The Complete Short Fiction (2 page)

At the point in his career when Wilde began writing his short fiction, what reputation he did possess was that which attached to what we should now call a ‘media personality' rather than a writer. He had been born and brought up in Dublin, the second son of Sir William and Lady Wilde. His father was an eminent eye surgeon and his mother an Irish nationalist who wrote poetry under the pseudonym of ‘Speranza'. Oscar was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he was taught by the eminent classicist John Pentland Mahaffy and from where he won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, taking in 1878 a first-class honours degree in
Literae Humaniores
(in, that
is, Greek and Latin literature, history and philosophy). He also distinguished himself by winning the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Ravenna'. The Oxford years were not, however, a complete success, for although Wilde succeeded in impressing dedicated friends, such as George Macmillan, he was also becoming adept at making lifelong enemies. His relationships would continue to follow this pattern of' friend or foe' right up until the first of his trials when he found that the counsel for his opponent, the Marquess of Queensberry, was none other than Edward Carson, an old enemy from his days at Trinity. Another setback at Oxford, but one which had more immediate and serious consequences, was Wilde's failure to secure a fellowship at Magdalen College: with it one possible route to literary fame was closed. A contemporary – such as Walter Pater – could support a modestly successful literary career by virtue of a fellowship at Brasenose College; Wilde, however, was forced to build a literary career in a different way. In the absence of the relative financial security of an academic post, he moved to London, and set about making himself known to the rich and powerful in London Society.

Much of his effort was spent on cultivating an image that would distinguish him in the fashionable milieu of London literary life. At Trinity, and later at Oxford, Wilde had become interested in the literary movement known as Aestheticism. Associated initially with French writers such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, and later in Britain with the work of Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater, Aestheticism, or the ‘Art for Art's Sake' movement, advocated the separation of artistic from ethical concerns. Followers of this movement were known popularly as Aesthetes and were generally the subject of public disapproval, if not outright contempt. In his search for a suitable image to engage literary society, Wilde fixed upon that of the Aesthete; indeed he perfected the role to such an extent that in the late 1870s and early 1880s he enjoyed modest celebrity as the prototypical ‘Aesthete'. He adopted a special ‘Aesthetic' dress and hair cut which had their origins in a fancy-dress ball which he had attended as an undergraduate. Distinguished by this flamboyant appearance, and later by the witty conversation for which he was to become renowned, Wilde socialized conscientiously, attending
fashionable parties, first nights and private views. On the strength of his new-found celebrity, he undertook in December 1881 a highly successful lecture tour in the United States in order to promote Richard D'Oyly Carte's production of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera
Patience
, which was taken by some to be a satire on Wilde's own ‘Aesthetic' posing. The lecture tour made Wilde money, and brought him further celebrity as the spokesman for what the press (and Wilde himself) had called a ‘new Renaissance' of art, a concern that we can now identify with the broadly based revival of interest in the applied and decorative arts which occurred in Britain in the last half of Victoria's reign. However, during thi season of celebrity, success as a writer continued to elude him. In 1881 he had published a collection of poems, but at his own expense; moreover the volume attracted mainly hostile criticism.

Wilde returned briefly to New York in 1883 to see the first night of his melodrama
Vera; Or, the Nihilists
, but the play was not well received. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd. They moved to 16 (now 33) Tite Street, Chelsea, a house which had been designed for them by the fashionable architect, E. W. Godwin. The couple had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, born in 1885 and 1886 respectively. Like so many other late nineteenth-century writers, including Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw, Wilde, finding himself with a wife and young family to support, was forced to turn his hand to journalism. In the early 1880s, he earned his money through book reviewing for periodicals such as the
Pall Mali Gazzette
and the
Dramatic Review
; and for a period in the mid-eighties he even edited the periodical
Woman's World
.

Wilde published
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
in 1888, but literary success eluded him really until 1891, when four of his books appeared in the same year. All consisted of earlier material, some of it in a revised form:
Lord Arthur Sarnie's Crime and Other Stories, Intentions
(a collection of four critical dialogues or essays),
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, and
A House of Pomegranates
. His play
The Duchess of Padua
was also produced in New York under the title
Guido Ferranti
. But most significantly, 1891 saw Wilde begin work on the first of his Society Comedies,
Lady Windermere's Fan
. The play was staged by George Alexander at the St James's
Theatre in 1892. It was a considerable artistic and financial success; indeed it is estimated to have earned Wilde in excess of £ 11,000, a sum worth much more then than it is now. In the same year
Salome
, Wilde's biblical drama, was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain's Office, but the final three Society Comedies, which established Wilde's literary fame, followed in quick succession:
A Woman of No Importance
and
A Ideal Husband
were produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket Theatre in April 1893 and January 1895 respectively; and Wilde's masterpiece,
The Importance of Being Earnest
, opened at the St James's Theatre in February 1895, making Wilde the toast of the fashionable theatres of the West End.

The story of how this dazzling success was transformed into disgrace, imprisonment and destitution in a matter of weeks is one of the best-known narratives in literary history. In 1891 the poet Lionel Johnson had introduced Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, the third son of the Marquess of Queensberry, then, as Wilde had been a decade or so earlier, an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford. Wilde fell deeply and tragically in love, and the affair with ‘Bosie' (as Douglas was known to his family) is the most exhaustively moralized of all nineteenth-century male-male relationships. Perhaps its two most important aspects were its very public nature and the violent and unpredictable reaction of Douglas's father. Douglas insisted upon flaunting his relationship with Wilde, possibly with the intention of hurting his father, and he cared little how his behaviour affected any of the parties concerned. Matters were further complicated by the mysterious death in 1894 of Viscount Drumlanrig, Douglas's half-brother, and by the rumour that he had been involved in a homosexual scandal implicating prominent members of British public life, including perhaps the Prime Minister himself, Lord Rosebery. Partly as a consequence of the death of Drumlanrig and partly because of the public nature of the affair with Lord Alfred, Queens-berry prosecuted what amounted to a vendetta against Wilde. He tried to create a public scene on the first night of
The Importance of Being Earnest
, but was thwarted by the timely intervention of the theatre's management. Two weeks later, on 28 February 1895, he left at the Albemarle Club a card that carried the inaccurately
spelt but mortifyingly exact inscription ‘For Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite'. Despite the advice of most of his friends, Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel. Under cross-examination Wilde made a number of compromising revelations, and the case went against him. He was soon arrested on charges made under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which made both private and public homosexual relationships between men illegal. The specific accusations concerned acts of gross indecency with young, lower-class male prostitutes. The jury at what was effectively Wilde's second trial failed to agree. A retrial took place, and on 25 May 1895 Wilde was convicted, receiving a sentence of two years' imprisonment with hard labour, one which could involve a regime of both solitary confinement and repetitive, debilitating manual tasks. Wilde movingly described this prison regime in letters on prison reform written to the
Morning Chronicle
and in a long bitter letter of recrimination written to Douglas which was later published under the title of
De Profundis
. During his time in prison Wilde was declared bankrupt and his possessions were sold. After his release he led a nomadic existence on the Continent. Constance died in 1898, leaving him a small annuity of £150 a year, but he was denied access to his children. In November 1900 Wilde grew ill and underwent an operation to his ear. This last illness was diagnosed at the time as cerebral meningitis; a more recent account has suggested tertiary syphilis. Whatever the cause, Wilde died in obscurity and poverty in Paris on 30 November.

The sympathy and tenderness with which Wilde describes the child's world was unusual in Victorian Britain, and it obviously derived from his own experience as a son and a father. Here it is worth noting that he had a particularly close relationship with his mother, Lady Jane Wilde. From the moment he left Ireland for Oxford right up to her death in 1896, Wilde was in regular contact with her; over a hundred of her letters to him survive. Most are familiar, conversational accounts of friends and neighbours and of common interests. Some reveal Lady Wilde to be in what she describes as trouble, and not infrequently she asks Oscar for financial support. So, for example, in 1894 she can be found writing to him that ‘You are always good & kind & generous, & have ever been my best aid and companion'.
³
That Wilde should have preserved such a copious correspondence from his mother is in itself revealing; more significant, however, is that after his father's death Wilde willingly took on a protective filial role. Interestingly, though, in this role-reversal Lady Wilde did not relinquish all of her maternal authority, for there is some evidence that Wilde's refusal to flee to France to avoid arrest after the
failure of his prosecution of Queensberry was made at the insistence of his mother who wished him to stand trial to clear his name.

Given Wilde's attachment to his mother, it should be unsurprising that he took his own role as parent equally seriously: indeed the evidence suggests that he was a loving and devoted father. For example, in a letter to Robert Ross (reputedly Wilde's first homosexual lover, certainly a lifelong faithful friend and his painstaking literary executor) Wilde reveals the importance of his children in his life – so much so that even his gay relationships had to be accommodated to them: in this instance Wilde's lover (and as such, interloper into his family matters) becomes a friend to his children, Cyril and Vyvyan, here through the present of a kitten: