Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

40 Bodley, ‘Diary’.

  41 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  42 Bodley ‘Diary’, 8 May 1875; Bodley also refers to OW’s ‘chaffable innocence’; R. Childers to J. E. C. Bodley, 13 March [1875], regretting he had missed OW’s initiation to the Apollo Lodge, ‘Wilde must have been great sport’ (Bodleian Library).

  43 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  44 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  45 Bodley, ‘Diary’.

  46 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’; Y. Bereisner, ‘Oscar Wilde: A University Mason’, www.Freemasons-Freemasonry.com.

  47 Bodley, ‘Diary’, 21 February 1875.

  48 Bereisner, ‘Oscar Wilde: A University Mason’; although WRWW had been a mason since 1838, there is no evidence that WCKW ever became one.

  49 De Sales La Terrière, Days that Are Gone, 77.

  50 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  51 Bodley, ‘Diary’; Bereisner, ‘Oscar Wilde: A University Mason’.

  52 Bodley ‘Diary’, 6 May 1875.

  53 Atkinson, in Mikhail 19.

  54 Even the stern critic A. E. Housman was impressed. When Alfred Pollard included the poem in his anthology Odes from the Greek Dramatists (1890), Housman wrote that is was ‘not bad at all’.

  55 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph and Review, 132; OW, ‘Art and the Handicraftsman’, Miscellanies: Vol. XIV of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, [ed. Robert Ross] (1908); OW in both these accounts (and in other references made in 1882) refers to his work being done on ‘November mornings’ (i.e. during his first term), but many of the other specific details he gives are demonstrably untrue, and Bodley’s account in the NYT suggests that any actual engagement with the road-builders came after OW’s first term.

  56 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 20; JFW to LVK, 6 May 1875, in Tipper, Kraemer, 57; JFW to [John Hilson], 5 May [1875], Tipper, Hilson, 74–5: ‘Oscar is now a scholar at Oxford and resides there in a very focus of intellect. Ruskin had him to breakfast.’

  57 The first mention of OW and Miles together occurs in Bodley’s ‘Diary’ entry for 7 May 1875: ‘Met Wilde with Frank Miles “the Gardener’s daughter” [the name of one of Miles’s pictures]’.

  58 Nottinghamshire Guardian, 26 September 1873; Molly Whittington-Egan, Frank Miles and Oscar Wilde (2008), 28–31.

  59 Advertisement, Graphic, 25 December 1875.

  60 Graphic, 18 September 1875. Among those publishing Miles’s work were George Rees, Mrs Agnes Russell and Mansell & Co.

  61 OW to Ward, CL, 22.

  62 Bodley, ‘Diary’, 16 December 1875. Bodley’s contemporary accounts disproves the anecdote – recorded by G. P. Jacomb-Hood, With Brush and Pencil (1925), 114 – that Miles had sent some of drawings to Ruskin asking ‘what he thought of them’, and received the answer, ‘Dear Sir, I think nothing of them.’

  63 Bodley, ‘Diary’, 8 May 1875.

  64 Harris, 23; his Oxford tailor’s bill from Joseph A. Muir lists on 18 May 1875 the purchase of some ‘super Angola trousers’ for £1 12s 6d.

  65 ‘Sonnet on Approaching Italy’, written in 1877, on his return to Italy.

  66 OW to WRWW, CL, 8–9. Wilde’s full itinerary is unknown. The first surviving letter clearly belongs to a sequence. From the evidence of his 1877 review of the Grosvenor Gallery he seems perhaps to have visited both Parma and Perugia. Perugia is close to Lake Trasimene.

  67 ‘The Theories of A Poet’, New York Tribune, 8 January 1882, in Hofer & Scharnost, 19.

  68 CL, 10–13.

  69 CL, 11–13; Ruskin, in a letter to Dean Liddell (12 October 1844) listed Giotto, Fra Angelico, ‘John Bellini’ and Titian as the four Italian artists most needed by the new National Gallery in London.

  70 ‘San Minato’ ms version, quoted in Mason, 64; the ‘Angelic Monk’ is a reference to the painter – and monk – Fra Angelico, not that he ever painted in the church of San Miniato.

  71 ‘Oscar Wilde’s Visit to America’, prospectus published 24 January 1882, Boston, 3; ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph and Review.

  72 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph and Review; OW’s poem ‘Rome Unvisited’ is dated ‘Arona’, though it seems to have been finished after he had left. OET I, 223.

  73 [Unknown] to OW, Bray, 29 July [1875?] (Clark); Miles’s picture is dated 12 August 1875. Ellmann, 55, says it was done in Dublin, but does not give a source.

  74 JFW to OW [July/August 1875], Tipper, Oscar, 32–3. Tipper dates the letter August 1876, but the 1875 date seems more probable on account of the reference to the ‘ode’ having just been finished and sent of ‘at once for there was not a day to spare’. JFW’s ode on O’Connell was published in the Boston Pilot on 6 August 1875, and perhaps also in Ireland. There is a letter from J. D. Sullivan, editor of the Nation, to Lady Wilde, dated 31 August 1875 (Clark) praising her for the ode on O’Connell, ‘You, whose poetry has the range and swell of a great organ.’ The Pilot, America’s oldest Catholic paper, was edited by John Boyle O’Reilly (1844–90), a one-time member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who had made his way to Boston, having been transported to Australia and then effected a daring escape. He had begun publishing JFW’s poems in 1874. WRWW and JFW were both in Dublin on 6 August 1875, the day of the ‘The Grand Centenary Banquet’ in O’Connell’s honour.

  75 OET I, 226, list the echoes of Swinburne, Rossetti and Morris; Wilde’s scrapbook notes that the poem was ‘Written going over from Kingston to Holyhead October 22nd 1875’.

  76 Cloisters VIII, Ground Floor Right (the rooms are currently the JCR dining room); Hunter-Blair, 116.

  77 Hunter-Blair, 118.

  78 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 16; De Sales La Terrière, Days that Are Gone, 75.

  79 Hunter-Blair, 118. Hunter-Blair says the vases were acquired from Spiers, but they do not appear on Wilde’s Spiers account. So either Hunter-Blair misremembered where they were acquired, or OW paid cash for them.

  80 OW’s Spiers bill lists these purchases in October 1875.

  81 Hunter-Blair, 117–18. Hunter-Blair records these parties as beginning in OW’s ‘first year’; but from his narrative, and the description of the room’s location, it is clear that he is describing OW’s second year (1875–6). Indeed the chronology throughout Hunter-Blair’s account is awry.

  82 John Sproule to JFW, 3 November 1875 (Clark); Kenningdale Cook, sometimes referred to as the ‘editor’ of the Dublin University Magazine, was the ‘proprietor’; he sent Lady Wilde a ‘cordial note of congratulation’ on her son’s debut, along with four copies of the magazine.

  83 WCKW’s contributions to Kottabos up to Michaelmas 1875: ‘First Series’, 261, 292–3, 312; ‘Second Series’, 4–5, 6–7, 80–1,124, 134–5, 161.

  84 Kenningdale Cook to OW, 21 July 1877, in Mason, 67.

  85 JFW to LVK, 6 May 1875, in Tipper, Kraemer, 56–7.

  86 JFW to [Hilson], [May 1875], in Ellmann, 33.

  87 JFW to OW [July/August 1875] in Tipper, Oscar, 32–3; JFW to OW [January 1876] ‘of course he [WCKW] must marry Katy’. Tipper, Oscar, 19–20.

  88 Bodley ‘Diary’, 31 October 1875: ‘White knows Armstrong by repute, he says old Wilde is a damned compromising acquaintance.’ Although the phrase has often been attached to OW (e.g. McKenna, 9), Bodley uses the term ‘old Wilde’ consistently in his diary to refer to WCKW. In one instance he even adds ‘old’ with a caret to make the distinction clear: 6 December 1875, ‘Went later in the evening to the Churchill where Wilde was elected… I sang for the first time old Wilde’s “Song of the Glass”.’

  89 Catalogued as [Unknown Person] to James R. Thursfield, 1 November 1875 (Clark). The letter, addressed from Oriel College, is signed ‘Lt’ i.e. Lancelot [Shadwell]; Shadwell and Thursfield were the two university proctors for 1875, see Historical Register of the University of Oxford (1900). Ellmann, 64, misdates the incident to 1876. The other undergraduates were Arnold Fitzgerald, Foster Harter and Baillie Peyton Ward.

  90 [Bodley] ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’, mentions that ‘an es
pecially painful interview with a proctor at a college consecrated to the education of youths from the Welsh mountain-wilds reminded Oscar that moderations were at hand.’ It also led to him getting a First. Jesus is the Oxford college with strong Welsh connections, and Thursfield the only proctor from Jesus during Wilde’s time at Oxford.

  Chapter 2: Heart’s Yearnings

  1 De Sales La Terrière, Days that Are Gone, 75.

  2 CL, 40.

  3 Florence Ward, ‘Diary’, 23 June [1876] (Magdalen).

  4 Bereisner, ‘Oscar Wilde: A University Mason’; OW was not present at the meeting when his membership was announced, though he does seem to have attended the following meeting, on 6 December 1875, when Bodley (as he records in his diary) ‘sang for the first time old Wilde’s “Song of the Glass” [from Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse].’

  5 For nicknames see Florence Ward’s diary; De Sales La Terrière, Days that Are Gone; and CL, 14n, 15n.

  6 Hunter-Blair, 119–20.

  7 Hunter-Blair, 124–5.

  8 Hunter-Blair, 125–8; St Aloysius was opened on 23 November 1875; Mass was celebrated by Dr Ullathorne, bishop of Birmingham, and the sermon preached by Cardinal Manning. Hunter-Blair’s account is slightly garbled.

  9 Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, My Reminiscences (1883) 2:133–4; [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  10 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph and Review, 134.

  11 OET I, 6; 7–9; the lines for the early version, regarding the nightingale, were converted into a separate piece, ‘By the Arno’.

  12 Hunter-Blair, 128–9.

  13 The lectures were held twice weekly from 2 to 27 November 1875.

  14 E. T. Cook, The Life of John Ruskin (1911) 2:26; M. L. Woods, ‘Oxford in the Seventies’, 281.

  15 Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), 231; the passage originally appeared in Pater’s review ‘Poems by William Morris’, Westminster Review, 34 (1868). Pater had dedicated his book to ‘C. L. S.’ – [Charles] Lancelot Shadwell, the proctor and Oriel don to whom OW had behaved so insultingly at the Clarendon Hotel in November 1875.

  16 Pater, ‘Conclusion’.

  17 ‘Mr Pater’s Last Volume’, OET VII, 243; OW, writing in 1897, claimed to have read the book in his ‘first term’ at Oxford (CL, 735); and it is certainly possible, although he frequently misremembered such details in his desire to appear precocious, or to obscure his intellectual debts. There are surprisingly few traces of Pater in OW’s early Oxford writings. He is not mentioned in OW’s letters before 1877. The revised version of OW’s poem ‘San Minato’, probably worked on in late 1875, contains an echo of Pater’s phraseology from the chapter on Winckelmann (OET I, 222), and OW’s essay ‘The Women of Homer’ – which may date from the summer of 1876 – refers approvingly to Pater’s prose style. It was not, however, until 1877, at the beginning of his fourth year, that OW met Pater. OW’s copy of The Renaissance has not been traced. WCKW’s copy of the 1873 edition – with marginalia possibly by OW – is at the Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco; it is inscribed ‘WCK Wilde, 1877’ (thanks for Thomas Wright for this information). From 1875 up until Trinity term 1876 Pater gave a course of lectures on ‘Republic of Plato – Book I’ for students from Brasenose, Magdalen, Oriel and five other colleges taking ‘final school of Literae Humaniores’ (‘Greats’). OW – still in his second year – did not attend; Mason, 101. But it is likely that Ward, who was in the year above, did go to these lectures. By the time OW was reading for ‘Greats’ the lectures on Plato were being given by a ‘Mr Henderson’ of Wadham.

  18 Harris, 28.

  19 OW, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, OET VI, 11.

  20 Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 128. Ross also notes Pater’s admiration for archaic Greek culture.

  21 ‘Preface’ and ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, in Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

  22 ‘The modern student most often meets Plato on that side which seems to pass beyond Plato into a world no longer pagan, based upon the conception of a spiritual life. But the element of affinity which he presents to Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek, and alien from the Christian world, represented by that group of brilliant youths in the Lysis, still uninfected by any spiritual sickness, finding the end of all endeavour in the aspects of the human form, the continual stir and motion of a comely human life.’ From Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

  23 The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Groskurth, 101–2; Ellmann, 58.

  24 Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge’, in Pater in the 1990s, eds Laurel Brake and Ian Small (1991), 1–20, gives a full account of the scandal and its aftermath, quoting letters from Milner (and Arnold Toynbee) to Philip Gell, as well as A. C. Benson’s Diary on the interview between Jowett and Pater.

  25 Bodley, ‘Diary’, 8 December 1875.

  26 JFW to OW, [Jan 1876], re. Sir William’s talk ‘of letting No. 1 furnished – Amen. I am content – A great change might do us good – Sir W to Moytura. Willie to Chambers, you in Oxford. I – Lord knows where. Tipper, Oscar, 18, 21,

  27 R. J. Le Poer Trench to OW, ‘Sunday’ [1875], in Clark (catalogued as ‘French, R. J. to OW).

  28 OET I, 330–1; OW, ‘Scrapbook’, refers to the poem as being written partly at Clonfin (December 1875), partly at Oxford. Published May 1876.

  29 JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 24–5.

  30 JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 25–6.

  31 Lewis R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 57: ‘We only knew of him as a… “freak”, who wrote poetry’; Gower, My Reminiscences, 2:133–4, refers to OW’s ‘long-haired head’.

  32 JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 20.

  33 CL, 32; ‘Rome Unvisited’ – as it appeared in Poems (1881) – was first published in the Month (September 1876) as ‘Graffiti d’Italia – Arona. Lago Maggiore’.

  34 CL, 16n, 32.

  35 JFW to OW, ‘Monday Night’ [March 1876], in Tipper, Oscar, 22–3.

  36 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph and Review; OET I, 330; the poem is entitled ‘To the Author of “Graffiti d’Italia”’; OW has marked the cutting optimistically ‘perhaps by Newman’.

  37 JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 25–6; Tipper suggests that it was the ‘worldliness’ rather than the Catholicism that Mahaffy objected to.

  38 De Sales La Terrière, Days that Are Gone, 75.

  39 Hunter-Blair, 122.

  40 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 16.

  41 JFW to Sir Thomas Larcom, in Melville, 128.

  42 Sherard, Life, 27–8.

  43 T. G. Wilson, Victorian Doctor – Being the Life of Sir William Wilde (1942), 311.

  44 Belfast News-Letter, 24 April 1876, mentions on the funeral at Mount Jerome Cemetery ‘the coffin, on which one of the sons of the deceased placed several handsome wreaths of immortelles and camellias’; J. E. C Bodley to OW, 20 April 1876, in Clark; World, 26 April 1876.

  45 JFW to Thomas Larcom, in Melville, 131.

  46 CL, 20; in his poem ‘O Loved one lying far away’, OW refers to his father’s ‘helping hand’; OET I, 29.

  47 ‘O Loved One Living Far Away’; ‘The True Knowledge’ and ‘Lotus Leaves’ also seem to refer to WRWW’s death. OET I, 29, 19–20, 26–8.

  48 Melville, 132; WRWW’s will was lost in 1922 when the Four Courts building in Dublin, including the Irish Public Record Office, was destroyed during the civil war.

  49 JFW to Sir T. Larcom, in Melville, 132.

  50 JFW to Sir T. Larcom, in Melville 132–3, says both loans were dated ‘5 June last’ (i.e. 1875); JFW to OW [1876], in Tipper, Oscar, 31–2, gives the date of ‘the last £1,000’ loan as ‘1874’; Amor, ‘Heading for Disaster: Oscar’s Finances’, 38, gives the date ‘November 1874’ for the Moytura loan, and the amount as £1,260.

  51 JFW to OW [1876], in Tipper, Oscar, 31–2; Ellmann suggests that WRWW might have giv
en it to his former mistress.

  52 JFW to Sir T. Larcom, in Melville, 132–3.

  53 JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 26–7.

  54 Inland Revenue to JFW, 7 August 1884 (Clark), the re. WRWW’s will: legacy and succession duty still due ‘in respect of leasehold property in Bray and Clonfeacle to Mr Oscar F. O. F. Wilde for which you and your co-executor are responsible’. Other papers in Clark show that OW held the Clonfeacle property in conjunction with various members of the Maturin family.

  55 JWF to Sir T. Larcom, in Melville, 133.

  56 ‘In the Midnight’, Dublin University Magazine, January 1877; JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 46.

  57 Melville, 133; JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 36–7.

  58 JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 43.

  59 Sherard, Life, 30–32.

  60 Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 36.

  61 CL, 19, 17.

  62 CL, 17; Florence Ward ms diary (Magdalen); Marion Fowler, Blenheim (1998), 68.

  63 Florence Ward, ms diary.

  64 Florence Ward, ms diary.

  65 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 16–17.

  66 De Sales La Terrière, Days that Are Gone, 75.

  67 Gower, My Reminiscences, 2:133–4.

  68 Hunter-Blair, 129.

  69 Private and Public Galleries of Holland and Belgium (1875); OW’s copy is in Clark. Three Hundred French Portraits representing Personages of the Courts of Francis I., Henry II., and Francis II., by Clouet. Autolithographed from the originals … by Lord Ronald Gower (1875); Some passages of the life and death of the Right Honourable John, Earl of Rochester / reprinted in facsimile from the edition of 1680; with an introductory preface by Lord Ronald Gower (1875).

  70 Hunter-Blair, 130.

  71 OW to R. Harding, CL, 19; the beautiful but ‘flighty’ Maria ‘Minnie’ Preston had married the 4th Earl of Desart in 1871; they divorced in 1878 on account of her affair with the actor Charles Sugden, whom she subsequently married, and – in 1891 – divorced.

  72 CL, 18.

  73 CL, 18.

  74 CL, 20; D. Inman, The Making of Modern English Theology: God and the Academy at Oxford, 1833–1945 (2014), 175.

  75 CL, 20.