The Fall of the House of Wilde (11 page)

Victorian Dublin tolerated sexual licence for men more than women, naturally. The barrister Isaac Butt, for instance, had as many, if not more, illegitimate children than William – neither was socially ostracised for it. Jane, I suspect, knew. Dublin was too small, social and gossipy for her not to have done. Equally, I suspect, she would not have flinched. In any case, she would have learnt the truth in time, as Henry could not have been William's nephew, nor Emily and Mary Ralph Wilde's children, given that he was unmarried. In due course Oscar would refer to Henry as his cousin, not his half-brother; this may have been to uphold convention.

Jane and William returned to Dublin after their honeymoon and lived in William's house, at 21 Westland Row, which he'd moved to from No. 15 after his mother died in 1848. William resumed his hectic life. In addition to attending to patients during the day, lecturing on science, and writing and delivering papers to the Royal Academy, he found time to put together the 600-page report of the medical census of 1851. William's report is more than a compilation of statistics. It included a general history of Irish medicine, as well as a detailed description of the famine and its impact. He also wrote
Irish Popular Superstitions
, published in 1852, to which we will return. Jane, too, resumed working. Since
Sidonia the Sorceress
, she had translated
Pictures of the First French Revolution
by Alphonse de Lamartine, published in 1850, and
The Wanderer and His Home
, again translated from Lamartine, and published in 1851. Then in 1852, she completed
The Glacier Land
, translated from Alexandre Dumas
père
. The publisher Simms & McIntyre commissioned all three books.

William was a prominent member of a number of Dublin's dining clubs, but one in which both he and Jane were involved was the ‘Mystics'. Dabbling in mysticism led Jane to consider translating Emanuel Swedenborg's
Of Heaven and Hell
, originally written in Latin and first translated into English in 1758. The Swedish philosopher, scientist and mystic appealed to many in the nineteenth century, and a society in London was founded to spread his thoughts. In the end, Jane did not translate Swedenborg, but nor did she lose interest in his work.

Ten months into their marriage, Jane gave birth to a boy on 26 September 1852. Jane and William followed the convention and gave their first-born ancestral names. Christened William Charles Kingsbury Wilde, he carried his father's name in addition to that of Jane's father, Charles, and the name of her mother's family, Kingsbury. Jane surprised herself at how moved she was by the whole experience. She wrote to Hilson, ‘It is like the return of a second youth . . . I scarcely know myself, I who lived in lofty abstractions, who loved objects only for the ideas they incarnated, how is it I am enthralled by these tiny hands?' She reflected on her former life, wondered if it was ‘nobler', and concluded, ‘perhaps so, but the present is the truer life'. But before she ended the letter, she had grown impatient with herself: ‘I think we are all getting stupid since we married, don't you think so? Ponderous, prosy, calculating. All the ethereal vanished . . .
genius should never wed
. You cannot serve two masters.'

Jane experienced what many women feel – the emotional draw of motherhood and regret at the loss of her former independent existence. Having been dubbed Ireland's Madame Roland, she had become Mrs Wilde and ‘mother of Willie'. She wrote to Hilson, ‘I look back on the past as into a former existence, and wonder at my own self that then was. Now I have gone forth into another life with nothing but memory to make me aware of the identity, for all true identity has vanished.' Worse, she discovered another side to William's character hitherto unseen. In reply to Hilson's enquiry about her husband, Jane answered.

And so you know nothing of my husband . . . Well then he is a Celebrity – a man eminent in his profession, of acute intellect and much learning, the best conversationalist in the metropolis, and author of many books, literary and scientific . . . in short he is a man to be proud of as far as intellect goes. But he has a strange, nervous, hypochondriachal home nature that the world never sees – only I and it makes me miserable, for I do not know how to deal with fantastic evils though I bear up grandly against a real calamity. In truth my own energy had sunk under what I have gone through – I am not the same – I have lost hope, faith, confidence, energy. My husband so brilliant to the world envelops himself . . . in a black pall and is grave, stern, mournful and silent as the grave itself. Although naturally I have my high spirit and long warred bravely against his gloom, yet at length his despondency has infected me and am now nearly as gloomy as himself. This is bad, so tell me how to keep up the bright vivid nature I once had, which made all things possible to me – 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 . . .
²

Jane hid her distress in a cloak of virtue, and declared herself bound to the role of a woman fostering a genius. ‘My great soul is prisoned within a woman's destiny – nothing interests me beyond the desire to make him happy – for this I could kill myself.'
³

In ‘Genius and Marriage', an essay Jane published in a collected volume,
Social Studies
, in 1893, she reflects on relations with geniuses in what at times seems a thinly veiled autobiographical piece. She shows genius all the mercy that would have baffled the former Jane. She makes much of the sympathy, reserve and patience that fostering such a nature requires, and excuses the ‘storms and whirlwinds', ‘the gloom of a midnight despair', the ‘intense, ingrained though unconscious selfishness' afflicting a genius. She exempts geniuses from all responsibilities, including that to a wife and children, and forgives them their inability to love.
⁴

On the other hand, in her essay on ‘The Bondage of Women', also from
Social Studies
, Jane condemns ‘the chief dogma of woman's education', which she describes as ‘husband-worship'. A woman's talent, she says, ‘dies out in despair for want of a definite sphere of action and a suitable reward'. She concludes that ‘women of intellect, especially, cannot accept the routine life of ordinary society and be happy. They revolt against the claims on time and thought of our petty conventional usages; they refuse to accept the limitations imposed by society on freedom of action; they chafe in the fetters of prejudice; and their strong passionate natures spring up elastic against the injustice of laws and the bondage of social fictions'.
⁵

Jane had a modern sensibility as much as she had a Victorian one. She was sufficiently a woman of her social milieu not to be immune to the dictates of Victorian society. She too, like many nineteenth-century women, could fall into martyrdom, and play ‘The Angel in the House', the Victorian model of selfless womanhood depicted by Coventry Patmore in his 1854 poem of the same name.
⁶
It is the conflict that beset many a woman living between the twilight of a conservative era and the dawn of a more emancipated one. Jane was self-aware enough to comment on the problem she faced. As she put it to Hilson, ‘[a] woman, too, must always stoop to the prejudices of Society – it is her duty, and yet, I so hate myself for doing it'.
⁷

She had spent her maiden life struggling against society's prejudices. But Jane had a surprising disposition to enslavement. She once said to Hilson, if somewhat skittishly, her ‘soul needs to worship'; she would be ‘a slave' to her lover, if he possessed ‘a divine mind' worth deifying. And Jane did indeed take an indulgent view of William, worshipping him with a religious zeal that would have surprised her relatives, who knew how egotistical she could be.

Somewhere in this dark-souled genius Jane looked for the makings of a devoted companion. But William preferred to throw his heart into causes rather than yield it to an individual.

William was fiercely independent. He had not married until he was thirty-seven, and may have found coupledom uncomfortable. He was social to an extent, but also intense, and needed solitude. Callers at their house spoke of William holed up in his study, from where he would communicate via a note some message to Jane. His prodigious output could not have been achieved had he not been completely dedicated to work. Jane told Hilson, her husband ‘burns with an infinite desire for the infinite that nothing on earth can satisfy'. He apparently would rather die than face intellectual stagnation.

He had much to show for what Jane referred to as his ‘unceasing mental activity'. In 1853 his
Practical Observations on Aural Surgery and the Nature and Treatment of Diseases of the Ear
was published. This became the standard textbook, enhancing his international reputation and bringing him more patients than he could handle. That same year, he received his first public honour – he was designated the surgeon oculist in ordinary to the Queen in Ireland. As Queen Victoria studiously avoided Ireland, save for one visit after the famine in 1849, this involved no work. The following year, in 1854, William had
On the Physical, Moral and Social Condition of the Deaf and Dumb
published. And somehow he found time to write a two-part article on ‘The Food of the Irish', published in the February and March issues of
Dublin University Magazine
of 1854.

Jane, too, had a biographical piece in the March 1854 issue of
Dublin University Magazine
on her cousin, Sir Robert McClure, who lived at her grandfather's house in Wexford until the age of four. McClure became a naval officer, ending his career as vice-admiral, and is credited with the discovery of the North-West Passage. And for the September issue, she reviewed ‘The Dramas of Calderón', translated by Denis Florence MacCarthy in 1853. Jane's seventeen-page essay marches comprehensively through the life of the dramatist, connecting his work to the history of Spain and the changing shape of its literature and drama.
⁸
Having told Hilson about these two articles, she added, ‘I am engaged now to write another on French literature of the eighteenth century, but it is not begun. This sort of writing brings a great deal of praise and a little small Dublin fame, just enough to make me remember that I once had an intellect; and money it brings too.' She said she no longer wrote without being paid. As she put it, ‘Think of the abysmal bathos into which I have sunk.'

Nevertheless, Jane complained of lassitude and mental torpor. She envied men, their lives scarcely modified by marriage. As she put it to Hilson, recently a father, ‘[you] merely opened another window in the Life Prison that warmer sunbeams might fall on you as you thought and wrought'. Men could keep their minds ‘in a fusion state'. Hers, by comparison, had ‘cooled down into a dull mass. I write occasionally, but never poetry', she said.
⁹

Jane was writing this in 1854 when Willie was but a year and a bit, and she was pregnant with a second child. Marriage was not the romantic bliss she had assumed it would be. We have no reason to believe William's eye for women had stopped wandering. Indeed, it was in July 1854 that he began treating a nineteen-year-old female patient called Mary Travers for a hearing problem. After the professional treatment ended, William and Mary continued to see each other. William asked her father, Robert Travers, if Mary could correct some of his manuscripts, as she had scarcely any money, other than an annual allowance of £16. Robert Travers was a man of high academic attainments, professor of medical jurisprudence at Trinity College and physician to the South Dublin Cholera Hospital, where he lived. Mary was one of five children; her two older brothers lived in Australia, and Mary had a tempestuous relationship with her mother, who no longer lived with her father. William did what he could to help Mary. He gave her direction in her reading and in how she should develop herself intellectually. He took Mary along to public events and included her in family outings. What began as fatherly guidance grew more intimate over time.

Meanwhile, Jane gave birth to a son on 16 October 1854. He was named Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wilde. Only O'Flahertie bears the trace of an ancestral ghost. It comes from the unruly Gaelic clan on William's mother's side, possibly a witty reference to the ancestral rebellious streak in this blatantly un-Anglo name. ‘Oscar' and ‘Fingal' derive from the Celtic mythology made famous by James Macpherson's
Ossian
poems – Oscar is Fingal's grandson, and son of the poet Ossian. Telling Hilson of the name they had chosen, Jane wrote, ‘Is not that grand, misty, Ossianic?'
¹⁰

Within months of Oscar's birth Jane struck up a friendship with Sir William Rowan Hamilton. William knew Hamilton from the Royal Irish Academy – he had been the chair of the Academy when William was elected a member. Hamilton was one of the most brilliant Irishmen of his day. A genius in mathematics since childhood, he was said to have mastered Hebrew, Latin and Greek by the age of seven, and a whole host of European and oriental languages some years later. At Trinity College he won every prize awarded for Greek and the Turner Prize for English verse, but his major claim to fame was his discovery of quaternions. By 1827, at the age of twenty-two, he had been appointed professor of astronomy to Dublin University, and in 1835 he was knighted and made astronomer royal. He also wrote poetry, and was a friend of Wordsworth's, who once said that apart from Coleridge, he had known only one other ‘wonderful' man – William Rowan Hamilton.
¹¹

Jane was introduced to Hamilton when she and William attended a dinner given by Colonel and Mrs Larcom in April 1855. Hamilton was married with three children, and in his early fifties when he met Jane, then thirty-three. It was her outspoken manner that attracted Hamilton, and the encounter left him completely smitten. He rightly discerned that creating ‘a
sensation
' was her lifeblood.