The Fall of the House of Wilde (66 page)

Ross had telegraphed Adrian Hope, the guardian of Cyril and Vyvyan. He did not respond. Ross had also telegraphed Douglas, on 6 November. He did not arrive until 2 December, after the coffin was closed.

The funeral took place on 3 December. The cortège left the Hôtel d'Alsace for the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There were about a dozen mourners. Other than Ross, Turner, Douglas and Gilbert, they consisted of the hotel staff, the doctor and the nurse. Nor did numbers swell at the graveside, at Bagneux, where the coffin was held until funds were raised to purchase a plot at the intended Père Lachaise cemetery. Wreaths were sent, twenty-four in all, some anonymously. In 1909 Oscar's body was moved to Père Lachaise, where it rests under a monument designed by Jacob Epstein with an inscription from
The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

And alien tears will fill for him

Pity's long-broken urn

For his mourners will be outcast men,

And outcasts always mourn.

What mattered to Oscar most – public recognition – he had achieved, but not in the way he would have wanted. Willie and Oscar died as outcasts. Jane died a pauper. For all three, death came as a release, as one would say in Ireland. Only Sir William died with honours and dignity. Not until 1971 did William receive symbolic due when a plaque was attached to No. 1 Merrion Square, honouring the Victorian polymath with a list of his credentials. The plaque reads as follows:

Aural and ophthalmic surgeon, archaeologist, ethnologist, antiquarian, biographer, statistician, naturalist, topographer, historian and folklorist; lived in this house from 1855–1876.

It commemorates Sir William's achievements; Jane's go unrecognised. No one who listened to the graveside eulogies at Sir William's funeral could have foretold the extent to which Oscar's downfall damaged his father's place in history and distorted the image of the man who gave so generously of his time and resources to resurrecting the country's history.

A plaque was put up at 16 Tite Street in 1954, celebrating Oscar's achievements, only to be splashed with paint shortly afterwards.

Epilogue

Of those who survived, only Willie's daughter, Dorothy, carried the Wilde name. She lived most of her life in France, and was a regular at Natalie Clifford Barney's literary, lesbian salon on the rue Jacob, where she crossed paths with the likes of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. One of her more lasting relationships was with the Standard Oil heiress, Marion ‘Joe' Carstairs. Lasting too was her addiction to heroin, a habit she tried but failed to kick. She died in 1941, at forty-six, the same age as her father and Oscar. Introducing a book of memorial essays on Dorothy, Natalie Clifford Barney said that with her death ‘a certain quality of laughter – of Wildean laughter – has gone out of the world'.
¹

After Constance's death, Cyril was sent to Radley College, a public school in Oxfordshire. From there he joined the army as a cadet and was killed fighting on the Western Front in 1915. Vyvyan Holland, Oscar's second son, was dispatched to Stonyhurst, the Jesuit college in Lancashire. He read law at Cambridge but left before completing his degree – he returned some years later and was called to the Bar in 1912. Vyvyan worked as a translator and writer. He had a son, Merlin, born in 1945. Today Merlin lives mostly in France. He is an author and expert on his grandfather's life and works. He too has a son, Lucien, born in 1979.

And then there is Robbie Ross, Oscar's executor. Robbie put Oscar's literary affairs in order. This was not an easy task – he had to track down manuscripts and restore copyrights lost to the family through bankruptcy. It took six years before Robbie could satisfy creditors; his task was made possible by sales and performances of Oscar's works – now out of favour in Britain and Ireland – in France and Germany. Robbie died suddenly in 1915. On the fiftieth anniversary of Oscar's death, in 1950, Robbie's ashes were placed in the Epstein tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery, as he had requested.

Lord Alfred Douglas married in 1902, although the marriage did not last long. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1911. In his book
Oscar Wilde and Myself
, published in 1914, he tried to distance himself from Oscar and from homosexuality. He had his own taste of prison, serving six months in Wormwood Scrubs after Winston Churchill took a successful criminal libel action against him. He tried again in 1928, in
Autobiography
, to get rid of the shadow of Oscar Wilde. He died in 1945, aged seventy-four.

Ireland's independence came in 1922, but not before a bloody clash, as Jane predicted. Anglo-Irish houses were burned and their inhabitants brutally treated in the civil war. Many of the Anglo-Irish left, never to return.

The Wildes inverted the American dream – they went from riches to rags. They belong to our century of celebrity, excess, laughter and scandal. Though the inhabitants of the houses fell, the Wilde name survives. It stands for what is singular, independent-minded and fearless.

Notes

1: Roots

1.
Hanberry, G.,
More Lives Than One: The Remarkable Wilde Family Through the Generations
, Cork, 2011, p. 16.

2.
William Wilde,
Irish Popular Superstitions
, Dublin, 1852, pp. 73, 62.

3.
Ibid., p. 52.

4.
Ibid., pp. 96–7.

5.
William Wilde,
Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands, Dublin
, 1867, p. 174.

6.
Ibid., pp. 188, 192–3.

7.
Wilde,
Irish Popular Superstitions
, p. 69.

8.
‘Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer' (1820), from the course The Gothic Subject, by David S. Miall, University of Alberta, autumn 2000, see
www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Gothic/Maturin.htm

2: Lust for Knowledge

1.
Coakley, D.,
The Irish School of Medicine: Outstanding Practitioners of the 19th
Century
, Dublin, 1988, p. 2.

2.
Ibid., p. 16.

3.
Ibid., pp. 18, 25, 22.

4.
See The Victorian Web, 23/7/2012 (John Buchanan-Brown,
Phiz! The Book Illustrations of Hablot Knight Browne
, London and Vancouver, 1978).

5.
The Nation
, October 1843.

6.
William Wilde,
Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and along the Shores of the Mediterranean, including a visit to Algiers, Egypt, Palestine, Tyre, Rhodes, Telmessus, Cyprus, and Greece (with observations on the present state and prospects of Egypt and Palestine, and on the climate, Natural History, Antiquities, etc. of the countries visited)
, vol. I, Dublin and London, 1840, pp. 416, 152, 181.

7.
Ibid., pp. 188, 236–7.

8.
Ibid., pp. 250, 253.

9.
Ibid., p. 268.

10.
Ibid., pp. 364–5, 383–5.

11.
Ibid., pp. 386, 387, 388, 389.

12.
Ibid., p. 396.

13.
Ibid., p. 322.

14.
Ibid., p. 323.

15.
Ibid., pp. 326, 324.

16.
Ibid., p. 342.

17.
Wilde,
Narrative of a Voyage
, vol. II, p. 425.

3: Patron-cum-Scholar

1.
Wilson, T. G.,
Victorian Doctor: Being the Life of Sir William Wilde
, London, 1942, p. 85.

2.
Wilde,
Narrative of a Voyage
, vol. I, p. 419.

3.
Holmes, R.,
The Age of Wonder
, London, 2008, pp. 446, 452–3.

4.
Wilde,
Narrative of a Voyage
, vol. II, p. 157.

5.
Wilson,
Victorian Doctor
, p. 82.

6.
See Terry Eagleton,
Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
, London, 1999, pp. 20–2, for an interpretation of Davis's address to the Historical Society, Dublin, 1840.

7.
‘Antiquities Recently Discovered at Dunshanghlin',
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy
, Dublin, June 1839.

8.
William Wilde,
The Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater
, Dublin, 1849, reprinted Galway, 2003, p. v.

9.
Vivian Mercier,
Modern Irish Literature
, Oxford, 1994, quoted in Eagleton,
Scholars and Rebels
, p. 28.

10.
Quoted in Eagleton,
Scholars and Rebels
, p. 24.

11.
Wilde,
The Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater
, p. vi.

4: Rising High

1.
Andrew Motion,
Keats
, London, 1997, pp. 551–4.

2.
William Wilde,
Austria: Its Literary, Scientific, and Medical Institutions
, Dublin, 1843, pp. 201–2, 205–12, 77, 196–8, 84.

3.
Wilson,
Victorian Doctor
, pp. 114–15.

4.
Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.)
, The Letters of Oscar
Wilde
, London, 1962, p. 37.

5.
Wilde,
Austria: Its Literary, Scientific, and Medical Institutions
, preface.

6.
Quoted in F. O'Toole, ‘The Genius of Creative Destruction',
New York Review of Books
, 19 December 2013.

7.
Wiiliam Wilde, ‘Opinions of the Press on the First Edition' in
The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life
, Dublin, 1849 (inside front cover).

8.
Wilde,
The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life
, pp. 89, 114.

9.
Coakley,
The Irish School of Medicine
, pp. 3–4, 85–6, 89–90.

10.
Coakley,
The Irish School of Medicine
, p. 87.

5: The Bourgeois Rebel

1.
Jane Wilde,
Poems
, Dublin, 1864, pp. 45–7.

2.
Ibid., pp. 53–5.

3.
Charles Gavan Duffy,
My Life in Two Hemispheres
, London, 1898, vol. I, pp. 141–2, 75.

4.
Jane Wilde,
Notes on Men, Women and Books
, London, 1891, pp. 105, 104.

5.
Ibid., p. 18.

6.
Ibid., p. 14.

7.
Letters to Hilson, University of Reading.

8.
Ibid.

9.
Ibid.

10.
Charles Gavan Duffy,
Four Years of Irish History
, London, 1883.

11.
Letters to Hilson.

12.
Duffy,
My Life in Two Hemispheres
, vol. I, pp. 217–18.

13.
Le Quesne, A. L.,
Victorian Thinkers: Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Morris
, Oxford, 1993, p. 19.

14.
Wilde,
Notes on Men, Women and Books
, p. 89.

15.
Sullivan, A. M.,
New Ireland
, London, 1877, p. 149.

16.
Letters to Hilson.

17.
Duffy,
My Life in Two Hemispheres
, vol. I, p. 88.

18.
Sullivan,
New Ireland
, pp. 186–7.

19.
Letters to Hilson.

20.
Wilde,
Notes on Men, Women and Books
, p. 25.

21.
Wyndham, H.,
Speranza: A Biography of Lady Wilde
, London, 1951, p. 199; a full transcript is included in Appendix 1.

22.
Wyndham,
Speranza: A Biography of Lady Wilde
, p. 199.

23.
Letters to Hilson.

24.
Ibid.

25.
Ibid.

26.
Wilde,
Notes on Men, Women and Books
, p. 25.

27.
Letters to Hilson.

28.
Ibid.

6: Flirtations, Father Figures and Femmes Fatales

1.
Hugh Chisholm (ed.), ‘William Carleton',
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(11th ed.), 1911.

2.
Letters to Hilson.

3.
Bridgwater, P., ‘Who's afraid of Sidonia von Bork?', 2000, in Stark, S. (ed.),
The novel in Anglo-German context: cultural cross-currents and affinities from the conference held at the University of Leeds
, 1997, pp. 216–17.

4.
Quoted in T. Wright,
Oscar's Books
, London, 2008, p. 41.

5.
Letters to Hilson.

6.
Ibid.

7: Marriage

1.
Quoted in J. Melville,
Mother of Oscar
, London, 1994, pp. 50–1.

2.
Letters to Hilson.

3.
Ibid.

4.
‘Genius and Marriage',
Social Studies
, London, 1893, pp. 28–52.

5.
‘The Bondage of Woman',
Social Studies
, pp. 1–27.

6.
Coventry Patmore's narrative poem ‘The Angel in the House' was published in 1854.