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

by Franny Moyle

  ‘I am going to write a few lines,’ she explained to her friend Juliet Latour Temple in June 1889, adding: ‘if they are very stupid you must put it down to my having had 30 people here to talk to this afternoon. I have been very ill again, but I am going to try and mind-cure myself well this time.’25

  As part of a programme of self-help Constance decided to read J. H. Shorthouse’s Golden Thoughts, she explained to her friend. Based on the writings of the seventeenth-century ‘spiritual guide’ and ‘Quietist’ Miguel Molinos, this was a book that invited inward contemplation, meditation and reflection as a means to achieving a higher understanding. All one had to do was find a place that would enable quiet meditation.

  Constance, earnest as ever, chose to try out some ‘golden thoughts’ in a church she increasingly frequented, St Barnabas, Pimlico, just a few minutes from her own home. But as so often seemed to happen to Constance, her best-laid plans were confounded. ‘How can one be a Quietist in London? I never get a moment’s real quiet,’ she complained to Juliet. ‘This morning I went to St Barnabas and thought I should be quiet there but carpenters came in and sawed wood till I went away!’26

  What did seem to relieve her sleeplessness and anxiety were trips to the theatre with Oscar and his friends. Fortunately these were still frequent and a source of great joy for her. She was a regular at the Lyceum to see Irving and Ellen Terry, often dining with them after shows, and always enchanted by Terry, who was becoming a good friend. And humour helped Constance relax. She admitted that she laughed so much at one production of Nerves, an adaptation of Les Femmes nerveuses, ‘that I had a good night’s sleep which I seldom get, so I think I shall try this medicine again’.27

  Finally an August holiday in Yorkshire with the journalists Emily and James Thursfield pulled Constance through this period of ill health. Constance got home on 31 August. Oscar was at King’s Cross to meet her. He had had to wait since her train was an hour late. He discovered his wife ‘looking extremely well – much better than when she went away’.28 Constance was delighted to be home and full of fun. On seeing the boys she told a silly story that the voracious Oscar had eaten her bread and butter – which made the extremely sensitive Cyril burst into tears.29 ‘However he was consoled and sent to fetch some more.’30

  Constance did not wait to throw herself into events once again, keen to show her socialist sympathies for any who cared to see. While Constance had been enjoying the Yorkshire moors with the Thursfields, London had become the battleground for a group of dockers, who, organized for the first time, were marching and striking for reform. A staggering ten thousand men downed tools. On 1 September the strikers, who had already been out for a fortnight, demonstrated in Hyde Park.

  ‘This afternoon I dragged Oscar to the Park to see the great meeting,’ Constance told Emily Thursfield. ‘We saw a great part of the procession … with innumerable banners flying, all the people perfectly orderly with police marching by their sides. There were representatives of all kinds of curious societies; one cart contained a Neptune with a long beard and a trident.’ Constance spotted Robert Cunninghame Graham among the crowd of workers. Her political friend apart, the crowd comprised strata of society Constance rarely experienced, and never in this quantity. They ‘were very much in earnest’, she noted, but also ‘very unsavoury’. In the midst of the rough workers she found herself almost overcome by the smell of the great unwashed and their ‘vile tobacco’. Nevertheless she was impressed by them. ‘One was in the presence of an immense power,’ she said.31

  In the end the dockers had their day. Two weeks later, after striking for a month, their employers caved in to their demands and they returned to work. They had secured a new pay rate of 6d an hour and a hiring period of not less than four hours at a time.

  More and more Constance saw political action in terms of her own personal quest to find meaning and purpose in life. And more and more she began to see parallels between Christian morality and socialism. ‘I have just been reading Tolstoy’s Work While We Have the Light and feel more depressed than ever,’ she would write to Lady Mount-Temple a little later; ‘I am more certain than ever that I am leading an absolutely useless life, and yet I don’t see how to alter it.’ Constance went on: ‘Mr Gurney says that the early Christians did not all have their goods in common and that the scheme of Socialism is a wrong one, but I am quite sure that the way we live now is wrong.’32

  And so, determined to right the wrongs of her day, it was not long before Constance found yet another cause to take up – this time the launch of a new club for ‘progressive’ women, one that might harness their shared ambitions to effect social change.

  Women had been noticeable as members of London clubs since the early 1880s. And there were already a few all-female clubs. The Alexandra Club in Grosvenor Street was grand and catered for high-class women. The University Club for Ladies in New Bond Street catered for university-educated working women of more modest means. And the New Somerville Club in Oxford Street was a club and college combined, providing lectures and talks alongside the standard offer of drawing rooms and a restaurant.33

  One of the earliest gentlemen’s clubs to accommodate women was that to which Oscar and Constance belonged, the Albemarle, founded in 1881. Constance was to be found there regularly, writing letters and meeting people. She and Oscar often dined there together. And she became involved in other aspects of club life too. In 1890, when the Albermarle expanded with the purchase of the neighbouring Pulteney Hotel, Constance was roped in as interior designer to fit out the new club house in suitably ‘artistic taste’.34

  Constance’s aesthetic contribution to the Albemarle must have only heightened its appeal. Despite the extension of its premises, its members remained concerned about its over-subscription. This sense of demand outstripping supply no doubt informed the decision by Constance and her friends to set up a rival women-only institution.

  In March 1891 Constance, along with Lady Harberton, Lady Sandhurst and a few other of her radical friends, announced their intentions in a series of advertisements intended to recruit potential members. ‘It is proposed to start a Ladies Club with a view to furthering all movements for the advancement and enlightenment of women,’ the notice in the Woman’s Herald proclaimed. ‘It is thought that such a club consisting at first of small but comfortable premises, in some convenient situation, would supply a want generally felt by women of intelligence, and provide them with a recognised centre and social rendezvous. The many and varied movements for improving and advancing women’s work suffer from lack of esprit de corps.’

  In the end the club, which initially was going to be called the Century Club, was launched as the Pioneer Club and opened in Regent Street. It quickly became embroiled in sororial controversy. The members of the Pioneer Club fell out with their sisters at the New Somerville Club when the latter labelled them ‘political propagandists’. The Somervillians were duly punished. In August clubs typically closed for cleaning for a week or two. The tradition was for a system of reciprocal hospitality between institutions with members who found themselves temporarily inconvenienced invited to use the facilities of other establishments. But in August 1892 the press enjoyed the spectacle of ‘the poor Somervillians wandering up and down … quite melancholy and homeless’ after the founders of the Pioneer refused them such hospitality and took the Writers’ Club instead, quite clearly out of spite.

  ‘The Pioneer is very advanced,’ a bemused journalist observed, ‘to discuss its character in the current phraseology in which radicals and socialites love to describe themselves. The members are all women with opinions that agree as to the urgent necessity of reforming society by turning the world upside down as soon as possible, and a good deal of that readjustment of property-owning which is colloquially known as “robbing Peter to pay Paul”.’35 But even though its radical credentials proved unpalatable for some women, within a year the club had gathered a sufficient membership to support a move to bigger premises in Cork Str
eet.

  Israel Zangwill, the celebrated Jewish novelist and humorist, known to be sympathetic to the feminist cause, took the Pioneer Club as the inspiration for his comedic novel The Old Maids’ Club. Zangwill’s version was in fact the complete antithesis to the real thing, a club for young, beautiful, single women, who absolutely abhorred ‘ideals’ and vowed never ‘to take part in Women’s Rights Movements, Charity Concerts or other Platform Demonstrations’.36 Zangwill’s Old Maids’ Club also swore ‘Not to kiss females’, a commitment that suggests that the genuine articles in the Pioneer Club were very much in the habit of kissing one another, much to the consternation of their peers.

  9

  Qui patitur vincit

  IF YOU HAD walked down Oxford Street at lunchtime on Friday 21 June 1889, proceeding from Oxford Circus to Marble Arch under the almost continual canopy of coloured awnings that once graced that thoroughfare, about half-way down you would have found a cluster of folk blocking the pavement, vying to press their noses up against the windows of no. 448. This group, drawn from hoi polloi working in central London, were enjoying the spectacle of a great crowd of celebrated women milling about inside, many of whom were smoking. This activity, normally the preserve of men, was causing particular consternation. Constance Wilde, in her signature Gainsborough hat and wearing a full-skirted velvet highwayman’s coat, was in their midst. She, like a whole host of other notable ladies, was attending the opening of a new Dorothy’s Restaurant.

  Dorothy’s was the initiative of one Mrs Cooper-Oakley, another of London’s leading feminists, who also ran a milliner’s business in Wigmore Street called Madame Isabel’s. It was an innovation, a restaurant for women only. Although dining for upper- and middle-class women was already available at the various women’s clubs, and although some conventional restaurants provided ladies’ dining rooms discreetly located in upper storeys or side-rooms, Dorothy’s was a bold modern proposition. Its door was right on the street, and it was open to all classes of women, from shop assistants to duchesses. Offering cheap wholesome fare for all, Dorothy’s liberated the former from having to eat a bun in a shop and offered the latter a new kind of experience. You just bought an eightpenny dining ticket on entrance, took a seat at one of the tables and waited for your ‘plate of meat, two vegetables and bread’ to arrive.1 For an extra couple of pence you could also get pudding, and for a further penny tea, coffee or chocolate.

  Dorothy’s was a perfect example of how, in late Victorian London, Aestheticism, liberalism and feminist sympathies could collide. The first branch of the restaurant to open, in Mortimer Street, had cream-coloured walls with ‘aesthetic crimson dados’ and had been made ‘gay with Japanese fans and umbrellas’.2 The Oxford Street branch, which opened just months later, was a far more dramatic proposition, its windows hung with rich Indian curtains, its ante-room painted a deep red that offset luxurious couches, small tables and carefully selected ornaments, and its larger luncheon room featuring rows of simple tables set with glazed white cotton tablecloths surmounted by vases of fresh flowers.

  Although men were not usually admitted within the hallowed walls of Dorothy’s restaurants, an exception was made for the inauguration of the Oxford Street enterprise. And so Constance brought Oscar along. They found themselves seated next to the exotic Russian émigré Madame Blavatsky and her disciple Annie Besant.

  Blavatsky proved a true rival for Oscar. Smoking just as heavily as he, until their table was defined by a blue cloud of tobacco, she held court talking about the position of women in Russia. Politically women were on a footing with men in Russia, Blavatsky told a fascinated group who had gathered around the rather exotic Wilde/ Blavatsky table. What was more, women could smoke openly in Russia, just like men, she explained.

  Her smoking aside, Madame Blavatsky had acquired huge fame at the time as one of the founders of the Theosophical Society. This society, which was created in New York in the mid-187os, with the objective of studying and investigating spiritual activity, had become a phenomenon across the Western world.

  It is hard to imagine the importance of mysticism and spiritualism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but rather than lying on the peripheries of social interest, it lay at its heart. Séances were regularly held as the focus of social gatherings, and self-proclaimed mediums, professional and amateur, were highly visible. Constance’s own interest in mesmerism as expressed in her juvenile letters, far from singling her out as unusual, merely shows the extent to which even the most conventional members of Victorian society were at least tolerant of and in some cases actively fascinated by the supernatural.

  The Theosophical Society represented an intellectual response to spiritualism. It sought to provide credibility to spiritualism by grounding it in a system of belief. At the very core of Theosophy was the concept that that the material world cannot be separated from its spiritual counterpart. In fact, the Theosophists believed that there was a different natural order from that which separated the material and spiritual worlds. This alternative scheme of cosmogony was based on the idea of a constant flow and relationship between the material and spiritual dimensions.

  Blavatsky herself promoted the study of Eastern philosophy as a means of grasping a higher understanding of the world, and of how the material and ‘supernatural’ worlds interact.

  Mrs Cooper-Oakley was a Theosophical enthusiast and an evangelist for the movement. So was Constance. Constance’s introduction to Theosophy lay in Speranza’s friendship with Anna Kingsford. Kingsford, a physician, mystic, author, vegetarian and campaigner for women’s rights, had eloped and married Algernon Kingsford on the firm understanding that he would support her determination to have a career in spite of her sex. She began writing and campaigning for female enfranchisement and used her not inconsiderable private income to become briefly the proprietor of The Lady’s Own Paper. In the early 1870s she trained as a doctor in the Paris medical school, since at that time women were unable to qualify in the UK. But then in the early 1880s she experienced a number of mystical revelations which formed the basis of first a series of lectures, and then what became a popular and seminal mystical work explaining the deeper mysteries of religion: The Perfect Way, or The Finding of Christ. This publication gained her a sudden and considerable prominence in Theosophical and spiritual circles, and by 1883 she had become the president of the British Theosophical Society.

  When Anna Kingsford wrote to Speranza back in 1884 to congratulate her on Oscar’s engagement and secure her invitation to the big day, she was also proselytizing for the Theosophical Society, over which she now presided. Sending Speranza some of her latest writings, she had informed her of the imminent arrival in London of Alfred Percy Sinnett, who headed the movement’s Indian branch:

  We shall shortly have a field day in the Lodge of the Theosophical Society for the President founder of the Indian Branch is expected in London about the end of this month; and we shall have a muster of all our Fellows to greet him. He and Madame Blavatsky are due today at Marseilles where they will stay a day or two … And Madame will then go on to Nice to visit Lady Caithness … My discourses, which I remember naming to you when I saw you in town, will probably be given under the auspices of the Theosophical Society as President of the London Lodge: and therefore it is not likely they will be quite public in their characters. They will be very grave and serious.3

  In July 1884, Kingsford had also written to Constance confirming that the newly married Mrs Wilde would attend the Theosophical Society meeting the following day. ‘I hear from Mr Sinnett that there will not be much “talk”, only a short discourse by Colonel Olcott,’ she had advised Constance. Constance had been a willing recruit from the start, providing Kingsford with a list of names of other people she knew who might be interested in the society. All of them had been sent invitations, Kingsford assured her.4

  In fact, the much anticipated visit from Sinnett that Kingsford seemed so excited about proved deeply problematic for her. Unlike Sinnett�
��s – and for that matter Blavatsky’s – version of Theosophy, which looked very much to the East for answers, Kingsford’s version invited the study of the Western mystery tradition and esoteric Christianity. The spiritual traditions that had grown up in the West, also known as Hermeticism, included alchemy, herbalism, the disciplines of the Tarot and astrology. Rooted in Western antiquity, in the ancient Hellenic and Egyptian belief systems, the Western tradition also extended to Rosicrucianism. This was a theology developed in medieval Germany by a secret society of mystics, which, again embracing the ancient past for profound answers to life, promoted a reformation of mankind according to new laws and knowledge.

  When Sinnett arrived in Britain that spring, he and Kingsford found themselves at loggerheads. Sinnett had ambitions to head the London lodge himself, and Anna disagreed with his focus on Eastern mysticism. Sinnett got the upper hand, and the society attempted to mollify Anna by offering her her own ‘Hermetic Lodge’. But soon the warring factions in the Theosophical Society forced Kingsford out of it altogether, and she set up her own independent Hermetic Society. And through this society Constance came into contact with yet another hermetic order, this one deeply secret, which would become notorious for taking the study of ancient mystical texts and beliefs a stage further. It was called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

  The Golden Dawn intended to revive ancient magic rituals that would unlock spiritual truths and experiences for its members. The founders of this extraordinary endeavour were three men: Mathers, Westcott and Woodman. Born in Hackney in the same year as Constance, Samuel Liddell Mathers was the son of a merchant’s clerk who, after a short military career, found himself in Bournemouth caring for his widowed mother. He nevertheless claimed an impressive ancestry that reached back into the depths of the Scottish MacGregor clan, and by the later 1880s he was referring to himself as MacGregor Mathers. Despite his flamboyant style, Mathers was essentially an impecunious scholar who scraped a living undertaking translations and specialized in occult matters.