Franny Moyle (2 page)

It is less easy for us today to invoke a mental image of Mrs Oscar Wilde. Yet her contemporaries would have had little problem. She was a high-profile figure, whose beauty was widely acknowledged, whose activities were often reported in the press and whose appearances and outfits were also monitored for the sake of an intrigued public. In fact, ever since their marriage Oscar's charming wife had done nothing but enhance and complement his reputation. Constance Wilde balanced her husband. She was wholesome and earnest and provided the ideal foil to his determined flamboyance.

Née
Constance Lloyd, she came from a moneyed background. Her highly respected family, although not aristocratic, had branches that had become entwined with the highest echelons of society. Stunning-looking and naturally stylish, with impressive chestnut hair and delicate features, she had been thrust into the limelight in 1884, when she wed a man who, at the outset of that decade, had managed to make himself famous even before he had achieved anything – an accomplishment in itself.

From the moment they married and Mrs Oscar Wilde came into
being, Constance had used her new-found celebrity to support the husband she adored but also to forge her own path. She had consistently encouraged Oscar's ambitions and contributed to his circle, and those who celebrated Oscar knew her well. But she had also pursued her own passions.

Those who admired Constance Wilde were discrete from Oscar Wilde's fans. In contrast to the self-proclaimed ‘Aesthetes', of whom Constance would have undoubtedly considered herself one, she was nevertheless a role model for a more politically motivated circle of liberal women. They formed a section of society seeking both to be improved and to improve what they saw as the failings of the nineteenth century.

Those who subscribed to
The Young Woman
in January 1895 could see the latest photograph of Constance accompanying an article she had written on ‘How to Decorate a House'. In contrast to Oscar, who posed so readily, his wife sat rather awkwardly in front of the camera, actually looking rather glum and insecure. This was her default expression in front of a lens, an involuntary look that she was all too aware made her appear ‘solemnly tragic'. She was consistently surprised by such photographs. ‘Do I really look like that?' she would ask.
⁴

Her natural warmth and charm unapparent, nevertheless the photograph in
The Young Woman
reveals Constance's round, soft face and brown hair, worn in what was then the latest Parisian manner: crimped and drawn down over the temples and ears, then looped back into a bun behind. Her eyes seem dark in the photograph, belying their real-life blue-green hue. Constance is captured wearing one of her favourite ‘Aesthetic' outfits: a full-sleeved dress with a loose pleated bodice that is drawn in at the waist. The silk she is wearing might be deep red or green, printed with a bold modern pomegranate pattern. Around her neck she wears two strands of ‘art beads' shining like bright cough sweets. You have no way of knowing that in her stockings she stood five feet eight inches tall.

Very much the darling of the women's magazines, Mrs Oscar Wilde was renowned for her beautiful outfits, a regular complement
to her husband's own attire. Constance, like so many other forward-thinking women of her day, used fashion to convey something of her political, feminist leanings. A hundred years before women burned their bras, she wore loose-fitting clothing in sympathy with the movement to reform female dress and emancipate women from the confines of corsets and hoops. She sported divided skirts, modelled Turkish trousers and talked about the hygienic virtues of cellular cloth.

But as much as her outfits could be ‘political', they were also ‘Aesthetic', worn to be beautiful and to express the value the wearer attributed to the importance of beauty and pleasure. Although her day dress was practical and pioneering, her evening dress could be show-stopping.

That January was no exception. What Constance wore to the opening night of
An Ideal Husband
became a story in its own right for the women's press. Her dress was ‘composed of green chine moiré arranged with green chiffon and black silk muslin, and trimmed with velvet roses and ribbon to match',
The Lady's Pictorial
informed its readers.

The full skirt is of green chine moiré with a black silk muslin round the hem, while the bodice is of green chiffon with sprays of roses and with long ends of ribbon reaching almost to the hem of the skirt. The sleeves are formed of two big puffs of black silk muslin, headed with green chiffon and moire, while a garland of velvet roses may be seen on the shoulders.
⁵

The very next day Constance sat down to convey to friends her delight in her husband's success. Formidable letter-writer that she was, she had a bespoke writing table in her bedroom, part of a larger set of fitted cupboards and shelves that had been specially built and were considered a complete innovation. One visitor to Tite Street described how, when opening the door to Constance's bedroom, one found oneself ‘about to walk through the opening in a wall apparently three foot thick. When you get into the room you find that on the one side of the door forming a side of the doorway is an
ideal wardrobe with every kind of drawer and hanging cupboard for dresses' and that ‘on the opposite side of the door is a book case and writing table'.
⁶
All this was painted white.

‘Oscar's play was the most tremendous success,' Constance wrote to her great friend Georgina, Lady Mount-Temple, ‘and is, I think, the most beautiful play that he has written.'
⁷
Like many of her female contemporaries, she clearly approved of the way in which the play aired the question of morality and marriage.

An Ideal Husband
quickly provided an excuse for widespread national debate on the nature of marriage. What constituted an ideal husband, and what was an ideal wife? The title of the play was like a red rag to a bull for the hordes of so-called ‘New' or ‘Advanced Women' emerging by the mid-1890s, a group of proto-feminists in whose cultivation women such as Constance and magazines such as
The Young Woman
played their part. These women, many of whom were associated with the latest craze for bicycling around London, expected more from men than their mothers had done. Not only did they challenge the dominance of men in society; they also challenged the assumption that moral divergences and duplicities were acceptable when perpetrated by men, but not by women. Husbands should adhere to the same moral rules as their wives, and marriages become transparent transactions. Wilde's farce could not have been better timed for them, and many of them reached for their pens, using the play's topicality to get letters and opinions into print.
⁸

After the success of
An Ideal Husband
at the Haymarket, the actor–manager of the St James's Theatre, George Alexander, had decided that if you can't beat the opposition, you should join it. He had produced Wilde's
Lady Windermere's Fan
three years previously, and now, with a play by Henry James foundering, he decided to rush Oscar's latest work,
The Importance of Being Earnest
, into production. Billed to open on 12 February, it finally enjoyed its prèmiere just two days later, on St Valentine's Day. A week after opening,
The Illustrated London News
proclaimed to its readers ‘the eclipse of Mr George Alexander's fortunes at the St James' theatre has been very brief. To the delicate but unhappily obscure comedy of Mr Henry
James has succeeded a piece of delightful nonsense by Mr Oscar Wilde.'
⁹

A nonsensical tale of assumed identities, hilarious duplicities and babies left in handbags on station platforms hit the spot again, and within just six weeks of the new year Wilde found himself with two huge successes on his hands. This was something quite unprecedented. But then 1895 had been extraordinary from day one.

It had been a strangely momentous year. As if the old world was being prematurely washed away to make way for a new century still five years off, pillars of the cultural and political establishment tumbled within the first few weeks. The poetess of the nation, Christina Rossetti, passed away, as did everyone's favourite storyteller, Robert Louis Stevenson. Then the great statesman Randolph Churchill died too.

Britain was being bombarded by some of the most extreme -weather for nearly half a century. New-year gales had cost ninety men their lives in the port of Hull, the Channel mail steam-packet had run aground in storms just off Calais, and Gravesend was drowned in flood water. Conditions had failed to improve by February, when wet conditions were replaced by a freeze over Europe the likes of which had not been seen for four decades. For the first time since 1854 the mouth of the River Medway, from Sheerness dockyard to the Isle of Grain, froze over. The Mersey and Thames were solid, and in Oxford coaches were running along the Isis. London had been transformed into a different city, and its parks were unusually busy with skaters packed ten-a-penny on to the frozen lakes and ponds.

Oscar had missed much of January's arctic conditions. After the opening of
An Ideal Husband
he had escaped to the warm sunshine of North Africa for a rest, at his wife's bidding. Since before Christmas, Constance had been worrying that her husband was overworked, and had suggested a recuperative visit to her great friend and Cyril's godparent, the adventurer Walter Harris, in Tangiers.
¹⁰
Oscar had embarked on such a trip on 17 January, although, rather than tracking down Harris in Morocco, he had decided to head to Algeria, so persuaded by his travelling companion Lord Alfred Douglas, or
‘Bosie', as he was called. Constance, meanwhile, stayed behind, battling with the elements to return her children to their respective schools before closing up the house in Tite Street and heading off on her own holiday.

The day before she left, she hurriedly wrote a note to her and Oscar's great friend Robert Ross. Could he make sure Oscar reserved tickets for
The Importance
for her friends the Lilleys? And could he arrange for Oscar to send her some money on his return, since she was £38 overdrawn at the bank? ‘I am writing this to you as you know what Oscar is about correspondence,' Constance explained. ‘He would forget the Lilleys' address and send me no money!' ‘My servants will be on board wages,' she added, ‘and if he wants to come home tell him he must let them have a day's notice!' Knowing she herself would miss the first night of
The Importance
, Constance also asked Ross to send her ‘some of the many papers Oscar will have about the play'.
¹¹

On 29 January Constance boarded the Great Western steam train from Paddington and made the journey down to Torquay, on the Devon coast. There she made her way to Babbacombe Cliff, the beautiful seaside home of her great friend the elderly Georgina Cowper-Temple, Lady Mount-Temple. If Constance felt a degree of disappointment at having to read the accounts of her husband's second first night in as many months in the press rather than enjoy them first-hand, she must have also felt her trip to Babbacombe was worth the sacrifice. For Constance's visit was not a mere escape. It was also intended to be recuperative.

Despite her relative youth, for some time Constance had been plagued by pains in her back, arms, legs and face. She had also been suffering headaches. What she commonly referred to as her ‘neuralgia' had more recently developed into intermittent paralysis in her right arm and leg. She had sought relief from her symptoms with increasingly desperate measures, but the ‘electricity treatment'
¹²
in which she had most recently invested was proving ineffective. By the end of January Constance was complaining that she could barely walk.
¹³

Constance's intense friendship with Georgina, Lady Mount-Temple, had begun some five years earlier, and she had come to rely on the therapeutic effects of the calming, retreat-like holidays she would take at Babbacombe with its septuagenarian occupant. Constance adored Georgina's country home, and she also loved its lush, wooded gardens, which culminated in cliffs reaching out over the sea. In the summer she and Georgina would walk in the grounds and feed the birds, which Georgina had such a passion for. Often then they would slip into Torquay and indulge in Turkish baths together, an activity that seemed to improve Constance's aches and pains no end, and Georgina would massage Constance's aching limbs.

Even when the weather was freezing, as it was that February, and the garden paths too slippery to risk, Constance was able to find much to please her. She and Georgina could talk for hours on the subjects in which they shared a deep interest. Constance had a formidably inquiring and studious mind. She was entranced by knowledge. And in Georgina she had found a partner in conversation without comparison. Their interests in literature, the supernatural, religion and art were perfectly aligned.

All in all, Georgina Mount-Temple had become more than a friend to Constance. She was almost a second mother, whom Constance would playfully address as ‘mothery', ‘santissima madre', ‘madre dolorosa' or ‘darling Ani'. Georgina had become a drug that Constance needed on a regular basis. If Oscar could be accused of an apparently insatiable appetite for fine champagne, cigarettes and the company of his young, adoring fans, in her own way his wife pursued her relationship with Lady Mount-Temple with a similar voracious hunger.

Constance's trip to Babbacombe had always been envisaged as a month's sojourn. And so, as February drew to a close, she came home, probably on that 28 February, to find 16 Tite Street empty and the servants still on board wages, as she had left them a month earlier. Her husband had not set foot in the place, a fact that is unlikely to have surprised her greatly.

But the problem Constance faced in February 1895 was that she
had grown very much out of touch regarding her husband's recent activities. With their respective holidays and Oscar's recent need to stay in the West End rather than at home, the pair of them had barely seen one another since the first night
o£ An Ideal Husband
.