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

by Franny Moyle

  Health and healthier options in life were an ongoing fascination for Victorians in the mid-1880s, and they were not confined to dress. As a follow-up to the immensely popular ‘Fisheries’ exhibition of 1883, the Prince of Wales came up with the idea of a health exhibition. The ‘Healtheries’, as it quickly became known, was designed apparently to encourage healthy and hygienic modes of living, ‘one of the first conditions necessary for the happiness and prosperity of a nation’, as explained by the Duke of Cambridge in his address at the opening of the event.

  In reality it was like an enormous handicraft show, featuring craft practices and handmade items from around the world. One of the most spectacular exhibits was a period street which saw lost buildings from London’s past rebuilt, inside which the city’s various crafts guilds showed off their wares and methods. There were working dairies producing milk and making butter on site, as well as areas devoted to the craft specialities of other countries, with Indian weavers demonstrating carpet-making and an Italian court featuring beautiful inlaid furniture as well as Venetian glass and mosaic. In this strangely eclectic assemblage the pump room from Bath had been rebuilt, and Royal Doulton had constructed a ceramic temple. In the section dedicated to healthy dress there were stalls featuring practical dress for various activities as well as displays of chemicals that might make fabrics less flammable and non-toxic natural dyes.

  There was also a display of waxworks dressed in historical costumes dating from the Norman Conquest to the Regency period. The Times explained that this was intended to provide a comparative study of civilian dress in its bearings on hygiene at different periods in the nation’s growth. The architect Edward Godwin, who was simultaneously busy modelling Oscar and Constance’s new home in Tite Street, gave an address on this section of the exhibition. In fact, Godwin’s address presented remarkably similar points to Oscar’s lectures on the same subject, made some months later. Like Oscar, Godwin talked about Greek dress, about the need for clothes that emancipate rather than constrict a body and about the recommendation that shoulders rather than waists should carry the weight of a garment. And he too made the connection between health and beauty.

  The ‘Healtheries’ loomed quite large in the first few months of Constance and Oscar’s marriage. For a start Oscar had participated in a fundraising venture for the Chelsea Hospital for Women that was associated with the exhibition. He contributed to The Shakespearean Story Book, a one-off novelty publication that went on sale at the ‘Healtheries’ the day before his marriage, and which was intended to accompany some Shakespearean performances and costume displays occurring in the Royal Albert Hall, part of the wider exhibition site. Then later in the autumn Constance and Oscar both participated in a Royal Fête at the exhibition. At another charity event, this time supporting London hospitals, the couple manned one of many celebrity flower stalls. Amid other luminaries selling flowers of all kinds, ferns, exotics, fruits and refreshments, the Wildes’ stall was, of course, offering lilies and sunflowers.

  Perhaps with the theme of the exhibition uppermost in her mind, Constance made a point of wearing a divided skirt to the occasion. This was a very early form of wide-legged trouser that provided women with unprecedented freedom when it came to walking. She consequently became the focus of popular interest and found herself portrayed in the press in this novel outfit, along with a loose bodice tied with a sash, and a waistcoat.

  The ‘Healtheries’ also provided a good source for hand-crafted decorative objects for the house in Tite Street. Just as Constance was now the living embodiment of the wife in an artistic marriage, so Tite Street would be the working precinct in which the marriage would operate. As such it too needed to be aesthetic, practical and healthy. The Wildes had come across A. B. Ya’s stall at the ‘Healtheries’, which was selling ‘Objets d’Arts du Japon’. A letter between Constance and Godwin indicates that they purchased a number of items from him.29

  Godwin’s remodelling of Tite Street took a while, and Constance and Oscar were forced to live for the first six months of their marriage in Oscar’s old bachelor digs in Charles Street, Grosvenor Square. Not only were the renovations time-consuming, they were also chaotic and expensive.

  Constance’s grandfather, whose health had been failing so long, died just seven weeks after Constance and Oscar married. Consequently Constance inherited fully that portion of his estate of which £5,000 had already been invested for her. The Lloyd estate was finally valued at £92,392, of which some £23,000 was settled jointly on Otho and Constance.30 And so within weeks of her marriage Constance’s annual income doubled. It did so not a moment too soon.

  No matter how great an architect and interior designer, Godwin was a poor site manager and seemed unable to assess builders’ estimates properly. First he employed a builder called Green to work on Tite Street, but Oscar ended up firing this first contractor for shoddy work and refused to pay him. While Green sued Oscar, Godwin hired a second builder called Sharp. The work dragged on longer than anticipated. Not only did Constance and Oscar have to settle out of court with the disgruntled Green, but the second builder, Sharp, was also now charging more than his original estimate. In the end the changes to Tite Street would cost around £250 more than Constance and Oscar had bargained for.

  The house was still uninhabitable in October 1884, when Oscar began his new lecture tour. And so Constance found herself suddenly taking over the reins of the project. What Constance brought to the project was a practical eye that Oscar and Godwin did not seem to have. Going back over the purchases and orders that Oscar and Godwin had agreed, she was quick to point out simple failings. The curtains for the first-floor landing were not wide enough and were not going to cross sufficiently to remove draughts; she asked if Mr Godwin intended to put fringes on the curtains, in which case she needed to source these; she chased Godwin to see if there were patterns yet for the other curtains, and whether she could view the fabrics with Godwin; the kitchen needed a deal table; and Constance wanted a bath of ‘any artistic shape’ for her bedroom. She wrote to Otho to find out the whereabouts of their old ‘nurse’, whom she wanted to install in the house for reasons of security and practicality until she could secure a housemaid; and of course, she was going to be paying the bills while Oscar was settling his debts.

  Oscar and Godwin are generally credited with the artistic vision for 16 Tite Street, an attribution that overlooks Constance’s contribution. There was some acknowledgement among the Wilde circle that Oscar was in the habit of taking the credit for his wife’s artistic talents. Later the writer Mary Braddon would model the fictional poet Daniel Lester and his wife, Sarah, on Oscar and Constance in her book The Rose of Life, rather pointedly noting that ‘Sarah’s good taste in chintzes and carpets, Chippendale chairs and Sheraton sideboards, generally went to the credit of Daniel’.31

  In fact, Constance had plenty to do with the design of Tite Street, and it is better to see the house as a genuine collaboration between the architect and both her and Oscar. Apart from her own room, for which she was entirely responsible for the design and which was full of the lace curtains and needlework chair covers that Constance so loved, the drawing room in Tite Street owed more to Constance’s taste than to Oscar’s. Just as her passion for textiles made itself felt in her dress and her bedroom, so for this room Constance sourced old faded brocades for the upholstery rather than use contemporary fabrics. And it was she who had designed the dull gold strip along one wall which united Oscar’s collection of etchings in a single frieze. This gentle nod to a faded past that Constance provided in the interior theme was complemented by decorative touches reflecting the latest avant-garde tastes. Two huge Japanese vases either side of the fireplace were perhaps the purchases from A. B. Ya’s. And to add the latest contemporary twist, Whistler painted dragons on the ceilings, partly composed of exotic feathers pressed into the plaster.

  Godwin’s style was probably most felt on the ground floor: in the dining room, which lay at the back of the h
ouse and which was a symphony in white – white walls, white furniture and white carpet – and in Oscar’s study at the front of the house, with its yellow walls and red woodwork.

  Above the dining room and to the rear of the drawing room was Oscar’s smoking room, which was North African in theme. Oscar’s son Vyvyan was convinced this room had been inspired by Constance’s great friend the traveller Walter Harris. With a dark red and gold Morris paper, it was furnished with low divans and ottomans, Moorish lanterns, beaded curtains and latticed shutters, which blocked out the view of the rather unsavoury Paradise Walk.

  Regardless of the worries over building work, one gets a sense that Constance and Oscar saw the first months of their marriage as nothing short of a wondrous adventure. By the end of their endeavours they had what Oscar’s brother acknowledged was ‘the prettiest house in London’, they were the centre of attention and having no end of fun, contributing to events such as the Royal Fête. Constance had taken steps that just two years previously she would never have dared. It was not just her dress or the events she attended; she had begun joining clubs and societies too – not least the fashionable Albemarle Club, of which Oscar was a member, and which was innovative in its acceptance of women. And love itself was still a tantalizingly fresh and exciting feeling. As Oscar dashed off around the country once again, he sent Constance notes just as passionate as those he had written to her on their honeymoon. From his hotel room in Edinburgh in December he told his wife:

  Here am I, and you at the Antipodes. O execrable facts, that keep our lips from kissing, though our souls are one … I feel your fingers in my hair, and your cheek brushing mine. The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some sweet ecstasy with yours. I feel incomplete without you.32

  Constance, meanwhile, was proud not only to be a married woman but to be the woman married to Oscar Wilde, and busied herself with some of the social formalities associated with her new status. At the end of 1884 she arranged greetings cards to send out over the festive season. One of these is in the British Library today. Gilt-edged, featuring a somewhat chocolate-box image of the Thames at night, it carries a poem that, popular, jaunty and sentimental, seems something of a contrast to Oscar’s own poetry, as it declares to its recipients:

  A Happy Christmas

  How swiftly comes old Christmas

  With the quickly rolling years

  With the joy, and with the sorrow

  The laughter and the tears.

  Love makes the sorrows hallowed

  And the joys are not a few

  If we have thankful happy hearts

  And friends are tried and true.33

  This Constance signed on the reverse, ‘with best wishes from Mr & Mrs Oscar Wilde’.

  Meanwhile, for New Year she chose a plain white card with italic writing announcing that the couple had finally moved into their new address:

  Mr & Mrs Oscar Wilde

  Send best wishes

  For a Happy New Year

  16 Tite St

  Chelsea34

  For the first five months of 1885, while Oscar was lecturing, Constance dutifully carried on applying the finishing touches to Tite Street. To compensate for his absence Oscar had once again bought Constance a pet – this time a puppy. Unlike the moments of separation during their engagement when Constance had hated being left alone, now she seemed happy on her own. Indeed, so determined was she to press on with their domestic arrangements that she even forwent a trip to Dublin when Oscar was lecturing there in January, instead busying herself over ‘embroideries and housemaids’.

  London, meanwhile, like a great unstoppable machine, churned on around her. By May the season was starting yet again. In a pause between lecture commitments Oscar and Constance attended all the gallery openings. Constance wrote to Otho and joked about the reception her ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ hat had received. It had not gone down well. She suggested that the unkind report of it as ‘indescribable’ by one critic who claimed to have seen her in it at the Royal Academy private view might have been due to the fact that ‘no one saw it’, including said critic.

  In the same month South Kensington was alive once again with the bustle associated with yet another international exhibition. After the ‘Fisheries’ and ‘Healtheries’ came the ‘Inventories’, or rather the ‘International Exhibition of Inventions’. Constance and Oscar attended, of course. Constance provided Otho with a full account, not least of an exhibition of American watchmaking, which displayed the latest machinery designed to manufacture the tiniest mechanical parts.

  ‘They were so minute that I could not see the thread of the screws without a magnifying glass,’ Constance recounted, adding: ‘It made me feel quite creepy, these wonderful sort of steel hands moving each in its twin in regular monotony with a feeling of dull fatalism. They can make 500 little cogged wheels in a day, one of the girls told me.’35

  The replica ‘Old London’ street that had been constructed for the ‘Healtheries’ was still standing, and once again housing handicrafts. The Wildes liked the Donegal linen that was being worked there and placed orders for a tablecloth for their new drawing room. The faded dyes that were being used went perfectly with Constance’s old brocade, and were

  really quite beautiful … artistic in colour and much finer than what they used to make, but what specially attracted us was their embroidery on linen and we have ordered a 5 o’clock tea cloth to be made for. us. The embroidery is done with flax thread on linen, old Celtic designs being used and the thread dyed the beautiful tints, yellow, pink, blue and green being the chief colours, green and pink, the chief combinations. The colours are dyed specifically for them and patented which is a very good thing. The cloth we have ordered is of ecru linen, worked with white, cream and olive green flax, the only colours we could have in the drawing room.36

  One wonders just how interested Otho was really going to be in such detail about linen. But Constance would have been writing to him in the full knowledge that Nellie would get to read the letter. Nellie, who married Otho just days after Constance’s own wedding, was now pregnant. In a postscript to her letter Constance mentioned two further things. First, that she was going to go to Whiteley’s department store shortly to buy a bassinet, or cradle, for her expectant sister-in-law. Second, that the puppy Oscar had given her was thriving, ‘fat as a pig and enormously strong’.

  That Constance had managed to raise this animal successfully boded well. For in the same letter Constance mentioned to Otho that, in terms of bassinets, her own had ‘come and is perfectly exquisite. I have never seen one so pretty.’ Constance was eight months’ pregnant. No wonder she had not travelled in Ireland in the new year, when her pregnancy would have been in its early stages. And no wonder she had been so frantically making Tite Street ready. Only six months in their new home, the Wildes were already expecting a baby.

  6

  Ardour and indifference

  ‘My dear’ said Mrs Oscar Wilde to her husband, ‘will you not be happy if I some day present you with a little flower of a daughter!’

  ‘I would prefer a son flower’ was the quiet reply, and then for a few moments the silence was so deep that you could hear a gumdrop.1

  Oscar’s wish was duly granted on 5 June 1885. He telegrammed Otho and announced, ‘Constance had a boy this morning at ten forty-five. She is quite happy and doing well but can not see anyone for some days. She sends her love.’2

  The birth was, by the standards of the day, easy. Constance was anaesthetized with chloroform during the very final part of her labour and, according to Oscar, suffered hardly any pain. The baby was delivered by forceps in a procedure that was fashionable among higher-class women at the time – Queen Victoria had tried this method for the delivery of her seventh child. And like many accounts of women who ‘slept’ through the actual moment of birth, ‘on coming to she absolutely declined to believe’ her child ‘was born at all! And was only convinced of the fact
by the nurse producing a stalward [sic] boy.’3 Constance’s doctor, the amusingly named Charles de Lacy Lacy, pinned a note up in the hall at Tite Street reminding the household, such as it was, that Constance was to have utter rest for a few days.

  Oscar had proved a considerate husband in the run-up to the birth. Writing to Lillie Langtry a few months before the baby’s arrival, he gives a hint of his sensitivity to Constance’s health. He and Constance could not dine out, he wrote to Mrs Langtry in April, ‘as we dined out yesterday. And I don’t like leaving her: you know she is going to have a child.’4

  Once the baby arrived, his tone changed from considerateness and caution to jubilation and enthusiasm. ‘The baby is wonderful,’ he wrote to his friend the actor and dramatist Norman Forbes-Robertson. ‘Constance is doing capitally and is in excellent spirits … you must get married at once!’5

  The Wildes christened their son Cyril. Constance’s friends and relatives predominated in the choice of godparents. Aunt Emily was godmother, while Walter Harris was appointed godfather. Although only twenty, Harris was showing every sign of being a living embodiment of action and adventure. He would become The Times’s special correspondent in Morocco, and with his perfect Arabic and Moorish garb would later live in North Africa with fellow adventurer Robert Cunninghame Graham and pass as a native. When Cyril was a little older, Harris returned from his latest travels and recounted how he had attended a cannibal feast and actually eaten human flesh. Perhaps Constance felt that Harris might present an alternative role model for her son, and an appropriate contrast to the artistic Oscar. Harris duly presented Cyril with a silver christening mug, which was placed in the dining room in a glass cabinet that contained the rest of the family silver.