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

by Franny Moyle

  Constance went on to remind her readers of the dangers of ‘our rains, our fogs, and our treacherous winds’ to children, and to promote the benefits of wool as a material that should be used more in clothing in British climes.

  Constance’s focus on wool chimed in with the latest thinking in the health movement. At around the same time as the ‘Healtheries’ was promoting healthy living and dress in London, in Stuttgart the zoologist and physiologist Dr Gustav Jaeger was developing his Sanitary Woollen System, which sought to encourage people to use wool in all domestic textiles, from their clothing to bedding. In a series of lectures in which he expounded purportedly scientific theories that wool allowed the skin to breathe properly, he encouraged people to wear wool next to their skin as a healthier alternative to vegetable-based fabrics.

  Jaeger’s theories, much discussed by a nation in the midst of a health debate, held sufficient appeal to encourage one entrepreneur, a grocer called Lewis Tomalin, to acquire a licence to open a clothing store in London under Jaeger’s name in 1884. Within year the company had a West End branch at Oxford Circus.

  Oscar is noted as having shopped at Jaeger, and it follows that Constance was a customer too. Her sons were also undoubtedly subject to the craze for wool, as per her advice to her readers: in terms of styles of uniform for little boys, she points out that ‘At present it is the Navy that is predominant, and it is a very sensible dress. The woollen under vest, the blue blouse for winter, the white one for summer, and the blue serge trousers are very good dress for a boy. He is warmly clad and his limbs are free for movement.’

  Constance continues: ‘Nothing can be more charming than the rough, thick, Irish claddagh cloths and coarse flannels, with their beautiful vegetable dyes, for outdoor garments, while for indoor wear we have the most lovely woollen materials in every range of exquisite colour.’

  For girls Constance recommended ‘The Kindergarten costume introduced by the Rational Dress Society’, which ‘consists of woollen combinations; woollen stays – to button, not to lace – woollen stockings kept up by suspenders fastened onto the stays; a divided skirt either buttoned on to the stays or made with a Princess bodice; and a smock-frock overall’.

  Despite the appeal of Constance’s journalism (her contributions were well publicized in the classified ads for The Woman’s World), she wrote only two pieces for Oscar, both on dress.24 This is almost certainly because, just months after Oscar took up his position as an editor, Constance also found herself at the helm of a publication.

  Throughout 1887 Constance’s involvement in the Rational Dress movement had deepened, and her confidence in public was mounting. In February 1887 she presided over a meeting of the Rational Dress Society in Westminster Town Hall. It was an event to which, the press noted, only women were admitted, and at which Constance gave an introductory speech. After Viscountess Harberton had spoken, a number of women who were sitting on the platform, including Constance, modelled the divided skirt for interested onlookers. Showing how the item could be combined with elegance, Constance wore her divided skirt as part of a costume of striped cheviot wool, trimmed with blue fox and ornamented with birds’ wings.

  In the month that Oscar launched The Woman’s World Constance once again caught the attention of the press as she attended the annual meeting of the RDS at the Westminster Palace Hotel. Now one of the most prominent leaders of the movement and noted as such, her literary successes and associations suggested Constance as the natural editor for the society’s gazette. At first Constance declined to be called the publication’s editor per se, and promised only to see the publication launch. The gazette duly went on sale in April 1888, at a cost of 3d per issue. It was published by Hatchard’s in Piccadilly, and thus began Constance’s relationship with a publishing house that in the fullness of time would have more significant personal ramifications for her. Despite her agreement to be a launch editor only, she ended up running the publication for all of its relatively short, two-year life.

  The gazette could not have been more different from The Woman’s World. A fraction of the size, more like a pamphlet in its dimensions, nevertheless its voice was loud, clear and unrelentingly campaigning. It was a political instrument for change and it set out its stall, in every issue, in no uncertain terms.

  ‘The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movement of the body, or in any way tends to injure health,’ the pamphlet declares. ‘It protests against the wearing of tightly fitting corsets, of high-heeled or narrow toed boots … It protests against crinolines or crinolettes … The maximum weight of underclothing (without shoes) approved of by the Rational Dress Society, does not exceed seven pounds.’25

  The Rational Dress Society was attempting many things. Not just a campaigning body, it sold rational outfits and produced paper patterns. All these were available from the society’s depot at 23 Mortimer Street. The need for money to support such initiatives put added pressure on Constance, who was tasked with turning the gazette into a commercial proposition and securing a solid base of subscribers.

  It was a tall order. Hatchard’s only managed to raise sufficient advertising revenue in the first issue to support a print run of 500. Constance quickly found herself in a Catch-22 situation, with too low a circulation to attract more advertisers and not enough advertisers to support an increased print run. Her letters indicate her unrelenting and thankless schedule of letter-writing to prospective subscribers in addition to her editorial duties. There was also an endless to-ing and fro-ing to Hatchard’s, passing on the suggestions from RDS members of enterprises that might be prepared to buy space. Her work was complicated by the necessity of running editorial issues past the RDS committee. The committee’s initial decision to deny prospective contributors by-lines was a constant thorn in the side of someone attempting to attract high-profile contributors.

  During her editorship of the RDS gazette Constance tackled many issues. She oversaw articles on the ‘Dangers of Women’s Dress’, she debated the term ‘Dress’, she commissioned a piece on ‘Why Women Age Rapidly’, which suggested that the inhibition of the lungs by tight lacing had much to answer for, and was constantly reminding her readers of the various forms of rational dress available, including the two most popular types of divided skirt, the Harberton ‘which is narrow … and has a narrow box pleat round it’, and the Wilson, ‘which is about a yard and a half wide round each leg’.26 She also related news of pioneering women who chose to wear men’s clothing ‘in the exercise of their profession’, and published reviews on the more feminine ‘trouser dresses’. ‘Those who have worn these dresses have testified … to the delightful sense of freedom that results from the removal of petticoats.’27 She was also careful to remind her readers of the genuine tragedies that still occurred to women wearing what Constance termed ‘portable firetraps’. She recounted the story of Rosina Williams, aged thirty-six, from Camberwell, who ‘was in the front room in a basement when a spark set her clothing alight’, and of Eliza Dixon, aged fifty-five, who, when linen on a clothes horse began to burn, attempted to extinguish the blaze but herself caught fire.28

  Interestingly, the fascination that Japan held for Constance and many of her Aesthetic contemporaries was also reflected in the magazine. Members of the RDS were concerned to learn that many Japanese women were adopting Western dress, and ‘were anxious that they should first know that those who have studied the subject hold that there is great need of improvement in certain particulars’. The Japanese question was one that the RDS actively pursued. By the April 1889 edition of the magazine Constance was able to inform her readers that the RDS committee had met Mr Shimada, the Japanese editor of the Daily News, ‘who had undertaken to ventilate the questions raised by the Rational Dress Society in the columns of the Japanese paper’. Constance adds that ‘Letters have also been received from a lady doctor in Russia, requesting admission to the Society … This Lady states that the s
ubject of Rational Dress is exciting much interest in her country.’

  By mid-1888 the appetite for politics that her involvement with the RDS had sparked in Constance was fully ignited. If the first four years of her marriage had been essentially ‘artistic’, the years to come would be ‘campaigning’. What, alas, she could not have foreseen was that as she pursued further rights and a higher profile for her own sex, her and Oscar’s paths would begin substantially to diverge. The interests of The Woman’s World had aligned Constance and Oscar both socially and professionally. But this alignment would prove brief. Oscar would soon succumb to different temptations and ambitions, ones that would quickly alienate him from the world in which his wife would continue to invest.

  8

  ‘Not to kiss females’

  ‘MY CHILDREN ARE growing and thriving splendidly, though unfortunately my nurse has taken it into her head to be married this July which is to say the least of it, annoying,’ Constance informed Otho in March 1888.1 Her brother, having left Nellie, was still in Switzerland with Mary. Brother and sister found themselves further apart from one another than ever before.

  Baby is quite strong and fat and long, and he can walk and is beginning to talk. Cyril adores me and Vyvyan more or less dislikes me and adores his father but I suppose this will come right in the end. People say he is pretty, but he was prettier when he was waxy and white and delicate. He is not as tall as Cyril was but is very much fatter. What you have lost by parting from your dear two boys, it’s only the babes that keep one young and fresh and happy.2

  Oscar and Constance were in some respects forward-thinking parents. Unlike many of their class and generation, they spent time playing with their children, and Constance certainly would do many of the domestic chores that others left to a nanny. Her letters are full of accounts of her taking her children to doctors, to tea parties and shopping for toys and clothes. Even when they were babes in arms, Oscar found his sons compelling,3 and as they grew older, he indulged his own sense of fun in the games he enjoyed with them.

  Vyvyan remembered his father playing with his sons with childlike delight, down on his knees pretending to be a lion or wolf. ‘And there was nothing half hearted in his methods of play,’ Vyvyan admitted:

  One day he arrived with a toy milk cart drawn by a horse with real hair on it. All the harness undid and took off, and the churns with which the cart was filled could be removed and opened. When my father discovered this he immediately went downstairs and came back with a jug of milk with which he proceeded to fill the churns. We then all tore round the nursery table, slopping milk all over the place, until the arrival of our nurse put an end to that game.4

  But alongside what seems like their modern approach to parenting, the Wildes could also be very Victorian. In addition to their parents’ attentions, the children were attended to by nurses and governesses. And they were often dispatched to stay with friends and relatives, normally on the basis of some need, be it to do with a particular ailment that would benefit from better air or in connection with some character-forming exercise.

  Constance took to heart the public debate on health. She was obsessed with the health of her children, and the effect of London fog on them was of particular concern to her. Constance worried particularly over Vyvyan, who she was convinced was sickly. He was often sent to Reading to stay with Constance’s friend Jean Palmer, the wife of Walter Palmer, of Huntley & Palmer biscuits. Despite his tender age, these rest cures could mean weeks away from home on a regular basis, a routine that Constance described to Georgina Mount-Temple in her letters:

  I am sending Vyvyan to stay by himself with Mrs Palmer for a month in hopes that complete change of surroundings may do him good. His nurse thinks he is going to have a ‘St Vitus’s Dance’ as she calls it, but I don’t think he is really so bad as that. Nurse will take him tomorrow, and stay with him till Monday and- then come back to Cyril.5

  Constance notes how furious Cyril would be with her ‘for taking his little play-fellow from him’. Despite such rebellions, Constance was in the habit of separating the boys. They would often holiday in different locations, and when it came to their education later on, different schools were chosen for them.

  With her nursery staff engaged, Constance had sufficient time to continue to pursue her interests. In addition to her writing for children, and her commitment to the cause of Rational Dress, as the 1880s drew to a close she began to focus on new projects. Constance’s strident views about dress reform had revealed her as a truly political animal. The genes of one-time MP John Horatio Lloyd were surfacing not in Otho but in his sister, and now, along with a group of other pioneering women, she began to take on other high-profile political causes.6

  ‘I have been political lately,’ she informed her brother in March 1888. ‘It has become the fashion to have political parties in London and some of the swells manage to get Gladstone, so I have seen a good deal of him lately and have heard him speak too, which was a real treat.’7

  Just a month after this boast Constance found herself with Gladstone yet again. On the evening of 16 April 1888 the Marylebone branch of the Women’s Liberal Association held a political party at the home of a Mr and Mrs Blyth in Portland Place, which enjoyed the attendance of ‘the best known liberals in the Borough’.8 Oscar and Constance were there, and one imagines that on this occasion Mr Wilde, finding himself on his wife’s home ground, was there very much at her bidding.

  The Liberal Gladstone held tremendous appeal for Constance. Not only was he a supporter of women’s rights, but his wife Catherine was in the process of organizing the regional Women’s Liberal Associations, of which Constance was a member of the Chelsea branch, under a national banner: The Women’s Liberal Federation.

  In addition to his sympathy for female equality, Gladstone was an ardent supporter of Home Rule for Ireland. And this was also a cause to which Constance subscribed. But Constance’s version of Liberalism was far more radical than that of her hero Gladstone. A few months before this particular date with the great man, Constance had signalled just how extreme her liberal leanings might be when she attended the trial of Robert Cunninghame Graham.

  Cunninghame Graham was a Scot who had been brought up largely overseas. But in the early 1880s he returned to the UK to pursue a political career. A regular attendee at William Morris’s socialist gatherings, he quickly developed radical socialist ideals that placed him at the most controversial limits of the politics of his day. In the 1886 general election he became a Liberal MP on a ticket that called for the abolition of the House of Lords, universal suffrage, widespread nationalization of mining and industry, the disestablishment of the Church of England and Home Rule for Scotland. Within a year of his election he had gained considerable notoriety as the first MP to swear in the Commons, uttering the word ‘damn’, and subsequently found himself suspended.

  But it was Cunninghame Graham’s ardent belief in the right to free speech that put him in the dock in December 1887 and increased his notoriety further. On 13 November 1887 protesters in favour of Irish Home Rule had marched on Trafalgar Square. The protest had been prompted by the recent imprisonment of the editor of the Irish nationalist newspaper United Ireland, William O’Brien, who had been campaigning on behalf of Irish tenants against their forced eviction by landowners. Several British radicals, including Cunninghame Graham, joined the protest, only to find themselves at the heart of what would become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. As the protest apparently began to turn into a riot, the British police and military in attendance applied such force that there were over a hundred casualties. Cunninghame Graham himself was badly beaten, arrested and taken to Bow Street.

  On 30 November 1887 Cunninghame Graham was tried alongside a Mr John Burns for their involvement in the riot. Constance was one of three women supporters that the national press noted as attending the trial in a show of support. The other women were Mrs Graham and Mrs Ashton Dilke, a notable campaigner for women’s suffrage. Oscar, busy i
n Tite Street making plans for The Woman’s World, did not attend. His own date with the Bow Street dock was yet to come.

  Cunninghame Graham was eventually sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment in Pentonville for his part in the Bloody Sunday riots. The friendship between Constance and his family never weakened. Cunninghame Graham would go on to live with Constance’s great friend Walter Harris in Morocco, and Constance continued to mention members of the Graham family in her letters well after the event.9

  These radical tendencies of Mrs Oscar Wilde soon found wider expression. Indeed on the very day that Constance had taken Oscar to meet Gladstone in Portland Place she had also attended a ‘conference of ladies’ in Victoria. This time it was the Women’s Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Association. And Constance was giving a paper ‘in which she offered a number of practical suggestions to wives, mothers and school mistresses’.10

  Like her journalism, Constance’s public speaking was commonsensical and no-nonsense. She was an inherently practical person, who considered how political belief might be translated into practical action. Her thesis was that war might be avoided and peace promoted if instilled at the earliest possible opportunity, as children were educated.

  The Pall Mall Gazette reported her suggestion that ‘children should be taught in the nursery to be against war’. Constance did not want nurses and mothers to ban toy soldiers and guns, as some of her peers were apparently advocating, but she did believe that mothers could instil a dislike of war in their offspring. More importantly, she felt that as part of their schooling children should be exposed more ‘to great international questions of the day’.

  The Women’s Liberal Federation quickly provided Constance with a regular public platform on which to express her liberal political views. It was not merely international peace that Constance dared to take on, but also the question of Irish Home Rule. At the 1889 annual conference of the WLF Constance gave a paper on this subject in which she pointed out ‘that self-governing nations were not in the habit of tolerating outrages in their midst, and she was convinced that, given Home Rule, so far from the sister country aiding or abetting any foreign conspiracy against us, she would prove our best friend and virtual sea wall against invasion from the West’.11