25 RR to Adela Schuster, CL, 1229.
26 Maguire, 34.
27 CL, 578; Gertrude Pearce, in Ellmann, 389–90.
Chapter 4: Enemies of Romance
1 CL, 581.
2 CL, 585.
3 CL, 581.
4 CL, 625; Sturge Moore, ed., Self-Portrait, 124.
5 CL, 581–2; OW’s plan for the final play in his ‘triple bill’ is unknown, but it may have been another quasi-biblical drama about Pharaoh and Moses. Ricketts recalled a conversation with OW (in 1895) about La Sainte Courtisane, which then leads to a discussion of Pharaoh, perhaps suggesting that, in his mind at least, the two were linked (Ricketts, 40). Guy & Small, 121, suggest that LWF was intended to be part of OW’s triple bill – assuming the three plays were to played on separate nights, but this seems unlikely. Triple bills of short plays – all played as part of single evening programme – were a popular feature of the late Victorian theatre. One of the most successful had been launched in 1891 by Brandon Thomas, comprising his own Lancashire Sailor, Weedon Grossmith’s A Commission and Cecil Clay’s A Pantomime Rehearsal.
6 The scenario (Clark) is printed in Mason, 383–5; CL, 589. OW had been nurturing a connection with Mansfield for some time; see Richard Mansfield to OW, 10 August 1888 (Austin), thanking him for his ‘kind letter’.
7 CL, 588; Among those threatening legal action were Rooper & Whately, of 17 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, who wrote to OW on 17 February 1894 regarding his overdue account with Powell Turner & Co. – for £14 4s 10d – requesting settlement by Wednesday or proceedings will be started (Clark); writ dated 30 May 1894 for Peter Robinson (of 216 Oxford Street) against Oscar Wilde, for £30 3s 7d, for drapery, hosiery and millinery goods (plus £3 3s costs) (Washington). OW to ‘Dear Sir’ [26 April 1894] (BL, RP 6688) re. Goring: ‘I don’t really knw what I owe you – as I have lost yr account… I enclose a chque for £13 which I think is what I owe you.’ ‘Theatrical Mems’, Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 27 March 1894.
8 Saturday Review, 24 March 1894, 317–18; S. Weintraub, Aubrey Beardsley (1976), 56; R. Ross, quoted in Sutton, ed., Letters of Roger Fry, 21: ‘[OW] loathed the drawings to Salomé but dared not say so’; CL, 587.
9 Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, 160; Ada Leverson, ‘The Last First Night’, Criterion, January 1926, in Mikhail, 270; LAD, Oscar Wilde and Myself, 60: Harris, 76.
10 A. Beardsley to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, 1 March 1894, in H. Maas, J. L. Duncan and W. G. Good, The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley (1970), 65; Harris, 75.
11 CL, 390; 577; F. C. Burnand to Ada Leverson, 2 April 1894 (Clark); Speedie, Wonderful Sphinx, 63.
12 CL, 695–6; Hyde, LAD, 51–2; CL, 621.
13 LAD to Charles Kains Jackson, 30 March 1894 (Clark), ends ‘I am going to Constantinople this June for many months’; CL, 696; MQ to LAD, 1 April 1894, in Ellmann, 394; Moyle, 236–7.
14 Croft-Cooke, Bosie, 97–8; James Wallis to H. M. Hyde, 10 August 1948; the song had been written by OW’s friend Corney Grain.
15 Linda Stratmann, The Marquess of Queensberry (2013), 178: the examination took place on 10 April 1894. CL, 588–9; LAD to Charles Kains Jackson 9 April 1894 (Clark). LAD departed on Saturday (14 April).
16 CL, 588, 589; see also Ricketts, 52, for further comments by OW; The Critic (US), quoted in Karl Beckson, Aesthetes and Decadents (2005), i.
17 Some twelve months later the Era printed a paragraph saying ‘It has come out that Mr Hare refused An Ideal Husband after reading the piece, and paid Mr Oscar Wilde £100 for so doing’ (‘Theatrical Gossip’, Era, 30 March 1895). This may be the root of the oft-repeated claim that Hare turned down the play because he disliked the last act (see CL, 578). But, as Guy & Small, 123, point out, this is not supported by Hare’s letter to OW, in which the only problem indicated seems to be about scheduling the play. And the notion that Hare’s reservations were technical and contingent – rather than aesthetic and absolute – is also suggested by a letter from OW to ‘Harry’ [Morrell] on Albemarle Club letterhead: ‘Will you wire to Waller at Brighton to say that Hare’s definite decision cannot be obtained till Thursday at 12 o’clock. Therefore he need not come up Tomorrow as I can do nothing’ (TCD). Contract for AIH between OW and Waller and Morrell, 20 April 1894, for ‘sole English and Australian rights’ (Clark); it specified that OW was to be consulted about the cast, and that OW ‘would object’ to the play being put on at the Avenue Theatre, but not the Trafalgar, the Shaftesbury or the Court. The financial arrangement involved with Hare is unknown. OW had had a ‘contract’ with Hare to write the play (CL, 686) which would certainly have included an advance against royalties, and maybe – as indicated in the Era – OW was able to retain at least some of the money. But it is likely he would have had to repay something when he took back his manuscript. There is a letter from a Mr Matthews to OW, 7 June 1894 (Clark), on Garrick Theatre letterhead, thanking him for his ‘cheque’ and wishing his play ‘every success’. OW would have been able to write such a cheque having received monies from Waller and Morrell. The new arrangement, though not officially announced, was common theatrical gossip that May. See William Archer to OW, 29 May 1894 (Austin). Elisabeth Marbury to OW, 9 July 1894 (Clark), mentions OW having already received £300 from Frohman for the US performing rights and being due to receive a further £300 after he has made ‘changes and improvements in the MS… to his satisfaction’.
18 Niederauer and Broche, eds, Henri de Régnier, 386.
19 Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels, eds, Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from her Diaries and Letters (1983), 55–6.
20 Samuels, Bernard Berenson, 218; Bernard Berenson, Sunset & Twilight (1964), 320; this also corrects Ugo Ojetti’s mis-quoting of OW’s remark in his diary (‘I am a Christian, and like Christ will speak evil of no one’). Freya Stark (a friend of Berenson’s) gives another variant: ‘I am like God in every way and must have constant praise.’ Freya Stark: Selected Letters (1988), 283.
21 Felix Mansfield to OW, 22 May 1894 (Clark).
22 André Gide to H. de Régnier, [30 May 1894], in D. J. Niederauer and H. Franklyn, Correspondance (1891–1911) André Gide, Henri de Régnier (1997), 139–141; LAD, Autobiography, 87–9.
23 Mason, 392–4; O’Sullivan, 217; ‘Mr Oscar Wilde and Edgar Poe’, Daily News, 11 June 1894; PMB, 21 June 1894; Athenaeum, 25 August 1894; PMG, 9 July 1894; Punch, 21 July 1894. CL, 593.
24 John Boon, Victorians, Edwardians and Georgians (1929), 1:200–1; Harris, 108; Melville, 243.
25 Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, Imperial Marriage (2002), 74; Morning Post, 26 July 1894; Blunt, My Diaries – Part One, 177–9.
26 Stratmann, Marquess of Queensberry, 182–4; CL, 708, Harris, 101; MQ to Lady Douglas [Minnie], 18 February [1895] (BL).
Chapter 5: Scarlet Marquess
1 Holland, 56–9; The second ‘gentleman’ has often been referred to as a ‘boxer’ or ‘rough’; in the press reports of OW’s trial he is referred to as ‘Mr Pip’ – suggesting perhaps a reference to Dickens’s Great Expectations. But the full trial transcript (in Holland, 57) records OW saying, ‘[the gentleman] was introduced to me by Lord Queensberry as a Mr Pape, as well as I remember that is the name’. Edward James Pape, a property dealer of Portland Place (Stratmann, Marquess of Queensberry, 162), was one of Queensberry’s confidants. MQ to Alfred Montgomery, in Hyde, Trials, 154–5.
2 CL, 708; Hyde, Trials, 154–5.
3 CL, 763, McKenna, 387–8.
4 George Lewis to OW, 7 July 1894 (Austin).
5 C. O. Humphreys to MQ, 11 July 1894, in Hyde, Trials, 162.
6 MQ to H. O. Humphreys, 13 July 1894, in Hyde, Trials, 162–3; MQ witness statement 1895, in McKenna, 388.
7 Hyde, Trials, 162.
8 MQ to H. O. Humphreys, 18 July [1894], in Hyde, Trials, 163: CL, 708.
9 LAD to Percy Douglas, 19 August 1894, in Stratmann, Marquess of Queensberry, 190.
10 Harris, 101; not the Pelican Club, which closed in 1891, re-emerging as the National Sporting Club. Boyd, A Pelican�
�s Tale, 95; Boon, Victorians, Edwardians and Georgians, 1:200–1; Harris, 99.
11 CL, 598, 708.
12 Hyde, Trials, 154.
13 CL, 589; Harris, 101–2.
14 CL, 594.
15 CL, 708; LAD to Percy Douglas, 19 August 1894, in Stratmann, Marquess of Queensberry, 190.
16 CL, 594–5; Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion, 307. The visit was in mid-August.
17 CL, 594; O’Sullivan, 35.
18 CL, 594.
19 Melville, 246–9; Moyle, 212.
Chapter 6: A Capacity for Being Amused
1 CL, 598; LAD to James Agate, 18 November 1940, quoted in James Agate, The Selective Ego (1976), 54: LAD gives himself the credit, saying, ‘[OW] originally planned [it] to be an eighteenth-century play… Oscar told me the idea of the play two or three times before he wrote it. I suggested that it would be much better to make it modern, and he said, “I believe you are perfectly right,” and he adopted my suggestion.’ Interestingly, Charles Frohman, in a letter to OW (2 March 1893) at Clark, asked for ‘a modern School for Scandal style of play’.
2 CL, 595–7.
3 Moyle, 243; Antony Edmonds, ‘Alphonse Conway – the “Bright Happy Boy” of 1894’, Wildean, 38 (2011), 20–3; LAD to A. J. A. Symons, 8 October 1935 (Clark).
4 CMW to Arthur Humphreys, 1 June 1894 (BL); CMW to Arthur Humphreys, 11 August 1894 (BL); CMW to Arthur Humphreys, 22 October 1894 (Clark).
5 CL, 598–9; Ellmann, 241; Agate, The Selective Ego, 54; R. Mangan, ed., Gielgud’s Letters (2004), 53; Antony Edmonds, ‘Chronology of Oscar Wilde in Worthing in 1894’, Wildean, 43 (2013), 108–9.
6 V. Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, 43; Moyle, 246; quoted in Antony Edmonds, Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer (2014), 13.
7 CL, 715.
8 Edmonds, ‘Alphonse Conway’, 30–4. Conway was born on 10 July 1878, so was just sixteen when OW met him, not ‘fifteen’ as in McKenna, 402, nor ‘about eighteen’, as OW claimed in court. CMW to Otho Lloyd, 31 August 1894, in Moyle, 247.
9 Edmonds, ‘Alphonse Conway’, 27.
10 Alphonse Conway witness statement, quoted in McKenna, 402; the ‘witness statements’ were intended to focus on OW, and to exclude references to LAD.
11 CL, 603; McKenna 410.
12 CL, 610. The chronology of OW’s letters to G. Alexander and LAD from Worthing (CL, 598–610) is certainly incorrect. They should, I think, be reordered: (1) OW to G. Alexander, CL, 610; (2) OW to LAD [8 September], CL, 607–8; (3) OW to LAD (not 13 August, but 10 September, as convincingly re-dated by Antony Edmonds, in ‘Bosie’s Visits to Worthing 1894’, Wildean, 39 (2011), 26ff); (4) OW to G. Alexander, CL, 599–600. I have based the narrative of the following paragraphs on that re-ordering.
13 CL, 607, OW had first made these points about America in his letter at CL, 610; and surely reiterated them up in London.
14 CL, 599–600.
15 CL, 602, ‘Mr Oscar Wilde on Mr Oscar Wilde’, St James’s Gazette, 18 January 1895, in Mikhail, 250.
16 John Gambril Nicholson, Love in Earnest (1892); the sonnet ‘Of Boy’s Names’ contains the line ‘Tis Ernest sets my heart aflame.’ The notion, however, that ‘Earnest’ was a contemporary code-word for homosexual is not supported by any evidence, and was emphatically rejected by John Gielgud, who – as he said – ‘would have known’ (The Times, 2 February 2001, 19); in the printed version of the play the address was changed to ‘B.4.’
17 Geoff Dibb, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Cardew Family’, Wildean, 33 (2008), 2–12: both Arthur and Herbert Cardew were contemporaries of OW at Magdalen. Their elder brother, Philip, had a daughter Cicely (not Cecily) Cardew, born on 2 May 1893. OW was charmed by the sound of her name.
18 There was a well-connected Bunbury family from Ireland, who were known to the Wildes (Henry S. Bunbury wrote to OW to congratulate him on winning the Newdigate). But there seems to be little to connect them with the character in OW’s play. The writer and occultist Aleister Crowley claimed in 1913 that the name was a portmanteau of Banbury and Sunbury, concocted by OW after he had met a good-looking schoolboy on a train going to the former place, and then arranged an assignation with him at the latter. But, although, Crowley did meet OW, he is a notoriously unreliable witness. T. d’Arch Smith, Bunbury: Two Notes on Oscar Wilde (1998).
19 CL, 602, 610; as a process in the composition OW had a first draft of the play typed up around the middle of the month. The draft is stamped 19 September, most probably the date the work was completed, rather than when the ms was handed in. Edmonds, ‘Chronology of Oscar Wilde in Worthing’, 110.
20 CL, 607; Moyle, 239; J. H. Badley to OW, 15 September 1894 (Clark), thanking him for the cheque, agreeing with OW about ‘the power of reading and writing English well being of far more importance than the acquirement of information’, and approving OW’s proposal to let Cyril bring OW’s ‘Canadian canoe’ to school.
21 The ‘Venetian Fete’ was held on the evening of Thursday, 13 September. Worthing Gazette, 19 September 1894, in Antony Edmonds, ‘Wilde and the Worthing “Festivals”’, Wildean, 40 (2012), 28–9.
22 CL, 607.
23 CL, 615.
24 CL, 615.
25 LAD to Hesketh Pearson, 13 Nov 1944 (Austin); CL, 615; John St John, William Heinemann: A Century of Publishing (1990).
26 CL, 617; Beckson, 124.
27 Harris, 107; LAD to Hesketh Pearson, 13 Nov 1944 (Austin).
28 CL, 607. Edmonds, ‘Chronology of Oscar Wilde in Worthing’, 110–11; A. Conway witness statement, in McKenna, 402.
29 Holland, 146–51; A. Conway witness statement, in McKenna, 403.
30 CL, 697.
31 CL, 618, 696–8.
32 CL, 710.
33 MQ to Alfred Montgomery, 1 November 1894, quoted (in slightly different transcriptions), in Stratmann, Marquess of Queensberry, 201–2, and Ellmann, 402.
34 National Archives J77/532/16267/1, quoted in Stratmann, Marquess of Queensberry, 184.
35 James Lees-Milne, The Enigmatic Edwardian (1986), 99; McKenna, 334–5, 426.
36 MQ to Lady Douglas (Percy’s wife), 12 May 1895 (BL); Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003), 191; CL, 618; the debate was occasioned by Grant Allen’s article in the Fortnightly Review on ‘The New Hedonism’, calling for personal liberty in heterosexual relationships.
37 CL, 625; Jack Bloxam to Kains Jackson, 19 November 1894. Bloxam credited Ives with suggesting the ‘very good’ title. It related, perhaps, to a passage in The Green Carnation in which Lord Reggie is described as ‘one of the most utterly vicious young men of the day… because, like the chameleon, he takes his colour from whatever he rests upon, or is put near. And he has been put near scarlet instead of white.’
38 CL, 623.
39 Guy & Small, 129–30.
40 Julia Neilson, This For Remembrance (1940), 139–40, in Mikhail, 243–4; CMW to Lady Mount Temple, 8 December 1894, in Moyle 252.
41 Florence Waller to OW, 11 December 1894 (Clark); Pearson, 246; Gilbert Burgess, ‘An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket Theatre: A Talk with Mr. Oscar Wilde’, Sketch, 9 January 1895, in Mikhail, 242.
42 Pearson, 246–7.
Part VIII: The House of Judgement
Chapter 1: The Last First Nights
1 ‘London Correspondence’, Freeman’s Journal, 27 May 1895; G. B. Shaw to Golding Bright, 30 January 1895, in Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 1874–1897, 480. Shaw excused OW’s words with the suggestion that it was ‘an Irishman’s way of giving all credit to the actors and effacing his own claims as author’.
2 Saturday Review, 12 January 1895.
3 Ian [Forbes] Robertson to OW, 13 January 1895 (Clark).
4 ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde on Mr. Oscar Wilde’, St James’s Gazette, 18 January 1895, in Mikhail, 246–50.
5 Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 79. Conan Doyle describes the incident as happening ‘many years’ after his first meeting with OW in 1889.
6 Burgess, ‘An Ideal Husb
and at the Haymarket Theatre’, in Mikhail, 239–44; ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde on Mr. Oscar Wilde’, St James’s Gazette, 18 January 1895, in Mikhail, 246–50.
7 Burgess, ‘An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket Theatre’, in Mikhail, 241.
8 Moyle, 253. CMW seems to have gone to Babbacombe in the first week of February 1895.
9 Guy & Small, 130.
10 Guy & Small, 256.
11 Val Gielgud, Years in a Mirror (1965), 178.
12 G. Alexander to C. O. Humphreys, Son & Kershaw, 12 September 1895.
13 Guy & Small, 255 CL, 629.
14 Donald Sinden, ‘Diversions and Digressions’, Wildean, 16 (2000), 13–14, quoting Joan Benham, daughter of the stage manager at the St James’s Theatre.
15 CL, 629.
16 CL, 629.
17 A. Gide, ‘Oscar Wilde: In Memoriam’, in Mikhail, 296.
18 Mikhail, 297 4n.
19 André Gide to his mother, in Jonathan Fryer, André & Oscar (1997), 115.
20 André Gide to his mother, in Jonathan Fryer, André & Oscar (1997), 115.
21 Gide, ‘Oscar Wilde: in Memoriam’, in Mikhail, 296.
22 CL, 632; Francis Douglas, Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas (1949), 41. It was Algy Bourke, a ‘cousin’ of the Douglases, who had got wind of Queensberry’s planned outrage; the news was passed on to Wilde by Percy Douglas.
23 CL, 631.
24 Leverson, ‘The Last First Night’, in Mikhail, 267, mentions OW arriving ‘with his pretty wife’; others present included the recently knighted Sir George Lewis, Lord Hothfield, Mr and Mrs Bancroft, Mr Stuart Ogilvie, Mr Inderwick QC, Judge Baon and Mrs Bernard Beere. Leeds Mercury, 15 February 1895.
25 Irene Vanbrugh, To Tell My Story (1948), 33–5, in Mikhail, 265.
26 Leverson, ‘The Last First Night’, in Mikhail, 267–70; ‘The Drama’, Daily News, 15 February 1895.
27 CL, 729.
28 A. E. W. Mason, Sir George Alexander & the St James’ Theatre (1935), 79.
29 CL, 632.
30 CL, 709.
31 CL, 795–6.
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