Franny Moyle (19 page)

Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde. Oscar's mother was an Irish poet whose pen name was ‘Speranza'.

Sir William Wilde, Oscar's father, was an esteemed eye and ear surgeon. He had a colourful private life and a brood of illegitimate children in addition to Oscar and Willie, his legitimate sons with Speranza.

Otho Holland Lloyd, Constance's brother, taken in about 1884 when he would have been twenty-eight.

Constance aged twenty-four, on holiday at Delgaty Castle, Aberdeenshire, August 1882. According to a note on the back, the picture was taken by ‘Mr Burton, Son of the Scottish Historian'.

Oscar the bachelor, wearing his hair long. According to Constance, her relatives in London disapproved of his appearance ‘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.'

Constance in an ‘aesthetic' dress in the period before her marriage to Oscar. Otho considered her loose dresses with wide sleeves ugly.

A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881
by William Powell Frith. Oscar is featured in the foreground to the right, with a lily in his buttonhole. To the left, a young woman, dressed very much as Constance did at this time, wears a green puffed-sleeved dress, on which she has pinned the badge of Aestheticism: a sunflower.

Oscar the married man, photographed in 1885, with his hair curled in what he described as his ‘Neronian coiffure'.

Consistent with the
Lady's Pictorial
descriptions of her honeymoon wardrobe, Mrs Oscar Wilde is seen here in one of her'large white plumed hats' and ‘somewhat quaintly-made gowns of white muslin, usually relieved by touches of golden ribbon'.

Suddenly in the spotlight after her marriage to Oscar, Constance featured in the press when she manned a charity flower stall at the ‘Healtheries' in 1884. She is seen wearing one of the latest ‘rational' outfits: a divided skirt.

As Constance and Oscar's home in Tite Street soon became acknowledged as a hub of cultural and social activity, the Wildes' ‘artistic' marriage became the source of caricature in the press.

Oscar photographed in 1889. While his private life took on new sexual dimensions, Oscar's public profile was essentially conventional in the mid to late 1880s. His dress was no longer bohemian, but traditional with just a dandyish twist.