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Oscar Wilde's Rise to Fame
From: The British Library
| By:
Sally Brown |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Oscar Wilde may have been the first great media-made figure. Famous for his extravagant self-belief, Wilde epitomised the aesthetic movement in Europe before he ever published a well-received piece of work. As famous for his love life as for his essays, epigrams and comedies of manners, Wilde married and fathered children before he became involved with the handsome but ill-intentioned Bosie, the relationship that brought about his rapid demise. |
 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. |
Rise to fame
By 1881, when Oscar Wilde was 27, he had left Oxford, where he was awarded a double First in Classics, and was living in London with a friend, the artist Frank Miles. He set out to conquer society, courting the leading actresses of the day and publishing sonnets to them. He dressed extravagantly and set himself up as a "Professor of Aesthetics," published his first play, "Vera," and his first volume of poems, neither of which was well received by the press or the public.
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In the early 1880s, cartoons of "aesthetic types" by George du Maurier had begun to appear in Punch. These included a character with flowing locks and a passion for blue china called, variously, Oscuro Wildgoose, the Wilde-eyed poet and Ossian Wilderness. In the spring of 1881 a new Gilbert and Sullivan opera, Patience, opened at the London Opéra Comique. Its main characters were Reginald Bunthorne, a "fleshly poet," and Archibald Grosvenor, an "idyllic poet," each representing different aspects of well-known aesthetes, who included Swinburne, the artists Whistler and Rossetti--and, most notably, Wilde himself. |
Following the success of Patience in London, its producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, took it to New York in September 1881. A North American tour was planned for the following year, and Wilde--eager to make an international reputation, and to earn some much-needed money--accepted an invitation to deliver a series of lectures that would give the Americans a taste of real-life aestheticism. |
Oscar Wilde in New York
From the moment of his much-quoted statement to a customs official on his arrival at the New York docks--"I have nothing to declare but my genius"--Wilde's every move and pronouncement was eagerly reported by the press. Asked to give a definition of aestheticism, he described it as "a search after the signs of the beautiful ... to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life."
Expecting a pale and delicate creature, the crowd of waiting reporters was surprised by his robust appearance; the New York Times commented, "The most striking thing ... is his height, which is several inches over six feet, and the next thing to attract attention is his hair, which is of dark brown colour, and falls down upon his shoulders." |
One of the first things Wilde did in New York was to take himself off to be photographed by the exotically named Napoleon Sarony, one of the foremost photographers of the day, in a variety of aesthetic poses and outfits. Despite the social demands immediately made upon him, he managed to write his lecture, entitled "The English Renaissance"--a disquisition on the school of creative art as practised by Whistler and Rossetti and the decorative arts movement as championed by Ruskin and William Morris--in time for his first appearance at the Chickering Hall, resplendent in a "dark purple sack-coat and knee-breeches," on 9 January. Its text was soon shortened and recast as "The Decorative Arts"; a reserve lecture, "The House Beautiful," was written during a week's break in Chicago. |
Oscar the aesthete
Such was the success of these lectures, which took Wilde from the Eastern seaboard to Canada and the furthest reaches of California, dazzling his audiences (which included a group of hard-drinking miners in Colorado) with his flamboyant outfits and his artistic views, that the proposed four-month tour eventually stretched to nearly a year. "Aesthetic" images of him--many produced illicitly--were to be seen everywhere, from department-store trade cards to musical scores and advertisements for cowboy boots; pirated editions of his works appeared, and he was caricatured in innumerable periodicals. Between lectures, he was, as he wrote to a friend, "torn to bits by society. Immense receptions, wonderful dinners, crowds wait for my carriage. I wave a gloved hand and an ivory cane and they cheer ... Rooms are hung with white lilies for me everywhere." He also made personal visits to such literary lions as the poets Longfellow and Whitman, who described him to the press as "frank, outspoken and manly." More importantly, he arranged for "Vera" to be staged in New York the following year and was commissioned to write a blank-verse tragedy, "The Duchess of Padua," for the actress Mary Anderson. When he returned home at the end of December with more than £1,200 in his pocket, he could congratulate himself on having carried out his mission to "civilise America" by the moral inspiration of beauty.
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Wilde's mother, who wrote under the name "Speranza," had written excitedly to her son in September 1882, "I think you will be mobbed when you come back by eager crowds and be obliged to shelter in cabs." Wilde, however, had been longing "to get back to real literary work," and a month after his return took himself off to Paris to write his play, which was due by the end of March. He arrived bearing letters of introduction and several presentation copies of his Poems and installed himself in the Hôtel Voltaire, on the Left Bank. From there he launched himself into Parisian literary life, aping Balzac with his white dressing gown and socialising with many of the foremost literary figures of the period, including Edmond de Goncourt (who described him rather dismissively as being au sexe douteux), Victor Hugo (who fell asleep after exchanging a few words with him) and Paul Verlaine (who took umbrage at Wilde's failure to ply him with enough absinthe when they met in the Café Vachette). He also developed a friendship with Robert Sherard, an English journalist who was to be his first biographer. Amidst all this, he resumed work on "The Sphinx," a rich and sonorous poem on the subject of the femme fatale which he had begun at Oxford, and managed to finish "The Duchess of Padua" and send it off to Mary Anderson by the end of March. In the event, she turned it down, much to his chagrin: apart from his dramatic ambitions, he had been living on the expectation of the $4,000 which was to be paid on its acceptance. The play was eventually performed in New York in 1893, but, sadly, to no better a critical reception than "Vera" had received 10 years earlier. |
On Wilde's return from Paris, he embarked on a British lecture tour, civilising the provinces with a new subject, "Personal Impressions of America," in his repertoire. It was on a lecture visit to Dublin in November 1883 that he proposed to Constance Lloyd, four years younger than he and the daughter of an Irish barrister, who had died when she was 16. Constance was very attractive, well educated, interested in art and music, a good linguist and an aspiring writer; her earliest surviving letter to Wilde discusses the merits of "Vera." Wilde described her to a friend as "a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis." They were married in London at St James's Church, Sussex Gardens, on 29 May 1884, Constance in a suitably aesthetic dress of "rich creamy satin" with a high Medici collar and a silver girdle around her waist. Following a honeymoon in Dieppe and Paris, during which Wilde spent some of his time roaming the city with Sherard, the couple returned to London. They had taken a lease on their own "House Beautiful" at 16 Tite Street, a few doors away from where Wilde had lived with Frank Miles three years earlier. Its elaborate interior decoration, with a spectacular dining room in white blended with pale blue and yellow, a ground-floor library decorated in Moorish style, and a second-floor drawing room with peacock feathers adorning its ceiling, was entrusted to the designer and architect Edward Godwin. Here they settled down to married life, entertaining at home and going out together in society. Their letters to each other at this time reveal their deep mutual love and happiness, and they both took great pleasure in their two sons: Cyril, born in June 1885, and Vyvyan, born in November 1886. |
As a family man with no regular income, Wilde needed to make more money than he was receiving from occasional lectures and reviews, which were written largely for the Pall Mall Gazette. "Believe me that it is impossible to live by literature," he wrote in a letter of 1885. "By journalism one may make an income, but rarely by pure literary work." It was not until the spring of 1887 that the chance of a regular income arose: Thomas Wemyss Reid, the general manager of Cassell's publishing house and an admirer of Wilde's journalism, offered him the editorship of a new monthly publication, The Lady's World, subtitled a "Magazine of Fashion and Society" and badly in need of revitalisation. Realising that this presented the perfect opportunity to launch himself back into the public eye, Wilde accepted with alacrity, writing to Reid: "We should take a wider range, and deal not merely with what women wear, but what they feel. The Lady's World should be made the recognised organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life." He persuaded Cassell's to change the title to The Woman's World ("The present name ... has a certain taint of vulgarity about it"), and spent the next few months preparing the ground for his editorship, which began in November. The first issue had a new masthead, a redesigned cover and Wilde's name on the title page; he managed to attract a range of talented writers, including his mother and his wife, although Queen Victoria firmly declined his request for a poem. |
The relaunched magazine was a success at first, and Wilde an energetic and assiduous editor; his assistant, Arthur Fish, pronounced him "extraordinary," while perceptively describing his editorship as "Pegasus in harness." Routine did not suit Wilde's temperament; "I have known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through the habit of answering letters," he informed Fish. Inevitably, the monotony of commuting by underground and on foot to the magazine's office in Ludgate Hill from Sloane Square three days a week took its toll, and his commitment to this new role gradually dwindled--as did the magazine's circulation--until he left in October 1889. Nevertheless, the experience had re-established him as a leading writer, relieved some of his financial pressures and primed him for the next, hugely creative period of his life, as stories inspired by the tales and legends of his childhood in Ireland--"a Celtic world dominated by ghosts and God," as another Irishman described it--began to pour out of him. Folklore and the supernatural colour "The Canterville Ghost," "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" and his first collection of short stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (written, he always insisted, "not for children but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty"), published in May 1888. His brilliant essay "The Decay of Lying," in which he made a plea for more imagination to counteract the growing influence of excessive realism in literature, appeared in 1889: "I have blown my trumpet against the gate of dullness," he wrote to a friend on its publication. In the following year, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in its original form in the American Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.
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This dark and disturbing piece of writing was described by Wilde as the story of "a young man selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth--an idea that is old in the history of literature, but to which I have given new form." He predicted that it would ultimately be recognised as "a real work of art with a strong ethical message in it," but as soon as it appeared in print the response of the press was almost universally hostile. The Daily Mail condemned it as "a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents--a poisonous book...heavy with the odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction." Constance is said to have remarked: "Since Dorian Gray, no one will speak to us." It was once described as the only French novel written in English--and it is certainly true that Wilde's fascination with the decadent atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Paris had partly inspired it. Of the deluge of criticism from the press, he wrote that it made him "despair of the possibility of any general culture in England ... there is not a single literary critic in France of high standing who would think for a moment of criticising it from an ethical standpoint." |
In late 1891 he went back to Paris to work on his new play, written in French, a retelling of the dramatic and disturbing story of Salomé, the Judean princess who danced before King Herod carrying the severed head of John the Baptist on a platter. André Gide, who met Wilde at this time, recalled that he radiated "the chief gift of great men: success. His gesture, his look triumphed ... His books astonished, charmed ... no sooner did he arrive, than his name ran from mouth to mouth." Six months after he left Paris, Sarah Bernhardt, then 50, had been persuaded to take the title role of the 16-year-old Salomé; rehearsals had already begun in London when the Lord Chamberlain, official censor of plays, refused to grant a licence, citing an old and obscure law prohibiting the representation of biblical figures on the stage. Both Wilde--who threatened to leave England--and Bernhardt, who had taken the Palace Theatre for a season, were incensed, but powerless to act further: the play's heady atmosphere of decadence and eroticism, with a disturbing hint of necrophilia, was too strong for English sensibilities. |
Self-discovery
Meanwhile, although his affection for his wife and two young sons never left him, Wilde's personal life was taking a new turn with his growing awareness--or acceptance--of his homosexuality, and the need to conceal it. Apart from any other considerations, it was a dangerous position to be in at this time, since the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act had made same-sex relations between men punishable by imprisonment. In 1884 he had written to a young Cambridge undergraduate: "I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience ... There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is a joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous." Three years later, a young Canadian, Robert Ross--who was to remain one of his most loyal and devoted friends and manage his literary estate after his death--came to stay at Tite Street, and almost certainly became Wilde's first homosexual lover. This brief affair was followed by dalliances with others, including the poets Richard Le Gallienne (to whom Wilde wrote, "I hope the laurels are not too thick across your brow for me to kiss your eyelids") and John Gray, who later became a Catholic priest. It was in the summer of 1891 that he first met Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, introduced to him by another young poet, Lionel Johnson. |
A golden-haired, alabaster-pale, extremely attractive but arrogant and wilful young man of 21 (16 years younger than Wilde), Douglas was an undergraduate at Magdalen, reading Classics and editing The Spirit Lamp, "An Aesthetic, Literary and Critical Magazine," when they met. The third and youngest son of the violent and erratic Ninth Marquess of Queensberry (author of the Queensberry rules for boxing), he had poetic ambitions and claimed to have read Dorian Gray at least nine times. They saw each other only occasionally at first, but in early 1892 events brought them into closer contact when Douglas, anxious and distraught, came to Wilde for help over an indiscreet letter with which he was being blackmailed. Soon after this, they became lovers; Wilde rapidly became infatuated with his "gilt-mailed boy," writing to a friend, "He lies like a hyacinth on the sofa and I worship him." He showered Douglas with telegrams, letters, gifts, champagne, lavish dinners at the Savoy, boxes at the theatre; Douglas in turn became captivated by the magical quality of Wilde's conversation, his brilliance and charm. Their relationship eclipsed all Wilde's earlier passions, but its intensity was often painful and exhausting. In a letter of March 1893 he begged Douglas not to "make scenes" with him: "They kill me, they wreck the loveliness of life." |
At this period, Wilde was often absent from the family house in Tite Street, taking chambers in St James's, ostensibly in order to write, and staying in various hotels. It was Douglas who drew him deeper into the homosexual underworld of London, with its "renters," or male prostitutes; in a letter written a few years later, he confessed that "so far from his leading me astray it was I that (unwittingly) pushed him over the precipice." Wilde was fascinated by what he found there, delighting in the company of these boys: "It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement ... They were to me the brightest of gilded snakes. Their poison was part of their perfection." He was spending far too much money at this time--Douglas was recklessly extravagant--and so it was fortunate that the actor-manager George Alexander had commissioned him to write a contemporary play (having turned down "The Duchess of Padua") when he took over the management of the St James's Theatre. |
Literary success
"Lady Windermere's Fan," subtitled "A Play About a Good Woman," opened, to huge acclaim, in February 1892. Its brilliantly witty repartee and smart society setting were subtly used to highlight hypocrisy as well as the nature of goodness. Wilde attended many of the rehearsals and argued with Alexander about various effects, particularly the "element of suspense and curiosity, so essentially dramatic." Alexander had offered him £1,000 for the rights, but he insisted on a percentage of the profits, and as a result made £7,000 in the first year of the play's production. Constance was in the audience for the first night, as were Florence Balcombe (now Mrs Stoker), Lillie Langtry, Robert Ross, Douglas and Edward Shelley, a publisher's clerk with whom Wilde was then involved. The playwright strode onto the stage as the final curtain fell, smoking a cigarette, and acknowledged the audience's cheers with a short speech congratulating them on their intelligence and the "great success" of their performance, "which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself." Frank Harris, editor of the Fortnightly Review, wrote that Wilde had "at last come into his kingdom." |
The play ran for 156 performances and went on tour in the provinces. Wilde seemed to have found his true literary medium and in quick succession wrote "A Woman of No Importance" (1892), "An Ideal Husband" (1893) and his comic masterpiece, "The Importance of Being Earnest" (1894), all along fairly similar lines, displaying a brilliant command of dialogue, and playing on themes of concealment and revelation, with an underlying moral lightly sketched in. Speranza was kept very busy collecting all her son's press notices, but wrote to warn him that now he had made his name and "taken a distinguished place in the circle of intellects" he must also take care of his health and "keep clear of suppers and late nights and champagne." On one such occasion, at a party held after the opening of "A Woman of No Importance," Wilde was disturbed by another warning, from a palmist who predicted that he would "send himself into exile." His relationship with Douglas, stormy from the first, became more complicated and fraught, with many painful quarrels and emotional reconciliations--"My fault," as he later wrote, "was not that I did not part from you, but that I parted from you far too often." He was also plagued by the "vulture creditors" circling round him as he continued to spend far more than he earned. |
One crisis rapidly followed another, and events began to take on an ominous momentum. Wilde survived a blackmail attempt over love letters he had sent to Douglas, only to be followed all over London by the Marquess of Queensberry, full of outrage at their "loathsome and disgusting" relationship and his son's defiantly scornful attitude towards him. At the end of June 1894, he called on Wilde in Tite Street, furious and abusive, vowing to thrash him if he ever found him again in a public restaurant with Bosie--to which Wilde famously replied, "I do not know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight." "It is intolerable," he wrote two months later, "to be dogged by a maniac." In October Queensberry's heir, Viscount Drumlangrig, was killed in what was reported as a shooting accident but was probably suicide: there was suspicion that he was being blackmailed over a relationship with Lord Rosebery, now prime minister. Having lost one son to what he saw as the evils of homosexuality, Queensberry was more distressed and incensed than ever about Bosie's relationship with Wilde. |
Oscar's nemesis
After the hugely successful opening of "An Ideal Husband" at the Haymarket Theatre (with the Prince of Wales in the royal box) in early January 1895, Wilde and Douglas went off for a holiday in Algiers. Hearing of this, Queensberry planned to create a dramatic disturbance at the opening night of "The Importance of Being Earnest" on 14 February, by presenting Wilde with a grotesque bouquet of vegetables. In the event, the police were alerted to this potential threat to public order, and the Marquess was denied entry to the St James's Theatre, only to pace furiously outside in the worst snowstorm London had experienced for several years. Four days later, he strode into Wilde's club, the Albemarle, and left his card with the hall porter: written on it, in his terrible scrawl, was the misspelt message, "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite." When Wilde found this waiting for him, some days later, he immediately sent off an agitated note to Robert Ross: "Bosie's father has left a card at my club with hideous words on it. I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My whole life seems ruined by this man ... I don't know what to do." What he did was to sue Queensberry for criminal libel. As he later put in "De Profundis," his long prison letter to Douglas: "I was no longer the Captain of my soul and did not know it. I allowed you to dominate me and your father to frighten me. I saw no possible escape from either of you. Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles." |
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