The Fall of the House of Wilde (25 page)

18

The Unravelling

The family received William's will with shock. Willie, as the eldest, inherited Merrion Square and the Moytura estate of 170 acres; Oscar, the four Bray houses, and part-share in the fishing lodge with Henry Wilson. These assets would have provided more than a secure foundation for Willie and Oscar, had the properties come free of debt. But they did not. The mortgage of £1,000 William had taken out on Merrion Square was still outstanding. Worse, there was also a mortgage of £1,000 on the Bray properties. Worse yet, all Jane received was an annuity of £200, but even that was a hypothetical sum, restricted to income-yielding farmland on the Moytura estate. The land typically yielded £100–150 when rents were paid, and often they were not.

The signs of financial trouble were there before William died: in January 1876, we recall, he had thought of letting Merrion Square, but Jane was indignant. She told one friend, ‘Sir William never spoke of his affairs, but it is now evident that since his health failed during the last three years and he was unequal to professional routine he had been living on capital until all is gone.'
¹

That Jane knew nothing of her husband's financial affairs is obvious from a letter she wrote to Oscar the month after William died, in May 1876. ‘This debt is the worst of all our affairs – for I see no way of clearing it. & what was it for? That I cannot imagine. The last £1000 was borrowed in 1874 & all gone – & for what? Who knows [?] – It is a mystery – & the insurance £1000 also.'
²
Had she given any serious thought to money, she might have known that their outgoings had risen considerably in the last few years. William had to pay for Willie studying for the Bar in London and for Oscar's living costs at Oxford, both during a period when the income to which they were accustomed had fallen. And for some years William had spent more time on honorary, unpaid work, and devoted more time to writing, all at the expense of his more lucrative professional practice. All or some of the above explain the depletion of his net worth.

William's will was destroyed when the Four Courts housing such public records was damaged in the civil war of 1922, so what we know of its contents comes from Jane's letters, and these are not always clear. There was a complication about a deed Jane had signed in which she had lent William £1,500 from her marriage settlement to purchase Moytura, with a stipulation that she would forgo interest on the loan in exchange for joint tenancy and ownership of the estate. That condition had been overlooked. At the very least, she argued, the annuity settled on her should not be restricted to the Moytura estate but include income earned from the other properties. This would go some way to reflect the capital she had invested and the loan interest she had forgone. She pulled together the loan agreement to her husband and other documents for a second legal opinion.

Whether or not the legacy to Jane was William's intention is an open question. If Jane saw it as a poor measure of her husband's affection for her, she was not going to admit it. She seemed to convince herself otherwise, putting it down to negligence. In an exchange of letters with Oscar, she did not disparage her husband. Yet nerves were frayed, as one gathers in this letter sent to Oscar. ‘Sir William often said that he would never leave his wife to live on less than £200 a year. – Of course that sum would not be supplied from Moytura alone and the best and fairest way now to form an arrangement is to have a legal opinion by which we shall all abide. J. F. W.'
³

The crisis dragged on, taking its emotional toil. Encumbered on the one hand with debts and on the other with bills of upkeep, Jane saw no solution. Neither she nor Willie could come close to earning sufficient income to pay the interest on the debts. Her correspondence to Oscar reflects her mounting anxiety. ‘How are we all to live? It is all a muddle. My opinion is that all that is coming to us will be swallowed up in our borrowings before we are paid.' A lull followed while she waited for her counsel's opinion. When authorisation to respect the terms of her former contract was not granted, as one gathers it was not, she could no longer ignore the true state of affairs – she could not rescue the money she had sunk into the marriage, and her future income was restricted to a paltry sum from ‘wretched Moytura'.

She had to push aside her foolish pride and, as she put it, ‘beg' for a state pension. She deeply resented having to do so; she saw it as alms-giving and thought the whole thing reeked of pity. ‘Abject like Mrs Hogan – Oh it is all so miserable,' she wrote to Oscar, likening herself to the Italian widow who was left destitute after the death of her husband, the Irish neoclassical sculptor John Hogan.
⁴
(William had acted as executor.)

So letters were sent and strings pulled. Jane wrote to Sir Thomas Larcom, then the former head of the Irish Ordnance Survey, and a close friend of William's, and let him know the true state of affairs – mortgages of £1,000 on Merrion Square and the Bray properties, ‘no funds by which my sons and I can meet these liabilities. Then the expenses of our new life, unaided by professional income. My sons unhappily are not self-supporting yet . . .'
⁵
Larcom urged her to set in motion the machinery of influence. She did as bidden, and reached out, among others, to Theodore Martin, Scottish man of letters and husband to Helena Faucit, the well-known Shakespearean actress. Her application received a flat refusal. Sir Thomas Larcom wrote to explain that the Literary Pension Fund was highly competitive, limited to the small sum of £1,200 a year and had a number of applicants. T. H. Burke, then under-secretary at Dublin Castle, who had also got involved on her behalf, put the refusal to grant her a pension down to political partisanship, saying, ‘if a Liberal Government was in, I think I would get her a pension – somehow or other these are larger-minded.'
⁶
The political tone of Jane's poetry would not have helped her case, as noted by the
Irish Times
. ‘We have often wondered that in recognition of Lady Wilde's services to Literature the Prime Minister has not placed her name on the Civil List; but we fear her poetry is not of the kind which excites sympathy in the breasts of English statesmen.'
⁷

Sir Thomas Larcom suggested she address the prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, through William's friend, the Conservative MP for Dublin, Sir Arthur Guinness, whose main advantage was the political favour he enjoyed with Disraeli. This way she would avoid a formal application. She had a deep-seated feeling that her efforts would end in a rebuff. Her involvement in 1848 would certainly not do her credit. She wrote to Oscar on the conditions the government expected of the applicant, saying:

It does not suit me. He requires the writers to be

loyal

orthodox

moral

& to praise the English!

   Fancy my descending to this level! I who have stood at the altar of Freedom!
⁸

She suggested to Sir Thomas Larcom that the claim would better rest ‘on Sir William's general services to the Government and the Country rather than on literary merit'.
⁹
A pension as gratitude for what William contributed would make more sense. After all, William had donated St Mark's training hospital to the country and had spent the better part of his years putting in place the first historical record of the country's antiquities. Besides, Jane was never naive, and would not have expected a government for whose downfall she had called to bear the burden of feeding her.

She had nothing left but her pride, and was reluctant to forfeit it. Then again, her economic survival depended upon securing some regular income, and whether she wrote then or two years later to Disraeli is uncertain. In either case, she wrote to him and attached a copy of Sir William's obituary, but her request was met with a note of thanks from his secretary ‘for a very interesting memoir'.
¹⁰
Getting a pension turned out to be as illusory as the hope of restoring her right to the jointure of property. In the end, she had to wait fourteen years before she received a pension.

Willie was taking it all lightly. As Jane put it to Oscar, apropos the contents of Merrion Square, which were to be sold at auction, ‘Willie seems very jolly – All the country is coming to the auction & Willie is to feast them like Balthazar.' He lived in perfect contempt of frugality in a way that to the Victorians would have signalled serious defects of character. ‘As Willie never pays he is splendid at hospitality,' Jane said on another occasion. Childlike and wayward is how Jane speaks of Willie. To Oscar, to whom Jane expressed her concern, she wrote of Willie's antics, of his jaunts that left him in a state of chronic torpor. ‘Not home till morning – He is now (one o'clock) only going to get up! Is this his ideal of pleasure?'
¹¹

Willie had the ideal academic and social background – a Classics graduate who had won prizes for oratory and ethics – to succeed at the Bar. He showed, however, no appetite for the beaten path of a profession. At the very least, he appeared unable or unwilling to reconcile the rigorous discipline that such a line of work demanded with his preference for dalliance. From Jane's correspondence with Oscar, it is fair to assume Willie did not try very hard to win briefs.

Meanwhile, Oscar was making his presence felt at Oxford. There he held regular Sunday evenings, offering guests ‘two brimming bowls of gin-and-whiskey punch' and ‘long churchwarden pipes, with a brand of choice tobacco'. A close friend, David Hunter-Blair, spoke of his ‘bonhomie, good-humour, unusual capacity for pleasant talk, and Irish hospitality, exercised much beyond his modest means'. The evenings drew a crowd, the college organist played music and ballads were recited. Typically, when all had dispersed, ‘there followed an hour or two which still,' Hunter-Blair wrote, ‘after sixty years, linger vividly in my memory. Round the fire gathered Wilde, W. Ward – known to us all as the “Bouncer” – and I.' They listened while Oscar talked.

Oscar was always the protagonist in these midnight conversations, pouring out a flood of paradoxes, untenable propositions, quaint comments on men and things; and sometimes, like Silas Wegg, ‘dropping into poetry', spouting yards of verse, either his own or that of other poets whom he favoured, and spouting it uncommonly well. We listened and applauded and protested against some of his preposterous theories. Our talk was quite unrestrained, and ranged over a vast variety of topics. Wilde said not a few foolish and extravagant things.
¹²

Oscar was like his mother in wanting to create a sensation, and as we recall, Jane had admitted as much to Sir William Rowan Hamilton. Indeed, what was discussed in the small smoke-clouded room probably mattered less to Oscar than recreating the atmosphere of animation and spirited talk he had known at Merrion Square.

In her youth, Jane had searched for some creed upon which to hang her dream of transcendence. For a time she found it agreeable to stake all for politics. Oscar, too, was avidly in search of something, or in flight from something. Either way, at Oxford, Oscar turned to religion and dallied with converting to Catholicism. Spiritual quests and crises were common in intellectual circles in the nineteenth century. Advancements in geology, astronomy and the debate on the origin of the species made it difficult for many to accept religion in the old guise. Some, such as John Henry Newman, saw religion in a more critical light, and found in Catholicism a truer creed than the Protestantism they had imbibed. This debate prompted what was known as the Oxford Movement, and led many to convert to Catholicism, prominent among whom was Henry Edward Manning. Among Oscar's friends at Oxford were a handful of new converts, including David Hunter-Blair, who became a Catholic during his time at Oxford. Heir to a Scottish baronetcy, Hunter-Blair would in time renounce material wealth and join a Benedictine monastery. He and Oscar spent countless evenings discussing religion. Oscar's letters from Oxford show a man gnawed by the state of his soul, full of self-reproach, yearning for ‘peace' and ‘purity', looking to Catholicism as a refuge for his disquiet.

That Oscar felt some threat to his moral integrity is substantiated by many of his early poems, whose leitmotifs are ‘sin and shame'. That his sexuality caused disquiet cannot be ruled out, judging by a letter he wrote to William Ward, another Oxford friend, in August 1876:

I want to ask your opinion on this psychological question. In our friend
Todd's
ethical barometer, at what height is his moral quicksilver? Last night I strolled into the theatre about ten o'clock and to my surprise saw Todd and young Ward the quire boy in a private box together . . . I wonder what young Ward is doing with him. Myself I believe Todd is extremely moral and only mentally spoons the boy, but I think he is foolish to go about with one, if he is bringing this boy about. You are the only one I would tell about it, as you have a philosophical mind, but don't tell anyone about it like a good boy – it would do neither us nor Todd any good. He (Todd) looked awfully nervous and uncomfortable.
¹³

That Oscar was not wholly comfortable with homosexuality, that he saw it as a moral and ethical issue, and not, as he later would, a natural sexual preference, is strange given what he wrote in the margin of his copy of Aristotle's preface to
Nicomachean Ethics
. ‘Man makes his end for himself out of himself: no end is imposed by external considerations, he must realise his true nature, must be what nature orders, so must discover what his nature is.'
¹⁴
St Augustine's
Confessions
was among the many books of spiritual questioning Oscar was reading at the time. Torn between reading St Augustine and Swinburne, Oscar seems to want to wear a crown of thorns as penance for desire. It is thus not surprising that Flaubert's book,
La Tentation de saint Antoine
, whose protagonist swoons with pleasure as he flogs himself, would in later years stand for his vision of happiness, together with a cigarette.