The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde

By Joseph Pearce

Vilified by fellow Victorians for his sexuality and his dandyism, Oscar Wilde, the great poet, satirist and playwright, is hailed today, in some circles, as a progressive sexual liberator. But this image is not how Wilde saw himself.

Joseph Pearce's biography strips away pretensions to show the real man, his aspirations and desires. It uncovers how he was broken by his prison sentence; it probes the deeper thinking behind masterpieces such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis; and it traces his fascination with Catholicism through to his eleventh-hour conversion.

Pearce removes the masks and reveals the Wilde beneath the surface. He has written a profound, wide-ranging study with many original insights on a great literary figure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2009
• ISBN: 9781681495644

Joseph Pearce

Joseph Pearce is the author of numerous literary works including Literary Converts, The Quest for Shakespeare and Shakespeare on Love, and the editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions series. His other books include literary biographies of Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

My motives for writing this life of Wilde are enumerated in the Preface to the first edition, which was published in the UK in 2000 by HarperCollins on the centenary of Wilde’s death. This second edition, published on the 150th anniversary of Wilde’s birth, signals its first publication in the United States. I am grateful, therefore, to Ignatius Press for making The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde available to a much larger readership on this side of the Atlantic.

Although, as I say, I have given my reasons for writing the book in the original Preface, to which I now refer the reader’s attention, I would like to make a few additional comments on the occasion of the publication of the first American edition.

Principally I would like to reiterate the overriding fact that Wilde remains an enigma. The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde is an attempt to get to grips with that enigma; it is an endeavour to solve the mystery that Wilde projects. It is nothing less than a quest for the Real Oscar. Thus, as the title suggests, I have sought to strip away the masks that Wilde wore throughout his life—and the masks that others have placed on him since his death.

Have I succeeded in this quest? Perhaps that is for the reader to decide. For my part, however, I am convinced that The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde penetrates to the very core of its subject. After peeling away layer after layer of artificial accretion we find the artful secretion of his deepest feelings, secreted away behind the masks of his public persona but revealed beguilingly in and through his art. As Wilde expressed it in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’:

How else but through a broken heart

May Lord Christ enter in.

The following work is a journey to the centre of a broken heart.

PREFACE

Oscar Wilde died a pariah. He was scorned by the world and was ostracized by all except a loyal handful of friends. Today, a hundred years after his poverty-stricken death, he is the adored and idolized icon of a growing cult. In the past few years any item of memorabilia connected with him has been sold for large sums at auction. A questionnaire filled in by Wilde when he was at Oxford sold for £23,000;an inscribed cigarette case apparently given to Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas sold for £14,000 despite its doubtful authenticity; and two letters from Wilde to Philip Griffiths, described as one of his lovers, reached £16,000 at Christie’s. The letters were themselves innocuous and there is no evidence that Wilde ever had a sexual relationship with Griffiths, but the letters sold nonetheless. Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, expressed a sense of exasperation at the cult surrounding his grandfather but added philosophically that he could ‘appreciate the humour of questionable pieces of memorabilia from Saint Oscar the Sinner being offered to a credulous public at absurd prices and be proud of my ancestor’s ability to take his revenge a century later’.¹

The irony of the present situation is that Wilde is remembered far more for his private life than for his art. It is not a state of affairs that would have pleased him. In fact, it would have horrified him. He would have seen it as the last and worst insult to his battered reputation. For Wilde, art was always Art and it was by this alone that he desired to be judged, both by his peers and by posterity. Furthermore, he believed that life followed art and, consequently, that life was best understood through the prism of art. Whether this is a universal law, as Wilde claimed, it is certainly a law that applies to Wilde himself. There is no way of understanding the true Wilde without first understanding the truth of his art. This was Wilde’s view and this is also the view that underpins the approach of this study.

‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples,’ Wilde wrote, ‘and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ These should be cautionary words for any prospective biographer, yet, in Wilde’s case, they have been all too tragically ignored. Over the years he has been served by a string of biographers who have betrayed him with either a kiss or a curse. Robert Sherard and Frank Harris, both journalists by profession and inclination, wrote with vivid sensationalism but questionable accuracy about their friendship with Wilde. Alfred Douglas spent most of his life trying to explain, or explain away, his relationship with Wilde, so that his views on the subject must be regarded as exercises in self-justification with little effort at objectivity. Later biographies of Wilde have sought to sensationalize his life, sacrificing truth on the altar of scandal if necessary. Perhaps the most obvious example was the illustration in Richard Ellmann’s biography, published in 1987, purporting to show ‘Wilde in costume as Salomé’. This was duly reproduced in many reviews of Ellmann’s book as a previously unpublished photograph of Wilde, depicting previously unsuspected transvestism. The ‘exclusive’ was no doubt greatly beneficial to sales and the photograph was subsequently included in halfa dozen works wholly or partially concerned with Wilde. Such was Ellmann’s reputation as a scholar that no one questioned the photograph’s authenticity. Then, in 1994, an article in the Times Literary Supplement proved beyond doubt that the ‘Salomé’ in the photograph was in fact a Hungarian opera singer, Alice Guszalewicz, photographed in Cologne in 1906.

The worst example of this sensationalist approach was the allegation that Wilde contracted syphilis as an undergraduate at Oxford and that, twenty-five years later, he died of the disease. According to Ellmann, and also to Melissa Knox in a more recent study, the ‘fact’ that Wilde had syphilis is crucial to any understanding of his life or his work. Yet Wilde almost certainly never had the disease and certainly never died of it (see chapter 5). Thus Ellmann’s and Knox’s crucial understanding becomes a crucial misunderstanding at the very heart of their respective studies.

It was a growing uneasiness at the misconceptions of these previous studies that was the principal motivation behind the writing of the present work. In particular, the enshrining of Ellmann’s study as the ‘definitive biography’ was in need of serious reappraisal. As a life of Wilde, it is fairly comprehensive in facts while it remains largely uncomprehending of truth. In this context it must be remembered that the distinction between fact and truth was one that Wilde reiterated often. A collage of facts, carefully constructed, can either present a kaleidoscopic truth or a colossal lie. Ellmann’s study may not be a colossal lie, but what emerges from its pages is not a true picture of its subject. Certainly, it cannot be considered either final or definitive in its presentation of the man who was Oscar Wilde.

For a purely factual knowledge of Wilde there is no better source than his letters. These were edited with great objectivity and meticulousness by Rupert Hart-Davis whose footnotes are invaluable. Yet for an understanding of the enigmatically elusive truth it is necessary to read between the lines of his letters and beyond the facts of his everyday life. In this respect, no adequate study exists. The transcendent reality at the heart of the man remains an untold mystery.

The problem stems from an inability to see Wilde except through the lens of either puritan or prurient motives. The prurient see Wilde as a subversive hero who undermines traditional values. For this school of thought his value is not primarily in his art but in his licentious life, encapsulated in the lurid title of Melissa Knox’s study as Wilde’s ‘long and lovely suicide’. Against the prurient is counterposed the puritan who believes that Wilde’s work lacks value because of his immoral life. The most extreme example of the puritan school of thought was St John Ervine whose conclusion to his ‘appraisal’ of Wilde, published in 1952, is particularly scathing:

Wilde came into the world with a small talent and made little of it. He did worse than that. He denied his principles by his practice. He cast such pearls as he had before swine, and then wallowed with the swine at the troughs in the sty. He was a flippant man who turned high matters to bibblers’ jests, and would not forgo a witticism to spare a friend’s wound. A brawler in the temple may be sincerely affirming a faith, but a man who titters in the temple and is flippant about his faith is a recusant who denies without any affirmation in the denial. The steward who hid his talent in a napkin was cursed and condemned, but what punishment is fitting for the man who takes his gift from God and drops it in the mire. That was the sin committed by Oscar Wilde. It was the sin against the Holy Ghost.²

The prurient and the puritan are both blinded by their bias. To one Wilde is a war-cry, to the other he is a warning. One betrays him with a kiss, the other with a curse. It is a choice between Judas and the Pharisee. George Bernard Shaw, in his preface to the 1938 edition of Frank Harris’s biography of Wilde, admitted that he had ‘somewhat Pharisaically’ summed up Wilde’s last days in Paris as those of ‘an unprofitable drunkard and swindler’. Yet, he argued, those of Wilde’s admirers who had objected to this description of their hero had forgotten ‘that Wilde’s permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to the police news’. It is a fact that is forgotten by Wilde’s detractors as much as by his admirers. In both cases he is condoned or condemned in accordance with the personal prejudices of those sitting in judgement. He is presumed innocent or guilty before the evidence is heard. Both sides pontificate before pondering Wilde’s own words, and come to conclusions before hearing and comprehending the arguments of the case. They are too busy casting stones at Wilde or each other to remember that the subject of their passion was first and foremost an artist who expressed the deepest secrets about himself in his art.

‘We are all in the gutter,’ says Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, ’but some of us are looking at the stars.’ To look for Wilde in the gutter, whether to wallow with him in the mire or to point the finger of self-righteous scorn, is to miss the point. Those wishing a deeper understanding of this most enigmatic of men should not look at him in the gutter but with him at the stars.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Such has been the depth of research into all aspects of Oscar Wilde’s life and legacy that the search for new primary source material is akin to prospecting for gold. The precious few nuggets which adorn this volume were collected during sorties to Oxford and London, most particularly to the Bodleian Library, to the Archives of Magdalen College and to the British Library Department of Manuscripts. Gratitude is due to Greg Glazov and Stratford Caldecott at Plater College for furnishing me with hospitality during my trips to Oxford. I am indebted to Father Charles Dilke of the London Oratory and to the Archivist at the Jesuit church in Farm Street for their valuable time and assistance in providing background material. Staff at the Department of Manuscripts and Records of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth were most helpful in providing me with copies of several unpublished letters.

I am grateful to Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, for his help and advice. As always, I am indebted to Sarah Hollingsworth for her reading of the original manuscript and for her comments and suggestions. Alfred Simmonds continues to offer support whenever needed. Dr Michael Nicholson, Rupert Hart-Davis and Katrina White have also provided valuable assistance.

Finally, I must thank James Catford, Elspeth Taylor, Kathy Dyke, Gina Sussens and everyone at HarperCollins, and Father Fessio, Mark Brumley, Tony Ryan and everyone else at Ignatius Press, for their continued faith in my work and for all their efforts to bring this and my other volumes to satisfactory fruition.

1

Mother of Masks

Even as above her nest goes circling round

The stork when she has fed her little ones,

And he who has been fed looks up at her,

So lifted I my brows, and even such

Became the blessed image, which its wings

Was moving, by so many counsels urged.

—Dante, Paradiso, Canto XIX

In 1885 Oscar Wilde wrote ‘The Truth of Masks’ in which he claimed that there was no such thing in art as a universal truth. Attitude, he wrote, was everything.

The truth, or otherwise, of masks is crucial to any understanding of Wilde’s complex character. His public persona, cultivated carefully from his youth onwards, was a calculated pose. He became the poseur par excellence, creating masks for himself that amused his friends, beguiled his disciples and infuriated his critics. Yet do the masks conceal the truth or do they reveal it? This question lies (in both senses of the word) at the very centre of any quest for a fuller understanding of this most elusive of characters.

Since the facts of his life are an elaborate masquerade, one must seek the truth beyond the facts, for, as Wilde stated in the essay on masks, ‘Truth is independent of facts always.’ Truth, in Wilde’s case, is the transcendent reality at the heart of the actor.

Oscar Wilde inherited the truth of masks from his mother.

Lady Wilde wore masks as others wore clothes, and her attire was anything but modest. Beginning with the assumption that a rose by any other name would smell sweeter, she set about reinventing herself. She had always disliked her first name, which was Jane, and she was not quite satisfied with her second, almost certainly Frances. The latter was improved to Francesca, which she felt was more befitting the dignity of her alleged Italian ancestry. Lady Wilde’s maiden name was Elgee and, according to family tradition, or so Lady Wilde maintained, the Elgee family was originally called Algiati. It was easy to imply that Algiati was itself a corruption of Alighieri and ipso facto that Dante was himself one of her ancestors. In later years her son would take this ingenious genealogy one fanciful step further, claiming a visual resemblance to, and a spiritual kinship with, both Shakespeare and Nero.

Lady Wilde wore her various names as fashion statements. To tradesmen or others of no consequence she signed herself Jane Wilde. To her friends or those of higher station she was Francesca or J. Francesca Wilde. Yet even these were insufficient. She felt the need for an altogether more elaborate and grandiose title. This was Speranza, her nom de guerre, plucked from the motto with which her notepaper was embossed: Fidanza, Speranza, Costanza. In her correspondence with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a translator of Dante, she adopted the most impressive combination of all these names, signing herself Francesca Speranza Wilde.

The flight of fancy into the Tuscan mists to claim Dante’s inheritance may have been wishful thinking, but Lady Wilde’s verifiable ancestors are themselves of considerable interest. On her mother’s side she could boast the Reverend Charles Maturin, who died in 1824, two years before her own birth. Maturin was a famous novelist and playwright. His tragedy Bertram had a successful run at Drury Lane in 1816, although its successors, Manuel and Fredolpho, failed to emulate its popularity. He is most remembered for a series of extravagantly macabre novels including The Fatal Revenge, The Albigenses and, most notably, Melmoth the Wanderer, which was published in 1820 to immediate critical acclaim. Its mysterious, some would say satanic, hero held a morbid fascination for Sir Walter Scott, and for Honoré de Balzac, who wrote a sequel. The poet Charles Baudelaire claimed to have found in Melmoth an alter ego, and Baudelaire’s own considerable influence on the young Oscar Wilde ensured that Maturin’s hero would hold Wilde even more in his thrall than he might otherwise have done. Wilde was beguiled both by Melmoth himself and by Melmoth’s French alter ego. Perhaps it was not so surprising, therefore, that Wilde would one day take Melmoth as his own name, emulating for more practical and tragic reasons his mother’s predilection for nominal masks.

Maturin’s son William was a controversial High Churchman whose Anglo-Catholic views kept him from preferment. William’s son, Basil William Maturin, took his father’s stance to its logical conclusion, becoming a Roman Catholic in 1897. Following his ordination, Father Maturin gained a reputation as a well-known pulpit orator, becoming chaplain to the undergraduates at Oxford where he exerted an important influence on the conversion of Ronald Knox. Father Maturin became one of the earliest victims of the First World War when he perished as a passenger on the torpedoed Lusitania. Paying tribute, Knox wrote of the horror of the circumstances surrounding the priest’s death, stating that ‘it was easy to conjure up the picture of him, as he moved fearlessly to and fro in those last moments on the Lusitania’.¹

Lady Wilde’s maternal great-grandfather Dr. Kingsbury was a well-known physician and friend of Jonathan Swift, while her great-grandfather on her father’s side, Charles Elgee (1709-1787), was a rich farmer in County Down. His son, John Elgee (1753-1823), was a rector and archdeacon in the Church of Ireland, and his grandson, also named Charles, Lady Wilde’s father, became a lawyer. Lady Wilde’s mother, Sarah, was the daughter of another Protestant cleric, Thomas Kingsbury, who divided his time between his duties as vicar of Kildare and his secular responsibilities as Commissioner of Bankruptcy. The token tradesman among Lady Wilde’s ancestors was an English immigrant from County Durham—a bricklayer who came to Ireland in the 1770s and died in 1805.

Wilde’s ancestry on his father’s side was a cause of some embarrassment both to Lady Wilde and to Oscar himself. They both considered themselves Irish nationalists, which made any mention in public of Sir William Wilde’s ancestral links with the invading army of William of Orange a serious faux pas. Oscar’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Wills Wilde, was a country doctor from Castlerea in County Roscommon; his great-grandfather, Ralph Wilde, farmed the land near Castlerea and also managed the property of the local landowner, Lord Mount Sandford. Ralph Wilde prospered in his dual role as land agent and farmer, no doubt fuelling the resentment of his master’s tenants in the process, and he passed on the benefits of his wealth to his three sons. His eldest son, Ralph, went to Trinity College, Dublin, so that he could pursue a career in the Anglican church; his second son, Thomas, Oscar’s grandfather, was sent to England to complete his medical studies; and the third son, William, was shipped off to Jamaica to seek his fortune in the sugar plantations. Yet it was Ralph Wilde’s ancestor Colonel de Wilde, a Dutch army officer, who was the principal cause of uneasiness to Lady Wilde and her son. Colonel de Wilde accompanied King William of Orange to Ireland where he helped the Protestant monarch, who had previously usurped power in England, to defeat the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne. This defeat, along with the earlier atrocities believed to have been carried out by Oliver Cromwell against the Irish Catholics, had bred the hatred and resentment that has afflicted Ireland ever since, in the days of Wilde’s childhood no less than today.

Colonel de Wilde was granted lands in Connaught for his services to King William during the military campaign in Ireland and this formed the basis of the Wilde family’s wealth and social position. In a further example of Lady Wilde’s ability to embellish the truth, she sought to conceal this aspect of her husband’s past by suggesting that the Wildes were in fact descended from a northern English family. Although Oscar did not go this far, he did seem a little uneasy about the orange skeleton in his family’s cupboard. According to the American writer Vincent O’Sullivan, who befriended Wilde during his last years in Paris, Wilde ‘did not seem particularly proud’ of his Dutch descent, ‘at least he liked to say that he took after his mother’s family which, it seems, was pure Irish, more than his father’s’.²

It is intriguing to compare Wilde’s ancestry and social position within Irish society with that of his great contemporary, George Bernard Shaw. In 1689, Captain William Shaw had sailed from Hampshire to Ireland to fight at the Battle of the Boyne. His reward was a grant of land in Kilkenny. There, as landed gentry, the Shaws lived in considerable comfort, marrying into the families of those who had come to Ireland in similar circumstances. As a class apart, these descendants of earlier invaders shunned the indigenous population and took their politics and religion from Dublin Castle, the bastion of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. ‘The Shaws made no secret of being aristocrats’, wrote Michael Holroyd, Shaw’s biographer. ‘Their aristocracy was a fact of natural history and the . . . social order of Ireland. No Shaw could form a social acquaintance with a Roman Catholic or tradesman. They lifted up their powerful Wellingtonian noses and spoke of themselves . . . in a collective spirit . . . using the third person: the Shaws.’³

G. K. Chesterton, in his earlier study of Shaw, discussed the implications and ramifications, and the psychological consequences, of such an upbringing. Shaw’s ancestry precluded the possibility of his ever being a typical Irishman, in the sense of being part of the common culture of Catholic Ireland. He was doomed to being a ‘separated and peculiar kind of Irishman’.

‘This fairly educated and fairly wealthy Protestant wedge which is driven into the country at Dublin and elsewhere’, Chesterton wrote, ‘is a thing not easy superficially to summarize in any terms.’

There is only one word for the minority in Ireland, and that is the word that public phraseology has found; I mean the word ‘Garrison’. The Irish are essentially right when they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived inside ‘The Castle’. They have all the virtues and limitations of a literal garrison in a fort . . . [T]heir curse is that they can only tread the flagstones of the courtyard or the cold rock of the ramparts; they have never so much as set their foot upon their native soil.⁴

In reading about Shaw’s youth, Chesterton observed, it was easy to forget that it was passed on the island that is ‘still one flame before the altar of St Peter and St Patrick’, adding wryly that Shaw’s formative years, to all intents and purposes, might have been happening in Wimbledon. Typically, Chesterton overstates and caricatures his case in order to make his point and ends plaintively by stating that Shaw had rejected all forms of Christianity without ever understanding the Catholicism of the vast majority of his fellow countrymen: ‘It could never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison that before becoming an atheist he might stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet, Pascal and Descartes.’⁵

Chesterton went still further, drawing psychological conclusions that push his argument to the limit, and perhaps beyond. His comments, though caricatured to hammer home his case, raise questions that are as applicable to Wilde as they are to Shaw:

He who has no real country can have no real home. The average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the man of the Garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people.⁶

In stating his case so forcefully, Chesterton is in danger of overstating it farcically. It would certainly be unfair to suggest that Wilde or Shaw were enemies of the Irish people; still less, as Chesterton implied on another occasion, that they were, in the words of a nationalist song, ‘anti-Irish Irishmen’. Yet his general point, however stridently stated, is valid. The Protestants of the plantation were a privileged class apart, distinct from the Catholic majority and unwilling and unable to be a part of the wider cultural and religious life of Ireland. They were a ‘separated and peculiar kind of Irishman’. In this context it is at least pertinent to conjecture that Wilde’s upbringing imbued him with the psychology of the privileged outsider and that this, in turn, contributed to the emotional rootlessness and restlessness that was a major factor in the unfolding of his life.

For all the similarities, real and superficial, in the circumstances surrounding the early years of Wilde and Shaw, significant differences remain. Whereas Shaw shrugged off the Protestantism of his upbringing without ever seriously considering the Catholic alternative, Wilde rebelled against Protestantism and courted conversion to Rome. Furthermore, whereas Shaw remained a puritan even when he had ceased to be a Protestant, Wilde’s whole life was a war against puritanism. In this, as in so much else, Wilde was merely following a trail that his mother had blazed before him.

Lady Wilde was a rebel who relished the opportunity to cause controversy. Counting among her relatives and ancestors several Protestant clerics, she flirted with the ‘Scarlet Woman’ of Rome; belonging to a class that upheld the Union, she proclaimed her Irish nationalism.

Her flirtation with Catholicism was to have practical consequences for the young Oscar and his brother Willie. When the brothers were quite young, probably under five years of age, Lady Wilde took them to stay at a farmhouse in the vale of Glencree about fifteen miles from Dublin. During their stay she met a young convert Catholic priest, Father Lawrence Fox, and asked him whether she could bring the two children to Mass. Soon afterwards, she requested that Oscar and Willie be baptized as Catholics. Father Fox duly obliged. ‘After a few weeks I baptized these two children,’ Father Fox wrote, ‘Lady Wilde herself being present on the occasion.’ Mentioning that one of the two infants was ‘that future erratic genius Oscar Wilde’, Father Fox added that Lady Wilde then requested that he call on her husband to inform him of what had been done. Such was the anti-Catholic prejudice at the time that the young priest must have been expecting a tyrannical tirade when he broke the news and would have been considerably relieved when Sir William merely informed him that ‘he did not care what they were so long as they became as good as their mother’.⁷ Father Fox’s recollections of these events were recalled more than fifty years afterwards, only months before his death at the age of eighty-five. By that time, Lady Wilde and her two sons had predeceased him so that corroboration of his story was not possible. There is, however, no reason to doubt the elderly priest’s story, especially as Oscar declared more than once to intimate friends in later years that he had a distinct recollection as a child of being baptized in a Catholic church.⁸

Other than the lingering ghost in her son’s memory, the clandestine baptism of her two children was the only practical result of Lady Wilde’s fling with Catholicism. Whether her attraction was ever more than a mask, a skin-deep shallowness designed to shock or provoke reaction, is difficult to discern. Certainly it appeared that at least one of her correspondents, Sir William Hamilton, was sufficiently concerned about the possibility of her conversion to express fears that the Catholic poet Aubrey De Vere could ‘succeed in converting, or perverting you’.⁹ He need not have worried. Lady Wilde’s brief affair with the Church appeared to be little more than a fleeting passion, aroused perhaps by nothing other than a desire for a little naughtiness and illicit excitement. If her motives were more noble than this, or her attraction deeper, her resolve must have faltered soon after the initial urge took hold. She showed little inclination to pursue the matter further in future years and never felt it necessary to take the step that she had desired for her sons.

Lady Wilde’s attraction to Irish nationalism seemed more serious and was expressed in the dedication to her sons in the first edition of her poems, published in 1864:

Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde

     ’I made them indeed

     Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,

     That country’s a thing one should die for at need’

Lady Wilde’s nationalism predated the births of her sons and had its roots in a pamphlet by Richard D’Alton Williams, who was tried for treason, though acquitted, in 1848. D’Alton was the author of’The Nation’s Valentine, To the Ladies of Ireland’, a poem that called upon women to ‘sing us no songs but of FATHERLAND now’. Lady Wilde was bowled over by the naked romance of Williams’ words though she seemed to be moved more by his poetry than his patriotism. ‘Then it was I discovered I was a poet’, she proclaimed.¹⁰ As the entirely different account given to W. B. Yeats testifies, her words should not be taken at face value. She told Yeats that she was walking through a street in Dublin when she came across a crowd so vast that she could go no farther. Asking one of the spectators the reason for such a crowd she was told that it had assembled for the funeral of Thomas Davis. Who was Thomas Davis, she enquired. On being told that he was a poet, she was astounded to think that a poet could be responsible for bringing so many people on to the streets. It was then, she told Yeats, that she decided to be a poet.¹¹ Again, it was Davis’s position as a poet rather than his role as an Irish nationalist which was efficacious.

There was also more than a little poetic licence employed in Lady Wilde’s weaving of the tale. It is extremely unlikely, for instance, that she could have been ignorant of Thomas Davis’s identity. She was probably twenty-three at the time of his funeral in 1845 and it seems inconceivable that she had not heard of the famous nationalist poet who was the talk of Ireland in the 1840s. It is likely, however, that she made her story more plausible by implying or explicitly stating that she was several years younger at the time. She allowed it to be known that she was born in 1826, a fact still recorded as her date of birth in most biographies and in respected works of reference such as the Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Yet when pressed on the matter of her age she invariably replied evasively, stating that her birth had never been recorded. The parish register that might have refuted her has not been discovered so that biographers have been forced to accept Lady Wilde’s word, never the most reliable of sources. It is interesting, however, that she recorded her date of birth as 27 December 1821 on her application for a grant from the Royal Literary Fund in November 1888, by which time age rather than youth was to her advantage.

Lady Wilde’s son appeared to approve of his mother’s evasiveness. ‘No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age’, says Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. ’It sounds so calculating.’ Indeed, Oscar was more than a match for his mother. He regularly claimed to be two years younger than he was, even on his marriage certificate, and his mother seemed delighted at her son’s deception. In 1878 she wrote to congratulate him on winning the Newdigate Prize ‘at the age of only 22’ when she knew he was nearer twenty-four. Years later this apparently harmless lying was to prove disastrous. During his trial in 1895, Oscar endeavoured to keep up the pretence about his age even in the dock and had the mask stripped away by examining counsel. It was a serious blow to his credibility. If he could lie so brazenly under oath about something as superficial as his age, how could the judge or jury be expected to believe anything else he said?

Perhaps Lady Wilde’s disingenuousness throws the very nature of her nationalism into question. Whereas Thomas Davis wrote poetry as an expression of deeply rooted beliefs, it seemed that Lady Wilde, or Speranza as she preferred to be known in her poetic guise, used a set of beliefs as an expression of her poetry. Nonetheless, whether her nationalism was a means or an end, it constituted a powerful compound of emotions with which to inflame her muse. She wrote verses on the coming revolution, on the famine and on the exodus from Ireland of the famished, all of which were published in the Nation, a nationalist journal that had been founded