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

by Franny Moyle

  While Otho’s marriage fell apart, Oscar and Constance patched up the frictions that had emerged between them around the time of Vyvyan’s birth. It would be a mistake to see Oscar’s early frustrations and his affair with Robbie Ross as marking the end of his marriage in all but name. It would also be a mistake to think that Oscar would see his enjoyment of homosexual sex as being in conflict with his marriage. He managed to reconcile his different appetites and aspirations. Whatever distractions Oscar was finding, unlike his brother-in-law, he did have a strong sense of parental and marital duty. He also continued to love his wife.

  Nevertheless, the sexual aspect of their relationship never properly recovered after the birth of their second child. Oscar’s new sexual preference for men no doubt informed this, but there may have been post-natal medical issues on Constance’s side that were also a contributing factor. Constance seems to have accepted the diminished physical passion in her marriage, reassured that at least the emotional and social bond between her and Oscar remained. She had a husband who was committed and affectionate, which was more than Nellie now had. Constance acknowledged as much somewhat pointedly when she wrote to Otho and told him that ‘Oscar and I are very happy together now.’30

  Whistler would note that Oscar was ‘a bourgeois malgré lui’,31 and that was the nub of it. Oscar was the married man, his wife, children and home the cathedral he had built around him. His relationship with men would be kept both discreet and discrete. From now on a clandestine version of Oscar would quietly seek to fill that ‘secret sacred niche’. This private version of Oscar, visible to us from the perspective history can offer, was apparent neither to the majority of his contemporaries at this stage nor to Constance. And it seems that once Oscar had realized that is was possible both to live a bourgeois married life and to have a secret existence, to have his cake and eat it, then his relationship with his wife improved.

  In a gesture that must have reassured Constance of his sense of familial responsibility, Oscar redoubled efforts to secure proper full-time employment. Such reassurance came not a moment too soon. Constance confessed to Otho that their finances were spiralling out of control. In fact, they had borrowed money from Otho, agreeing to pay him back with interest.32 Now that Otho found himself with two households rather than one, he needed evidence that the Wildes could meet their debts.

  ‘Of course I will see that your interest is paid in future,’ she calmed her brother. ‘You shall receive this half year’s in January and the rest shall, if possible, be paid off gradually also, but we have given up any hope of being able to let our house and I am afraid we shall still be living here rather too expensively as we neither of us have a notion how to live non extravagantly.’ Constance added that she was ‘obliged to have two nurses on account of baby and expenses flow … however, I hope that after next year we shall be able to get on.’33

  That the Wildes were actually attempting to lease the house they had so recently moved into and in which they had invested so heavily seems extraordinary. This alone must have applied a pressure that would have brought the most romantic love affair down to earth with a bump.

  Oscar finally got a job. In 1887, after being overlooked in his attempts to become first an inspector of schools and then the secretary of a charitable foundation, he was invited to become a magazine editor. In the spring of that year Thomas Wemyss Reid, a former editor of the Leeds Mercury, joined the publishers Cassell & Co. in London. Cassell’s had begun publication of a magazine called The Lady’s World: A Magazine of Fashion and Society. Oscar’s lectures on dress and interiors had not gone unnoticed by Reid. The fact he had such a high-profile fashionable wife, well versed in the hot issues of the day such as rational dress, could not have hurt. Reid invited Oscar to look at the magazine and see if there were improvements that he thought could be made were he to edit it. It’s tempting to consider that the letter he wrote to Reid in response was written in consultation with Constance.

  ‘It seems to me that at present it is too feminine, and not sufficiently womanly,’ Oscar wrote.

  No one appreciates more fully than I do the value and importance of Dress, in its relation to good taste and good health: indeed the subject is one that I have constantly lectured on, but it seems to me that … the field of mere millinery and trimmings, is to some extent already occupied by such papers as the Queen and Lady’s Pictorial, and that we should take a wider range, as well as a high standpoint, and deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel.34

  Oscar went on the magazine payroll in May 1887 and immediately began recruiting writers from among the female intelligentsia of the day. The venture instantly realigned him and Constance. To be the successful man at the helm of The Lady’s World Oscar must have known that his wife was going to play a crucial role. In accepting the job, Constance’s and Oscar’s interdependence was re-established. Their artistic marriage was back on track – for the time being at least.

  7

  A literary couple

  Mrs Oscar Wilde entertains ‘in a cream-tinted dining room, of which walls, furniture, and all things are in unison’ – even the guests, who are of course the crème de la crème of society.1

  Constance’s ‘at homes’ were famous. From the moment Constance and Oscar moved into Tite Street in 1885 the great and the good had come to see the avant-garde interiors, meet the beautiful wife and, of course, hear Oscar entertain the room. ‘To my mother’s receptions came people of such widely different interests,’ Vyvyan remembered, noting attendees including ‘Henry Irving, Sir William Richmond, R A, Sarah Bernhardt, John Sargent, John Ruskin, Lillie Langtry, Mark Twain, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, John Bright, Lady de Grey, Ellen Terry and Arthur Balfour. All the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was constantly in attendance.’2

  Ever the collector, and impressed by fame and success, Constance made sure that she captured the signatures of some of her visitors in an autograph book. Those she solicited provide an interesting insight into her own character and passions.

  The first entry in the book, even before Oscar’s own dedication, is from Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American poet and physician, friend of Longfellow and liberal reformer, who had championed the rights of women and blacks to attend university. Oscar’s own contribution to the pages, written in June 1886, apart from being intended as an expression of his love for his wife for all subsequent signatories to see, seems to contain a very private message about the deeply intimate nature of their mutual understanding.

  I can write no stately poem

  As a prelude to my lay

  From a poet to a poem –

  This is all I say.

  Yet if of these fallen petals

  One to you seems fair,

  Love will waft it, till it settles

  On your hair.

  And when wind and winter harden

  All the loveless land,

  It will whisper of the garden,

  You will understand.3

  After Holmes and Oscar, Constance made sure that Walter Pater provided his signature for her along with Jimmy Whistler, the painter W. B. Richmond and the critic and poet Theodore Watts. The latter, contributing a poem called ‘Baby Smiles’ in the summer of 1886, had obviously met an infant Cyril during his visit. Watts offered a rather saccharine and flattering observation that

  … a sight I saw outshine all other –

  Saw a woman kiss a lovely child –

  Saw the lovelier smile of her, the mother,

  When ‘baby’ smiled.4

  the liberal politician and campaigner for parliamentary reform John Bright presented a much more sombre thought a few months later. He reminded Constance that ‘In Peace sons bury their Fathers – In War Fathers bury their sons’.

  Constance treated her twice-monthly ‘at homes’ as a theatrical exercise where scenery and costume were meticulously planned. She spent much time and effort in finding new surprising ways of decorating Tite
Street to impress and please her guests, and the combination of this attention to detail with celebrity attendees quickly made Mrs Oscar’s parties a matter of national news. In July 1887 the Lady’s Pictorial took delight in listing those who attended one particularly successful party. Apart from family, including Aunt Mary Napier, Constance’s mother, Mrs Swinburne-King, and Speranza, the Wildes managed to gather under one roof aristocrats such as Lady Nevill, Lady Ardilaun and Lady Monckton, alongside theatrical celebrities such as Mr and Mrs George Alexander and Mr and Mrs Bram Stoker, and artists such as Walter Crane and Waldo Story.

  ‘Roses were the only flowers used for decoration,’ the Lady’s Pictorial noted; ‘the hostess looked most picturesque in a lovely gown made with a bodice and train of dark green silk and outlined with small gold beads; long hanging sleeves from the shoulder lined with dark green, worn over tightly-fitting sleeves of gold gauze, completed this very charming and picturesque attire.’

  Anna, Comtesse de Brémont, remembered the cachet that an invitation to Constance’s ‘at homes’ carried. ‘I was not prepared for the crush of fashionable folk that overcrowded the charming rooms of the unpretentious house in Tite Street,’ she wrote.

  There was an air of brightness and luxury about it … A smart maid opened the door and I found myself in the wide hallway towards the dining room. There tea was served in the most delightfully unconventional manner from a quaint shelf extending around the wall, before which white enamelled (Chippendale) seats – modelled in various Grecian styles – were placed … I presently found myself sitting in one of the white Greek seats, drinking tea out of a dainty yellow cup that might have been modelled on a lotus flower, and being talked to by a young poet.

  On finding Oscar in the smoking room, she was duly introduced to Constance, who was wearing ‘an exquisite Greek costume of cowslip yellow and apple leaf green. Her hair, a thick mass of ruddy brown, was wonderfully set off by the bands of yellow ribbon, supporting the knot of hair low on the nape of the neck, and crossing the wavy masses above the brow.’5

  In such circumstances it seems that Constance produced an event at which ultimately her husband could perform. The Comtesse noted that, once Oscar took the floor, Constance would slip back into the general hubbub of the event, mixing among the crush, ‘a rapt expression of love and pride on her face; while her eyes were magnetised, on her husband’s inspired features’.

  Oscar did not underestimate Constance’s ‘at homes’ as a recruitment ground for The Lady’s World. His tactics are revealed in his letter to Helena Sickert, the sister of the painter Walter Sickert and a writer, lecturer and campaigner for women’s rights. First he wrote to her and invited her to write an article for his new magazine, and then he followed this with an invitation: ‘My wife is at home the first and third Thursdays in each month. Do come next Thursday with your mother and talk over the matter.’6

  It’s hardly surprising that Constance’s autograph book also reflects the notable women who graced her living room en route to their contribution to The Lady’s World. Mary Braddon, the author of the best-selling novel Lady Audley’s Secret, and the American poet and critic Louise Chandler Moulton penned little epigrams and notes of affection for their hostess. The South African novelist and women’s rights campaigner Olive Schreiner made her mark. The writer John Strange Winter (real name Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Stannard) wrote a strange little note in blank verse that reminded Constance that

  There are lions & there are tiger-

  Cats, but the balance is pretty

  Evenly kept between them:

  Man is not all lion; woman is not all tiger-cat.7

  Constance must have felt inspired by these successful literary women with whom she now associated, not least because she had been progressing her own literary ambitions. Even during the personally difficult years of 1886 and 1887 Constance had exploited the literary opportunities that life within the Wilde circle brought, probably motivated as much by their financial mess as anything else.

  While she was on honeymoon, Speranza had promised Constance that Willie Wilde was going to use his influence to get Constance appointed as a special correspondent for a women’s weekly magazine. It was no idle pledge. While Oscar was a drama critic for The Dramatic Review and other periodicals, Constance was writing drama reviews of the plays they saw together for the Lady’s Pictorial. These were all written anonymously. But on at least one occasion a beneficiary of Constance’s comments wrote to Oscar, suspecting his authorship and thanking him for his kind words. The amateur singer and social phenomenon Georgina Weldon was flattered that in an account of Henry Irving’s Merchant of Venice she had been described as ‘radiant and young looking as ever’.8 Oscar was forced to confess: ‘The little note in the Lady’s Pictorial on the Irving Benefit was written not by me, but by my wife.’ This ‘little note’ was an article that stretched to close to a thousand words.

  By June 1888 Constance was noted as one half of a ‘literary couple’ attending a gathering of ‘Literary and Artistic Society’ at the Royal Institute Gallery. But this literary acclaim was not down to her journalism alone. Although she had not realized the ‘practical Romance’ she had discussed with Otho, she began to write children’s stories.

  In 1887 Oscar had his first short stories published. ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, inspired by the amateur fortune-teller Edward Heron Allen, is the story of a young man who becomes the subject of a self-fulfilling destiny after a chiromantist (or palm-reader) called Mr Podger foresees a murder in the lines on his hand. Oscar’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ also reflects the fascination for other-worldly phenomena that prevailed in society at the time, and which held a particular fascination for Constance.

  While Oscar was busy negotiating the publication of these stories, Constance was approached to write a children’s story for The Bairn’s Annual, a publication produced by the Leadenhall Press and edited by the writer Alice Corkran. Corkran’s Irish family were established friends of Speranza’s and by default Oscar’s. Alice’s sister the society artist Henriette had painted Constance’s portrait two years earlier.9

  For the third edition of The Bairn’s Annual, released in November 1887 ready for the Christmas market, Constance wrote a story called ‘Was It a Dream?’ Her contribution provided instant publicity for the annual. ‘The Bairn’s Annual … contains tales and poetry for children in every way worthy of the Leadenhall Press,’ noted Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper in its ‘Books of the Day’ column, adding: ‘among the contributors being Mrs Oscar Wilde’.10

  The Leadenhall Press had built a reputation for publishing high-quality illustrated books and children’s books, many of which were facsimiles of eighteenth-century editions. The firm was run by Andrew Tuer, who had a particular sympathy with the Aesthetic and liberal-minded set in which Constance moved. In addition to his children’s literature, he published work by the feminist writer and poet Emily J. Pfeiffer, whom Oscar invited to contribute to The Lady’s World. Pfeiffer’s book was illustrated by none other than Edward Burne-Jones and Jimmy Whistler. Speranza’s friend Anna Kingsford had written a Theosophical text, The Perfect Way, which was also published by Tuer. A passionate collector, Tuer had his own impressive stash of antiquarian books, which often provided the source of his company’s facsimile reproductions. His own collection of Japanese stencils also allowed him, in collaboration with Liberty & Co., to produce a facsimile stencil book, enabling those Aesthetes who could not afford the services of a Godwin or Whistler a DIY alternative.

  ‘Was It a Dream?’ stands out among the other stories that Corkran assembled in The Bairn’s Annual of 1887. Tonally it is quite different. The book generally features jungle animals, witches, moral tales of nursery tiffs and adventures featuring brave children. Constance’s story, by contrast, takes art and dreaming as its subject matter. These preoccupations place it firmly as an ‘Aesthetic piece’. Dream-like, somnambulant paintings were the mainstay of the movement’s painters, such as Edward Burne-Jones. The
adoration of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ was articulated by the philosophers of the movement such as Walter Pater and, of course, Oscar himself.

  Another aspect of the story that secures its claim to being part of the Aesthetic tradition is its fascination with Japan. ‘Was It a Dream?’ is about a Japanese fan, an object that could well have come from A. B. Ya’s store at the ‘Healtheries’, or which could have travelled back with Mortimer Menpes from his own travels in that country.

  In Constance’s story the fan, decorated with a painted stork ‘flying daintily’ across it, is hanging in an imaginary nursery. One night the stork is magically brought to life by an angel who has come to bestow ‘sweet dreams’ on the nursery’s two infant occupants. In the sleepy atmosphere that Constance conjures, where the children slumber ‘with flushed faces and tossed golden hair on their downy pillows’, the little stork complains to the angel, ‘I am fastened here for ever; and though the sky is always blue, and the almond blossoms are always pink … I still long once more to see the dear home where I was born, and the wife who was given to me, and the little ones who came after I left, and whom I have never seen!’11

  The angel releases the painted stork with the aid of a magic pink feather plucked from her wings. With this empowering feather attached to its head, the stork is able to leave the fan in which it is imprisoned and fly to its homeland, on condition that it returns before the two sleeping children wake.