The Fall of the House of Wilde (13 page)

The north side of the square had been designed by the architect John Ensor and completed in 1764. In the eighteenth century these desirable quarters were the town houses for the parliamentarians and aristocracy. The houses functioned almost as political annexes to Parliament, where dignitaries visiting Dublin were entertained in lavish splendour. The broad staircases leading up to the spacious, high-ceilinged drawing rooms offered the ideal setting for many balls and dinner parties. The grand first-floor windows open on to black wrought-iron balconies from where one can look down upon the world. By the nineteenth century, owning a Georgian house on Merrion Square gave doctors the kind of prestige that was once the sole preserve of the aristocracy.

Dublin in 1855 was markedly different from the capital Swift had inhabited a century earlier as Dean of St Patrick's. The city was the creation of the eighteenth-century Ascendancy, the powerful and dominant Protestant social, political and religious leaders who nourished the ambition to transform Dublin into a capital to rival its imperial neighbour. By the end of the eighteenth century the Ascendancy had gone some way to implementing a dream that had begun to grip them during the last decades of independent government, when Westminster put pressure on them to relax laws against Catholics and Dissenters. Fearing the end of their monopoly of privilege, the Ascendancy pressed ahead with building, perhaps to reassure themselves of their rootedness or, at least, that their roots were there to stay. Certainly their aspirations to grandeur struck some as megalomaniacal; one English visitor commented that it was like being ‘at table with a man who gives me Burgundy, but whose attendant is a bailiff disguised in livery'.
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The layout of Dublin owed its inspiration to the seventeenth-century viceroy, Lord Lieutenant James Butler, the 12th Earl of Ormond, and his ideas took shape in the following century when buildings rose to face the River Liffey and participated in the busy life of the quays, where trade then flourished. Vehicles that formerly crept in and out of the back alleys of medieval streets now moved along a wide thoroughfare, intersected with a succession of bridges, allowing the city to spread out through the suburbs planned on a grid framework by Sir Humphrey Jervis, a private developer and later lord mayor. The city was pried open, and before long it would be made to yield its medieval inwardness, where memories had been stored and contagions had percolated. Gone were the maze of winding alleys, while such names as Gardiner, Dawson, Molesworth and Leinster, to name but a handful, saw their designs unfold in orderly squares, straight streets and neoclassical architecture. The city spread out in concentric rings – the North and South Circular – and corresponding canals imposed order and logic on what had been higgledy-piggledy. The Ascendancy did to eighteenth-century Dublin what Baron Haussmann did to nineteenth-century Paris, if on a lesser scale.

Dramatic changes revealed themselves in the architecture. The German architect Richard Cassels came to Ireland and went some way to implementing the Ascendancy's penchant for splendour in the Rotunda Hospital. Built to stand at the centre of a pleasure garden, the grounds included a chapel whose Baroque magnificence embodied his stagecraft. More ubiquitous was the consistency of neoclassical design, visible in the new Houses of Parliament (now the Bank of Ireland opposite Trinity), built as a display of stability and authority at a cost of £95,000, a sum greater than that of the Gothic Westminster, whose façade still retained a memory of the medieval. But it was not until the last decade of the century, with trouble over the future of an independent parliament near boiling, that the Ascendancy's metamorphosis of the city was truly visible. When James Gandon's Four Courts and his Customs House matched Parliament in its neoclassical design, these landmarks formed a triumvirate of public display – symbols of law, order and commerce – heralding Dublin's arrival as the imperial city's sibling.

Except Dublin's relation to London was not that of a sibling, nor that of a spouse, as the Union in 1801 implied, but that of a dependent child. And Oedipal ambivalence, which characterises the Ascendancy's attitude to England, grew more intense as England impressed upon them laws to emancipate Catholics and Dissenters. If the Ascendancy could forgive Westminster the Act of Union, far more troublesome was its pressure to end their domination as a cartel of favour, which declared itself in Catholic emancipation, the loss of bishoprics, and rumblings of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland.

But the word ‘Ascendancy' evokes strong reactions. The term ‘Protestant Ascendancy' was, according to historian Roy Foster, minted late in the eighteenth century by the editor of the
Dublin Journal
, John Giffard. For Edmund Burke, always a stringent commentator, the term referred to ‘a caste of self-interested jobbers'. Strictly speaking the definition revolved around religion, around Anglicanism, not class. The label applied to the 25 per cent of the population who counted as Protestant, whose descent could be Norman, Old English, Cromwellian or even, in a few cases, ancient Gaelic. Anglicanism, then, not ethnic origin, conferred exclusivity and defined the Ascendancy, who interbred and reproduced themselves, guarding the doors of advancement into the country's professions, clubs and government posts.

But the Ascendancy resented its constitutional dependence on mainland Britain for prosperity and career advancement. Many landowners needed government posts to supplement their income: 37 of 150 Irish peers in 1783 were employed in the army, foreign and colonial service, or central government.
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Edmund Burke, who along with Swift, the philosopher George Berkeley, Sheridan, the writer and dramatist Oliver Goldsmith and novelist and Anglican clergyman Laurence Sterne, counts as one of the great minds of eighteenth-century culture, depended on England for career progression. England was where Burke honed his ideas on international politics and the country from which he could develop a broad enough perspective to speak with originality and influence on the French Revolution, Indian colonialism and Catholic emancipation. Yeats wistfully conjured up the Ascendancy in ‘the great bold rooms, [where] their high doors imposed order on life . . . [where] life still kept a touch of colonial vigour. At the same time, because of the glory of everything, it was bound up in the quality of a dream.'
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A dream in peril, just as it was for the British a century later, sitting out the last days of the Raj in India.

Ambivalence is the keynote shaping the literature written by the Ascendancy, marked by a dexterous inversion of logic. Swift's ‘Short View of the State of Ireland' (1728), for instance, takes evidence of riches in Ireland as a sign of poverty – the cost of living signals not high wages but grasping landlords; low interest rates indicate devaluation in public finance, not potential for increase.
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Swift's deftness pries open logic and leaves the reader suspended, questioning their reason. This example stands as illustrative of the congruence of personality and environment, the intimacy between psyche and social and political history, which was the linchpin of the aesthetic creed from Swift through Sterne to Shaw. Milieus make beings and Irish artists have for centuries used inversion and paradox to satirise the received wisdom of the colonial overlord. Oscar will, in his comedies, invert values and hierarchies – of men over women, of good over bad. He will detect insincerity in charity, authenticity in masks, depth in appearance. The Wildes viewed their ancestors even more ambivalently, castigating the Ascendancy for its exclusivity, yet never fully admitting to whom they owed their privileges. Jane, for instance, damned England as loudly as she damned the Ascendancy for what she saw as their enslavement of natives. She and William were the rebellious children of their era.

Oscar's first biographer, Robert Sherard, wrote in
The Life of Oscar Wilde
, 1906, that there was a ‘taint of moral laxness' in the Wilde home, where ‘high thinking did not go hand in hand with plain living'. He described No. 1 Merrion Square as a scene of ‘opulence and carouse; of late suppers and deep drinking; of careless talk and example. His father's gallantries were the talk of Dublin. Even his mother, though a woman of spotless life and honour, had a loose way of talking which might have been full of danger to her sons.' Sherard wrote disapprovingly of William for conducting supper parties for boozy and boisterous bohemians.
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If bohemia is a state of mind that rejects all conventional ways of looking at things and that tries to turn the world upside down politically and artistically, then Sherard is right – this was the atmosphere of the Wilde home. It was liberal, lively and unbuttoned in a way many Victorian English homes were not. Virginia Woolf, for instance, spoke of her childhood as embodying the spirit of Victorianism, which stifled the imagination and forced the mind into a traditional shape. Woolf sought release in Bloomsbury, where refuge lay for the alienated Victorian sons and daughters of the intellectual classes. In a century that promoted authoritarianism and patriarchy, the Wilde family was more like an alliance, where the bonds connecting the parents to children derive not from authority but from mutual respect. The children grew up in the spirit of liberal enquiry where, as Oscar put it, ‘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'.
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Sherard, who knew Oscar personally, also wrote, ‘[Oscar] considers that the best of his education in boyhood was obtained from his association with his father and mother and their remarkable friends.'
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Oscar and Willie had no need to rebel against parents whom they regarded as their closest companions.

It was a home where originality was fostered, where poetry was promoted. Jane read poetry to the boys from a young age. She wrote to Hilson of Willie's ‘pretty graceful head' resting on her shoulder while she read Tennyson's ‘Lady Clare' or Longfellow's ‘The Song of Hiawatha'.
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Oscar spoke of his familiarity with the poetry of Walt Whitman, ‘almost from the cradle'.
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Listening to their mother's reading and embellishing the lyrics would have created in the boys a visceral bond between the maternal and the word, a place of storied memories of desire, loss and sensual pleasure.

It was a happy house. Often recounted is the tale of a two-year-old Oscar turning his name into a vehicle for extemporary performance. He used to insist on chanting his name repeatedly – ‘Oscar, Fingal, O'Flahertie, Wilde . . . Oscar, Fingal, O'Flahertie, Wilde.' This may have been his way of capturing an audience he possibly needed if only to displace an older sibling who possessed the virile physique the flabby Oscar lacked. By comparison to Willie, whom Jane described as ‘slight, tall, spirituelle-looking [
sic
] with large beautiful eyes full of expression', Oscar was a ‘great stout creature who [thought of] nothing but growing fat'.
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That Oscar's stage performance could oust his rival and make him the cynosure for all eyes was a lesson he would put to brilliant use. A photo of the two-year-old Oscar shows him cross-dressed in a black frock with white lace, probably fashioned loosely after that of a Celtic bard. Biographers repeat the anecdote that Jane wanted a girl and dressed Oscar accordingly. There is no proof of this. Worse, one memoirist, Luther Munday, in
A Chronicle of Friendships
, published in 1912, claimed dressing Oscar as a girl ‘caused' his homosexuality.
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This is nonsense, written in an atmosphere antagonistic to homosexuality and to the Wildes.

Posing as characters from poems was common practice among literati: one has only to think of Julia Margaret Cameron's photos of people dressed as dramatis personae from history and legend, such as Lancelot and Guinevere from Tennyson's
Idylls of the King
. Jane herself was a fastidious connoisseur of historical costumes, from ancient times to the French courts, and lit up mercantile Dublin by dressing outlandishly, often evoking controversial historical figures. On one occasion, she dressed as Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, and had a photograph taken.
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At two, the ringleted, dimple-cheeked, chubby child was probably mimicking his mother. Posing for the camera, he gives us some hint of the warmth of this home, and of parents intensely and passionately engaged with their children and with life.

9

The Wildean Missionary Zeal

On 2 April 1857 Jane gave birth to a girl – she was named Isola Francesca Emily. She soon became, as Jane put it, ‘the pet of the house'.
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Jane was thirty-six when Isola was born – which was old for the time. Willie was now five and Oscar three, and although the Wildes employed six servants, much of Jane's time was taken up with the children. Not that she minded. ‘Children bind one down to home with such strong cords it seems unnatural even to leave them for a day. Their quick kiss and warm hug at parting fill me with remorse for going away at all from them. . .' she wrote to Hilson.
²
At the time she was visiting London to engage a governess, who by 1858 was teaching the children.

In July 1857 the Wildes struck up a friendship with the Kraemers. Baron Robert von Kraemer, the Viceroy of Uppsala, and his daughter, Lotten, came to Dublin to consult with Dr Wilde. Lotten suffered from chronic painful sensations in her ears, since an attack of scarlet fever at the age of fourteen had damaged her hearing. She had spent a decade travelling from Paris to Berlin consulting with specialists, none of whom could alleviate her symptoms or her pain. Then a certain Anders Retzius (1796–1860), professor of anatomy at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, suggested they look up Dr Wilde in Dublin. The publication in 1853 of William's text on aural surgery had earned him international renown in the field.