by Colm Toibin
William Wilde and Jane Elgee and, indeed, Isaac Butt were eminent Victorians in Ireland and lived in a time when Dublin had no parliament and when revolutionary fervor in Ireland was ill-fated, half-hearted or part of a literary rather than a serious political culture. They themselves were a strange, unruly ruling class in Ireland, not accepted as fully Irish and not wealthy landowners either. They, with much to say, lived in an in-between state. Until they made connections (William as an antiquarian, Jane as a poet and translator and Butt as a lawyer) with the Ireland of their time, they were oddly powerless. But once the connections were made, their power was considerable.
It depended, however, on the ambiguity of their position, on their ability to draw power from two opposite sides without having fully to obey a set of rules to which either of these two sides adhered.
To a large extent, they could do whatever they liked. William Wilde, for example, had no difficulty in accepting a knighthood for his work on the medical implications of the census returns, and his wife, despite her efforts to be arrested in 1848, was happy to be known as Lady Wilde, and indeed was often referred to in this way by Oscar.
Even though the Wildes were Protestants in a mostly Catholic country, with family origins in England and Scotland rather than Ireland, their loyalty was not only to a distant England, from which some of their power came, but also to a distant Ireland, a dream nation of traces and fragments, a country that might once more, with their assistance, materialize.
What is fascinating is how the duality of their position made its way into the sexual realm. The Wildes and Isaac Butt were an essential part of respectable Dublin society at the height of Victoria’s rule, yet they flouted the rules of sexual morality. Wilde’s illegitimate son, for example, was completely acknowledged by him and also became a doctor, working closely with his father, writing the first book in English on ophthalmoscopy.
The Wildes saw themselves as English or Anglo-Irish as it suited them. Wilde was surgeon oculist in Ireland to the queen and he and his wife’s sense of privilege and power derived from the very oppressor of the ancient culture that they both admired and studied. Their interest in this culture, however, gave them an edge, lifted them out of their own circumstances and gave them an astonishing individuality and independence of mind.
Their dual mandate allowed them to throw good parties and caused them to be noticed and to be remembered. Lady Wilde was prone to grandiloquence, telling a fellow poet: “You, and other poets, are content to express only your little soul in poetry. I express the soul of a great nation. Nothing less would content me, who am the acknowledged voice in poetry of all the people of Ireland.” She saw herself in lofty terms: “I should like to rage through life—this orthodox creeping is too tame for me—ah, this wild rebellious ambitious nature of mine. I wish I could satiate it with Empires, though a Saint Helena were the end.”
Many accounts were subsequently written of the Wildes. George Bernard Shaw remembered William Wilde “dressed in snuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) of being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.” Harry Furniss wrote that
Lady Wilde, had she been cleaned up and plainly and rationally dressed, would have made a remarkably fine model of the Grande Dame, but with all her paint and tinsel and tawdry tragedy-queen get-up she was a walking burlesque of motherhood. Her husband resembled a monkey, a miserable-looking little creature, who apparently unshorn and unkempt, looked as if he had been rolling in the dust . . . Opposite to their pretentious dwelling in Dublin were the Turkish Baths [the baths where Leopold Bloom would go, and Samuel Beckett and his father] but to all appearances neither Sir William nor his wife walked across the street.
W. B. Yeats saw that any understanding of who Oscar Wilde became had to take into account the mixture of formidable intelligence and unmoored strangeness exuded by his parents. “Of late years,” he wrote in The Trembling of the Veil, “I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family history.” Yeats recounted an old Dublin riddle: “ ‘Why are Sir William Wilde’s nails so black?’ Answer: ‘Because he has scratched himself.’ ”
They were famous people [Yeats wrote] and there are many like stories; and even a horrible folk story . . . that tells how Sir William Wilde [as an eye surgeon] took out the eyes of some man . . . and laid them upon a plate, intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes were eaten by a cat . . . The Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles Lever, dirty, untidy, daring . . . and very imaginative and learned.
Lady Wilde, Yeats wrote, “longed always perhaps, though certainly amid much self-mockery, for some impossible splendour of character and circumstance . . . I think her son lived with no self-mockery at all an imaginary life; perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all that he had known in childhood and early youth . . .”
While these accounts were all written many years later—Shaw’s in 1930, Furniss’s in 1923, Yeats’s in 1922—and have to be read in the light of Oscar Wilde’s disgrace and his mother’s eccentric salon in London after her husband’s death, there are contemporary accounts of the Wildes that note their willingness to be strange. Sir William Rowan Hamilton, for example, wrote to a friend about Jane Wilde in 1855 when Oscar was just one year old: “She is undoubtedly a genius herself . . . She is almost amusingly fearless and original and avows (though in that as in other respects she perhaps exaggerates what is unusual about her) that she likes to make a sensation.”
Hamilton wrote her many letters, some oddly ardent, and took her seriously. Although they were easy to mock, the Wildes, like their son, also took themselves seriously. Other contemporary accounts of the Wildes show that they were much respected and admired and were indeed influential.
Sir William, as Terence de Vere White wrote, “set himself against quackery and superstition in medicine. It is only necessary to glance at the advertisements in the newspapers of the day to see how much scope there was for reform.” Wilde’s biographer T. G. Wilson takes the view that he was “one of the two greatest English-speaking aurists of his time.” Wilde was appointed editor of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science. He founded and ran St. Mark’s Hospital in Dublin, one of the leading ophthalmic hospitals in the British Isles. In 1853 he published the first significant textbook on aural surgery, Practical Observations on Aural Surgery and the Nature of Treatment of Diseases of the Ear, which was also published in America and in German translation. The following year he published On the Physical, Moral, and Social Condition of the Deaf and Dumb.
A medical procedure—an aural incision—was called after him, and he was credited with developing the first dressing forceps as well as an aural snare called Wilde’s snare. He was the first to understand the importance of the middle ear in the genesis of aural infections.
Wilde and his wife continued to work on folklore and legend. The young Bram Stoker, when he was alone in Dublin in the early 1870s, gravitated to their house, where there was much talk of ghosts and superstitions. Sir William had published Irish Popular Superstitions in 1852; his wife published two volumes of Irish folklore and fairy lore. Roy Foster wrote of the influence of these books: “Her folklore volumes profoundly influenced the young Yeats . . . they may also have been read by Bram Stoker . . . Both of them [the Wildes] were interested in Transylvanian legends, which may provide a possible link to Dracula.”
In the preface to her second book, Lady Wilde displayed an eloquence that would have made Lady Bracknell proud: “Thus to the primitive races of mankind the unseen world of mystery was a vital and vivid reality; the great over-soul of the visible, holding a mystic and psychic relation to humanity, and ruling it through the instrumentality of beings who had strange powers either for good or evil over human lives and actions.”
While William, in his work as a travel writer, historian, biographer and
antiquarian, could reach what one writer called “outlandish assumptions,” he had, at the same time, or perhaps a moment later, a well-ordered mind and an ability to collect facts, classify and analyze information and write clearly and at times passionately about monuments, ruins and archaeology. He also made a significant contribution to Irish life in his work as a census commissioner.
William Wilde was, in fact, a distinguished statistician. In 1841 when the Census Commission needed to find out more about the causes of death in Ireland and were seeking a doctor with some fluency in Irish, an awareness of folk habits, a knowledge of the country and an enthusiasm for statistics, Wilde was the one chosen, even though he was only twenty-six. The fact that he was a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Association certainly helped, but it may also have mattered that he was a young doctor of modest means and would be likely to do the work.
Collecting information in Ireland was fraught with difficulty. People were suspicious of outsiders coming to investigate them. Thus, as Terence de Vere White wrote, “the first census of Ireland, taken between the years 1813 and 1815, had been a failure. This was partly due to the not unnatural suspicion of the people that any government effort would work to their disadvantage . . .”
William Wilde’s Report upon the Tables of Deaths in the 1841 census ran to 205 tables and 78 foolscap pages of closely written analysis, including a 94-item classification of diseases, using colloquial terms, Irish names and English translations, and then creating a standard system of description by which the diseases could be tabulated. For example, he noted the different terms for scrofula that were commonly used in Ireland: “The Evil, King’s Evil, The Running Evil, Running Sore, Felloon, Bone Evil, Glandular Disease, an Impostume; in Irish Easbaidh bragadh, deficiency in the neck; Fiolún, the treacherous disease; Cneadh Cnáithneach, the wasting ulcer; Cuit bragach, cuts in the neck.” It is obvious from this that analyzing medical census returns required nuanced linguistic knowledge and sensitivity to local lore as much as statistical skills.
In an essay on Wilde’s demographic work, published in the Irish Journal of Medical Science in 2016, P. Frogatt wrote how Wilde
examined the 1,187,347 deaths which the census had enumerated as having occurred since the previous (1831) census, and he looked for any associations between each death and the usual suspects—that is age, sex, occupation, poverty, fever, etc. He had to devise some ingenious methods of calculation of comparative estimates, e.g. he used medians instead of means, “proportionate” mortality and other devices because he had no way of knowing how many births had taken place since 1831, and hence had no base line. Apart from everything else the whole exercise showed Wilde’s grasp of statistical principles, unusual at the time, and his demoniacal energy, drive and ingenuity. The census exercise itself and its enthusiastic reception whetted Wilde’s appetite for more, and he welcomed his appointment as “The Assistant Commissioner” (no longer just a “contracted official”) for the forthcoming 1851 census.
Wilde was a commissioner for the 1851, 1861 and 1871 censuses. In preparing the questions for the 1851 census in Ireland, his inclusion of some questions about physical and mental handicaps was unique and original. Such data had been gathered in no other country. Some of the information was compiled during the main census, other elements by supplementary inquiry. When the returns for 1851 came in, Wilde wrote two of the volumes, more than seven hundred pages, dealing with the information that the census yielded about disease and mortality. He also oversaw the work on the eight other volumes. Since death registration was not introduced in Ireland until 1864, Wilde’s work on mortality was invaluable. And since the statistical work on the 1851 census dealt with mortality during the Great Irish Famine, the information he gathered is immensely important.
Also, because the evidence collected showed the obvious connection between poverty and mortality, Wilde’s work was of considerable political significance and displayed independence of mind since he did not flinch from criticizing the government for its policies on health and social welfare in Ireland, basing his views on his exhaustive and energetic and accurate research. As one historian wrote: “William Wilde saw the practice of scientific medicine as offering a means of deliverance from historical catastrophe for Irish society.”
In his statistical and epidemiological work, Sir William Wilde was at the very center of the Victorian impulse in Ireland, which was to map the country, integrate it, make sense of its past and present. In matching the study of Ireland’s realities and its heritage with systems of study in place elsewhere, as he did, Wilde was effectively undermining the very wildness and otherness of the country that he was at the same time busily charting. Wilde, filled with a mixture of idealism and patriotism and dutiful harmlessness, was part of a system that saw its function as modernizing, civilizing.
Wilde’s high sociability and the hard work he put into so many different projects, some of which required clarity of mind and sharp focus and others of which needed raw enthusiasm and an ability to imagine and speculate, came at a cost or were signs indeed of a complex personality. Frogatt noted
the sheer volume of work which Wilde personally got through with the help of admittedly quite a number of clerks, usually a dozen or so but at times up to 30 or more . . . while at the same time he was also busy conducting his professional medical and other rather more alluring affairs. The pace is caught in the tone of his letter to the Chief Secretary seeking his seemingly originally promised £1,800 fee though now he was being offered only £700 . . . “I gave up all society and recreation for 18 months (November 1854–May 1856) and more than once impaired my health by the incessant daily and nightly labour devoted to this voluminous work.”
Wilde’s enthusiasm for work and company, his general tirelessness, included a dark side that became apparent to his wife. In an undated letter, Jane wrote to a Scottish merchant and man of letters, John Hilson, whom she had befriended before her marriage, that although her husband was, as Emer O’Sullivan quotes in her book The Fall of the House of Wilde,
the best conversationalist in the metropolis, and author of many books, literary and scientific . . . he has a strange, nervous, hypochondriachal home nature that the world never sees . . . My husband so brilliant to the world envelops himself . . . in a black pall and is grave, stern, mournful and silent as the grave itself . . . when I ask him what could make him happy he answers death and yet the next hour if any excitement arouses him he will throw himself into the rush of life as if life were eternal here. His whole existence is one of unceasing mental activity . . .
A year after their marriage, the Wildes’ first son, Willie, was born. Oscar was born two years later, in 1854, and their daughter Isola, in 1857. The year before Oscar’s birth, his father bought Illaunroe, a fishing lodge on Lough Fee in Connemara in the west of Ireland on thirteen acres of land. Later, he built another house ten miles away, at Moytura on Lough Corrib. The year after Oscar was born, the Wildes moved from their house in Westland Row to a much grander Georgian house at Number 1 Merrion Square, where they employed six servants.
The children were included in the atmosphere of sociability and intellectual inquiry to which their parents dedicated their lives. In 1880, Oscar wrote that “at eight years old [he] heard every subject demolished at his father’s dinner table, where were to be found not only brilliant geniuses of Ireland, but also the celebrities of Europe and America.”
In July 1857 the Swedish writer Lotten von Kræmer and her father, who was the governor of Uppsala, visited the Wildes. Although it was one o’clock, the butler let them know that Mrs. Wilde was still in bed. When William Wilde appeared, von Kræmer noted that
the noble figure is slightly bowed, less by years than by ceaseless work . . . and his movements have a haste about them which at once conveys the impression that his time is most precious . . . He carries a small boy in his arm and holds another by the hand. His eyes rest on them with content. They are soon sent away to play, whereupon he g
ives us his undivided attention.
At the time of the Kræmer visit, William Wilde was involved in cataloging the holdings of the Royal Irish Academy, a project that had foundered on a number of occasions and that he had agreed to take on alone. As Emer O’Sullivan wrote: “The catalogue was no mere inventory of objects. It provided a detailed description of every article, together with its history and provenance, demanding in turn a vast hinterland of numbered references, historical suggestions and quotations.”
The work was exhausting and beset with controversy as Wilde decided to use drawings and wood engravings rather than photographs and to catalog by type rather than chronologically. In 1859, he wrote to the council of the academy: “Had I known the amount of physical and mental labour which I was to go through when I undertook the Catalogue, I would not have considered it just to myself to have done it; for I may fairly say, that it has been done at the risk of my life.”
The decision by the academy to stop funding the project caused Wilde much distress. Lady Wilde wrote after his death: “The necessary funds were, at last, collected to continue Parts II and III, Sir William contributing largely, with his usual liberality towards all national objects; but there the work stopped, whether from want of funds or want of interest among members of the Academy, it is difficult to say.”
While part 2 of the catalog was published in 1860, part 3 in 1862, part 1 was completed in time for a visit of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which had a meeting in Dublin in August 1857. As secretary of foreign correspondence to the Royal Irish Academy, William Wilde invited the association’s Ethnological Section to the Aran Islands. Seventy of the members were conveyed to the largest of the islands by a steam yacht chartered in Galway. Wilde led the scholars through the island, jumping over walls and climbing hills, using a small whistle to assemble them.
