The Illustrated letters of Oscar Wilde E-Book

Juliet Gardiner

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

"I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do anything one does. I lived on honeycomb." Oscar Wilde Although it is over 120 years since his infamous trial for indecency, Oscar Wilde has never held greater fascination for us. This packed illustrated biography tells the life of Oscar Wilde through his own words – private letters, poems, plays, stories and legendary witticisms. It includes his relationships with key artists and writers of the time, including John Ruskin, Charles Ricketts, and Lillie Langtry. It is illustrated throughout with paintings, engravings, contemporary photographs, cartoons and caricatures of Wilde and his social circle. With illustrations and paintings by Aubrey Beardsley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Whistler and Max Beerbohm, it is a beautiful evocation of the glittering fin de siecle word by its most fascinating wordsmith and aesthete. The book details Wilde's ruin after the trial and its outcome. The profundity of his writing from prison and exile form an epitaph, not only to his own life, but also for the era that carelessly delighted in it.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

‘YOUTH HAS A KINGDOM WAITING FOR IT’

CHAPTER 2

‘IT IS ALWAYS NICE TO BE EXPECTED AND NOT TO ARRIVE’

CHAPTER 3

‘THE ARTIST CAN EXPRESS EVERYTHING’

CHAPTER 4

‘I BECAME THE SPENDTHRIFT OF MY OWN GENIUS’

CHAPTER 5

‘I HAVE GOT AS FAR AS THE HOUSE OF DETENTION’

OSCAR WILDE AND HIS CIRCLE

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, by James McNeill Whistler, the painter Wilde admired more than any other. The subject is Whistler’s Irish model and mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, standing by the mantlepiece in his house in Lindsey Row, Chelsea. A piece of fashionable blue-and-white porcelain lends an aesthetic touch. The picture, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868, was a move away from the realistic school of painting which, in Whistler’s view, lacked imagination and despised charm. It was complemented by a ballad entitled ‘Before the Mirror’ by the poet Swinburne. The second verse read:

Art thou a ghost, my sister,White sister there,

Am I the ghost, who knows?My hand a fallen rose,

Lies snow-white on white snows,and takes no care.

INTRODUCTION

‘And I?’ Oscar Wilde had said from the dock of the Old Bailey on 25 May 1895, ‘May I say nothing…?’ But Mr Justice Wills waved aside the interruption and ‘the most brilliant talker, the most witty, the most audacious’ personality of fin de siècle London was led down in silence to begin a sentence of two years’ hard labour for acts of gross indecency.

And never a human voice comes near

To speak a gentle word

And the eye that watches through the door

Is pitiless and hard.

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’

‘The dinner table was Wilde’s event and made him the greatest talker of all time, and his plays and his dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation, now a record, of his talk,’ summed up Wilde’s fellow Irishman, the poet and dramatist W.B. Yeats. ‘I had never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labour, and yet all spontaneous.’ The writer André Gide reflected that ‘Wilde did not converse, he narrated,’ and those sentences, that narration (written and spoken), were the mark of a natural wordsmith revelling in the possibilities and paradoxes of language. The same quality of immediacy, characterized by humorous or astringent asides, dominates his letters to a wide range of recipients: lovers, friends, family, actor/managers, newspaper and magazine editors, admirers and detractors. It is from this multifarious correspondence, as well as the outpouring of plays, stories, articles and essays, that this telling of Wilde’s life derives.

A Dream of Patience: the opera Patience, subtitled ‘Bunthorne’s Bride’, was a satire on the aesthetic movement in which the ‘perfectly precious’ young aesthete loses his lady love. Its parodies embraced Rossetti, Swinburne – and less obviously Wilde. But it was Wilde who was to benefit from its whimsy by positioning himself as an utter aesthete and dandy.

‘From Aesthete to Convict (Our Captious Critic)’: A sequence of cartoons reviewing Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of America from The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 21 July 1882. It anticipates with astonishing dramatic irony the events of Wilde’s later life.

‘I hope you will enjoy my ‘trivial’ play,’ Wilde had written of The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened at the Haymarket Theatre on 14 February 1895. ‘It is written by a butterfly for butterflies.’ Wilde, the less than ideal husband, did not understand – or chose not to understand – the importance of being earnest, for it was with his wit that he exposed and challenged Victorian society. He proved a formidable opponent. His epigrams inverted commonplaces and lanced hypocrisies. His aestheticism was ridiculed and yet in its spectacle, intellectual rigour and homo-eroticism, it confronted, and became a slow-burning fuse within, a society grown stale in art as in morality. ‘How strange to live in a land where the worship of beauty and the passion of love are considered infamous. I hate England,’ Wilde had written to Lord Alfred Douglas in November 1894. ‘It is only bearable because you are here.’

Earlier in the year that he went to prison, two of Wilde’s plays (An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest) had opened in the West End of London within little more than a month of one another. Critical acclaim for both plays capped his earlier successes, A Woman of No Importance and Lady Windermere’s Fan. Praise was heaped upon Wilde’s theatrical skill and the perfection of his dialogue. The New York Times was led to conclude that ‘Oscar Wilde may be said to have at last, and by a single stroke, put his enemies under his feet’. But less than three months later his enemies seemed to tower. The Daily Telegraph pontificated on his conviction:

No sterner rebuke could well have been inflicted on some of the artistic tendencies of the time than the condemnation of Oscar Wilde…the man has now suffered the penalties of his career, and may well be allowed to pass from that platform of publicity which he loved into that limbo of disrepute and forgetfulness which is his due. The grave of contemptuous oblivion may rest on his foolish ostentation, his empty paradoxes, his insufferable posturing, his incurable vanity.

Wilde’s tomb in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. He died on 30 November 1900 at the Hôtel d’Alsace on the left bank of the Seine, aged forty-six. Wilde’s faithful friend, Robert Ross, wrote after his death: ‘Later on I think everyone will recognise his achievements; his plays and essays will endure. Of course you may think, with others, that his personality and conversation were far more wonderful than anything he wrote, so that his written works give only a pale reflection of his power. Perhaps that is so, and of course it will be impossible to reproduce what is gone for ever.’ Wilde’s monument, designed by Jacob Epstein, was not finished until 1912.

But the resonance of his words and the recollection of his life have ensured that no blanket of oblivion has settled on Oscar Wilde in the hundred years since that judgement. ‘He has become the symbolic figure of his age,’ pronounced the poet, Richard Le Gallienne, many years after his friend’s death.

‘I have my put my genius into my life and only my talent into my works,’ Wilde explained to André Gide. Yet the fascination of the two is their synergy. When he supplied a volume of his poetry to the Oxford Union, Wilde suffered the humiliation of having it rejected as the poetry of a plagiarist. But if he recklessly plundered anyone’s work, it was his own. Unable to resist his own telling phrases and witty formulations, he re-worked them in his conversation, his letters, his poems and his plays.

The protean and enduring quality of Wilde’s writing, and in particular of his letters – written in love, in anger, in sorrow, but above all in friendship – testify to the truth of the life he told in De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, a high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring…I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder…whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty…I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century…I forgot that…what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry aloud from the rooftops.

A hundred years on, the words of Oscar Wilde continue to echo ever louder from the rooftops.

Dublin from The Three Rock Mountain, Co. Dublin, by William Craig, 1849. By 1854 Dublin had lost much of its importance to become ‘a deposed capital’, with a sharp division between the fine Georgian squares of the south where the Wilde family lived, and the miserable tenements round the River Liffey.

CHAPTER 1

‘YOUTH HAS A KINGDOM WAITING FOR IT’

‘Behold me – me, Speranza – rocking a cradle at this present writing in which lies my second son – a babe of one month old the 16th of this month and as large and fine and handsome and healthy as if he were three months. He is to be called Oscar Fingal Wilde. Is not that grand, misty, and Ossianic?’ wrote Jane Francesca Wilde to a friend. In fact, the names finally bestowed on the infant owed even more to the Gaelic bard – and were even grander – than his mother suggested. The second son of ‘Speranza’ and her husband, William, was born on 16 October 1854 and christened Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde – a string of appellations, drawn from life and legend, that their owner was to edit for his own purposes in adult life.

My name has two O’s, two F’s, and two W’s. A name which is destined to be in everybody’s mouth must not be too long. It comes so expensive in advertisements. When one is unknown, a number of Christian names are useful, perhaps needful. As one becomes famous, one sheds some of them, just as a balloonist,…rising higher, sheds unnecessary ballast…All but two of my five names have been thrown overboard. [Oscar Fingal remained.] Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as ‘The Wilde’ or ‘The Oscar’.

A sketch of the Mound of Douth in Ireland, from The Beauties of the Boyne and Blackwater, by Sir William Wilde, 1850. Oscar’s father was dedicated to the cause of Irish folklore and archaeology.

The flourish of names was to be expected. Mrs Wilde (or Lady Wilde as she became when her husband was knighted in January 1864) was proud to admit that she loved ‘to make a sensation’ and by the time Oscar was born, his mother was a well-known figure in Dublin society and beyond. She was a patriot, a poet and a presence. Deeply affected by the nationalist poetry of others, particularly Thomas Davis, she had found her own distinctive voice in verse, which she first submitted to the editor of The Nation, Charles Gavan Duffy, in 1846 using the nom de plume ‘Speranza’ (Italian for ‘hope’). Speranza’s patriotism had made her a poet and her verses, as her prose, were committed to the cause of freeing Ireland from English rule. Her learning was considerable; she was a linguist, capable of ‘mastering two European languages before I was eighteen’; an adept translator from Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, who scattered her poetry and prose with Greek and Latin epigrams; and she published thirteen books, including collections of her poetry, Irish myths and legends, and translations, including her best known of Meinhold’s Sidonia the Sorceress. A statuesque woman, some six feet tall, with handsome, aquiline features – which she attributed to having been an eagle in a previous existence – she dressed with flair and flamboyance. ‘She is undoubtedly a genius, and won my heart very soon,’ confided the brilliant Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1845, describing her as ‘a very odd and original lady …She is almost amusingly fearless and original, and averse (though in that, as in other respects) she perhaps exaggerates whatever is unusual about her that she likes to make a sensation…I think she has a noble nature (though a rebellious one)’.

An idealized portrait of Jane Francesca Wilde (née Elgee) who as ‘Speranza’ had articulated the ‘madness of lyrical passion’ that swept Ireland in 1848. The editor of The Nation described her as ‘a tall girl...whose stately carriage and figure, flashing brown eyes, and features cast in a heroic mould, seemed fit for the genius of poetry, or the spirit of revolution’.

Speranza’s second son, Oscar, appreciated his mother all his life. Her unwavering support for him and her unshakeable, frequently expressed belief in his genius were matched by his concern, respect and affection for her. In The Importance of Being Earnest he was to lament ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’

A photograph of Oscar Wilde as a young child in Dublin. ‘How is it that I am enthralled by these tiny hands?’ his mother wrote of her sons. ‘Was there a woman’s nature in me after all? Was I nobler then? Perhaps so, but the present is a truer life.’

On 14 November 1851 at St Peter’s Protestant Church in Dublin, Speranza married William Wilde. The bridegroom was eleven years older than his bride. He was an aural surgeon and oculist, whose name has passed into medical terminology, and who, in 1863, was appointed Surgeon Oculist to the Queen in Ireland – available on the spot should Victoria ever have cause to come to Ireland and need such services. He was innovative in his approach to medicine, travelling around Europe in his studies, compiling the incidence of blindness and deafness in Ireland for the census of 1851, and publishing the earliest textbooks in the field of ear and eye surgery. He was reputed to have ‘removed the squint from the eye of a British princess when no one else would attempt the operation’. However, when he attempted to do the same for the father of George Bernard Shaw, he succeeded only in enabling Shaw senior to ‘squint the other way all the rest of his life’.

A print showing St Mark’s Ophthalmic Hospital for Diseases of the Eye and Ear, established by William Wilde in Mark Street, Dublin, in 1844. The hospital grew from humble origins. Wilde converted a stable at home into a dispensary for the poor, run on ‘scientific principles’ and opposed to the ‘shroud of quackery’ surrounding medicine at that time.

William Wilde was also the father of three acknowledged illegitimate children when he married – ‘a family in every farmhouse’ was George Bernard Shaw’s verdict. Henry Wilson (born in 1838) was to join his father in his medical practice. Emily (1847) and Mary (1849) were both adopted by William’s eldest brother, the Reverend Ralph Wilde, and brought up as Wildes until their tragic deaths in 1871 from burns sustained as the one, invited to a ball, pirouetted in her crinoline too close to an open fire, and the other went to her aid. Deaths that were all the more dreadful since the tragedy ‘had to be buried in silence’.

An illustration showing an ancient tomb in the Royal Cemetery of Brugh na Boinne, from The Beauties of the Boyne and Blackwater, by Sir William Wilde. Oscar’s father had a deep love of Ireland and its culture. He compiled A Descriptive Catalogue of Irish Antiquities and was awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Cunningham Medal, its highest honour. For those patients unable to pay, he would often barter his medical services for the retelling of ancient folklore and superstitions.

Soon three children born in wedlock paralleled the three born outside the institution of marriage. William Charles Kingsbury Wills was born on 26 September 1852; Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills a little over two years later. Both boys owed the name Wills to their cousins, landowners in County Roscommon who numbered the playwright W.G. Wills among the family. William was called for his father, with Kingsbury added in deference to his mother’s family. Oscar and Fingal were both taken from Irish legend, Oscar being the name of the son of Ossian, the third-century Irish warrior poet, killed at the battle of Gabrha in single combat with King Cairbre. Fingal was Ossian’s father, and also the hero, in Ossian’s poems, who delivered Erin from her enemies. The Galway name, O’ Flahertie, derived from the ‘ferocious O’Flaherties’, linked back to William’s father’s grandmother. On 2 April 1857, the third child, a daughter, was born and christened Isola Francesca. She was soon deemed to have ‘fine eyes’ and the promise of ‘a most acute intellect’ by her mother, who added, ‘These two gifts are enough for any woman’.

A portrait of Sir William Wilde by Erskine Nicol, 1854. A respected surgeon and oculist, he was the author of two of the earliest textbooks in the field of opthalmics and his name still describes some medical procedures. He also compiled exhaustive medical statistics for the Irish census of 1851 which revealed the terrible consequences of the 1840s famine.

William (or Willie as he was known) and Oscar were both born in Dublin at 21 Westland Row. In June 1855 when Oscar was nearly a year old and, according to his mother, ‘a great stout creature who minds nothing but growing fat’, the family’s increasing prosperity allowed them to move up in the world. In later life Oscar was to claim that he had been born at the house they now moved into, complete with the trappings of a French maid, a German governess and six servants. The house, a large Georgian residence with imposing ironwork balconies, had one of Dublin’s smartest addresses, 1 Merrion Square.

The Seafront at Bray, Co. Wicklow, by Erskine Nicol, 1862. The Wilde family had a house at this seaside resort near Dublin, and it was whilst staying at Bray with Oscar and Willie in May 1864 that Lady Wilde was further harassed by the activities of one Mary Travers. This young Dublin woman published a series of pamphlets lampooning the Wildes as Doctor and Mrs Quilp, and alleging that when she was his patient several years before, Sir William had administered chloroform and raped her in his consulting rooms.

A drawing of the Maiden Tower from The Beauties of the Boyne and Blackwater, by Sir William Wilde. When the great historian Macaulay was writing his history of England, and came to inspect the site of the Battle of the Boyne, it was William Wilde who was his guide.

With its ‘fine rooms and the best situation in Dublin’, Merrion Square was perfect for entertaining. Speranza’s nationalist fervour seemed to have abated after the failure of the 1848 uprisings. ‘I take an interest now in children beyond all other objects in life,’ she wrote after Oscar’s birth. ‘Revolutions may agitate and dynasties fall, but I have scarce a thought for them…a woman cannot live for her country and her children.’ The Wildes kept a renowned salon. There would be dinner parties and soon gatherings for dozens of guests on a Saturday afternoon, comprising professional colleagues of Sir William, government officials, academics, and any artist, writer or performer who happened to be passing through Dublin. Even though it was daylight, the curtains were kept drawn – Speranza rose late and, even when a young woman, preferred to socialize in the semi-gloom. The boys were often allowed to attend these social occasions, but they had to sit quietly and not speak.

Then, when Oscar was almost ten and Willie was twelve, they were sent away to Portora Royal School at Enniskillen in County Fermanagh – until then the boys had been largely tutored at home.

A sketch of Merrion Row, Dublin, by Walter Frederick Osborne. With its ‘fine rooms and the best situation in Dublin’, 1 Merrion Square, where the Wildes moved in 1855, was perfect for Speranza’s role as a hostess to Dublin society – and to any interesting artist, writer or poet who happened to be visiting the city.

Perched on a hill overlooking Lough Erne, with a Protestant clergyman, the Reverend William Steele D.D. as its headmaster, Portora was a public school that enjoyed a high academic reputation coupled with relatively reasonable fees of £17 10 shillings a term per pupil. Oscar’s considerable ability was obvious from the first – ‘I was looked on as a prodigy by my associates,’ he told a friend towards the end of his life, ‘…quite frequently, I would, for a wager, read a three-volume novel in half an hour so closely as to be able to give an accurate résumé of the plot of the story: by one hour’s reading I was enabled to give a fair narrative of incidental scenes and the most pertinent dialogue.’ Speranza was soon boasting: ‘Willie is all right, but as for Oscar, he will turn out something wonderful.’ Oscar’s literary and aesthetic inclinations were evident in a letter he wrote home dated September 1868:

Darling Mama, The hamper came today, and I never got such a jolly surprise, many thanks for it, it was more than kind of you to think of it. Don’t please forget to send me the National Review…The flannel shirts you sent in the hamper are both Willie’s, mine are one scarlet and the other lilac but it is too hot to wear them yet. You never told me anything about the publisher in Glasgow, what does he say? And have you written to Aunt Warren on the green note paper?

He also enclosed a drawing captioned ‘ye delight of ye boys at ye hamper and ye sorrow of ye hamperless boy’. Unsurprisingly, Wilde had little interest in games at school, ‘I never liked to kick or be kicked’, though ‘nearly everyone went in for athletics – running and jumping and so forth…No one appeared to care for sex. We were healthy young barbarians and that was all. Knowledge came to me through pleasure, as it always comes, I imagine.’

Wilde found this transfixing pleasure at Portora when he became absorbed in his lifetime affair with antiquity. ‘I was nearly sixteen when the wonder and beauty of the old Greek life began to dawn upon me…I began to read Greek eagerly, and the more I read the more I was enthralled.’ One of the masters at Portora was a Mr J.F. Davies who, in 1866, had published an edition with commentary of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Wilde was caught up with its literary resonances and read deeper into Greek and Latin texts, translating them orally with such facility that he easily beat the boy who was later to become a distinguished professor of Latin at Trinity College at a viva voce on the Agamemnon. In 1870 he won the Carpenter prize for Greek testament and the following year was one of three pupils awarded a Portora Royal School scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin.

The roll of honour at Portora Royal School where Oscar Wilde was a pupil from 1864–71. When he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, Wilde’s name was emblazoned on the board. When he was sent to prison it was erased. Now restored, the gilt letters stand a little proud of those above and below.

However, whilst Oscar was away making a stir, despite his pronounced boredom with school – ‘Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught’ – there had been a tragedy at home.

Oscar Wilde was twelve when his younger sister Isola, aged nine, died of fever in the spring of 1867. The local doctor who ministered to her – she was staying with an uncle and aunt in the country – described Oscar at the time as ‘an affectionate, gentle, retiring dreamy, boy…whose lonely and inconsolable grief found its outward expression in long and frequent visits to his sister’s grave in the village cemetery’. Sir William wrote that Isola’s death had made him ‘a mourner for life’. Lady Wilde tried to find consolation in her remaining children, but it was hard. ‘My sons were home for the vacation,’ she wrote to her friend, the Swedish writer, Lotten von Kraemer, on black-edged paper, ‘fine clever fellows – the eldest quite grown-up looking – I thank God for these blessings. Still a sadness is on me for life – a bitter sorrow that can never be healed.’ In 1875 she wrote to condole a bereaved friend: ‘I know too well the grief you suffer. Eight years have passed since I, too, stood by a grave – but the sorrow knows no change and sometimes it deepens with the bitterness of despair.’

A sketch of Sir William and Lady Wilde by Harry Furniss. ‘Do you know me?’ Sir William is supposed to have asked a fellow member of the British Association in 1874, ‘I’m Wilde.’ ‘By God, you look it,’ was the reply, whilst his six-foot wife is reputed to have reprimanded a servant for stacking plates on the coal scuttle, since ‘What are the chairs meant for?’

Oscar Wilde, too, felt diminished by his sister’s death. He kept a lock of her hair in an envelope with the words ‘My Isola’s Hair’ and ‘She is not dead but sleepeth’ written above two linked wreaths, one surrounding an ‘O’, the other an ‘I’. Later, when a young man travelling in France, he wrote a poem, ‘Requiescat’, expressing his own sense of melancholy at this early loss:

Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The daisies grow.

The Four Courts, Dublin, by Walter Osborne. In December 1864, as in 1895, a member of the Wilde family appeared in court over a libel case. In 1864 Mary Travers sued Lady Wilde for libel over a letter Speranza had written to Travers’ father. This complained of his daughter’s ‘disreputable conduct’ in disseminating ‘tracts in which she makes it appear that she has had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde’. The jury found libel proved, but awarded Miss Travers only a farthing in damages.

All her bright golden hair

Tarnished with rust,

She that was young and fair

Fallen to dust…

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear

Lyre or sonnet,

All my life’s buried here,

Heap earth upon it.

The Signature of Oscar Wilde on the rules of Trinity College, Dublin. In October 1871 Wilde matriculated as a junior freshman at Trinity. It was here that one of his tutors was the Greek scholar J.P. Mahaffy, whose pretensions Wilde was to later mock as ‘Aristotle takes tea...’

Trinity College had a high academic reputation for classical scholarship – and one man in particular liked to think of himself as its exemplar. Two years before Oscar Wilde went up, the Reverend J.P. Mahaffy – who had certainly attended one of his mother’s salons – had been appointed to its Chair of Ancient History. The thirty-two-year-old Mahaffy was a considerable polyglot. Apart from his familiarity with classical Greek and Latin he was fluent in German, highly competent in French and Italian and wellversed in Hebrew. For Mahaffy civilization was vested in the Greeks (which he pronounced ‘Gweeks’). Wilde was tutored in Latin at Trinity by another fine classicist, Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, who had been appointed Professor of Latin at the young age of twenty-five. Less obviously a man of all talents than the showier Mahaffy, Tyrrell was a kinder man and a more rigorous – if less flamboyant – scholar than his colleague. Wilde was well served. It was at Trinity that, in his mother’s words, he received ‘the first noble impulse to your intellect that kept you out of the toils of meaner men and pleasures.’

And the pleasures brought rewards. In his first year Wilde could hardly have done better, coming top of those in the first class; in a competitive examination in 1873 he received one of ten highly sought-after Foundation Scholarships, and when he scored the highest mark in a taxing examination on Meineke’s Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets in 1874, he was awarded the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek.

A lithograph of Trinity College, Dublin. Founded in 1592, it is the oldest university in Ireland. Wilde had rooms on the north side ‘of one of the older squares, known as Botany Bay [which] were exceedingly grimy and ill-kept.’ He never entertained there. When rare visitors were admitted, an unfinished landscape in oils was always on the easel in his sitting room. He would refer to it in his humorously unconvincing way [saying] that ‘he had just put in the butterfly’.

Willie Wilde, who had preceded his brother at Trinity, and who had won a Gold Medal for Ethics, left Ireland for London in 1872 to study law at the Middle Temple. Oscar determined to follow his brother to England. Mahaffy did not discourage him as he was not convinced that Wilde would be offered a fellowship at Trinity on graduation. Sir William, who had become anxious that his younger son was dallying with Catholicism, anticipated that a break with Ireland might effect a desirable rupture with the seductions of Popish ways.

On 23 June 1874 Oscar Wilde presented himself at Magdalen College, Oxford, to sit the examination for one of the two Demyships (scholarships)in classics that the college was offering. Each was worth £95 a year and was tenable for five years. He sat the exam with frequent interruptions to request more paper – his generous hand covered sheet after sheet with spidery writing that only managed to fit in four words to a line. ‘One wonders,’ pondered a fellow Demy scholar, ‘if examiners ever mark by weight.’ Again, he came top.

The young Wilde at Oxford, 1878. ‘The two turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and when Society sent me to prison,’ wrote Wilde in recollection.

Oscar Wilde found the ancient city of Oxford entirely to his taste – it was ‘the most beautiful thing in England’ and the three years he spent there were ‘the most flower-like time’ of his life. It was the interlude which honed his aesthetic taste and temperament. He had rooms in Magdalen on which he spent considerable thought – and a not insubstantial amount of money – equipping them with fine glass for entertaining, candles, ornaments, and most notably a pair of blue Sèvres vases which he filled with the aesthete’s favourite flower, the languorous lily. ‘I find it harder every day to live up to my blue china’ was a widely circulated remark that made him infamous in undergraduate circles where he was to be caricatured as ‘O’Flighty’.

Within the small, intense world of Oxford, Wilde soon became both famous and somewhat notorious. ‘He was,’ recalled one G.T. Atkinson, his fellow Demy scholar, writing in The Cornhill Magazine in 1929, ‘a personality from the first’:

A cartoon of Wilde in Punch as Harold Skimpole, the childlike character in Dickens’ Bleak House. Wilde, however, saw his youthful aestheticism rather less whimsically. ‘I was a man,’ he was to write, ‘who stood in symbolic relation to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards.

His hair was much too long, sometimes parted in the middle, sometimes at the side and he tossed it off his face with much the same gesture that is used by the flapper today. His face was colourless, moon-like, with heavy eyes and thick lips: he had a perpetual simper and a convulsive laugh. He swayed as he walked, and lolled when at table. I never saw him run…He came up having read much more than most of us, including all the ‘fragments’ of the Greek dramatists…Of savoir-faire he had abundance, and also of self-conceit. Sincerity was not his strong point; it was ‘bourgeois’…Charming rooms were given to him overlooking the Cherwell, and he decorated them lavishly. The usual pictures in the ’seventies were hired at Ryman’s, stags crossing a lake, Swiss mountains, or ‘sloppy’ but innocuous portraits of maidens. Wilde had a more luxuriant fancy, and even his chairs were covered with ‘bibelots’ and Tangara statuettes. His scout had to wear slippers – a creak would have caused him agony – and the operation of extraction of a cork from a bottle was performed in his bedroom. The vulgarity of a ‘pop’ was thus obviated…Surely he ought to have been ragged severely for these things, but, though other men were penalised for much less, I never heard of any such visitation on Oscar…In Hall he was a clever talker of the monopolistic type…dining in ordinary clothes was one of his abominations. ‘If I were all alone marooned in some desert island and had my things with me, I should dress for dinner every evening.’