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

by Franny Moyle

  The last line suggests that Constance is feeling towards an affair. She instinctively senses a mutual attraction. She reassures Humphreys that she will be discreet. These signals were clearly responded to and acted on. After the last few years of misery Constance had found someone who loved and respected her once more. By August she was writing to ‘My darling Arthur’ and explaining:

  I am going to write you a line while you are smoking your cigarette to tell you how much I love you, and how dear and delightful you have been to me today. I have been happy, and I do love you dear Arthur. Nothing in my life has ever made me so happy as this love of yours to me has done, and I trust you, and will trust you through everything. You have been a great dear all the time quite perfect to me, and dear to the children, and nice to Oscar too, and so I love you, and I love you just because you are, and because you have come into my life to fill it all with love and make it rich.20

  At the beginning of August Constance secured a house in the seaside resort of Worthing from her friend Miss Henrietta Lord, the educational reformer, translator of Ibsen and Christian Scientist. Miss Lord’s means were comparatively modest, and she had made her home available while she was away in the spa town of Matlock seeking a remedy for rheumatic gout. It offered a holiday in stark contrast to the high life Oscar had been leading in London. But then it was exactly Oscar’s entertaining at the Savoy and Café Royal that had forced Constance’s hand in choosing the property. They were overdrawn again, and a budget holiday that cost 10 guineas a week was all they could afford if they wanted to spend the summer together by the sea.21

  As the house was not even properly equipped, Constance had to take all her own linen and kitchen equipment from London in order to cater for her household, which at that time included a new Swiss governess, who had replaced Miss Simmons, a cook, a maid and Arthur the butler. The latter – so young that Constance described him as a ‘page boy’ – was tasked with taking the children to the beach and sailing, alongside his normal duties.

  Her first guest at her holiday home arrived on 7 August. When Constance was barely installed, a young minister, Mr Lilley, called on her in Worthing. Lilley was a preacher whose name begins to feature quite heavily in Constance’s correspondence in 1894 onwards, and it seems that there was a passionate friendship developing between them.

  Lilley was an associate of the high-profile Revd Eyton, the rector of Holy Trinity Church in Upper Chelsea. Eyton and Lilley, like Constance, were signed-up members of the Christian Social Union, an organization that sought to find ways of applying ‘the principles of Christianity to the social and economic difficulties of the present time’. Both men were radical and reforming. Constance’s recent trips to do good in Paradise Walk had been encouraged not just by Georgina but also by the rousing sermons of the rector, who proposed engaging in the ‘toss and tumble of this common life’. He warned his congregation that they must be prepared to be ‘bothered by human unreasonableness, and saddened by human distress’. His protégé Lilley saw Christianity as a force for wider political change. In his lecture on ‘Democracy and Government’ he saw God at work in the new, emerging democratic landscape, the champion and saviour of the working man who was at last finding his voice.22

  Constance was deeply impressed by the young, politically active Lilley, and were it not for the evidence of the love letters between Constance and Arthur Humphreys, it would be tempting to speculate that Constance and Lilley’s friendship was verging on something more intimate. But it was Arthur Humphreys, who came and spent a Saturday night in Worthing a few days later, with whom Constance ‘walked about and enjoyed the air and the sea’, as she revealed to Georgina Mount-Temple on 11 August, adding:

  I have been so busy with collecting passages from Oscar’s books for ‘Oscariana’ that I have been obliged to neglect everything else including you my Darling … But it has to be, if possible, in Mr Humphreys’ hands before he goes abroad next Saturday. I think I have collected all the passages, but now they must be put in order which, I am afraid, I shall find the most difficult part.23

  Before Humphreys left, he gave Cyril some money, with which the boy bought a little tortoiseshell fish, for which he wrote a thank-you note.

  Oscar, it seems, was well aware of Constance’s new-found love for the manager of Hatchard’s. In fact, while at Worthing he began to sketch out a play, provisionally entitled Constance, with a plot that told of a marriage which, having run into difficulties, sees the husband and wife both seek solace in extramarital affairs. He sketched the plot out in a letter to the actor–manager George Alexander.24 In Constance the plot centres on a man of rank and fashion who has become bored with his wife. The husband holds a house party full of his more outré, fin-de-sièck friends, and warns his wife that she must not be prudish but allow Gerald Lancing to flirt with her.

  At the party all the guests are horrid to the wife, with the exception of Lancing, who is ‘nice and sweet and friendly’. The husband makes love in a dark drawing room to one of the female guests, unaware that his wife is also in the room. When the guest’s husband begins to bang on the door, the husband is astonished that his own wife safeguards her deceitful husband by presenting herself and saying the three of them were ‘trying an absurd experiment in thought reading’.

  This gesture of selfless love reignites the passion the husband once had for his wife. But such passion comes too late. Gerald Lancing’s flirtations have borne fruit. She has fallen in love with the man her husband encouraged her to entertain. In fact, she is carrying his unborn child. Gerald and the wife go away together. The husband kills himself.

  It is enormously tempting to see Oscar as a combination of the husband and the friends who are horrid to the wife. Lancing, of course, is the kind Humphreys. It is also tempting to consider the outcome of his proposed play as a suggestion that at some level Oscar was jealous of Humphreys, regretful of his recent behaviour towards her, and sad that he had lost his wife to another man. Certainly his letters to Humphreys regarding Oscariana are perfunctory and cool. His reaction to the first proofs of Oscariana was also extremely negative. ‘The book is, as it stands, so bad, so disappointing, that I am writing a set of new aphorisms, and will have to alter much of the printed matter,’ Oscar wrote later. ‘The plays are particularly badly done. Long passages are quoted where a single aphorism should have been extracted.’25

  But what is also fascinating about the play that Oscar sketched out to George Alexander is the tragic ending that he chose for it, because it suggests that he knew now that his and Constance’s life had become so complex that any outcome other than a tragic one was highly unlikely.

  Oscar joined Constance in Worthing after suffering yet another humiliation at the hands of Queensberry, as he described in a letter to Bosie. Queensberry was ‘on the rampage again – been to the Café Royal to enquire for us, with threats etc.’26

  Worthing, for all its inconveniences, offered some respite from persecution at the hands of the Marquess. Away from the influences of London, Oscar became momentarily a typical husband and father again. He and Constance pored over Miss Lord’s books. Constance was delighted to find Middlemarch, which she determined to read once she finished the light seaside reading she had brought with her – Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. Oscar meanwhile discovered a little book called I Woke. Constance, writing to Georgina, inquired whether her friend knew it. ‘Oscar has been reading it and is much interested in it.’27

  When he wasn’t working on what would become The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar was dedicated to his sons. They had an aquarium with them, into which the finds from the day’s fishing and rock pooling would be proudly deposited. Oscar swam with the boys and, relieving Arthur from his maritime duties, delighted in taking them out in fishing boats with the local fishermen.

  ‘Cyril went out with his father in a boat this afternoon, and this evening bought 150 prawns and two lobsters,’ Constance relayed to her brother in a letter. She added details of a subseq
uent conversation with her husband that must have taken on a different hue in retro spect. ‘I instantly said that I should like to go prawning with him one afternoon. After he had gone, Oscar explained to me the costume that the fishermen wear when they go prawning, which is indeed like the Emperor’s New Clothes, so I think differently now about going!’28

  Lord and Lady Mount-Temple. Constance became very close to Georgina, Lady Mount-Temple in 1890. Georgina, by then widowed, had a house in Chelsea close to Tite Street, and Constance soon became a regular visitor.

  Babbacombe Cliff, Georgina Mount-Temple’s seaside home near Torquay, photographed by Vyvyan Wilde, c. 1904. The house, full of Pre-Raphaelite art, held a kind of magic for Constance.

  An interior shot of Babbacombe Cliff, also taken by Vyvyan.

  Constance aged thirty-four, 1892.

  Oscar aged thirty-eight, 1892.

  Lord Alfred Douglas, or ‘Bosie’, taken in 1891 when he was twenty-one. Although Oscar remained loyal and devoted to Constance whilst pursuing other homosexual affairs, his affair with Bosie would have a catastrophic effect on his relationship with Constance.

  Constance and Oscar in the garden of Mr and Mrs Palmer in Reading. Constance stands while her friend Jean Palmer is seated on the ground.

  A photograph of Oscar, Constance and Cyril taken at the end of their holiday in Felbrigg, near Cromer, summer 1892.

  Oscar posed with Bosie during the same session. He had originally asked to spend just one night with the Wildes, however he stayed on at Felbrigg with Oscar after Constance and the children had left.

  As this cartoon from early 1895 indicates, Oscar’s play An Ideal Husband prompted much debate – particularly in the women’s press – as to just what might constitute the perfect spouse.

  During Oscar’s trials, the press had a field day. Vyvyan remembered his mother ‘in tears, poring over masses of press cuttings, mostly from Continental newspapers’.

  The New York Standard ran this piece in early 1895. The photograph of Constance is the same as that published in January by The Young Woman, which Constance herself admitted made her look ‘solemnly tragic’.

  Otho, his second wife Mary and their children Hester and Eugene, photographed ‘in exile’ with Constance, probably in Switzerland.

  Constance in exile. This snap is probably taken on her own Kodak; the annotation is Vyvyan’s.

  Carlos Blacker and his wife Carrie, Cyril, Vyvyan and an unidentified boy, almost certainly the Blackers’ son.

  Constance, aged thirty-nine, photographed in Heidelberg, 1897. She put the boys into school in this German town where her friend Lady Brooke was also educating one of her sons.

  Cyril (left) andVyvyan photographed in Heidelberg, 1896. Constance sent Oscar a copy of these photographs on his release from gaol in 1897. ‘I have heard from my wife,’ he wrote that May to Robbie Ross, ‘she sends me photographs of the boys – such lovely little fellows in Eton collars.’

  Oscar and Bosie in Naples, 1897.

  Constance’s sitting room in the Villa Elvira, near Nervi. Her treasured photographs are displayed on the mantelpiece.

  Constance’s letters refer to her making cushions for the villa. The picture on the right may be a print of Watts’s portrait of Lady Mount-Temple, also mentioned in the letters.

  Constance’s grave in the cemetery in Genoa.

  The line that she was the ‘Wife of Oscar Wilde’ was added later by Otho’s family.

  His sons were not the only boys that Oscar was taking out in boats or swimming with. Despite attempts to keep Bosie away from Worthing, the young lord managed to inveigle his way into the holiday. To Constance’s horror he joined Oscar. Together they courted local young men: Percy, Alfonso and Stephen flirted with the couple, and swam and drank with them.

  While they were at Worthing, a scandal hit the headlines. A police raid at a club in Fitzroy Street had led to the arrest of Alfred Taylor – the man who had been procuring for Wilde. And now Taylor and one of his lovers, Charlie Mason, wrote to Wilde asking for his help. In the past Wilde had paid off blackmailers and bailed out many a young man. But now, for the first time perhaps, Oscar, already £40 overdrawn at the bank, found he was too strapped for cash to oblige.

  If, by Oscar’s own admission, Constance had always been gracious to Bosie, at Worthing she was fractious and annoyed by his presence. Bosie became a bone of contention, a fact that Bosie himself reported in a letter to their mutual friend Robbie Ross.29 Her irritation must have been aggravated further by the fact that, rather than being able to escape temporarily from the burdens of celebrity, Bosie and Oscar, once together, began to attract attention in Worthing, creating much excitement among the locals. Perhaps unaware that the two men were not permanently joined at the hip, in early September, long after Bosie’s return to London, Oscar and Bosie were invited to patronize a local concert, a patronage that was used to advertise the event with, according to Oscar, ‘our names … placarded all over the town’. When Oscar took his son Cyril in Bosie’s place, he faced a packed hall and was greeted with loud applause. ‘Cyril was considered to be you,’30 Oscar jested – a joke that Constance could scarcely have approved of under the circumstances.

  Arthur Humphreys, meanwhile, was holidaying in Florence with his wife. But he wrote to Constance from the city she adored. With a new sense of confidence that Humphreys had brought, Constance now not only looked forward to new adventures of the heart but also to more creative and literary ones too. Once Oscariana was out of the way at the end of the summer, she wanted to start on another entrepreneurial literary project. She wanted to revive the literary project based around letters that she had proposed to Otho two years earlier. Oscar had helped her strengthen the plot. He suggested that the story should be based around two people discovering that they have committed to marry the wrong person, a theme somewhat pertinent to the Wilde household.

  ‘I’m still thinking of that book that I suggested our writing of letters and Oscar has now given me a suggestion for a plot,’ Constance wrote to Otho from Worthing.

  It only needs to be a rather flimsy plot. A man and a woman, each engaged to a friend of the other’s, write to congratulate one another, they have never met. These two first letters should cross each other, then each should write again, being rather interested in the other, perhaps describing where they are staying. You could describe Pisa, I Worthing and so we should gradually fall a little in love with each other and should at last suggest breaking off our engagements and marrying one another.

  We are supposed never to have met and suggest a meeting place, then the last two letters should also cross each other, each saying to the other that he or she has made it up and is going to be married and hoping that the other will not mind so much. I think that a charming little book might be written in this way. Do tell me that you will try and let us write our first letters on I October, when the children will be gone and I shall have time. Write on one side of the paper and I should suggest that you, having much more wit than I, should write more humorous letters and that I should write very serious ones about books that I had read. These are to be imaginary books, not real ones and I think that we should each miss the point of the other’s letters. Do let us try. We can both of us write letters about the only thing that we can do and we might make some money.31

  Constance and the boys left Worthing on 4 September. Speranza was unwell and had been summoning her daughter-in-law. Constance was not just a regular companion for Oscar’s mother but also did many chores for her, such as collecting her pension and sorting out disputes with servants. Oscar and Constance were growing concerned about the manner in which Willie Wilde seemed to be extracting money from the old woman. His marriage to the American Mrs Leslie had broken down, and by 1894 he was not only divorced but now married again to a former Miss Lily Lees.

  Scribbled in the back pages of his own copy of a biography of Wilde, Constance’s brother Otho made some comments about his sister years after the event: ‘She wa
s constantly short of money it is true, partly from Oscar’s habit of expecting her (not I fancy himself) to pay off his mother’s and brother’s debts when the bailiffs were in their house in Oakley Street,’ Otho notes rather bitterly.32 And whether she sought it directly, Constance was certainly in receipt of handouts from friends such as Georgina, Lady Mount-Temple, to pass on to Speranza.

  Oscar stayed on in Worthing while the family returned to London. He was well out of the way, for in September matters deteriorated when he became the subject of national ridicule with the release of a novel, The Green Carnation. The book, published anonymously, was a barely concealed satirical portrait of Oscar and Bosie, characterizing them as Esme Amarinth and Lord Reggie Hastings respectively. A caustic portrayal of the couple, the implication that they were not only practising homosexuals but also held unhealthy interests in young boys was clearly legible between the lines. To Oscar’s and Constance’s horror, the book was a huge success.