The Fall of the House of Wilde (12 page)

Jane crops up in all Hamilton's correspondence of the time, even to such unlikely recipients as fellow mathematician Professor Augustus De Morgan. But to his friend, the poet Aubrey de Vere, Hamilton gave the fullest account of his first meeting Jane. He tells de Vere she is married to Dr Wilde and continues, ‘she is undoubtedly a genius herself, and she won my heart very soon by praising what she had seen of the poems of my deceased sister . . . She is almost amusingly fearless and original – and
avows
(though in that as in other respects she perhaps exaggerates whatever is unusual about her) that she likes to make a
sensation.
We agreed on many points, and differed on some, but on the whole got on very well. I think she has a noble nature (though a rebellious one as I told
herself
 – she
was
a rebel in 1848 for which I don't like her a bit the worse, though I remained on the Queen's side) . . . But Dr Wilde need not be (and is not) jealous, since it was to Lady Hamilton (who could not attend that dinner-party) that I afterwards talked most about
his
wife.'
¹²

Jane asked Hamilton to be godfather to Oscar – her ‘young pagan', as she put it – and Hamilton was utterly taken aback at her blunt request. Why Jane asked a man she had just met to be godfather to her son, we can only speculate. Presumably it had something to do with Hamilton's intellectual eminence, or his connection with Wordsworth – he was godfather to a grandson of Wordsworth's.
¹³
But Hamilton declined the offer, and from his account, Jane was not remotely put out.

Thenceforth Hamilton acted like a besotted teenager, suffering the pangs of puppy love. He tried obsessively to cross Jane's path or, at the very least, hear mention of her name. He befriended William, invited him to Dunsink Observatory, tracked his movements at the Royal Irish Academy to pass on messages to Jane, and called at their home for spurious reasons. He also invited Jane to the Observatory, and in his account of the day brushed lightly over the other guests to speak of Jane reading his poem ‘To the Dargle River', praising her lilting, vibrant voice, which transported him back to his younger days when he was, as Jane astutely surmised, ‘enthusiastic'.

Jane was always eager for new encounters. She was curious about and responsive to people. She liked to broach intimacy; she had a way of getting others to open up, though she revealed little of herself. Hamilton had opened his heart to her, and told her all about his love for his dead sister, Eliza, a mutual devotion by all accounts. After Eliza died, Hamilton had found a poem with her dying words of love and devotion for her brother. Hamilton's relationship with Eliza, it appears, was along the lines of Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy. That is, a highly romantic love in which the unmarried sister adores the brother and the brother feeds off and needs her love as a stimulus to his work. Hamilton's disclosure of his feelings for his sister to Jane touched a raw nerve, and he allowed himself to say more than he had hitherto admitted. Jane was fortunate enough to have read Eliza's poetry, and praised it, naturally. Hamilton then went to untold lengths to track down a spare signed copy of Eliza's verse for her.

But the relationship was not one-sided. Hamilton flattered Jane and gave her the attention her nature craved. Jane may well have been piqued at William's interest in Mary Travers, and here was an eminent scholar who thought Jane a ‘genius' and ‘no mean poet'. He encouraged her to write poetry again. Jane sent him a lengthy poem, ‘Shadows from Life', for his comments. Hamilton admired its depth of feeling, and suggested some metrical changes. He shared the poem with Aubrey de Vere, who was equally supportive. De Vere thought Jane ‘certainly must be a woman of real poetic genius to have written anything so beautiful, and also so full of power and grace as [this] poem'. De Vere advised Hamilton to ‘do all you can to make her go on writing, and publish a volume soon', and admired Jane's openness to criticism. ‘It is indeed pleasant to meet that rare thing, poetic genius, in union with a rarer one – the magnanimity (in which genius is so often deficient, and without which it almost ceases to be respectable) which can take censure with gratitude, praise with simplicity, and both with equal grace.'
¹⁴
Jane tended to be self-deprecating about her poetry, and here were two poets who were enthusiastic about her work. Their encouragement came at a time when Jane needed reassurance that she still had a brain and some potential. It was a peculiarity of the relationship that Jane stood timorous of Hamilton's judgement while still coming across as fearless and assured. For a time they were companionable spirits.

That is, until Hamilton started to act even more like a lovelorn adolescent, tying himself in knots, denying that there was anything
more
in his attentions, while demonstrating all too clearly the contrary. One of his letters to Jane makes clear this tension: ‘You must know that Lady Hamilton has been growing very
jealous
about you – not in the sense that might first occur to a sentimental schoolgirl – she did
not
at
all
think that
I
had paid too much attention to you – but often hearing me talk so much about you, and knowing that you had favoured me with a long (though not by any means a
too
long) visit, and that I had afterwards sent you my book with an inscription, she asked me about twenty times, “Why does Mrs Wilde not write you a line?” “Why,” said I, “I have not written a line to
her;
it was to her husband that I wrote” . . . In short I had to
defend
you to my wife, for what
she
thought your want of attention to
me
!'
¹⁵

Hamilton's adoration grew more intense. He fussed about the correspondence, sent follow-ups to detract former statements, and fretted over who should be allowed to read it. He started to give his correspondence to Jane into William's hand at Royal Irish Academy meetings, presumably to pay lip service to the proprieties. On one such occasion, on being handed an unsealed envelope addressed to Jane, a bemused William asked Hamilton ‘if he [I] did not wish it sealed?' ‘Just as you please,' was Hamilton's reply. And ‘so [William] fastened the adhesive cover on the spot'. William was probably thoroughly unfazed by it all. Indeed, Hamilton's attempts to woo Jane may even have been a source of amusement between them. But then Hamilton really did breach the line of decorum and Jane burnt the letter. He replied to what was presumably Jane's letter of caution: ‘Perhaps too I thought that you wd consider me (though Dr Wilde I am sure wd
not
) to have praised you too much . . . I don't think, after all, that I said more than that I thought you a very remarkable, a very interesting, and (if I cd be forgiven for adding it) a very loveable person . . . of course, I never presume to imagine that anything which I may at any time write to you will not be seen by Dr Wilde.'

As the years passed Hamilton remained a friend of the Wildes, but he kept his admiration for Jane in check. He included Jane in his gatherings at Dunsink Observatory of what he called ‘a Feast of Poets', where the guests often read from Shakespeare's works. Hamilton continued to call at the Wilde home; sometimes he would join Jane and William for dinner, but more often he chatted with Jane while William ‘was however obliged to write most of the evening in the other room'.
¹⁶

8

Merrion Square

In 1853 William bought a fishing lodge in Connemara for his family. Situated on thirteen acres of land jutting into Lough Fee, it is surrounded by water on all sides. William had first returned to the west of Ireland in 1849 when he was working on the census. At the time, the Great Famine had transformed the place he had known as a child into a ghostly land, more desolate and haunting than ever, and he came across a village still ‘hot' from ‘smoking ruins . . . with the late miserable inmates huddled together and burrowing for shelter among the crushed rafters of their cabins'.
¹
Jane too was shocked at how desolate the place had become. She told Hilson, ‘the roofless cabins everywhere made me sick with helpless despair and rage'.
²

William feared Irish rural society was in danger of dying out, of losing its customs, legends, myths and rituals. Thus did he decide to record for posterity what he called the ‘poetry of the people' – their oral culture. This was part of an ambition, shared by his friend George Petrie, to build a Celtic archive. Petrie had started to record oral music and ballads. William was not naive enough to think recording the oral culture would revive it. On the contrary, he acknowledged that ‘nothing contributes more to uproot superstitious rites and forms than to print them'. It would be better to leave them veiled, and have them passed on ‘secretly', clandestinely.
³
But the community he saw had been too thoroughly decimated and uprooted by famine for that to happen.

William published
Irish Popular Superstitions
in 1852 as a record of oral culture. It is a collection of tales and rituals, in which characters rise from the dead and create mayhem. Rooted in ancient myth and mysticism, such tales are typically dismissed as frivolous, foolish and blasphemous. Their illogic offends rationalists as much as their profanity affronts Christians. Fantasy has throughout history been censored as something deeply shameful. Though William describes the rites in all their crude and sometimes pornographic detail, he takes a scientific angle, showing them to stem from existential anxiety.

Blasphemy, eroticism, violence and female excess wind their way uncensored into a collection that William neither tried to reconcile to good taste nor dismiss as the ramblings of a confused populace. In digests and abridgements he recorded their thoughts; thus did he avoid casting any judgement or displaying more erudition than befits the subject. In these tales fairies prove there is no will or purpose in God, because no matter the desperate appeals made to a Christian god, fairies have the last word and the last laugh. These Janus-faced creatures boast of being the cause of all good and evil, never allowing one blessed relief from the world, for they never let humans ‘die all out'. At the time William was writing, a man in county Kerry ‘roasted his child to death, under the impression he was a fairy', while at Oran, in Roscommon, ‘the body of a child had been disinterred . . . its arms cut off, to be employed in the performance of certain mystic rites'.
⁴

Desire is also a big contender in a world where lust manipulates and sways human affairs. Weddings become orgies, and the excited wake from dreams of bliss only to find they have killed their lovers. Alternatively, frustrated virgins go mad with unconsummated desire. But penitence often shadows lust, and in one tale a virgin tears off her clothes and rolls herself in feathers of various colours, swooning with pleasure as she lashes herself.

Living on the margin of culture, with limited language and little education, the people voiced their fears and desires uncensored. By calling these stories ‘the poetry of the people', William universalised them as human nature, and in so doing revealed that society wears a thin mask of civilisation. His lifelong pursuit of these tales displayed a fascination beyond the ordinary. To defend these tales of beings trying to escape or transcend the human condition was an enlightened act of foresight, for it was not until the last decades of the century that anthropologists and psychologists valued them as insights into the workings of the unconscious.

William also paid close attention to the importance of ritual in a culture where literacy levels were low. Ribbonism, we recall, was a sinister movement where troops of men dressed up as bandits, carried guns and marched by moonlight to the sound of the fiddle or bagpipes. They dressed in long white shirts and scarves, and beribboned their horses for ostentatious display. But what started as a ritual frequently turned nasty, for brewing under the mask of male bravado and coarse buffoonery was much pent-up frustration. Having come together to taunt and subvert an overweening, intrusive regime, Ribbonmen expressed the disaffection that overcame the common people, who, as William said, ‘had long been taught that there was no law or justice for the poor man, unless his master was a magistrate'. Having lost faith in society, the disaffected outlook illustrated by Ribbonmen spoke to a people, many of whom, William said, ‘neither knew nor cared' for the cause of their rebellion.
⁵
With their peculiar blend of terror and irony, the baleful rituals William described evoked the essence of an era in which a desert of mutual hatred divided the haves and the have-nots. Historian Charles Townshend observed in
Political Violence in Ireland
, ‘it is hard to look at some of the manifestations of Irish collective violence, especially the clearly structured faction fight and sectarian riot, without seeing in them some element of carnival'.
⁶
This strain of calculative, self-fashioning shenanigans, which William dubbed ‘the poetry of the people', has been carried through into Irish literary culture, certainly into Joyce's
Ulysses
, most obviously in his Circe episode, in which logic and law give way to a surreal chaos.

In the autumn of 1855 the Wildes moved from Westland Row to the brighter and more spacious No. 1 Merrion Square – one of Dublin's best addresses. No. 1 is a corner house on the north side, overlooking the square's gardens in front and possessing a large garden at the rear. They employed six servants to manage the property. The house move gratified Jane. She told Hilson, ‘this move is very much to my fancy as we have got fine rooms and the best situation in Dublin. I trust the two children may flourish there.'
⁷
Merrion Square placed the Wildes among the powerful Protestant dynasties. Many of the leading medical men resided on the square – Robert Graves, William Stokes and Dominic Corrigan. Another prominent figure, at No. 18, was the Gothic writer, editor and owner of
Dublin University Magazine
, Sheridan Le Fanu, part of the literary dynasty that included the playwright R. B. Sheridan.