad they didn’t duck him, though you would have enjoyed it.’26

  Shortly after this encounter, Constance and her mother paid a return visit to the Wildes in Ovington Square. Speranza had resumed her Saturday salons, which had become famous in Dublin society. Like her son, Speranza loved aristocratic society, and in London she did her best to attract the great and the good to her drawing room, along with Irish friends and literary folk. At that meeting the flirtations continued, with Oscar talking to Constance ‘nearly all the time excepting when his Mother seized on him for somebody else. The room was crammed.’27 On this occasion Oscar asked Constance to go to the theatre with him to see Othello.

  Othello was playing at the Lyceum and was creating a sensation, thanks to its unusual proposition that the lead roles of Othello and Iago were being alternated between the famous American actor Edwin Booth and Britain’s greatest stage star, Henry Irving. But more than this, Ellen Terry was starring as Desdemona. And this, Oscar must have known, would delight Constance.

  Terry was, as the papers were reminding their readers that summer,

  something else besides a graceful, refined and tenderly emotional actress. She has the pre-Raphaelite facial angle, the pre-Raphaelite chest bones, the pre-Raphaelite eyes and lips. She is … justifiably dear to the dramatic but is doubly dear to the aesthetic heart.28

  What better, then, than to take Constance to the most talked-about show in town, with the possibility of introducing her afterwards to a heroine? Oscar, already aspiring to become Miss Terry’s recognized male counterpart, the High Priest of Aestheticism, had of course already made a point of getting to know both Irving and Terry personally.

  Given her family’s general suspicion regarding her latest beau, it was probably not just the social protocol of her time that encouraged Constance to present the theatre invitation as coming from the mother rather than the son: ‘He [Oscar] or as I put it to the family, Lady Wilde has asked me to go to see Othello some night,’ Constance wrote to her brother Otho in June 1881. ‘Auntie looked aghast when I told her … I know she’ll try and prevent me going and I shall be in a fury if she does.’29

  It is not clear whether Constance managed to secure her exeat, but the fact that her suitor managed to see the production is evidenced by a note he sent to William Morris’s daughter May, in which he included autographs of the full cast of that particularly celebrated production.30

  As the love affair accelerated, barely a day went by when Constance wasn’t either discussing or seeing Oscar. At a dinner with her sculptor friend Mr Belt, Constance sought his ‘opinion of Oscar Wilde and yesterday got Oscar’s opinion of him’. This, Constance noted, was ‘the sort of thing I thoroughly enjoy’.31

  By 10 June, Oscar had begun the process of inveigling himself with the elder Lloyds. He had taken Constance and her grandfather to see an exhibition by the Russian Romantic artist Ivan Aivazovsky at the Pall Mall Gallery. He specialized in seascapes, which Constance decided amounted to ‘Poetry as well as painting on the canvas’. And it seems that even John Horatio was impressed:

  Grand Papa wants to buy the Moonlight scene on the Black Sea, price 700 guineas, which Auntie says is absolute folly but that Auntie has a soul above art, one that considers shillings and pence. She did not see the force of my argument that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. I told Grand Papa he might take it out of my money and leave me
the picture instead for I never have seen anything I should like more, but he has no will of his own and Auntie will of course overrule him.32

  Although John Horatio did not buy a major seascape, he did not return empty-handed from his excursion with Oscar and Constance that day. And, like his granddaughter, he proved himself more than capable of being a little sly when it came to dealing with Auntie Emily. Two major watercolour exhibitions were also on close to the Aivazovsky show at the Pall Mall Gallery. At 5 Pall Mall the Society of Painters in Water Colours had a selling exhibition, while at 53 Pall Mall the Institute of Painters in Water Colours was also exhibiting. It seems that after seeing the oil paintings by the great Russian, Constance, Oscar and John Horatio wandered through some of the other shows, and the temptation proved too much for the wealthy old man: ‘However, he has actually bought 3 water colours of Aglaia Walton’s for the drawing room for a 100 guineas,’ Constance gleefully wrote to her brother, ‘and he wrote and sent the money without even telling Auntie that he had made up his mind to it. She said he’s mad.’33

  Within just days of meeting Oscar, Constance had become so keen to continue seeing him that, rather than attend social invitations, she found herself staying in on the off chance of a visit from him. If ever there was someone Constance could see herself marrying it was Oscar, and she was going to make sure that she engineered every possible opportunity to realize this ambition.

  ‘Aunt Mary has got a dance on Wednesday evening,’ she told Otho, ‘but I don’t think I shall go to it, because the Wildes are coming to see Mama … some Wednesday and I want to be there when they come.’34

  3

  The sunflower and the lily

  GIVEN HER OWN private ambitions towards Oscar Wilde, Constance must have been delighted to read in the newspapers, a year after they started seeing one another, that not only had her suitor’s fame now spread internationally but that he had apparently also made a fortune. She must, in the same instant, have been devastated to hear that another woman seemed destined to become the beneficiary of Oscar’s success.

  The January after their summer of flirtation Oscar had travelled to America to undertake a lecture tour. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience had opened in New York in September 1881, and within days of the fictional Aesthete Bunthorne delighting the American public, the opportunity to present the real thing was seized. An agent approached the producer of Patience, Richard D’Oyly Carte, who in turn cabled Oscar and proposed the tour. It was a massive enterprise that would see him travel the length and breadth of the United States and deliver readings on first ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, and then more fully on ‘The Decorative Arts’ and ‘The House Beautiful’.

  Constance had been delighted when the Wildes informed her about this important career break for Oscar the previous November. And regardless of quite how the tour had originated, Oscar’s response to it proved that beneath the long hair and aesthetic pose was a man of substance and hard work. ‘O.W. is going to be about 3 months in America firing 50 lectures and having all his expenses paid, not bad for him,’ Constance proudly noted to Otho.1

  Far from a three-month tour, what Oscar embarked on would in the end keep him away for a year. Adopting for real his own version of the velvet coat, knee breeches and silk stockings that had been designed for the fictional Bunthorne to wear on stage, Oscar was a hit with the American public. By September 1882 the gossip column of Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser noted with glee how Wilde had been

  so completely filling all America with his renown that the country is absolutely bursting … and can hold no more. So he is about to depart for Japan. He will first of all however visit the still unexhausted countries of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island … Apart from all the ridicule there is much to admire and to wonder at in Oscar Wilde’s career … He started from Europe, beneath the heavy burthen of ridicule … He was poor and dependent and laughed at. He has risen above every insult and condemnation and will return home filled with respect for his own capacity and justly proud of his own perseverance … He is rich by his own labour, and will be respected now in spite of the strange attire he assumes.

  But if this kind of report filled Constance’s heart with pride and hope, the intelligence it offered next must have dealt a hefty blow. ‘Moreover the great aim of his life is about to be accomplished (so folks declare) by a rich and laudable marriage with the daughter of the great American actress Julia Ward Howe. Miss Maud Howe was one of the beauties of the London season some three years ago, and obtained the honour of especial notice by one of the gallant sons of royalty.’2

  Until this point things had been going well for Constance from a romantic point of view. Right to the moment of his departure, her and Oscar’s mutual flirtation had been progressing, and although no correspondence between the pair while Oscar was overseas survives,3 it seems likely Oscar would have been writing to Constance or, more appropriately, her family during his travels.

  That Constance had revealed something of her unhappy private life to Oscar is evident. It is also clear that Oscar was moved by the fact that her circumstances had failed to erode Constance’s capacity for kindness. By the time Constance heard that Oscar would be leaving for America, she was no longer bothering to conceal her feelings for him. She had become completely infatuated with him.

  Just a few weeks after his flirtation with Constance began, Oscar had published his first book of poems. The edition had been roundly panned. The Saturday Review summed up the general tenor of the criticism that Oscar faced: ‘Mr Wilde’s verses belong to a class which is the special terror of reviewers, the poetry which is neither good nor bad, which calls for neither praise nor ridicule.’ The Review informed its readers that ‘The author possesses cleverness, astonishing fluency, a rich and full vocabulary, and nothing to say. Mr Wilde has read Messrs Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold and Rossetti … and he has paid them the compliment of copying their mannerisms very naively.’ But it warned its readers of Wilde’s ‘sensual and ignoble tone which deforms a large proportion of the poems for which a plea of youth is scarcely sufficient to excuse. So much talk about “grand cool flanks” and “crescent thighs” is decidedly offensive.’4

  Far worse than the critical response, though, was the public humiliation that Oscar faced when an edition of his poems, specifically requested by the library of the Oxford Union Society, was then returned to him in what amounted to a rather public slap in the face. In a debate and vote held at the Union the majority of members found, like the Saturday Review, that Oscar’s verses were immoral and derivative.

  Quite what Constance thought has not been recorded. But it’s more than likely that, like her contemporary Violet Hunt, who was an immediate rival for Oscar’s affections, she saw only art and beauty in lines that others were interpreting decidedly differently.

  Violet Hunt was the daughter of the landscape artist Alfred Hunt and something of a fixture within the bohemian art world. Beautiful, confident and attending the South Kensington School of Art, she had been courted quite aggressively by Oscar in the months before he met Constance. According to Violet, Oscar had even proposed to her, an offer that her father rejected.

  Oscar sent Violet his book of poems, at a time when he sent copies to a number of people, including William Gladstone and the poets Robert Browning and Swinburne. It seems highly likely that Constance would have received a copy too. Despite the rumpus about their morality and originality, Violet thought that Oscar’s poetry was beautiful. She wrote him a letter so full of praise that he felt moved to thank her, noting that ‘In an age like this when Slander, and Ridicule, and Envy walk quite unashamed among us, and when any attempt to produce serious beautiful work is greeted with a very tornado of lies and evil speaking, it is a wonderful joy, a wonderful spur for ambition and work, to receive such encouragement and appreciation as your letter brought me.’5

  Other immediate members of Wilde’s circle had, however, taken a similar view to t
he Oxford Union – most dramatically, his housemate Frank Miles’s father. This clergyman, whom Oscar had known for years and visited on several occasions, found himself so concerned about the subtext of the poetry that he felt it necessary to write to Oscar and suggest that he and his son cease lodging together.

  Since the days of ‘tea and beauties’ in Salisbury Street, Oscar and Frank had moved into ‘Keats House’, a property in that bohemian part of Chelsea, Tite Street, where Oscar would one day live with Constance. They were following the footsteps of their hero and friend the painter James McNeill Whistler. In 1877 Whistler had had the architect du jour Edward Godwin design ‘The White House’ in Tite Street for him. Here ebonized and gilt furniture stood amid Japanese cabinets and oriental carpets. But the house was sold just two years later, when Whistler went bankrupt.

  In 1879 Miles commissioned the same architect to remodel 1 Tite Street into another temple of Aestheticism. Designing a studio at the very top of the house, Godwin created light airy interiors that, painted white, would display Miles’s collection of exotic flowers and plants. A huge inglenook in the studio framed bespoke furniture, and throughout the house was indulged in exquisite detail such as door and furniture handles in the form of swan’s heads and glassware specifically blown by the famous Arts and Crafts glass manufacturers Powell & Sons of Whitefriars.