2007 - Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (35 page)

Oscar Wilde’s collection of fairy stories,
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
, appeared in 1888, followed more controversially, by ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ in 1889 and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
in 1890. The first of his successful social comedies,
Lady Windermere’s Fan
, was produced in London in 1892, followed by
A Woman of No Importance
(1893),
An Ideal Husband
(1895), and
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895).

In 1891 Oscar Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, the third son of the 8
th
Marquess of Queensberry. In 1895, Queensberry left a card for Wilde at the Albemarle Club accusing him of ‘posing Somdomite’ (
sic
) and provoking Wilde to sue Queensberry for criminal libel. The failure of the libel action led to Wilde’s own prosecution on charges of gross indecency. On 25 May 1895, he was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

Released from gaol on 19 May 1897, Wilde travelled immediately to France and spent the rest of his life on the Continent. His poem,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, was published in 1898, and
De Profundis
, his confessional letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, was published posthumously, in 1905. Constance Wilde died in Genoa on 7 April 1898, following an operation on her spine. Oscar Wilde died in Paris on 30 November 1900. He was buried at Bagneux Cemetery. In 1909, his remains were moved to the French national cemetery of Pere Lachaise.

Of Irish-Catholic descent, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, on 22 May 1859. He was the second of Mary Foley Doyle’s ten children, of whom seven survived. His father, Charles Doyle, was an artist and alcoholic who died in a mental hospital near Dumfries. His grandfather, John Doyle, left Dublin, aged twenty, to become a successful portrait painter in London. His uncle, Richard Doyle, was a celebrated caricaturist and illustrator. From his great-uncle, Michael Conan, a noted journalist, Arthur received the compound surname of Conan Doyle.

Arthur Conan Doyle was educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, at a Jesuit school in Feldkirch, Austria, and at Edinburgh University, where he studied medicine and became the surgeon’s clerk to Professor Joseph Bell whose diagnostic methods he acknowledged as the model for the science of deduction perfected by his most famous creation, ‘the consulting detective’, Sherlock Holmes.

After serving briefly as a ship’s medical officer (on board a whaler bound for the Arctic Circle), he settled on the south coast of England, in Southsea, where he established his own medical practice in 1882. It was while waiting for patients that he began to write fiction. Sherlock Holmes first appeared in
A Study in Scarlet
in 1887.
The Sign of Four
was published in 1890, followed by
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
(1894),
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1902),
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
(1904),
The Valley of Fear
(1915),
His Last Bow
(1917) and
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
(1927).

In due course, his success as an author enabled him to give up his medical career and, beyond the Sherlock Holmes stories, his many popular books ranged from historical romances, such as
Micah Clarke
(1889) and
The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard
(1896), to science fiction, such as
The Lost World
(1912) and
The Poison Belt
(1913). In 1899, he volunteered to serve as a medical officer in the South African war and he published
The Great Boer War
in 1900. For his services to his country, he received a knighthood in 1902. In his later years he became deeply interested in psychic phenomena and published
The History of Spiritualism
in 1926.

In 1885, Conan Doyle married Louisa ‘Touie’ Hawkins. They had two children: a daughter, Mary, and a son, Alleyne Kingsley. Touie died of tuberculosis in 1906. Alleyne Kingsley, weakened by injuries received on the Somme, died of influenza in 1918. Conan Doyle married Jean Leckie in 1907 and they had three children. Arthur Conan Doyle died at Crowborough in Sussex on 7 July 1930.

Robert Harborough Sherard Kennedy was born in London on 3 December 1861, the fourth child of the Reverend Bennet Sherard Calcraft Kennedy. His father was the illegitimate son of the 6
th
and last Earl of Harborough, and his mother, Jane Stanley Wordsworth, was the granddaughter of the poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Robert was educated at Queen Elizabeth College, Guernsey, at New College, Oxford, and at the University of Bonn, but he left both Oxford and Bonn without securing a degree. In 1880, having quarrelled with his father and lost his expected inheritance, he abandoned his ‘Kennedy’ surname.

In the early 1880
s
, Robert Sherard settled in Paris and set about earning his living as an author and journalist. He cultivated the acquaintance of a number of the leading literary figures of the day, including Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet and Oscar Wilde. He published thirty-three books during his lifetime, including a collection of poetry,
Whispers
(1884), novels, biographies, social studies (notably
The White Slaves of England
, 1897), and five books inspired by his friendship with Oscar Wilde:
Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship
, 1902;
The Life of Oscar Wilde
, 1906;
The Real Oscar Wilde
, 1911;
Oscar Wilde Twice Defended
, 1934; and
Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde
, 1936.

He was three times married and lived much of his life in France, where he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’hon-neur. He died in England, in Ealing, on 30 January 1943.

In 1960, in
Oscar Wilde and His World
, Vyvyan Holland, Wilde’s younger son, gave this assessment of Robert Sherard: “When they first met they felt that they had nothing in common and disliked each other intensely; but they gradually got together and became life-long friends. Sherard wrote the first three biographical studies of Wilde after his death…On these three books are based all the other biographies of Wide, except the so-called biography by Frank Harris, which is nothing else but the self-glorification of Frank Harris. Sherard got a great deal of his material from Lady Wilde when she was a very old lady and was inclined to let her imagination run away with her, particularly where the family history was concerned; and Sherard, a born journalist, was much more attracted by the interest of a story than by its accuracy, a failing which we can see running through all his books. But where his actual contact with Wilde is concerned, he is quite reliable.”

Gyles Brandreth was born on 8 March 1948 in Germany, where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his father, Charles Brandreth, was serving as a legal officer with the Allied Control Commission and counted among his colleagues H. Montgomery Hyde, who, in 1948, published the first full account of the trials of Oscar Wilde. In 1974, at the Oxford Theatre Festival, Gyles Brandreth produced the first stage version of
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
, with Tom Baker as Wilde, and, in 2000, he edited the transcripts of the trials for an audio production starring Martin Jarvis.

Gyles Brandreth was educated at the Lycee Français de Londres, at Betteshanger School in Kent, and at Bedales School in Hampshire. Like Robert Sherard, Gyles Brandreth went on to New College, Oxford, where he was a scholar, President of the Union and editor of the university magazine, and then, again like Sherard, embarked on a career as an author and journalist. His first book,
Created in Captivity
(1972), was a study of prison reform; his first biography,
The Funniest Man on Earth
(1974), was a portrait of the Victorian music-hall star, Dan Leno. More recently he has published a biography of the actor, Sir John Gielgud, as well as an acclaimed diary of his years as an MP and government whip (
Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries
1990—97) and two best-selling royal biographies:
Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage
and
Charles and Camilla: Portrait of a Love Affair
.

Robert Sherard’s forebears included William Wordsworth. Gyles Brandreth’s include the somewhat less eminent poet, George R. Sims (1847-1922), who wrote the ballads ‘Billy’s dead and gone to glory’ and ‘Christmas Day in the workhouse’. Sims was also the first journalist to claim to know the true identity of ‘Jack the Ripper’. Sims, a kinsman of the Empress Eugenic and an acquaintance of both Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, was arguably the first ‘celebrity columnist’. He was also well known in his day for his endorsement of an ‘infallible cure for baldness’: ‘Tatcho—The Geo. R. Sims Hair Restorer’.

As a broadcaster, Gyles Brandreth has presented numerous series for BBC Radio 4, including
A Rhyme in Time, Sound Advice
and
Whispers
—coincidentally the title of Robert Sherard’s first collection of poetry. He is a regular guest on
Just a Minute
and
Countdown
, and his television appearances have ranged from being the guest host of
Have I Got News for You
to being the subject of
This is Your Life
. On stage he has starred in an award-winning revue in the West End and appeared as Malvolio in a musical version of
Twelfth Night
in Edinburgh. With Hinge and Bracket he scripted the TV series,
Dear Ladies;
with Julian Slade he wrote a play about A.A. Milne (featuring Aled Jones as Christopher Robin); and, with Susannah Pearse, he has written a new musical about Lewis Carroll,
The Last Photograph
.

Gyles Brandreth is married to the writer and publisher, Michele Brown. They have three children: a barrister, a writer and an environmental economist.

EOF