The Fall of the House of Wilde (36 page)

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While Oscar was in America unwritten notions seemed to have been gathering in Jane's mind. She did not have to exercise her imagination too rigorously to get the press's insinuations about the ambiguity of Oscar's sexuality. That she might have thought this could be masked by marriage was not unusual in Victorian society, where many men and women lived double lives. Her letters to Oscar in America were laced with references to marriage. ‘You must bring home the American Bride' runs through these letters like an exhortation. ‘Are you in love? Why don't you take a bride?' Indeed, shortly before Oscar returned, she wrote she had found the ideal bride for him: Constance Lloyd. Constance had visited Jane and the two bonded instantly. Thus did Jane write to Oscar apropos Constance: ‘I had a great mind to say I would like her for a daughter-in-law, but I did not.'
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Oscar had met Constance Lloyd before he left for America, but there was no further contact between them until the summer of 1883.

Oscar first met the shy and timid Constance Lloyd in June 1881, at a tea party in her mother's home in Devonshire Terrace, Hyde Park. The tea party was a set-up. Oscar was supposed to fall for the twenty-eight-year-old Ella Atkinson, Constance's young aunt. Constance's Irish grandmother, Mary Atkinson, had orchestrated the event. Mary Atkinson, knowing the Wildes from Dublin, had thought Oscar would make a plausible husband for Ella, but it was the younger Constance who caught his attention. Daunted by the overt interest of Oscar, Constance found herself ‘shaking with fright'.
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Four years younger than Oscar, Constance was younger than many of the other women he befriended. She was born to an Irish mother, Adelaide Atkinson (Ada), who had left Dublin at nineteen to marry her cousin, Horace Lloyd. His father, John Horatio Lloyd, was both a QC and an MP. Constance grew up with both cultures. Her mother's family, the Atkinsons, lived in a Georgian house in Ely Place, adjacent to Merrion Square, and moved in the same close-knit set as the Wildes in Dublin. Constance's great-uncle, Baron Charles Hare Hemphill, was Ireland's solicitor general, lived on Merrion Square, and had walked behind Sir William's coffin as part of the cortège to Mount Jerome Cemetery.

Constance had led a sheltered life. Her early years, as she described them, were lonely. She endured the coldness of a mother who got no joy from maternity and the neglect of a father who looked elsewhere for pleasure. Like her compatriot, Jane, Ada found herself with a husband who had a roving eye for women, and was rumoured to have fathered more offspring than his official children, Constance and Otho. The siblings turned to each other for the warmth denied them by self-centred parents. Otho Lloyd, two years Constance's senior, later said that he and his sister were brought up ‘against the will and determination of two most selfish and egotistical natures'. Shuttled between Dublin and London, their grandmother's house in Ely Place provided a welcome refuge from family strife. Horace Lloyd's death in 1874, when Constance was sixteen, only exacerbated maternal antagonisms. Eager to remarry, Ada found her daughter's blooming beauty a distraction to the men she hoped to woo. When, in 1878, Ada married George Swinburne-King, Constance found herself evicted from her home and sent to live with her then ailing paternal grandfather, John Horatio Lloyd. John Horatio had accumulated enough of a fortune to bring up his family in one of the mansions on Lancaster Gate, overlooking Hyde Park. Otho was by now reading Classics at Oriel College, Oxford, so Constance had only the cold-hearted Aunt Emily for company. Living with the staunchly rigid Emily, whose function, it appeared, was to censure, did not foster girlish exuberance. They made a cheerless little grouping in a dwelling whose vast and gloomy proportions aggravated Constance's nervous disposition – terror cast a shadow over Constance, who feared being alone in the night and was often described as ‘sulky' by others.
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Her supposed sulkiness did not lessen her charm for Oscar. Constance's vulnerable air, her abundant chestnut hair, her slight figure, her pouting lips, won her many admirers. Beauty, the trait most glorified by Oscar, was what Constance had in abundance. Certainly, with her oval eyes and long, flowing locks, she was a sight for painterly eyes. Still, the arousing of Oscar's interest was quite a conquest for a conventionally bred young woman like Constance. Then again, Oscar's effete manner and the scent of posies he gave off hardly made him the most suitable of prospective husbands. Otho was not the only Lloyd to voice grave reservations. The upright Lloyd family, with the exception of ‘Grand Papa', did not approve of Constance's association with this bizarre young man. ‘Grand Papa I think likes Oscar,' Constance conceded to her sceptical brother, ‘but of course the others laugh at him, because they don't choose to see anything but that he wears long hair and looks aesthetic. I like him awfully much but I suppose it is very bad taste.' Her Irish relatives, on the other hand, warmed to Oscar. Constance was flattered at Oscar's bid to see her again, a ‘little request I need hardly tell you I have kept to myself', so wrote Constance to Otho.
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Constance was as impressionable as Oscar, and took up Aestheticism with gusto. She was soon dressing as a Pre-Raphaelite, much to the horror of Aunt Emily, who frowned upon her niece identifying with such women as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, the wives respectively of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, whose loose flowing gowns and tresses falling over bare shoulders bespoke a freedom of spirit. And if there was anything left to alarm the stiff Lloyds – that is, after the sight of Constance in such garb – then the suggestion that Constance attend the theatre with Oscar clinched it. Oscar's invitation to see
Othello
, then provoking a sensation at the Lyceum, with the two stars, Edwin Booth and Henry Irving, alternating the roles of Iago and Othello, and with the arch-Aesthete, Ellen Terry, playing Desdemona, caused consternation under the Lloyd roof. ‘He [Oscar] or as I put it to the family, Lady Wilde has asked me to go see
Othello
some night,' Constance wrote to her brother in June 1881. ‘Auntie looked
aghast
when I told her . . . I know she'll try and prevent me from going and I shall be in a fury if she does.'
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It appears that Auntie did stop Constance from attending and exposing herself to the bohemian circle of painters, writers and actresses among whom Oscar circulated.

Nothing more came of this flutter. Oscar spent 1882 in America and the first few months of 1883 in Paris, during which time he did not correspond with Constance. Then in May 1883, Oscar emerged on the scene as quite the dapper European gent, and appeared an altogether more suitable prospective husband for John Horatio Lloyd's granddaughter. That season Constance found herself assiduously courted by Oscar.

Quite possibly no one in the Lloyd family could take the full measure of the voluble, mercurial Oscar. As the Lloyds got to know him, they found it more difficult to belittle him. Indeed, it was more a question of whether the mind of a lovelorn, star-struck young woman could stimulate this capacious personage, whose
savoir faire
and intellectualism were starting to impress some of the best minds. Letters confirm that Constance's adoration of Oscar left her nervous and desolate. The Irish writer Katharine Tynan met both of them at Park Street and described Oscar thus: ‘he came and stood under the limelight so to speak, in the centre of the room' and with him came ‘poor picturesque pretty Constance Lloyd . . . a delicate charming creature'. For a woman so unsure of herself, she could hardly have hitched herself to a worse vehicle than a man whose stout ego and narcissistic and dominant personality completely overshadowed hers.

Time did not dispel Otho's reservations about Oscar. Otho had overlapped with Oscar at Oxford. Outside term time, Otho had, at the prompting of his grandmother, called on his fellow Classicist and Oxonian at Merrion Square, but no bond developed between the two men, then or later. Few people who entered Oscar's ambit were left indifferent, and Otho was no exception. The more plain-speaking Otho recoiled from the inveterate charmer, finding Oscar's self-dramatising persona insufficiently sincere. As the romance flourished during the summer of 1883, greater exposure to Oscar did nothing to allay Otho's suspicions that Oscar did not love his sister. He could not bring himself to believe that Oscar was serious in the attention he bestowed on Constance. To his own beloved, Nellie Hutchinson, he wrote, ‘I don't believe that he means anything; that is his way with all girls whom he finds interesting.' And he added, ‘If the man were anyone else but Oscar Wilde one might conclude that he was in love.'
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That autumn, on 24 September 1883, Oscar began a lecture tour in the UK. The tour opened at Wandsworth, and during the course of the year he delivered more than 150 lectures. In an effort to pay off debts, which stood at around £1,500, he submitted himself to a punishing schedule. During these months, Oscar wooed Constance with more consistent ardour than hitherto. Letters trading sentiment flew between the lovers, with Constance often in Ireland and Oscar bringing the message of beauty to the heartlands, ‘civilising' them, as he put it.
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One letter from Constance shows she did not share his artistic creed. As Constance put it, ‘I am afraid you & I disagree in our opinion on art, for I hold there is not perfect art without perfect morality, whilst you say they are distinct & separate things.' She also wrote with regard to art, ‘there is not the slightest use of fighting against existing prejudices for we are only worsted in the struggle'.
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Constance's ideas would smack too much of bourgeois prudence for a man who liked to jolt people's prejudices.

If Oscar harboured any doubts, he kept them to himself. Certainly he must have felt honoured by the Atkinsons hosting a reception in his honour, at Ely Place in Dublin, in November 1883. Oscar had been invited to Dublin to deliver two lectures at the Gaiety Theatre, on ‘The House Beautiful' and ‘Impressions of America'. The occasion prompted the Atkinsons to assemble forty to fifty people to meet Oscar. ‘They all think him so improved in appearance,' Constance told her brother. ‘Mama Mary is so fond of him & he is quite at home here.' But nothing would convince Otho that Oscar was a suitable husband for his sister. He had got wind of some unsavoury story about Oscar at Oxford, and he wrote words of warning to Constance. Otho's letter, now lost, arrived at Ely Place on 27 November. It crossed with Constance's letter to Otho, written a day earlier, announcing her engagement. ‘My dearest Otho, Prepare yourself for an astounding piece of news! I am engaged to Oscar Wilde and perfectly and insanely happy.'
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Would Otho's warning have stopped Constance marrying Oscar? It appears not. She expected to face resistance from the Lloyds. ‘I am so dreadfully nervous about my family; they are so cold and practical. I won't stand opposition, so I hope they won't try it,' she wrote to Otho. Constance grew more in love with Oscar, and became so dizzy with happiness that she feared it was all a ‘dream'. ‘Your letters make me mad for joy and yet more mad to see you and feel once again that you are mine and that it is not a dream but a living reality that you love me . . . I worship you my hero and my God.'
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Meanwhile, Oscar did what was expected and wrote to John Horiato Lloyd, to Constance's mother, and to Otho, declaring his intentions. Lloyd, beset by illness, got Aunt Emily to reply on his behalf. He wanted to know the material security Oscar would offer Constance before giving his consent. John Horatio has ‘no objection to you personally as a husband for Constance', wrote Aunt Emily, ‘but he thinks it right as her guardian to put one or two questions to you . . . He would like to know what your means are of keeping your wife.' And John Horatio must know ‘if you had any debts'. Only if Oscar could satisfy these concerns would he ‘give a considered consent'. Oscar would have known full well that the tone and terms did not imply enthusiasm; that the negative ‘no objection' spoke of censure of all he represented. Time did not soften Aunt Emily's hostility to Oscar, who she probably saw as an impecunious luminary. That Oscar had already squandered his inheritance, and the ‘fortune' he made in America, and now had debts of £1,500, must have made the ailing John Horatio's head spin. He still had enough of his faculties left to stipulate that Oscar must reduce his outstanding debt by £300 before the marriage could take place.

No bourgeois marriage could go forward without a contract drawn up whose precise stipulations regulated the couple's economic future. Aunt Emily set out in a letter to Oscar what he could expect Constance to bring to the marriage. Constance would, on John Horatio's death, have an annual income of at least £700, but for the time being her allowance would be limited to £250 a year. However, to allow Constance to get married, John Horatio agreed to advance £5,000 against his granddaughter's eventual inheritance. This sum, from which Constance would receive interest, would remain undeniably hers, under the control of trustees. John Horatio also relinquished a further £500 to pay for a six-year lease on a property that had come up in Tite Street, Chelsea.
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The generous reaction came from the Atkinsons in Dublin. Constance told Otho, on 26 November, that ‘everyone in this house [Ely Place] is quite charmed, especially Mama Mary who considers me very lucky'.
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For ‘Mama Mary', Constance was marrying into her milieu.

Probably no one was more flabbergasted by Oscar's decision to marry than himself.
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Was he deluding himself? Would he end up a bourgeois? Certainly Robert Sherard had grave doubts about Oscar's suitability as a husband. ‘I know that I felt he [Oscar] was not likely to be happy in domestic life, and still less to make a woman happy . . . I misdoubted the future, for I could not fancy him in the part of a householder and man of family.'
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At the time of Oscar's engagement Sherard was also in London, living at Charles Street with Oscar.