Franny Moyle (7 page)

Once Oscar was in residence in Salisbury Street, he and Miles began inviting people to join them for ‘Tea and Beauties'. In their bohemian rooms Miles would display his latest portraits of society belles and Oscar would entertain as only he could, with his rolling, golden voice pouring out wit and stories. Miles had persuaded the supermodel of her day, Lillie Langtry, to pose for him, and his delightful sketch of her had earned him a tidy income when, in reproduction, it became something of a best-seller. She had become a friend of Miles's and was soon also on Oscar's arm.

During his university days Oscar's romantic attentions had been trained for two years on Florence Balcombe, a Dublin girl and future actress whom he adored. But by 1878 he had found himself usurped in her affections by another Dubliner, the writer, theatre manager and future creator of
Dracula
, Bram Stoker. She married Bram that December, to Oscar's great distress. Now the high-profile Mrs Langtry, who seemed more than happy to adopt Oscar as her mascot, went some way to easing this disappointment.

But it was not just Lillie Langtry with whom Oscar regularly flirted. He was also showing public devotion to the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. In May 1879 he travelled to Folkestone to meet Miss Bernhardt as she arrived in England. In a gesture that guaranteed press attention, as she stepped foot on British soil, Oscar threw at her feet the armful of lilies he had brought to greet her. He was becoming a study in self-promotion. The following month he wrote a sonnet to her that was published in
The World
. A month after that his poem ‘The New Helen' in praise of Miss Langtry appeared in
Time
.

Laura Troubridge, then a young, aspiring artist but who would one day marry Adrian Hope and become Constance's neighbour in Tite Street, witnessed the frisson that surrounded Oscar in those early days in London. Her cousin Charles Orde, known as ‘Tardy', was friendly with the young Mr Wilde. ‘To tea with Tardy', Laura wrote
on 30 June 1879. ‘Met Oscar Wilde, the poet. Both fell awfully in love with him, thought him delightful.' Then in July:

To the National Gallery, saw Sarah Bernhardt there, had a good stare at her. Met Tardy and went together to tea at Oscar Wilde's – great fun, lots of vague ‘intense' men, such duffers, who amused us awfully. The room was a mass of white lilies, photos of Mrs Langtry, peacock feather screens and coloured pots, pictures of various merits.
¹⁷

Lillie Langtry remembered that, ‘on his arrival from Oxford, Oscar had longish hair and wore an outfit that spoke of bohemian credentials: light-coloured trousers, a black frock coat, brightly coloured waistcoats with a white silk cravat held with an amethyst pin and always carrying lavender gloves.' But as Oscar's charm worked its magic on London society and, as Langtry observed, he ‘began to rise in the life of London, and his unconscious peculiarities had become a target for the humorous columns of the newspapers, he was quick to realise that they could be turned to advantage, and he proceeded forthwith to develop them so audaciously that it became impossible to ignore them'.
¹⁸

Before long Oscar had grown his hair longer than anyone else, and his buttonholes were more unusual. And his outfits became even more outrageous. Caricatures of him in the press quickly became animated on stage. By the end of 1880 a satire on Aestheticism called
Where's the Cat
opened at the Criterion Theatre, in which Oscar clearly provided the inspiration for the character of the Aesthetic writer Scott Ramsay. The actor playing Ramsay, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, modelled his performance on Oscar. Then came another play,
The Colonel
, in which another Aesthete, called Lambert Stryke, was again played in Wildean manner.

In early 1881 the
Punch
cartoonist George du Maurier was running weekly caricatures of two Aesthetic types, the poet Maudle and the painter Jellaby Postlethwaite. Maudle transfigured over the weeks into Oscuro Wildegoose, Drawit Milde and Ossian Wilderness, and was teased for his interest in lilies, the Grosvenor Gallery and blue china.

And so within two years after arriving in London, Oscar had
landed the city. Despite his limited output in print, by 1881 Oscar's fame was secured when the great painter and social observer William Powell Frith captured him at the Royal Academy summer show amid the great and the good. A lily in his lapel, the young Wilde, tall, long-haired and not yet showing the weight that would define his later years, stands notebook in hand, surrounded by a group of admiring women. To the right of the canvas the figure of George du Maurier is depicted looking on. To the left a woman wearing a loose, puff-sleeved Aesthetic outfit with a sunflower pinned to her breast gives us some sense of the figure that Constance too must have cut at this time.

In the same year that Frith immortalized Oscar in paint, the masters of popular music Gilbert and Sullivan confirmed Oscar's celebrity with the production of
Patience
, an operetta in which an Aesthete was presented in the character of Bunthorne. Bunthorne's costume took Aesthetic dress to new extremes. He wore a loose velvet jacket, knee breeches, silk tights and patent pumps. These extremes of dress were ones that soon became associated not with the fictional Bunthorne but with the man Wilde.

The Lloyds must have looked on with a mixture of bemusement and disapproval at the progress of their family friend. Conventional and upright, the inhabitants of 100 Lancaster Gate would not have considered wearing one's hair long and becoming the target of ridicule the best credentials. But then again, Oscar's Oxford contemporary Otho was hardly turning out as they had hoped.

For one thing, Otho had become embroiled in a court case that captured the public's imagination. A report in the
Daily News
for 22 March 1879, under the headline ‘The Alleged Frauds upon the Charitable Public', gives an idea of the case's appeal. It describes the accused Vernon Montgomery and Ethel Vivian in the dock, amid an unusually packed and rowdy courtroom. Much of the crowd comprised young professional men, attracted by the impressive appearance of the bottle-blonde Miss Vivian, who was parading in the witness box in ‘a light silk dress of fashionable make'.

The prosecution alleged that Montgomery and Vivian placed
advertisements in
The Times
purporting to be on behalf of an embarrassed girl in need of financial assistance. When charitable individuals responded to the advert, Montgomery entered into a correspondence that invited donations.

However, far from being a genuine lady in distress, prosecution witnesses identified Miss Vivian as in fact a Miss Wilmore, a Pimlicobased prostitute for whom Montgomery was almost certainly a pimp. In her defence, Miss Vivian protested from the witness box, much to the obvious mirth of the courtroom, that, far from being her pimp, Montgomery (who was using the moniker Viscount de Montgomery) was in fact a ‘poet' whom she had met at the Promenade concerts, and that she had subsequently left Pimlico to live with him in his ‘country house' near Maidstone.

To the horror of some constituents of his Lloyd and Napier relatives, Otho found himself appearing in court as a witness for the prosecution. He was one of the charitable individuals who had responded to
The Times
advertisement. In what was evidently an act of utter naivety, Otho sent Miss Vivian £5, a not insignificant sum. To the continued mirth of those watching proceedings, Otho noted that, although he acknowledged the fraud, he did not regret his donation to a woman who, regardless of her means of soliciting it, was indeed a subject for charity. Like many of those in the courtroom that day, Otho Lloyd presented as a man too easily turned by a pretty face.

Leaving aside his rather embarrassing susceptibility to the charms of young women and lack of financial acumen, Otho was beginning to concern the family more generally. Despite having won a scholarship to Oxford, he was lackadaisical in his approach to his studies and was soon failing key exams. Constance had made a huge emotional investment in her brother. Unable to pursue a career herself, her natural ambition was bound up in his achievements. As she saw the potential for such achievements slip away, Constance was genuinely distressed.

My Dearest boy, I am so terribly disappointed that you're being plucked, perhaps the more so that Francis has passed his examination,
and I think in all probability Charlie his. It cannot but force itself upon my mind, seeing Grand Papa's disappointment, almost unspoken it is true, but scarcely for that the less, that you have not worked or that you have worked only indolently, as we are both only too inclined to do. Do dear boy try to make up this future year and work steadily and try to attain the honours that I know with study you have the capability of attaining … Do not think I am lecturing you. You know that all my ambition, all my future hopes are bound up in you and it is really a keen disappointment to me to find that you have none for yourself and it is not only that, but also that it is Grand Papa's money that is being spent and if you do not profit by your college career it is wasted, is it not so? Is there any possible way by which I can help you? Remember that ignorant as I am, I will do anything in my power, or learn anything by which I could afford you any possible assistance.
¹⁹

With Otho's prospects foundering, Constance must have felt all the more keenly what potential suitors might offer her in terms of success and achievement. Despite now having several men ‘in various stages of devotion', none of them was right. In fact, all of them were, for different reasons, utterly wrong.

In the summer of 1880 Constance, her aunt and grandfather travelled to the coast ahead of a family holiday in Holland. Constance's Irish uncle Charlie Hemphill and her cousin Stanhope joined the party briefly before it sailed. Constance thought this was nothing more than a social get-together, made possible by the fact that two branches of the family fortuitously found themselves close to one another during their respective travels. She suddenly discovered, however, that Stanhope, whom she had known since his boyhood, had long been holding a torch for her, and the whole meeting had been engineered for a very specific purpose.

‘I've been so terribly horrified and frightened that I cannot get over it,' she wrote to Otho.

Did it ever in your wildest dreams enter your head that Stanhope cared for me? I went out for a long walk yesterday with him and Uncle Charlie and we two stayed behind to pick some berries, and he informed me that he had come to ask me to be his wife. I do hope no
one will ever again propose to me, for it is horrid. He said that he had wished to speak to me in Dublin and also in London when he was last there, and he would have waited now to test my feelings but that our going away tomorrow had hurried him on. It was so dreadful. I could but refuse him and he came again this morning to get a final answer, and looked as white as a sheet and frightened me so and yet I could not do anything else, could I? He would insist that I cared for someone else, and I assured him I did not. I have sent him away, and I don't want to marry, and I do hope nobody else will ever ask me. I am shaking all over still with fright. Tear up this letter.
²⁰

With poor Stanhope dispatched, it was not long before another admirer was buzzing around the Lloyd household. As London warmed up under the June sun of 1881, a Mr Fitzgerald began to hover. Despite his admirable persistence, he got short shrift. ‘Mr Fitzgerald came … deep sigh, and requested to escort me somewhere this week,' Constance informed her brother. ‘It ended finally in his arranging to come to Devonshire Terrace tomorrow and take Mama, Ella, Tizey and myself to the Fancy Fair at the Albert Hall. Poor man. I hope I shall meet someone I know and then I'll get rid of him. I left Zena and him to have a long conversation together but he made his way over after a time and I couldn't get rid of him.'
²¹

Three days later the hapless Fitzgerald, failing to take a hint, tried his luck once more, as Constance once again relayed. ‘Mr Fitzgerald was with me the whole afternoon and to my horror … went to the Arbuthnots
²²
at home in the evening. I positively loathe him now. Isn't it horrid? He came last Monday and asked to be allowed to escort us on Wednesday, so I couldn't get off it.'
²³

Mr Fitzgerald's timing was poor. Unbeknown to him, his attentions were in competition with those of someone in whom, unlike himself, Stanhope and presumably the now defunct Alec Shand, Constance found herself passionately interested. Like Henry Fedden, whom she found so enthralling, this other suitor was cultured, and, like the fascinating Mr Belt, he was artistic and rather risqué. The man was none other than the newly famous Oscar Wilde.

It was Constance's Irish grandmother who engineered an
opportunity for Constance and Oscar to become properly acquainted in the early summer of 1881, somewhat by default. Grandma Atkinson's intention was to do a little matchmaking on behalf not of Constance but of her young aunt Ellena. ‘Ella' Atkinson came to stay with her sister Ada Swinburne-King at Devonshire Terrace in the early summer of 1881. She was twenty-eight and still unmarried. Grandma Atkinson, well acquainted with Lady Wilde, suggested that Oscar, just a year Ella's junior, might come to tea during her stay. Lady Wilde was only too happy to oblige.

When Sir William Wilde died, Lady Wilde had been left in financial difficulty. Although the gross estate left by the surgeon was some £20,000, he had had debts, and since a substantial £2,000 was left to each of his three sons, William, Oscar and Dr Wilson, Lady Wilde was left with a sum that was quickly deemed not enough to live on in style in Merrion Square. Given both her sons' ambitions to seek careers in London, the decision was made that she would move to the capital, where she and Willie, Oscar's older brother, would combine their resources. And so in 1879 Speranza decamped to rented accommodation in Ovington Square, just off the Brompton Road, the plan being that Willie would take a house for himself and his mother once he had succeeded in securing a staff job on a national newspaper. Speranza was devoted to both her sons and, with them both now in London with her, securing a good match for them had become a priority.