Oscar Read online

  William Robert Wills Wilde had been born (in 1815) and raised in Co. Roscommon in the west of Ireland, the third son of a modestly well-to-do provincial doctor from the established Anglo-Irish protestant class. His mother, Amelia née Fynn, though, came of old Irish stock (the Fynns of Ballymagibbon in Co. Mayo were renowned for their wide estates, their ancient name, their connection to the O’Flaherties and their mental instability).8 In an Ireland that was too often divided along established lines, between indigenous Catholic Celts and Anglo-Protestant incomers, William Wilde embraced the connections and ambiguities of his heritage. He saw great benefit in the ‘fusion’ of the races, and thought that there could not be a better intermixture ‘than the Saxon and the Celt’.9

  While both his older brothers entered the established Church of Ireland (and one of his two sisters also married a clergyman), William followed his father’s profession. As a young man of seventeen he was sent to study medicine – or, rather, surgery – in Dublin. And after five years of training at the city’s leading medical institutions, and five years of amiable sociability among his fellow medical students, he was appointed a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland.

  It was an achievement gained in the face of considerable distractions. He suffered from recurrent bouts of asthma. On the eve of his final exams he contracted a near-fatal fever, and was only brought through by a course of strong ale (one glass taken every hour) prescribed by his sometime tutor and long-time friend, Dr Graves. And, on top of these health worries, the unmarried twenty-two-year-old also learnt that he was due to become a father. Any – or all – of these considerations might have encouraged him to accept a position as medical attendant to a wealthy and consumptive Scots merchant who was about to depart in his steam yacht for a restorative nine-month cruise to the Holy Land. The newly qualified doctor’s duties were not onerous, and he found time during the frequent stopovers to compile material for his first book, a two-volume travelogue, which was published to considerable acclaim on his return to Dublin.

  Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and along the shores of the Mediterranean (or ‘Wilde’s Madeira’, as it was more conveniently known) revealed the author as a young man of extraordinary energy, erudition and pluck. His literary style was lively and engaging; his range of interest boundless: birdlife, plant specimens, antiquities, the health-giving effects of climate, the habits of stray dogs, modes of capital punishment, modes of dress, Napoleonic battle sites, royal tombs, the beautifully shaped eyes of the young women in Bethlehem, the beautifully shaped fingers of the young women in the tobacco-factories at Corunna. He visited Algerian slave markets, ascended a pyramid at the risk of his life, dissected a dolphin (to discover how marine mammals suckled their young without drowning them), and – at Tyre – carried out a thorough investigation into the true origins of the ‘Tyrhennian purple’ dye.

  At Mycenae, in the Greek Peloponnese, he was struck by a resemblance between the vast un-mortared stonework of the so-called ‘Treasury of Atreus’ and the great Neolithic tumulus at Newgrange in Co. Meath. It suggested to him that there must be a common ancestry between the Aryan peoples of pre-classical Greece and the early Celts of prehistoric Ireland.10 William Wilde had a particular enthusiasm for the early history of Ireland. During his childhood in rural Roscommon he had often accompanied his father on his medical rounds among the local peasantry. These trips had given him a love of the topography, the antiquities, the history and the folklore of the country. It was a world of mystery: unexplained ruins of ancient stone and earth littered the landscape, place names echoed with the figures of a lost heroic age, and the colourful superstitions of the local people seemed to preserve the world-view of Ireland’s pre-Christian past.

  And, as a medical student in Dublin, William Wilde had been delighted to find others who shared his antiquarian interests. Their common enthusiasm reflected a new spirit of cultural nationalism, less political and revolutionary than that espoused by some of their contemporaries, but no less challenging to the established hierarchies. The celebration of Ireland’s pre-Christian Celtic past seemed to trump all the later divisions of creed, nationality and political allegiance, and to offer a vision of an Ireland united in itself and separate from England. A focus for these enthusiasts was provided by the RIA, an institution dedicated to the collection, investigation and analysis of Irish antiquities. William Wilde was elected a member at the young age of twenty-three.11

  His love of Ireland, however, was never limiting or parochial. He used the money he earned from his book (a very useful £250) to complete his medical education at some of the foremost centres of learning in Europe. Partly as a result of his travels in Egypt, where he had seen many people suffering from ophthalmic trachaea, he decided to specialize in diseases of the eye. He spent three months at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital (Moorfields); he travelled to Vienna and studied at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus, the city’s great general hospital, where classes were still conducted in Latin; and he visited institutions in Prague, Dresden, Heidelberg and Berlin, before returning to Dublin – in 1841 – to establish his practice in Westland Row (initially at No. 15, then at 21).

  Wilde’s energy was prodigious. He quickly built up a fashionable practice as both an ophthalmic and aural surgeon. As an act of civic philanthropy he opened a dispensary for poor patients in the converted stables next to the house, transforming it in 1844 into St Mark’s Hospital for Diseases of the Eye and Ear, on Mark Street. On both the professional and the philanthropic fronts he was perhaps aided by the fact that he was an active Freemason.12 He contributed regularly to the prestigious Dublin Journal of Medical Science before – at the age of thirty – becoming its editor, and transforming it into the yet more respected Quarterly publication. His pioneering interest in medical statistics led to him being made medical commissioner for the census of 1841 (and assistant commissioner for the subsequent censuses of 1851, 1861 and 1871).

  And there was more. He produced an overview of Austrian intellectual life (Austria: Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions); he attended the natural history and ethnology sessions of the British Association. He continued his investigations into the antiquities of Ireland, giving regular updates to the RIA. He revised his Madeira for a second edition. He contributed articles on diverse topics to the Dublin University Magazine (a publication co-founded, and briefly edited, by Isaac Butt). He published The Last Years of Dean Swift’s Life, the first work to suggest that the author of Gulliver’s Travels had not gone mad during his final years. He produced a discursive account of The Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater (1849) based on his ramblings in the west of Ireland (he had taken Lord Macaulay over the battlefield of the Boyne when the author was researching his History of England).

  And all this was accomplished against a background of committee meetings, convivial club dinners, occasional lectures and a busy social life. He seems to have taken some part in the education of the illegitimate son he had fathered at the end of his student days. Henry Wilson (as he was obliquely named) was acknowledged as an unspecified ‘cousin’, and brought up to follow his father’s profession. William Wilde also sired at least two more children out of wedlock, girls – Emily (born 1847) and Mary (born 1849) – who were adopted as wards by his eldest brother, Rev. Ralph Wilde, sometime vicar of Kilsallaghan, outside Dublin. Their mother was reputed to be the keeper of a ‘black oak shop’ in the city.13 The notion, though, that Dr Wilde was an inveterate ‘runner after girls’ with an illegitimate ‘family in every farmhouse’ was probably the exaggerated invention of Dublin gossip.14 By the beginning of the 1850s he seems to have been in want of a wife. There was a courtship – or at least a flirtation – with the Shakespearean actress Helena Faucit. But it came to nothing, and he turned his attentions elsewhere.

  Jane Francesca Elgee was a worthy mate. In 1851 she was twenty-nine and famous. Over the previous five years she had achieved a popular renown as one of Ireland’s heroic voices, exposing
the horrors of the Famine, and expressing a nationalist outrage at the failure of the British government to address it. Although she came of a thoroughly conventional middle-class Protestant Dublin family, brought up among people high in both the established church and the British army, she had been seized by the radical nationalist spirit of the times, her ‘patriotism kindled’ by reading the poetry of the recently deceased Thomas Davis, one of the founders of the ‘Young Ireland’ movement.15 The fire soon took hold.

  The youngest of four children, brought up by a widowed mother, Jane was of a strongly romantic and literary disposition. She was proud of her connection to the Gothic novelist Charles Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer, a bizarre Faustian tale revered by Goethe, Balzac and the young Romantics. Maturin had married her mother’s sister, and although he had died in 1824 he remained a key presence in Jane’s imaginative life. In search of additional support for her artistic nature, Jane had also convinced herself that the Elgee name derived from the Italian ‘Algiati’ – and from this (imaginary) connection she was happy to make the short leap to claiming kinship with Dante Alighieri (in fact the Elgees descended from a long line of Durham labourers).16 Her childhood was spent among books and poetry. Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning became her favourites, ‘leaving, of course, the Great God, Wordsworth, undisturbed on his throne’.17 An excellent linguist, she became familiar not just with English authors, but also with the whole range of classical and modern European literature. It was, though, in Ireland’s nationalist cause that she found a subject to inspire her own creativity – and her own sense of an exalted destiny.

  Confronted by the injustice and tragedy of the Famine and its aftermath, she began to write impassioned letters and impassioned verses indicting her own landlord class – ‘the spoilers of our land’ – in ringing cadences. They were sent to The Nation, the leading weekly paper of Irish radicalism, the voice of the ‘Young Ireland’ movement. Not daring to use her own name, for fear of outraging her family, she signed her letters ‘John Fanshaw Ellis’ and her verses ‘Speranza’, the Italian word for ‘hope’. The Nation’s editor, Gavan Duffy, was impressed, and through the pages of his paper Speranza’s poems were carried into thousands of humble Irish homes; they were read round fires and declaimed by ballad sellers: ‘The Voice of the Poor’, ‘The Stricken Land’, ‘A Lament for the Potato’.

  In her 1847 ballad ‘The Brothers’ she commemorated young John and Henry Sheares, who had been hanged for their part in the thwarted Irish rebellion of 1798, and imagined them calling to the next generation to take up their fight for ‘Fatherland’:

  Oh! they preach to us, those still and pallid features –

  Those pale lips yet implore us, from their graves,

  To strive for birthright as God’s creatures,

  Or die, if we can but live as slaves.

  Jane’s family was shocked when, inevitably, her alias was exposed and they discovered what she was up to. But she was unrepentant. There was too much excitement and drama in her new role. She had found her calling: ‘I should like to rage through life,’ she declared; ‘this orthodox creeping is too tame for me – ah, this wild rebellious ambitious nature of mine. I wish I could satiate it with Empires, though a St Helena were the end.’18 An Irish revolt seemed a real possibility – at least in the radical circles of literary Dublin. In July 1848, with Duffy and some of the other leaders of the movement imprisoned, Jane added her voice to the calls for armed insurrection. Writing anonymously in the Nation she cried out for ‘a hundred thousand muskets glittering brightly in the light of heaven’. The results were calamitous. The people, exhausted by their privations, did not rise. The government suspended habeus corpus. There was one minor insurrection in Tipperary (‘the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch’) in the course of which two ‘rebels’ were shot. At the subsequent trial of Gavan Duffy (where he was defended by Isaac Butt), Jane’s inflammatory leader was one of the planks in the prosecution’s case. Jane had the considerable courage to go to the solicitor general and admit her own authorship. This act of bravery added new lustre to her reputation: it rapidly became mythologized into the story that she had actually stood up in open court, and interrupted the prosecution’s address with the ringing declaration, ‘I am the culprit, if culprit there be.’19

  During the course of the trial Jane was certainly impressed by Isaac Butt. The thirty-five-year-old lawyer, though a recent convert to the Nationalist cause, was an impassioned advocate (he secured Duffy’s acquittal). Jane romanticized him as ‘the Mirabeau of the Young Ireland movement, with his tossed masses of black hair, his flashing eyes, and splendid rush of cadenced oratory’.20 There were rumours that the attraction was mutual. Years later, John Butler Yeats, writing to his son William, reported: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found [Jane] with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’21 The incident, however, seems to have been as transitory as the 1848 uprising.

  Following the chastening collapse of the Young Ireland movement, Jane withdrew from the political front line, concentrating instead upon sexual politics and literary work. She became an ardent supporter of women’s rights, and an able translator. She produced, in 1849, an English version of Wilhelm Meinhold’s weird Gothic romance Sidonia the Sorceress. Over the following two years she published translations of Lamartine’s’s Pictures of the First French Revolution (1850) and The Wanderer and his home (1851). Not that these high-minded endeavours ever obscured her relish for the less exalted aspects of life: one female writer friend recalled how, at their first meeting, Jane ‘spoke much about poetry… but still more about fashion’.22

  Among Jane’s several contributions to the Dublin press was an enthusiastic review – in the Nation – of William Wilde’s Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater. It is uncertain whether this encomium initiated a new, or reflected an existing, friendship, but in November 1851 Jane was married to the book’s author. The marriage was timely. She had been left orphaned by the death of her mother at the beginning of the year, and life for an unmarried woman in the middle years of the nineteenth century was still fraught with practical problems. Her relatives certainly were relieved to see her settled.

  Speranza had once joked that ‘genius should never wed’. And it was a stricture that might apply as much to her husband as to herself. Nevertheless, they both strove to accommodate themselves to their new state. They shared a pleasure in socializing and entertaining. Literary production was not abandoned. William, while working on his analysis of the 1851 census returns, also published Irish Popular Superstitions (dedicated ‘to Speranza’) and an important textbook on aural surgery, which helped establish the speciality of ‘otology’ (the branch of medicine relating to the diseases of the middle ear and mastoid). Jane continued her translation work with a version of Dumas père’s Glacier Land, before embarking on a new edition – if not a new translation – of Swedenborg’s The Future Life.

  Some adjustment, though, was of course necessary. William Wilde was not an easy man. He had, as Jane confided to a friend, ‘a strange, nervous, hypochondriacal home nature which the world never sees – only I and often it makes me miserable, for I do not know how to deal with fantastic evils though I could bear up grandly against a real calamity… My husband so brilliant to the world envelops himself… in a black pall and is grave, stern, mournful and silent as the grave itself… And yet the next hour if any excitement arouses him he will throw himself into the rush of life as if life were eternal here. His whole existence is one of unceasing mental activity.’23 But his brilliance excused much, and brought other rewards. In 1853 he was appointed ‘surgeon oculist-in-ordinary to the Queen in Ireland’, and besides his own flourishing practice, he took on a lucrative role as medical advisor to the Victoria Assurance Company.24

  The Wildes’ first child, a son, was born on 26 September 1852. Although known as Willie almost from the first, he was christened William Charles Kingsbury (Wills) Wilde
(Charles had been the name of Jane’s father; Kingsbury her mother’s maiden name). Another son arrived just thirteen months later: the ‘young pagan’ Oscar, his string of names providing a suitably Irish counterbalance to the Anglocentric designations of his older brother.

  Jane embraced the cares of motherhood with self-dramatizing irony and enthusiasm. As she apostrophized to a friend, soon after Willie’s birth, ‘Oh Patriotism, on Glory, Freedom, Conquest, the rush, the strife, the battle and the Crown, ye Eidolons of my youth, where are you? Was I nobler then? Perhaps so, but the present is the truer life. A mere woman, nothing more. Such I am now… How many lives we live in life!... as someone said seeing me over little saucepans in the nursery, “Alas! the Fates are cruel / Behold Speranza making gruel!”… Well, I will rear Him a Hero perhaps the President of the future Irish Republic. Chi sa? I have not fulfilled my destiny yet. Gruel and the nursery cannot end me.’25

  When Oscar was barely a year old, the Wildes moved the short distance from Westland Row to 1 Merrion Square. Although literally just around the corner, the new address marked a definite upward shift in both status and scale. The square, with its generously proportioned houses and large central garden, had been built in the 1760s as a fashionable Dublin enclave for the country’s great landowning families. But, with the Acts of Union in 1800 marking the demise of the old Irish Parliament, many of these Anglo-Irish aristocrats found it more desirable to have their town houses in London, close the seat of real political power. Over the following decades the large Merrion Square houses became, instead, the preserve of Dublin’s successful professional men – a home-grown aristocracy of talent and wit. With William’s ever-growing practice and Jane’s vivid sense of self-worth the square seemed an entirely appropriate setting for the unfolding drama of Wilde family life. Jane was thrilled: ‘This move is very much to my fancy,’ she declared complacently. ‘We have got fine rooms and the best situation in Dublin.’