Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

52 OW, ‘Grosvenor Gallery’, Irish Daily News, 5 May 1879, OET VI, 18.

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

  54 WCKW to Miss Campbell, Thursday [30 January 1879] (Clark); the stories referred to in the letter had appeared in the World, 29 January 1879, 12; Harris, 32. WCKW to Ellen Terry, 19 November 1879 (Leeds) refers to editing the ‘Christmas Number’ of Vanity Fair, and ends, ‘I hope you got my notice of the Merchant [of Venice] in the Irish Daily News.’ It is possible that WCKW was writing for other papers as well.

  55 OET VI, 16–18; CL, 79; OW’s only other foray into criticism during 1879 was an unsigned review for the Athenaeum of J. A. Symonds’ new volume Sketches & Studies in Italy, in which he praised the author’s keen appreciation of beauty and lamented his occasional want of linguistic restraint.

  56 Edmund Yates to WCKW, 30 January 1879 (Houghton); Yates seems to have had a belief in the cachet of the Newdigate Prize. William Money Hardinge, winner in 1876, contributed verse to the World: see W. M. Hardinge, ‘A Benediction’, World, 19 March 1879, 14; ‘A Chance Meeting’, World, 27 August 1879, 13.

  57 W. L. Courtenay, The Passing Hour (1925), 118. Courtenay lists Yates and Harry Cust as the only two people he heard who, at their best, came ‘somewhere near’ OW as a conversationalist.

  58 ‘The Conqueror of Time’; see OET I, 104–16. When the poem appeared in OW’s 1881 volume, Poems, it was re-titled ‘Athanasia’.

  59 World, 4 June 1879, 9: the ball took place on the evening of Thursday 29 May 1879. Charles Dilke described Mrs Douglass-Murray as ‘agreeable but rather superfine’. Stephen Gwynn, The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke (1917).

  60 Harris, 32.

  61 The prize was not awarded that year. A very full – but not finished – manuscript of OW’s essay is preserved at Clark. OW’s correspondence makes no reference either to his submitting the work, or failing to win the prize. See OET IV, xxii.

  62 CL, 78; Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 100–1.

  63 CL, 79.

  64 CL, 78n. OW’s application for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum gave as his ‘Purpose’: ‘Study of Greek and Latin literature with ref. to University career.’

  65 Harris, 29.

  66 He published two poems in Waifs and Strays, vols 1 and 3: ‘Easter Day’ and ‘Impression de Voyage’; Mason, 216–18; R. Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories (1922), 10.

  67 Gower, My Reminiscences, 2:320. The visit was in December 1879.

  68 CL, 80–1, 84; Oscar Browning, Memories of Sixty Years (1910), 281–2, mentions a visit in October 1879 when he and OW ‘went together to the A.D.C. Some of the actors came to supper with me afterwards.’ H. E. Wortham, Oscar Browning (1927), 185.

  69 CL, 86; Francis Adams, ‘Frank Miles’, Boomerang, 5 May 1888, 9, quoted in Meg Tasker, Struggle and Storm, the Life and Death of Francis Adams (2001).

  70 Marillier, quoted in Fryer, ‘Harry Marillier and the Love of the Impossible’, 3; diary entry ‘July 1879’ in Laura Troubridge, Life Amongst the Troubridges (1999), 152.

  71 OW, quoted in Harris, My Life and Loves, 457.

  72 William Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors (1882), 210, quoting ‘An English Aesthete’ from the Boston Herald. This article (with other early American press reports) claims that OW’s afternoon receptions were held by candlelight with the blinds down, but this seems to be a confusion with Lady Wilde’s parties, and is not supported by the contemporary accounts of known visitors, such as Lillie Langtry or Laura Troubridge.

  73 Troubridge, Life Amongst the Troubridges, 152.

  74 CL, 86 and n; Vanity Fair, 13 December 1879, gives the picture’s theme as ‘An Ocean Wave’.

  75 Marillier, quoted in Fryer, ‘Harry Marillier and the Love of the Impossible’, 3.

  76 ‘The New Helen’ was to have appeared in the June 1879 number of Time, but was held over for the July edition, 400–2. Edmund Yates to OW, 20 May 1879 (Austin); the delay was due to Yates having committed to two long topical poems by Violet Fane and ‘Mr Scudamore’. Violet Fane to OW [May 1879] (Austin), re. the delay in publication: ‘I don’t see “The New Helen” in the advertisement of the contents of Time – perhaps our fat Editor [Yates] put it by for next time, thinking that, like the beauty of the original it would keep.’

  77 ‘The Apostle of Beauty in Nova Scotia’, Halifax Morning Herald, 10 October 1882, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 170; CL, 65, n.3.

  78 Sarah Bernhardt, My Double Life (1907), 297–8. The crowd was not huge; indeed there are references to ‘the scanty, but not the less eager contingent of sightseers’, ‘Arrival of Comédie Français’, Daily News, 2 June 1879.

  79 CL, 80; in a mixed programme, including two plays by Molière (Le Misanthrope and Les Précieuses Ridicules) Bernhard played Act 2 of Phèdre.

  80 WCKW to Miss Campbell [June 1879] (Clark).

  81 ‘Queen Henrietta Maria’, World, 16 July 1879, 18; ‘Portia’, World, 14 January 1880, 13.

  82 CL, 81.

  83 Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 211, quoting ‘An English Aesthete’ from the Boston Herald.

  84 Ward, in Mikhail, 14: ‘She had tried to see how high she could jump and write her name with a charcoal on the wall. From the scrawl on the side of the room and not much below the ceiling it seemed that she had attained a considerable success in the attempt.’ H. Marillier, memoirs, ‘Sarah Bernhard had scrawled [her name] in large letters with a carpenter’s pencil right across one panel.’ Quoted in Fryer, ‘Harry Marillier and the Love of the Impossible’, 3.

  85 Quoted in Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, The Divine Sarah (1992), 151; Christian Krogh, ‘Fitz Thaulow and Oscar Wilde at Dieppe, 1897’, New Age, 10 December 1908, in Mikhail, 349.

  86 ‘Humanitad’, OET I, 96; CL, 107, indicates that OW had confided to Ellen Terry at least his former devotion to Florence.

  87 CL, 107.

  88 OW to Henry Irving, 13 Salisbury Street [on St Stephen’s Club letterhead] [1979], requesting seats for Mrs Langtry for Hamlet. Ref 8497 in Henry Irving Correspondence online in HI Foundation Centenary Project; CL, 91.

  89 Lillie Langtry to OW [1879], quoted in Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, 138: ‘I called at Salisbury Street… I wanted to ask you how I should go to a fancy ball here.’ W. Graham Robertson, Time Was (1931), 70.

  90 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 95; Langtry describes the lectures as occurring at King’s College London, and during her ‘first season’ – i.e. 1877. But the course of lectures, by C. T. Newton, keeper of classical antiquities at the British Museum (and president of the Hellenic Society), was given at University College, in May/June 1880; see ‘Literary Miscellany’, Leeds Mercury, 29 May 1880. Langtry and OW’s presence made the lectures ‘fashionable’ and ensured that ‘the aesthetic world was… strongly represented’. ‘London Gossip’, Hampshire Telegraph, 16 October 1880.

  91 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 150–1; Violet Hunt, ‘My Oscar’, quoted in Secor, ‘Aesthetes and Pre-Raphaelites’, 402. Ellmann, 109, recounts that Ruskin ‘drove [Langtry] out of the room in tears with one of his diatribes against Jezebels. “Beautiful women like you hold the fortunes of the world in your hands to make or mar,” he called after her retreating form.’ But Hunt’s terse account does not allow for this gloss. Langtry could just as well have been moved to tears of awe by the tribute paid to her beauty by the great man.

  92 Ricketts, 29; The ‘Jersey lily’ (amaryllis belladonna) had been associated with Lillie Langtry ever since Millais had exhibited her portrait entitled ‘A Jersey Lily’ at the Royal Academy in 1878, depicting the Jersey-born Langtry holding a single bloom of amaryllis belladonna. ‘The Jersey Lily’ became her nickname.

  93 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 93.

  94 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 96.

  95 OET I, 118–21, 278; although the inscription ‘To L. L.’ certainly suggests a connection to Lillie Langtry, she is not very recognizable in the shy, flitting grey-green-eyed creature in the poem. Moreove
r, it should be noted that OW was not above writing poems to one person and then dedicating them to another. He adapted his sonnet ‘Helena’ – written for Modjeska – into ‘Camma’, a sonnet celebrating Ellen Terry. See OET I, 290.

  96 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 96; Vincent O’Sullivan to A. J. A. Symons, 26 May 1937 (Clark): ‘I think that Wilde was certainly in love with Langtry during his first years in London… She was not in love with him at all, and I feel sure that she never gave him anything.’

  97 Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, 160–6.

  98 Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, 140.

  99 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 96; Gerson, Lillie Langtry, 54.

  100 Lillie Langtry to OW, Shipley, Derby, ‘Monday’ [1879–81] (Austin); she was ‘so disgusted’ with herself ‘for forgetting till this moment all about the brougham’.

  101 ‘London Gossip’, Hampshire Telegraph, 16 October 1880.

  102 Frederick Locker Lampson, My Confidences (1896), 309–10; World, 3 December 1879, 9: ‘Here is a correct copy of some lines that were written by a well-known society versifier, and handed about at Mrs Millais’ on Friday night [a party at which OW was present]:

  For MRS LANGTRY

  When youth and wit and beauty call,

  I never walk away;

  When Mrs. Langtry leaves the ball

  I never care to stay.

  I cannot rhyme like Oscar Wylde

  Or Hayward (gifted pair!) [Abraham Hayward, 1801–84]

  Or sing how Mrs. Langtry smiled,

  Or how she wore her hair.

  And yet I want to play my part,

  Like any other swain;

  To fracture Mrs. Langtry’s heart –

  And patch it up again

  103 For OW’s copy of Lord Ronald Gower’s A Pocket Guide to the Public and Private Galleries of Holland and Belgium (1875) at Clark see Thomas Wright, ‘Tite Street Books at Clark Library’, Wildean 48, 88–90

  104 OW ‘L’Envoi’, preface to Rodd’s Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf (1882); in which Rodd’s sonnet ‘Une heure viendra qui tout paiera’ appears. In Rodd’s own annotated copy of the book, the poem is marked ‘Tournai, 1879’, W. Schrikx, ‘Oscar Wilde in Belgium’, Revue des Langues Vivantes, 37 (1971), 122.

  105 OW lecture, ‘The Renaissance of English Art’, 1882.

  106 Paul de Reul, quoted in Schrikx, ‘Oscar Wilde in Belgium’, 119–20.

  107 Schrikx, ‘Oscar Wilde in Belgium’, 126–7; the lines are from Peck’s poem, ‘A Monsieur de Reul’, dated ‘Diekirch 25 Juillet, Dans un café’; Mathilde Thomas confirmed that the young Englishman referred to was OW rather than Rodd. Jacques Peck died in 1882, acclaimed as a harbinger of the Aesthetic ‘Eighties generation’ in Dutch literature. Xavier de Reul’s art historical studies focused particularly on Rubens; he – like OW – was a great admirer of the artist’s Christ Bearing the Cross at Brussels.

  108 Walter Sickert to Alfred Pollard, 27 August 1879 (private collection); Helena Swanwick, I Have Been Young (1935), 65–6.

  109 Swanwick, I Have Been Young, 64–5; Oswald V. Sickert to Edward Marsh, 30 August 1895 (Berg).

  110 CL, 82.

  111 Harris, 39.

  112 Harris, 36, 38.

  113 CL, 84.

  114 Harris, 39; CL, 156.

  115 The examination, held at Trinity, commenced on 23 September 1879, at 9.30 am. ‘The subjects of examination will be such as are recognized in the Classical Schools’, Oxford University Gazette, 17 July 1879, 487.

  116 Lewis R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 70–1.

  117 CL, 87. The Trinity fellowship was awarded to Mr James Saumarez Mann MA, late of Exeter College (Oxford University Gazette, 10 October 1879, 17). The examination for two classical fellowships at Merton was announced on 4 November 1879. On the day of the exam (23 December) OW was in London; CL, 85.

  118 CL, 85.

  119 CL, 87–8.

  120 Marillier, quoted in Fryer, ‘Harry Marillier and the Love of the Impossible’, 3.

  121 OW to ‘Mr Silter’, [n.d], 13 Salisbury Street; OW claimed to be in demand (‘As I have one other offer I should be glad to hear from you soon what you intend to do about matters this summer’) but this may have been a ploy to help close the arrangement. Bloomsbury Auctions, 20 August 2015, lot 402.

  122 Constance Westminster to OW, 4 January [1880] (Austin).

  123 Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories, 23; flooding was not infrequent in London at this period. Morning Post, 28 August 1879, mentions flooding in Lambeth and ‘the damage inflicted… upon the inhabitants of the poorer districts’ being of ‘a most serious character’.

  124 George E. Woodberry to C. Eliot Norton, 25 April 1882 (Houghton), in Ellmann, 192.

  125 CL, 85.

  126 J. Ruskin to OW, ‘Thursday’ [December 1879] (Berg): ‘My dear Oscar, I can manage nicely (I find) to be at Ovington Sq by 4 tomorrow; and very happy in being there I shall be – as you made me all through Sunday.’

  127 The visit occurred on a ‘Sunday Morning’ in December 1879; David Waller, The Magnificent Mrs Tennant (2009), 238.

  128 J. Ruskin to OW, ‘Thursday’ (Berg).

  129 This was the verdict Ruskin passed on to OW after the visit; Waller, The Magnificent Mrs Tennant, 238.

  130 CL, 84.

  131 L. B. Walford, Memories of Victorian London (1912), 147–8; much of the material in the book is based on contemporary letters and diary entries written by Lucy Bethia Walford’s friend and ‘sister’ (identified by John Cooper of Oscar Wilde in America (OWIA), as Mrs Humphrey Ward); Walford, though, misdates the above incident to 1874, most likely a misreading of ‘1879’.

  Chapter 2: The Jester and the Joke

  1 Hake and Compton-Rickett, The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton, 1:172–3.

  2 Lady St Helier, Memories of Fifty Years (1909), 180.

  3 ‘Postlethwaite from a new point of view’, World, 16 February 1881, 7–8.

  4 Sherard, Life, 168.

  5 Hugh and Mirabel Guinness, Imperial Marriage (2002), 34; OW to Mrs Maxse, Salisbury Street [1879?] (BL), inviting her and Violet to tea.

  6 Troubridge, Life Amongst the Troubridges, 152, entry for 30 June 1879, at a tea party given by Charles ‘Tardy’ Orde, a cousin of the Troubridges and Creswells.

  7 Adrian Hope, Letters of Engagement (2002), 6. Another of the Troubridges’ cousins, Charlie Orde, took a different line, refusing to allow OW to introduce him to Ellen Terry, as it might ‘destroy the illusion and he preferred to imagine [actresses] to be really the beautiful beings they appeared to be on the stage’, 91.

  8 Fletcher had become engaged to Lord Wentworth (Byron’s grandson) in October 1879, after meeting him in Venice. Plans for the wedding, to be held in Rome, were well advanced when, on Christmas Day 1879, the engagement was dramatically broken off by Lord Wentworth. Although the reason was not made public, Wentworth had discovered that Fletcher’s mother had divorced (or separated) from her father, before taking up with Mr Benson. Fletcher, devastated by the blow, became dangerously ill in Rome. She recovered, and revisited London later that year, but never married. Lord Wentworth married Mary Stuart-Wortley on 30 December 1880; CL, 82 n2.

  9 C. Hamilton Aidé to OW (Austin), asking OW to call on the Count Bonzenta, ‘to whom I introduced you & make the acquaintance of his charming wife – it is possible you or your brother might be of some service to them. She is to appear on the London boards in May. She seems to be a very gifted and sympathetic woman – her name under which she is well known in America is “Modjeska”. The address is no. 6 Half Moon Street.’

  10 CL, 90, 99; OET I, 152, 290. An early ms version of OW’s poem ‘Camma’ (Clark) is titled ‘Helena’ and was composed for Modjeska; see M. Sturgis, ‘From Cleopatra to Camma’, Wildean, 50 (2017), 97–100. Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 18 June 1881, 12, re. report in ‘Figaro’ of ‘the faithful Mr. Oscar Wilde’ at Modjeska’s new production. Modjeska to Frank Miles, 18 Feb
ruary 1881 (Clark), re. studio. World, May 1881, re. the charity bazaar in aid of the National Hospital for the paralysed and epileptic, at the Duke of Wellington’s riding school. CL, 95, re. ‘The Artist’s Dream’ by ‘Madame Helena Modjeska. Translated from the Polish by Oscar Wilde’, in The Green Room; Helena Modjeska, Memories and Impressions (1910), 396.

  11 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 20.

  12 OW to Mrs Maxse, 13 Salisbury Street [1879] (BL), ‘I have been so busy with my play that I have had no time to come and see you and arrange for our art pilgrimage to the National Gallery’; also William Powell Frith’s painting A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881; The Hampshire Advertiser, 8 January 1881, ‘Notes on Current Events’, re. the Grosvenor Gallery opening.

  13 William Powell Frith, quoted in Christopher Wood, William Powell Frith (2006), 211.

  14 John Coleman, Charles Reade – As I Knew Him (1903), 266.

  15 William King Richardson to Dudley [Lincoln], 29 May 1881 (Houghton).

  16 Violet Hunt, ‘My Oscar’, quoted in Secor, ‘Aesthetes and Pre-Raphaelites’, 402–4.

  17 CL, 88, 93, 94, 101, 102, 108, 114.

  18 Violet Hunt, ‘My Oscar’, quoted in Secor, ‘Aesthetes and Pre-Raphaelites’, 403; Ellmann, 221.

  19 C. Hale-White, ‘A Tribute to Mark Rutherford’, ts, Bedford Public Library, Mark Rutherford Resource, MS. JHW7, 25–29 (I am grateful to Thomas Wright for alerting me to this source). Arthur Hughes’s second daughter, Agnes, married John-Henry [Hale-]White in 1891, and her recollections are reported in the manuscript. Other guests at Wandlebank included Theophil Marzials, the Macdonalds, Huxleys, Darwins, Burne-Joneses and Rossettis – but there is no evidence that OW met any of them there.

  20 Hale-White, ‘A Tribute to Mark Rutherford’. The manuscript gives a full account of OW’s ghost story, involving a haunted piano that would play mysteriously during the night.

  21 The origins and date of OW’s friendship with Burne-Jones are impossible to fix exactly. There were, of course, other mutual friends, including Ruskin, who might have brought them together. David Waller, in The Magnificent Mrs Tennant, 195, records a curious entry in Mrs Tennant’s diary apparently for 27 December 1876: ‘Had to labour to amuse Mr Burne-Jones and Mr Oscar Wilde. Oh how bored. Vexed.’ It is curious, because OW was certainly in Ireland in late December 1876. Harold Hartley (Eighty-Eight Not Out, 269) claims that he was told by Miss Holiday (sister of the artist Henry Holiday) that OW simply arrived chez Burne-Jones, one day, in a velvet jacket, holding a lily in one hand and letter of introduction in the other. But the account seems fanciful, even if Burne-Jones did hold an open studio on afternoons which might have allowed OW to call in this way.