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The Downfall of Oscar Wilde
From: The British Library
| By:
Sally Brown |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Oscar Wilde appears such a modern figure that it is hard to comprehend the forces that brought about his personal and professional demise. At the height of his career he was to discover that admiration was not the same as acceptance, when the Marquess of Queensberry successfully countersued him on rumours of his homosexuality. In the following feature, British Library curator Sally Brown discusses the strange public betrayal of Oscar Wilde. |
 scar Wilde (1854-1900), one of the most brilliant, celebrated and versatile writers of his age, is still among the most widely read and translated authors in the English language. By turns poet, journalist, writer of short stories, essayist, novelist and playwright, he was also a famous wit and a prolific correspondent.
His meteoric rise to success as a literary and social figure was followed by an equally sudden fall into public disgrace, poverty and exile: 12 years after publishing his first work of fiction in 1888, he was dead at the age of 46, buried in a pauper's grave on the outskirts of Paris. |
It was the summer of 1891 when Oscar Wilde first met Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, the young Oxford undergraduate with whom he would develop a passionate and ultimately destructive affair. Homosexual men of Wilde's era were running a great risk: the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act had made same-sex relations between men punishable by imprisonment. But when Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, began to publicly harass and humiliate Wilde for his homosexuality, Oscar made the dangerous decision to sue for criminal libel. |
In suing Queensberry, Wilde must have been aware that he would have to defend in court his relationship with Queensberry's son and possibly also his public behaviour and published works; but he could not have anticipated the explosive evidence which the Marquess's lawyers extracted from the homosexual underworld, some of which was disclosed to him in Queensberry's "Plea of Justification" shortly before the trial opened. |
At this point he might have withdrawn, and several of his friends urged him to do so, but still he chose to see the play out, and the trial of Wilde versus Queensberry opened at the Old Bailey on the morning of 3 April 1895. Wilde was represented by Sir Edward Clarke, then Solicitor General; Edward Carson, his former Trinity contemporary, was Queensberry's counsel. Arriving in some style in a carriage and pair, Wilde strolled calmly into the courtroom. He acquitted himself well at first, eloquently and wittily defending his views on art and morality in relation to Dorian Gray; when questioned about the only sentence he had judged it prudent to omit from the published book, "Have you ever adored a young man madly?," he replied, "No, not madly. I prefer love--it is a higher form. I have never given adoration to anybody but myself." Carson was--or so it seemed--unable to make much significant headway, and Wilde left the court believing that he would win the case. |
On the second day, matters did not go so well. Wilde was overconfident, Carson more determined and cunning, listing the names and occupations of the "homeless and shiftless boys" Wilde was alleged to have consorted with, and laying subtle traps which he fell into several times. When asked if he had ever kissed a boy who had been Douglas's servant at Oxford, his reply was, "Oh dear no. He was a peculiarly plain boy. I pitied him for it." When, on the third day, it was made clear that Carson was about to produce a clutch of witnesses ready to give explicit evidence about their relationships with Wilde, Clarke immediately advised him to withdraw from his suit, and the jury was ordered to return a not guilty verdict. Queensberry's solicitor lost no time in sending all the trial papers, including the statements of the witnesses who had not been called, to the Director of Public Prosecutions. |
The next stage, the prosecution of Wilde for homosexual offences, was inevitable; he had just enough time to escape to France, but with a characteristic mixture of bravery and fatalism chose not to do so, and was arrested that evening at the Cadogan Hotel. He spent the night in a cell at Bow Street Police Station; the following morning, he was charged with offences under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act and, with bail refused, he was transferred to Holloway Prison, where he remained until his first trial against the Crown began three weeks later. Douglas, who had visited him nearly every day in Holloway--"A slim thing, gold-haired like an angel, stands always at my side"--left London for the Continent on the day before the trial opened, persuaded by Clarke and others that his presence in London would do Wilde's case no good. |
Banning and censorship
From the moment of Wilde's arrest, events moved with a terrible swiftness. All his books in print were removed from sale; his name was expunged from the programmes and posters advertising his plays; his wife and children went into hiding; and, to his great anguish, the bailiffs moved into his Tite Street house: "All my charming things are to be sold: my Burne Jones drawings ... my china; my library with its collection of presentation volumes from almost every poet of my time ... its beautifully bound editions of my father's and mother's works." After several gruelling preliminary hearings at Bow Street, on 26 April he found himself once again in the dock at the Old Bailey, charged with 25 acts of "gross indecency." Sir Edward Clarke continued to represent him, generously waiving his fee. Various boys who had been pressurised into appearing in order to escape prosecution themselves were called to give graphic testimony against him; when he took the stand he denied all charges of indecency, claiming to be merely "a lover of youth." His finest moment came when Douglas's poem "Two Loves" was read aloud: he responded with an extremely eloquent and moving defence of the love between men "that dare not speak its name," drawing applause from the gallery. |
The highly publicised trial, which lasted five days, ended with a hung jury. Released on bail, Wilde found that no London hotel would take him in, and eventually finally took refuge with an old friend, Ada Leverson, at her Kensington house. Again, his friends--joined by his wife--urged him to flee the country, and again he refused, writing to Douglas: "I decided that it was nobler and more beautiful to stay ... I did not want to be a called a coward or a deserter. A false name, a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me ..." A re-trial opened on 20 May, and lasted six days, with yet more evidence, some offered by staff from the Savoy Hotel. In his final speech, Clarke laid stress on the tainted nature of the witnesses and their statements, declaring that the trial was "operating as an act of indemnity for all the blackmailers in London"; Wilde described the prosecution's summing-up as "appalling--like a passage from Dante." This time, the jury was unanimous in convicting him. In passing a sentence of two years' hard labour--the maximum allowed by law--the judge proclaimed that the defendant had clearly been "at the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind" and that this had been the worst case he had ever tried. Wilde was sent briefly to Holloway and then to Pentonville Prison; Constance, who had sent their sons away to safety in Switzerland, stayed on until this point, when she too went abroad. |
Wilde in prison
Wilde's first six months in prison were spent in Pentonville and Wandsworth, which he described as "not fit for dogs." He was kept in solitary confinement, apart from the daily hour's exercise with other inmates in the prison yard, during which talking was forbidden. The prison food was meagre and bad, and his health quickly deteriorated. At first, the only books he was allowed were a Bible, a prayer book and a hymn book; later he was allowed one book a week from the prison library, and R.B Haldane, a member of the Prison Commission, arranged for him to be provided with further works of his own choice, which included St Augustine, Newman and Pater. For the first three months he was not allowed to communicate with the outside world; thereafter he was allowed to write and receive one letter, and receive a visit from behind a wire screen from up to three people, every three months. When Constance visited him, she was shocked and horrified at his surroundings and physical condition: "I could not see him and I could not touch him. I scarcely spoke." |
In November, unable to pay the legal fees incurred by Queensberry in his libel trial (which Douglas had originally promised his brother would settle), Wilde was declared bankrupt; later that month, he was transferred to Reading Gaol, a humiliating and traumatic journey which took place by public transport and during which he was jeered at while waiting, handcuffed and in prison clothes, to change trains at Clapham Junction. In February 1896 his mother died. Constance--who had been forced to revert to an old family name, Holland, in order to protect herself and her sons from gossip and hostility--travelled from Genoa, where she was then living, in order to break the news to him. It was the last time they were to see each other. Financial arrangements were made which led finally to her settling £150 a year on her husband, provided that he did not "notoriously consort with evil or disreputable persons." In July, he sent his first petition to the Home Secretary, requesting a mitigation of his sentence; this was refused, but the Prison Commissioners did give permission for extra books and writing materials to be provided. In January 1897, encouraged by the new Governor at Reading, Major Nelson, under whose enlightened regime his health and mental outlook began to improve, he began to write the long, moving, often extremely bitter letter to Douglas now known as "De Profundis." He was not allowed to send it from prison, but on his release he instructed Robert Ross to copy it and send the original to Douglas; in the event, Ross did the reverse, and placed the manuscript safely in the British Museum. |
Wilde's release
The release itself took place on 18 May 1897. After spending the day with a few close friends, including Ada Leverson, who found him looking "markedly better, slighter and younger than he had two years previously," Wilde--accompanied by his friend More Adey, who had met him from prison that morning--took the night boat to Dieppe, where Robert Ross and another old friend, Reggie Turner, were waiting for him. Once in France he adopted a new identity as Sebastian Melmoth, the surname taken from his great uncle Charles Maturin's Gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer. From Dieppe he moved to the small seaside town of Berneval, where he started work on his poem of suffering and betrayal, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," a searing indictment of man's inhumanity to man inspired by the case of Charles Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards who had been hanged for the murder of his wife. It was published in February 1898, under the name "C.3.3," Wilde's prison cell number at Reading. Constance wrote to her brother that it was a "wonderful poem" but "frightfully tragic and makes one cry." |
Although Wilde had resolved never to see Douglas again, he weakened under the bombardment of his letters and agreed--partly because he was upset at Constance's continuing refusal, on the advice of well-meaning but interfering friends, to let him see his children--to meet him in Rouen at the end of August. "Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don't understand us," he wrote afterwards. "Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world." They arranged to spend the autumn together in Naples--a disastrous episode, as it turned out, which prompted Constance temporarily to cut off Wilde's allowance, and left him distressed, miserable and exhausted. Six months later, he wrote to Ross that he had arrived only to find that Douglas had "no money, no plans and had forgotten all his promises," and that the reunion had been "the most bitter experience of a bitter life." He never saw his family again. Constance spent one last summer holiday with her sons, in the Black Forest, in 1897, before she returned to Italy and they to their separate schools in Heidelberg and Monaco. Six months later she died, following an operation on her spine. Wilde visited her grave in the cemetery at Genoa a year after her death, and was "deeply affected--with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets." At that time, the tombstone gave only her maiden name; the words "wife of Oscar Wilde" were not added until 1963. |
The last period of Wilde's life, which he sadly declared could be "patched up" no longer, was spent partly in Paris and partly in wandering aimlessly around Europe, with very little money, supported by a few loyal friends. "Like dear St Francis of Assisi," he wrote, "I am wedded to Poverty; but in my case the marriage is not a success ... my thirst is for the beauty of life: my desire for the joy." In December 1898 Frank Harris invited him to spend two months on the Riviera in the hope that he might start to write again, but the spark had gone: "The intense energy of creation has been kicked out of me." After some further travels in Switzerland and Italy, he returned to Paris, moving into the small and shabby Hôtel d'Alsace, whose proprietor was kind to him, and venturing out only to drink a glass of brandy or absinthe in the small cafés and bars of the neighbourhood. In the autumn of 1900 a recurrent ear problem, dating back to a fall in Wandsworth prison, developed into a severe infection and an operation was carried out in his hotel room on 10 October. Complications followed and cerebral meningitis set in. Wilde was soon desperately ill, in great pain, confined to bed and intermittently delirious. Shortly before the end, Ross fulfilled his last promise to him and sent for a priest who received him into the Roman Catholic Church and administered extreme unction. He died on 30 November, not long after his 46th birthday, and was given a pauper's burial in a "sixth class" grave at Bagneux, outside the walls of Paris. It was nine years before Ross was able to move him to his present resting place in the great cemetery of Père-Lachaise, beneath the strange and impressive tomb designed by Jacob Epstein and bearing an inscription from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol": |
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long broken urn
For his mourners will be outcast men
And outcasts always mourn. |
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