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The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

Prisons

On 25 May 1895 Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour for ‘gross indecency’. He was processed at Newgate Prison before being moved on to Pentonville Prison, where he began to experience the ‘hard labour’ he’d been sentenced to, namely many hours of walking a treadmill or separating the fibres in scraps of old navy ropes. A few months later he was moved to Wandsworth Prison where the regime was so harsh that in November he collapsed, banging his ear on the way down, which led to later infections and ailments. After spending two months in the infirmary, he was transferred to his final prison, Reading Gaol.

Freedom

Two years after his conviction, on 19 May 1897, Wilde was taken by train from Reading Gaol to Pentonville preparatory for his release. The next day he was actually set free and sailed the same evening for Dieppe, France. He never returned to England. He was to live on for three miserable, poverty-stricken years in Paris before dying of meningitis on 30 November 1900, aged 46.

A few months after his release, Wilde began writing ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ while staying with his former lover and loyal friend, Robert Ross near Dieppe on the Normandy coast. It was assembled from aspects of his experience of imprisonment but came to focus on one particular character and event, the hanging of one Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a former trooper in the Royal Horse Guards.

Charles Thomas Wooldridge

On 7 July 1896 i.e. a year into Wilde’s imprisonment, Wooldridge was hanged at Reading Gaol. He had been convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen, earlier that year at Clewer, near Windsor. He was 30 years old. Wooldridge’s case and punishment provide the focus of Wilde’s poem. In Wilde’s hands Wooldridge is transformed from a prisoner into a symbol round which descriptions of prison life, the misery and harshness of incarceration, and the awe and horror at the prospect of judicial murder all crystallise.

The ballad form

Wilde added and added to the poem until eventually it consisted of 109 stanzas. Wilde’s pre-incarceration poems had been written in the style of late-Victorian Romanticism, with lush metaphors and sophisticated literary allusions to Greek mythology etc. By stark contrast, the Ballad is, as the name suggests, written in the simpler ballad form, long associated with folk, peasant and working class culture, and stripped of fancy literary references.

One of the reasons for choosing this form is that Wilde intended it, along with its message of prison reform and moral injustice, to reach as wide an audience as possible. He wrote to a friend suggesting that it be published in Reynolds’ Magazine, ‘because it circulates widely among the criminal classes – to which I now belong. For once I will be read by my peers – a new experience for me.’

The simplest ballads usually consist of four-line stanzas. Probably the most famous ballad in the English language is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published precisely 100 years before Wilde’s ballad, in 1798. The most famous stanza goes:

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

In the technical language of poetry a ‘iamb’ is a metrical foot made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (ti-tum). In the Ballad Wilde uses the traditional structure of iambic tetrameters (four metrical feet per line) alternating with iambic trimeters (three metrical feet per line) so the effect is:

ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum (4 beats)
ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum (3 beats)

So it’s the identical rhythm to the stanza I just quoted from the Rime. Where Wilde is a little unusual is that the 109 stanzas of his Ballad have six lines rather than four.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

The longer, 6-line form has at least two results. One is that each stanza has 50% longer to develop its thought or idea. This gives individual verses, and the poem as a whole, more weight (maybe).

The second consequence is that he could make the rhyme scheme more complicated. The rhyme scheme in the Coleridge is almost as simple as could be, ABAB i.e. where, shrink, where, drink.

Wilde’s rhyme scheme is that bit more complicated, at ABCBDB: first come three freestanding words – loves, heard, look; then a word rhyming with the end of line B (heard); then a freestanding word D (kiss), before another B word (sword). You can see how the D word doesn’t rhyme with anything else. The effect is to break up the seesaw monotony of ABAB with a wild card. It is regular enough to feel song-like but irregular enough not to be boring.

One last point: Wilde also mixes it up by quite regularly including internal rhymes within the same line, as in lines 1 and 5 here:

So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.

Sing-song isn’t quite the right word but this excess of rhymes, and especially the internal rhymes in one line, emphasise the ‘popular’ ballad vibe which in turn give the whole thing a kind of thumping obviousness; or maybe a kind of inevitability. Instead of the subtle floating of modernist verse it has a kind of thumping, marching quality, a doom-laden inevitability.

One last point: again, unlike the one-off lines and perceptions of more sophisticated poetry, the ballad revels in repetition. The multitude of rhymes are a sort of repetition on a small scale while certain words and phrases, descriptions (of the condemned man’s plight, of the grave) and indeed entire stanzas (namely the ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’ stanza), are repeated throughout the poem. This quality of wholesale repetition – repetition at the micro and the macro level – also contributes to the oppressive, doom-laden feeling.

Six sections

The ballad is arranged in six parts.

Part 1 (16 stanzas)

Part 1 paints the background: in the prison exercise yard the prisoners are walking in silent circles, looking up at the little patch of blue the prisoners call the sky, when the narrator notices a man with a cricket cap on his head who is looking up at the clouds with a particularly ‘wistful’ expression. One of Wilde’s neighbours whispers that the man is ‘going to swing’ i.e. be hanged. Why? For murdering his wife in her bed. This introduces the central premise of the poem, the rather sweeping generalisation that:

each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

And these generalisations move onto the idea that, although most men kill the thing they love, most are never caught or punished or condemned to hang, whereas this man, Wooldridge has been caught, convicted and sentence. Which allows the poem to move onto a vivid series of scenes describing what it’s like to be a man condemned to death, how:

he is watched by wardens day and night to make sure he doesn’t kill himself and deprive the system of its justice
on the fatal morning he wakes at dawn to see his cell filled by the chaplain, sheriff and governor
he hurries to put on his convict uniform while a doctor checks his pulse
he feels the hangman tie the leather nooses (three, apparently) round his throat
he walks past his own coffin
he listens to the Burial Office being read
he looks up into the miserable skylight overhead in his last moments

Part 2 (13 stanzas)

Back in the exercise yard the narrator comments on how the man he now knows is condemned to death, oddly, strikingly, doesn’t give way to despair but drinks the air with simple pleasure. The narrator describes the black fate of the tree whose trunk is turned into a gallows. Then reflects how his own life has crossed with the condemned man’s like two ships passing in a storm, how they are both outcasts.

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.

Part 3 (37 stanzas)

The narrator (again) describes life for the condemned man, the behaviour of the governor, doctor and chaplain who ‘leaves a little tract’. And life for the prisoners with vivid details of the ‘hard labour’ Wilde was condemned to:

We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill…

But the description is background all the more to foreground the specific horror of Wooldridge’s fate. This description leads up to the prisoners returning from work past an open grave and knowing who it had been dug for.

And Wilde marvels that, while the condemned man slept like a baby, it was the others, his comrades, who were kept awake at night in terror at his fate. He claims the wardens were amazed to find, on their rounds, men praying (for the condemned man or for themselves) in the depths of the night. This seems doubtful a bit doubtful although we accept it as poetic licence and as part of the ballad form’s traditional spooky, supernatural vibe. It also happens to provide a handy example of how effective the poem is when it sticks close to actual description:

The warders with their shoes of felt
Crept by each padlocked door,
And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,
Grey figures on the floor,
And wondered why men knelt to pray
Who never prayed before.

But just as quickly loses it, that closeness of observation I admire, when Wilde gives way to melodrama:

All through the night we knelt and prayed,
Mad mourners of a corse!
The troubled plumes of midnight were
The plumes upon a hearse:
And bitter wine upon a sponge
Was the savour of Remorse.

I don’t think the prisoners are actually ‘mad’, what does ‘the troubled plumes of midnight’ mean?, the hearse is conventional melodrama because, of course, there is no hearse for this dead man; the bitter wine on the sponge is of course a reference to Christ being offered the same during his crucifixion; and the capitalisation of Remorse takes us back to the heavy-handedness of medievalising allegory.

This histrionic tone continues into some stanzas which go way over the top. Wilde has the prison invaded by ‘crooked shapes of Terror’, by ‘phantoms’, a ‘ghostly rout’, who proceed to dance a grisly masque’ and even sing a phantom song whose lyrics are quoted. This has lifted off from the real to become a visionary fantasia which reminded me not only of the most hallucinatory parts of Coleridge’s poem but also the visionary processions you find in Shelley’s poetry. The ghostly rout’s song goes:

‘Oho!‘ they cried, ‘the world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with Sin
In the Secret House of Shame.‘

(Does this refer to Wilde himself? We know that between his trials his boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas persuaded him to go abroad to, of all places, Monte Carlo, where he lost large sums gambling (a vice which never appealed to Wilde). Is he comparing the way Douglas rolled the dice but escaped conviction partly because he was a gentleman, whereas he, Wilde, was convicted because he indulged a bigger game, ‘playing with Sin’? Does ‘the Secret House of Shame’ refer to the entire lifestyle of gay orgies and rent boys which he indulged in and created in the years leading up to his arrest?)

The visionary dance scene ends as a more realistic dawn arrives. The prisoners are woken at 6am to clean their cells and by 7 are standing to. The narrator describes the horrible hopelessness the men felt at the absolute inflexibility of human justice which, for once, justifies the capital letter:

For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride…

And at 8am prompt a great wail goes up from the cells because every one of the prisoners knew that was the hour when Wooldridge was hanged. Again I’d contrast overdoing it (the madman on a drum):

We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man’s heart beat thick and quick,
Like a madman on a drum!

With description which is more realistic and therefore more impactful:

With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair…

OK, I don’t like the archaic phraseology (‘smote’) or the schoolboy angst (‘despair’) but I can well imagine a kind of collective groan did go up all round the prison at the hour of Wooldridge’s execution, and that is a haunting image.

Part 4 (23 stanzas)

No chapel service is held on the day they hang a man; the chaplain feels too sick. The prisoners were finally released from their cells at noon to take exercise in the yard. And so the men traipse round and round in the usual silent circles in their shabby prison outfits with the ‘crooked arrows’ on them. The wardens mind them in the usual way but the prisoners note the traces of lime on their boots and the newly filled-in grave by the prison walls. And Wilde is haunted by the image of the freshly dead man’s corpse wrapped in a shroud of quicklime designed to eat into his body like acid.

And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day…

The authorities don’t sow anything on a hanged man’s plot of earth for fear the product will be tainted, but Wilde suggests the opposite: that God’s earth is kindlier than men know, that beautiful roses would blossom out of the curse man’s soil.

Wilde bitterly criticises the shabby underhand way Wooldridge was killed, a passage all the more effective for the relatively restrained diction, no capitalised allegories, no Despair etc, just the facts:

They hanged him as a beast is hanged:
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.

They stripped him of his canvas clothes,
And gave him to the flies:
They mocked the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes:

The chaplain didn’t kneel to pray at the grave and yet Wilde insists it was precisely for sinners that Christ died, that God’s Son died for all men.

Part 5 (17 stanzas)

Only now does Wilde get round to telling us what it is like to be in prison. Having told us about this one condemned man, part 5 now widens the perspective out to consider prison and prisoners in the wider perspective of society and contains Wilde’s bitter criticism of the prison system: all it does is breed more vice and crime.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison-air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there…

Although he spoils this stanza, as so much else, with what I regard as heavy-handed use of capitalised allegorical abstract nouns:

Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.

‘Despair’ is a word I associate with immature poems by fifth formers in the school magazine. It’s such a lazy word, so easy to throw around in any situation, it lacks specificity and precision. It’s also so over-used simply because it is such a handy rhyme word – air, there, care, loads of rhyme words can set it up, it’s too easy, too available. In many ways Wilde’s diction, here and in all his poems, is an object lesson in how not to write a poem.

It was only around now that I realised there’s a recurring pattern in Wilde’s stanzas. Remember my comments on the 6-line stanza, how the extra 2 lines allow the thought to be extended? Well, I realised there’s a tendency for the first four lines to be good, sticking close to description of actual sights or events, but for Wilde to repeatedly spoil the effect by using those final two lines for over-the-top, allegorising histrionics. So:

At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill.

Or:

The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.

To paraphrase George Orwell in Animal Farm, four lines good, six lines bad.

And yet, despite his style, the horror of prison life comes over well enough, the enforced silence and the loneliness. The first of these stanzas is a bit rank but the second one really conveys it:

With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.

And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.

But precise and upsetting, or over-the-top and Gothic, all these descriptions are designed to lead the poem up to its heart which is a vision of Christian redemption. For it is the very intensity of their suffering which, in Wilde’s view, leads men’s hearts to break but not into hopeless despair – instead, in the optimistic climax of the poem, this breaking allows Christ’s love to enter in and redeem them. I’ll quote the three relevant stanzas in full to give a sense of the flow of the argument:

And thus we rust Life’s iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God’s eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.

And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper’s house
With the scent of costliest nard.

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

This immediately reminds you of the passages in De Profundis where Wilde repeats that the only way to stay sane in prison was through acceptance – accepting his fate, accepting his destiny, accepting that it couldn’t have happened any other way, accepting every step that led to the miserable depths of wretchedness, and then accepting his condition in its entirety. Repining and objecting – if only I’d done this and if only I hadn’t done that – can only drive you mad with regret. The wretchedness of the conditions cause many a man’s heart to break but this is good. Only by breaking hardened hearts can the sweetness of God’s forgiveness be experienced.

Wilde is giving a straightforwardly, unironically Christian message of salvation. Jesus Christ moved among sinners, moneylenders and prostitutes, not among the upstanding rule-abiding members of the community, precisely because it is the sinners who need saving (and who, incidentally, in their own way, often embodied the true Christian virtues of charity and forgiveness, as demonstrated in his fairy stories). And so it’s in this spirit of Christian redemption that the poem rises to its pious climax:

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.

It’s a moving climax within the rhythm of this very rhythmic poem but also because of what we know about Wilde’s biography: it is moving that the lifelong cynic, dandy and provocateur has been so broken down, so stripped of poses and smart one-liners, that his Christian conversion appears utterly genuine.

Part 6 (3 stanzas)

Having reached the climax of this Christian vision the poem tastefully, tactfully, ends with three short stanzas which recap and summarise the entire work with the laconic simplicity of the true ballad:

In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.

To be honest, Wilde could have ended there and done his job. I think he weakens the effect by going on and making the final stanza a repetition of the idea which dominated the opening, the notion that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, repeating word for word the related verse in Part 1.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

It has a purely rhetorical, incantatory effectiveness but I don’t like it as an ending because I just don’t believe it.

Sales

The finished poem was published by Leonard Smithers on 13 February 1898 with the author’s name given as C.3.3. This number was how Wilde was referred to in prison, standing for cell block C, landing 3, cell 3. The aim was to avoid having Wilde’s name – by then notorious – appear on the poem’s front cover.

The poem was a surprising success, with Smithers reprinting it in February, a signed edition and a fourth mass edition in March, a fifth edition later the same month and a sixth edition in May. The seventh edition, in June 1899, finally revealed the author’s identity, putting the name Oscar Wilde in square brackets below the C.3.3.

The Ballad brought Wilde a small income for the rest of his life but it wasn’t enough to live on. The Ballad was the last thing he wrote.

Thoughts

You can see the effort that’s gone into the poem. You can appreciate the careful structuring of the material which delays a description of prison life till part 5 so that all the horror and negativity of prison life doesn’t sit hopeless and heavy but leads directly into the message of Christian redemption at what I take to be the climax of the poem. It is well and cleverly done. But still, in my view, it is marred by all kinds of faults.

Melodrama

The leading one is the sometimes ridiculous melodrama, the Victorian Gothic exaggeration. Coleridge’s poem is intended to be a high Gothic melodrama and works partly because it brings a sort of realistic description to an over-wrought subject. Wilde’s poem is not as good because it brings a consistent tone of overwrought melodrama to a subject which, arguably, would have been better treated with understatement. Thus in the opening stanzas one of the other prisoners tells him Wooldridge is going to swing and rather than accept the news as one more horrible thing about prison life, Wilde goes bananas:

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel…

Similarly, describing Wooldridge’s manner he writes:

He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair…

This kind of melodrama is too simplistic; it’s a child’s version of psychology. The Cave of Despair reminds me of the widespread allegorisation in the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser’s huge allegorical epic, the Faerie Queene.

I take the point that the ballad, as a form, is often melodramatic and involves elements of the supernatural (loads of gruesome murders and midnight ghosts). But Wilde’s penchant for capitalised abstract nouns (Justie, Despair) felt to me like a giving-in to late-Romantic clichés and that these clichés do what all clichés do, which is close off the possibility of genuine observation, of subtle psychology and insight, in favour of cheap special effects.

Late-Romantic diction

Secondly, Wilde’s style brings together all the faults of late-Romanticism, its archaic vocabulary and lush tone, without a hint of the new, stripped-down modernism which was going to appear in English poetry in just ten years’ time. It is the last gasp of a dying tradition. So (in my opinion) the first four lines of this stanza are good(ish):

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky…

But are marred by the ‘poeticism’ of silver in the final couplet:

…And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

Wilde is more successful when he avoids big words like Despair and poeticisms about silver and ivory, and instead describes the observable facts, as he does in this grim stanza about what a hanging actually looks like:

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!

OK the exclamation mark is childish but the image of the feet of the hanged man ‘dancing’ in a spastic frenzy for a few last seconds is vivid, realistic and horrible.

The central premise

I just couldn’t relate to the central theme or premise, the phrase Wilde repeats again and again and chooses to end the entire poem with – the notion that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

I think the emotional impact he intended depends on the reader buying into this sentiment but I didn’t really understand it – I don’t think it makes sense. Most men very much do not kill the thing they love. Surely most men love the thing they love, don’t they? The following simply isn’t true:

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Wilde 1) tries to give the phrase the ominous weight of impending Greek tragedy, to make it some central plank of human nature, 2) then places it as the central refrain of the whole poem, 3) assigning it the final concluding position in the entire work.

And yet, reading it in the summer daylight, it seemed non-sense, the opposite of the truth; it evaporated in my hands and so, insofar as the poem relies on it, the Ballad, as an overall argument or proposition, for me, fails.

Christian redemption

What did work for me (this time round) was the sequence about the human heart breaking in order to allow Christ’s love in to save. On this particular morning, on this particular reading, I found this very moving.

The power of details

But if I don’t buy into the ‘all men kill’ premise, many of the incidental details do stick and haunt the imagination: the little patch of blue overhead, the cricket cap Wooldridge wears, the wailing that goes up from all the inmates at the hour of the hanging, and the corpse’s swollen purple throat. Despite all its flaws of diction and logic, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ remains a powerful work and indictment.

Femicide

It’s possible to read the entire poem, along with modern introductions to it, references in the letters, articles about it, and never once be reminded of the central fact that Wooldridge isn’t the innocent victim of a barbaric system, but that Wooldridge murdered his wife.

Do you remember the name of his wife (which I mentioned at the start)? No, most people don’t. She was Laura Ellen. Their fractious relationship led him to beat her up and Army rules led to them living apart. Suspecting her of having an affair he travelled to her lodgings in Clewer, they had an argument indoors which spilled out into the street where he cut her throat with a cut-throat razor and she bled to death.

You don’t have to be a feminist to find the way that Wilde lionises Wooldridge and makes him the central figure in his longest and most famous poem somewhat distasteful. It’s not hard to see the entire production as another example of the assault and abuse of a woman, and then her brutal murder, being elided and glossed over so that men can feel sorry for themselves.

The real victim here is Laura. Wooldridge, like Wilde, got his just deserts under the existing law of the time. Both of them would be imprisoned now, in 2024 (Wilde for procuring sex with under-age boys). Just like Wilde, Wooldridge was totally guilty of the offences he was charged with. But in Wilde’s concern for moral or poetic or spiritual exoneration, the real victim of the story is elided, occluded, forgotten, turned into the vague pretext for the refrain ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’.

You don’t have to be a feminist to find this a typical example of a male writer writing from a male perspective for male readers, distorting the truth, inverting the system of values (it was the woman who was the victim, not Wooldridge), making the wife-beating murderer into the central symbolic figure of the long poem, and over-writing, occluding, burying the real victim.

There’s a handy Wikipedia article about Wooldridge, which gives a lot more background to his case (and corrects Wilde’s erroneous belief that Wooldridge murdered Laura in their bed). But as if to prove the point, there’s no Wikipedia article for Laura. She only ‘exists’ in the discourse in her relation to the man who abused and murdered her. You don’t have to be a feminist to think this is typical.

Charles Thomas Wooldridge Wikipedia article

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by Simon on September 9, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Poetry

Posted by Simon on September 9, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/09/the-ballad-of-reading-gaol-oscar-wilde/

Oscar Wilde reviews

Fairy stories

The Happy Prince and Other Tales (May 1888)

The Happy Prince
The Nightingale and the Rose
The Selfish Giant
The Devoted Friend
The Remarkable Rocket

A House of Pomegranates (1891)

The Young King
The Birthday of the Infanta
The Fisherman and his Soul
The Star-Child

Short stories

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891)

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
The Canterville Ghost
The Sphinx Without a Secret
The Model Millionaire

Essays

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889)

Intentions (4 critical essays: May 1891)

Novel

Introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Peter Ackroyd (1985)
The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (April 1891)

Maxims

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)

Poems in prose

Poems in Prose (1894):

The Artist
The Doer of Good
The Disciple
The Master
The House of Judgement
The Teacher of Wisdom

Plays

Lady Windermere’s Fan (premiered February 1892)
Salome (published 1893)
A Woman of No Importance (premiered April 1893)
An Ideal Husband (premiered January 1895)
The Importance of Being Earnest (premiered February 1895)

Letter

De Profundis (1897)

Constance

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle (2011)

Social history

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by Simon on September 4, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Poetry, Theatre

Tagged A House of Pomegranates, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, Constance, Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, critical essays, De Profundis, Essays, fairy stories, Franny Moyle, Intentions, Lady Windermere's Fan, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, maxims, novel, Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green, Peter Ackroyd, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, plays, Poems in Prose, poetry in prose, Salome, short stories, The Artist, The Birthday of the Infanta, The Canterville Ghost, The Critic as Artist; with some remarks upon The Importance of Doing Nothing, The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue, The Devoted Friend, The Disciple, The Doer of Good, The Fisherman and his Soul, The Happy Prince, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, The House of Judgement, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Master, The Model Millionaire, The Nightingale and the Rose, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Portrait of Mr. W. H., The Remarkable Rocket, The Selfish Giant, The Soul of Man under Socialism, The Sphinx Without a Secret, The Star-Child, The Teacher of Wisdom, The Truth Of Masks: A note on illusion, The Young King

Posted by Simon on September 4, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/oscar-wilde-reviews/

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle (2011)

She was a high-profile figure whose beauty was widely acknowledged, whose activities were often reported in the press, and whose appearance and outfits were monitored for the sake of an intrigued public. Ever since their marriage Oscar’s charming wife had done nothing but enhance and complement his reputation. Constance Wilde balanced her husband. She was wholesome and earnest and provided the ideal foil to his determined flamboyance.
(Franny Moyle summarising her subject in Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, page 7)

‘She could not understand me and I was bored to death with the married life – but she had some sweet points in her character and was wonderfully loyal to me.
(Wilde summarising his wife to his first gay lover and lifelong confidante Robbie Ross)

As we know, the book market changes to reflect changes in society and culture. For some time now there’s been a feminist market for books about ignored, overlooked and suppressed women, the women history forgot, the women written out of the record – books which boldly proclaim that now, at last, their voices can be heard, their true stories told!

Stories About Women Who Changed The World

An easy-to-understand subset of this is that, wherever there’s been a man eminent in any field who historians and fellow professionals have noted and praised, there’s now a well-developed and profitable market for books about the woman behind the man. Quite regularly this wife or lover is now credited with much of the man’s achievement, facts which have, up to this moment, been erased from the record but now the truth can be told! Often (to paraphrase Wilde) these revisionist accounts are even true!

Very much in this spirit comes ‘Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde’, researched and written by former TV executive Franny Moyle. It tells the life story of Constance Mary Lloyd, from her birth on 2 January 1858 to her early death on 7 April 1898 (aged just 40) dwelling, of course, on her ill-fated marriage to one of the most notorious figures in English literature.

Horace Lloyd

Constance was the daughter and second child of Horace Lloyd, an Anglo-Irish barrister, and Adelaide Barbara Atkinson (Ada), who had married in 1855 in Dublin, when Ada was just 18 and he was 8 years her senior. Constance was born in London where her father had moved his legal practice and family.

Moyle tells us unflattering things about both her parents: Horace Lloyd was a fast-living womaniser, part of the Prince of Wales’s set, strongly suspected of having more than one illegitimate child. Adelaide (Ada) was ‘a selfish and difficult woman’. Horace died in 1874 when Constance was 16 and his death heralded a devastating deterioration in her life. Her mother began to abuse and insult her with a steady stream of insulting and sarcastic comments, snubs and public humiliations. Moyle quotes accounts by her brother Otho (2 years older than Constance) bleakly describing the insults and abuse she was subjected to. As you might expect this made Constance shy and nervous and lay behind the ill health and insomnia which dogged her youth. It also explains why, in adult life, she found herself attracted to older women (not sexually, just emotionally) and had a succession of older women she referred to as mother (including Wilde’s mother, Speranza).

William Wilde

Meanwhile, the Wilde family had troubles of its own. Oscar Wilde had been born to the eminent Dublin surgeon Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Elgée (‘the fiery poet and Irish nationalist’, who wrote under the nom de plume Speranza) four years earlier than Constance (1854) but the Wilde family had similar tribulations. William Wilde also sowed plenty of wild oats, fathering a number of illegitimate children via different mothers. Apparently he already had three illegitimate children when he married.

In the year of Oscar’s birth (1854) he started an affair with the 19-year-old daughter of a doctor colleague, Mary Travers, which was to last a decade. But when Sir William tried to end the affair, Mary was furious, put the word about that he had raped her, wrote a pamphlet denouncing him and then triggered a libel trial in which she was able to list every detail of the affair. She lost the case but a traumatised and humiliated Sir William retreated to the west coast of Ireland and never recovered. He died in 1876 while Oscar was at Oxford. Wilde – extra-marital affairs – the courts – all very prophetic.

So you can see that Wilde had plenty of personal experience when he wrote, in his essays and plays, about the gross hypocrisy of the British, who put on a respectable bourgeois facade, denouncing the kind of plays and stories which he wrote as ‘immoral’, while all the time having multiple affairs and numerous children out of wedlock.

And you can also see why this is a very enjoyable book, because it is full of gossipy stories like these. It immerses you in the family backgrounds of both its lead players as well as their extensive social lives, the network of relations and family friends that everybody socialised with in those days.

It also has one very big selling point which is that Moyle had access to the archive of Constance’s letters. A surprising number of these survive and barely a page goes by without extensive quotes from them, describing her teens, her life as a young woman ‘coming out’ in London, and then her engagement and marriage to Oscar.

Thus we get the story of Constance’s life and, from the age of about 20, her slowly escalating courtship of Oscar, very largely in her own words, via letters to her brother, mother, other family members, and some to Oscar himself.

Constance and Oscar

She and Oscar were pushed towards each other by their mothers, Lady Wilde keen to get Oscar married and settled, Ada Lloyd imagining Oscar was a successful young writer who would settle the daughter she resented and disliked. What I didn’t understand is that both matriarchs knew the other family was on hard times so it’s neither can have expected relief for their own money troubles. Surely Oscar should have held out for one of the American heiresses that he met on his famous lecture tour of the States (January 1882 to February 1883). In the event Constance supplied the money via a financial deal with her grandfather whereby she was given some of the money he was going to give her in his will, in advance before dying and leaving her the rest of the lump sum (p.100). Oscar didn’t marry rich, but he married comfortable.

The key to their relationship

It was also something to do with the fact that the Lloyd and Wilde households had not been very far apart in 1860s Dublin and the neighbourly contact continued when they all moved to London. At one point Moyle makes the best speculation as to what drew Oscar and Constance together which is that, having known her and her family since he was a boy, Oscar could drop his guard with her. He could speak to her quite frankly and naturally without putting on the pontificating pose and tone he adopted for almost everyone else.

This fact – that she was the one person he could be quite frank and natural with – explains why he was prepared to overlook her conventionality. The latter is crystallised in a letter which Moyle charitably says is carrying on a ‘debate’ about the nature of art but which Constance reveals herself to be as absolutely conventional as possible.

‘I am afraid you and I disagree in our opinion on art, for I hold that there is no perfect art without perfect morality whilst you say they are distinct and separable things.’ (p.71)

Reading that makes you wonder if she ever understood what came to be the quite complicated, wide-ranging and deeply worked-out theories of art which Oscar expounded in the essays in Intentions (1891). On the evidence here, she isn’t even on the same planet.

And yet her account makes it absolutely clear that both partners were genuinely, deeply head-over-heels in love. Oscar wrote letters to all and sundry gushing about his beautiful bride-to-be and, once married, praised the state of matrimony to all his friends till they got bored of it.

But all the time, in parallel to the love, went worry about money. Oscar’s main source of income was the endless lecture tours he undertook, first the famous one across America, but even when back in England, he was regularly away for long stretches on tours of the north or Wales.

Moyle’s narrative goes into minute and fascinating detail about the couple’s finances. Despite making money from his American tour and a little from his first few plays, Oscar was still burdened with debts from his Oxford days, not to mention trying to help out his mother who was living in increasingly straitened circumstances in a pokey apartment in Mayfair: nice address, shame about the shabby little rooms. Oscar worked hard to maintain everyone.

Constance’s achievements

Moyle makes a very decent fist of talking up her protagonist’s interests and achievements.

Apostle of aestheticism

Moyle describes Constance’s association with the Aestheticism which became fashionable at the end of the 1870s. Once she is married to Oscar she becomes a leading figure in the movement, supervising the interior furnishing of their home at number 6 Tite Street, as well as becoming famous or notorious for her adventurous clothes. She was widely greeted as an appropriate partner for Wilde as they jointly attended the theatre and art galleries, putting on a joint aesthetic front. They were acknowledged in society and the Press as a cultural power couple (p.93). Their ‘at homes’ became famous (p.126). The (lesbian) author Marie Corelli saw a lot of the couple and wrote a mocking portrait of them as the Elephant and the Fairy (pp.151 to 153).

Wedding

Many of her outfits are described in very great detail including her wedding dress (page 87). (The wedding took place on 29 May 1884 at St James’s Church, Sussex Gardens, with a detailed description of the wedding dress, what the bridesmaids wore, and the wedding ring Oscar designed for her, p.87.) Descriptions of dress pages 93 to 98.

Rational Dress Association

Constance’s focus on clothes led her to get involved with the movement for more ‘rational’ wear for ladies, the Rational Dress Society (pp. 109 to 111, 142 to 154). Along with other progressive and feminist women, she campaigned for an end to the absurdly constrictive Victorian womenswear. Constance presided over meetings of the Rational Dress Society (RDS) and in April 1888 edited the first issue of its magazine (pages 142 to 144).

Acting

In letters to her brother Constance speculates about going on the stage. Via Oscar she had become friends with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry who he praised in his reviews and who they socialised with. She had a minor part in an ‘authentic’ production of the Greek tragedy, Helena in Troas, and looked very fetching but nothing further came of it (pages 112 to 114). She wrote theatre reviews for the Lady’s Pictorial (p.130).

Writing

Meanwhile she had been pursuing a writing career of her own. When Oscar took over the editorship of The Woman’s World magazine, Constance contributed articles on her specialist subject of rational clothes. But in a completely different vein, in 1888 she also produced a volume of children’s stories she had heard from her grandmother, called There Was Once (p.133 to 138).

Moyle devotes a couple of pages to the speculation, based on recently discovered manuscripts, that Constance may have written Wilde’s fairy story, ‘The Selfish Giant’ (pages 136 to 137). Characteristically the main evidence for this is that the story is less well written and contains blunter Christian moralising than Wilde’s other tales.

Politics

Moyle shows us how active Constance was in a variety of organisations and bodies, most focused around the ruling Liberal Party. She was a member of the Women’s Liberal Association and the Women’s Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Movement. She supported Gladstone’s position on Irish Home Rule and went further. She made speeches at conferences. Her confidence and articulacy bloomed. Moyle devotes a few pages to showing how Constance was instrumental in the campaign to get the first women elected to the London County Council. She was at the heart of a lot of feminist and early suffragette activity. She dragged Oscar to Hyde Park to support the dockworkers strike of 1889. She helped to set up a women-only club, The Pioneer.

Spiritualism

This feminism and intellectual curiosity spilled over into an advanced interest in ‘spirituality’, all the rage in the last decades of the nineteenth century (pages 164 to 177). She was initiated into the secretive organisation, The Golden Dawn, whose initiation ceremony Moyle describes. After a while she dropped out of the order but maintained her interest in the subject, a few years later joining the Society for Psychical Research (p.176).

Photography

In her last years, especially in exile on the Continent, Constance developed an interest in photography, which Moyle describes a couple of times. However, taking photos of your family and children doesn’t really make you a pioneer.

In fact Moyle can’t overcome several problems. The main one is that despite all these attempts to make her sound exciting, and despite her involvement in all these causes, nonetheless Constance, in her letters, in her own words, often comes over as disappointingly conventional. Her letters portray her as a conventional Victorian lady who fusses and frets over family affairs, parties and gossip, as well as the endless money troubles the Lloyd family experienced after their dissolute father’s death, rarely rising above a very mundane, run-of-the-mill tone.

Plain

Oscar’s letters rave about Constance’s beauty but it is difficult to reconcile this with the few paintings and many photos of her we have. Moyle says she was self conscious and camera shy and it shows. She managed to look dour with a pronounced down-turning of the mouth, in more or less every photo ever taken of her.

Constance Lloyd in 1883

Clumsy

Constance had a tendency to clumsiness and misadventure when it came to everyday life. Throughout her life she was known for losing umbrellas or purses or losing things. (p.84)

Oscar bought her a pet marmoset to keep her company while he was away on his endless lecturing and she managed to kill it within a few weeks (p.84). Other examples pp.133 and 260 where she was tasked with carving a chicken but ended up dropping it on the floor.

Constance and Oscar’s prose

Oscar’s prose (in a letter to Lillie Langtry):

I am going to be married to a beautiful young girl called Constance Lloyd, a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop to listen to her…. (p.80)

Constance’s prose (in a letter to Oscar):

My darling love, I am sorry I was so silly: you take all my strength away, I have no power to do anything but just love you when you are with me & I cannot fight against my dread of you going away. Every day that I see you, every moment that you are with me, I worship you more, my whole life is yours to do as you will with it, such a poor gift to offer up to you but yet all I have and you will not despise it. I know it is only for 3 days but – it is the wrench of the parting that is so awful and you are so good to me that I cannot bear to be an hour away from you… (p.78)

Now it’s not a very fair comparison because Oscar is self-consciously performing for a high cultural figure while Constance is writing a private love letter to her fiancé. Nonetheless, it’s a good indication of the vast gulf between Oscar’s hard-won performative prose and Constance’s naive schoolgirl gushing.

It also belies Moyle’s insistence that Constance was a feminist revolutionary keen to overthrow gender stereotypes. In this and most of her writing and behaviour around her marriage and children, Constance was the embodiment of gender stereotyping. Compare a letter she wrote to a friend after Oscar’s imprisonment:

‘By sticking to him now I may save him from even worse…I think we women were meant to be comforters and I believe that no-one can really take my place now or help him as I can.’ (quoted page 282)

‘I think we women were meant to be comforters’ – not that feminist or revolutionary, and most of her letters display the same attitudes.

Children and schism

Constance undertook all these activities while being pregnant, bearing and raising two children, Cyril (born 5 June 1885) and Vyvyan (3 November 1886). As a modern man I don’t underestimate the effort, sickness, discomfort and risk involved in each of these pregnancies. Interestingly, Moyle tells us that Constance took advantage of the latest thinking about childbirth which was to anaesthetise the mother when she was in labour so that the child was delivered while she was unconscious (p.106).

The Wildes are described as doting parents. His children remember Oscar happily getting down on his hands and knees to join in with their games. But there were straws in the wind.

1) Vyvyan

Both parents wanted the second child to be a girl and were disappointed when Vyvyan was born. Unlike Cyril he was a weakly sickly child and was treated differently from Cyril who was very obviously his parents’ favourite (p.115).

2) Pregnancies

Moyle believes the second pregnancy and birth were problematic, though no record survives. Alas the physical changes the two births caused to her body had a very negative effect on Wilde (p.123). Moyle includes a letter from Oscar to a friend lamenting that he now found Constance – who thrilled him with her physical beauty two short years earlier, who he referred to as Artemis – repellent and disgusting and it was an effort to touch or kiss her. Poor Constance.

3) Oscar’s absences

Moyle points out that when Oscar returned from his American lecture tour he threw himself into a gruelling series of unending lecture tours around the UK and this meant he was often away from her, often for long periods i.e. their relationship right from the start included Oscar’s absences. When these lecture tours came to an end and Oscar settled down to be a) a family man and b) the more regular office job of editing a magazine, he rankled at the lack of travel and novelty. Quite quickly he reverted to the nearest he could get which was routinely going out without Constance, something she lamented but got used to (for example, even on his honeymoon, p.91).

4) Oscar and danger

Moyle also brings out how Oscar was always attracted by danger and the seedy side of life. He enjoyed being taken by friends who knew about them, to the worst slums, to the drinking dens of Docklands and so on. In this he was at one with the cultural mood of the times which was becoming more and more interested in in the gritty realities of poverty and squalor. Wilde insisted on visiting criminal dens in Paris on his honeymoon (p.91).

Wilde deprecated the scientific Naturalism of Zola and his school but was as fascinated by low life as them; just that in his hands it acquires a ‘romantic’ mystique, most obviously in the passage in Dorian Gray where the protagonist takes a hansom cab way out East to drinking and opium dens down by the docks. There was nothing massively new in this. Dickens depicted the hypnotic thrill of criminal lowlives and purulent slums in many of his novels.

As to his sex life, Moyle tells us that up to and including the first years of his marriage, Wilde routinely used female sex workers, especially on trips to Paris with his heterosexual friend Robert Sherrard (p.79). This kind of thing also comes under the heading ‘Oscar’s interest in the sordid side of life’, with Wilde fascinated by bordellos and brothels well before he began any homosexual activity.

Writing about Wilde, especially by gay critics, routinely refers to his ‘double life’ in terms of his concealed homosexuality as if this was a great achievement, a bold gay rebellion against Victorian values – but millions of Victorian men led ‘double lives’ with heterosexual sex workers and they are routinely labelled hypocrites (p.124). In the eyes of feminists and posterity these straight men are horrible exploiters. It’s a mark of our own double or dubious standards that when Wilde began to use male prostitutes, he became a queer icon. There was much more of a continuum of exploitation in Wilde’s sex life, from female prostitutes to male prostitutes to boys. Categorising Wilde or anyone’s sex life in simplistic binary terms seems to me factually and morally wrong. We’re all on the spectrum, on numerous spectrums…

Robbie Ross

Moyle describes the arrival of the 17-year-old Robert Ross in Oscar’s life. Despite being so young, Robbie was precociously experienced in homosexual sex and social practices. Moyle repeats the rumour that Oscar first met Ross in a public convenience where the boy propositioned the older man. He was welcomed to Oscar’s home and became good friends with Constance. In fact he was just one of many young men whose adulation Oscar encouraged, including students at Oxford and Cambridge. It’s unclear how much of this was homosexual and how much was narcissism.

I’m not going to repeat the stories of Wilde’s gay experiments, cruising and rent boys. From the perspective of this book, what’s interesting is Constance’s reaction which is that she didn’t know about it. She thought Oscar liked surrounding himself with youthful adorers (which was indeed true) but when he disappeared on absences and his affections seemed directed elsewhere, Constance thought it was to a woman and Moyle details the several women Constance was jealous of. In fact, in the period 1887 to 1889 Moyle calculates that Wilde had six homosexual lovers (p.181).

The Portrait of Mr W.H.

It’s striking that Frank Harris thought it was the publication of Wilde’s essay-dialogue about the disputed identity of the muse of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, in the July 1889 edition of Blackwood’s Magazine, which began the ruin of his reputation. Up till then he had been a well-known figure of fun in London Society and the Press, portrayed as a workshy, effeminate fop. But he worked on the ‘Portrait’ with Robbie Ross as ‘a barely concealed apology for homosexual love’ (p.179). Friends and colleagues in the literary world advised against publishing it but Wilde went ahead and it marked a change in tone of the attacks on him, from cheerful satire to beginning to detect ‘immoral tendencies’. As we know, this would snowball.

Separate lives

By the end of 1889 the pair were living separate lives. Oscar often stayed out at hotels for nights on end, allegedly to concentrate on his writing, in reality to entertain streams of young men. There were arguments and recriminations. Constance developed a close friendship with another older woman, Georgina Cowper-Temple (vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist) the latest in a line of mother figures (‘I turn to you for love and claim a Mother’s love because I need it so desperately’). Georgina lived nearby, in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, but also owned a big house on the coast at Babbacombe which was a shrine to pre-Raphaelite taste.

She also brought with her a passion for devout Christianity. As she felt more isolated in her private life (and worn down with concern for her dissolute brother Otho) Constance developed an intense late-Victorian Christian devoutness. She started attending church every day, making notes on sermons.

All this suited Oscar as it allowed him to pursue his own life, not just sex but all the socialising and schmoozing, the dinners and openings and whatnot required of someone trying to sustain a career as a freelance writer in London.

Moyle’s account of these years seen from Constance’s perspective are fascinating. As a general summary what comes over is that Oscar, despite long absences – for example months spent in Paris where he was writing Salome and having gay affairs – he continued to write regular letters to Constance full of the most loving endearments. Like a lot of women, Moyle struggles with the notion that a man can have sex with someone else and yet still love his wife, but that’s what Wilde appeared to do. Or he preserved one type or mode of love for her and the family life she created for him; other, most passionate and excitingly transgressive modes were expressed elsewhere. Human beings are complex.

Anyway, although they were now mostly living apart – with Constance taking holidays at friends’ houses around the UK – Oscar still sent her copies of his new play ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ to her and, a little later, the first copy of his next book of fairy stories, ‘A House of Pomegranates’ in November 1891 (p.199).

Enter Bosie

Bosie’s personality was twisted and difficult. Demanding and hedonistic, greedy and selfish… (p.221)

In Moyle’s account all this changes with the arrival of Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) in Wilde’s life in June 1891. The pair were introduced by poet Lionel Johnson (p.194). But it was in only a year later, in May 1892, that Bosie was being blackmailed by a fellow student at Oxford and turned to Wilde for help and Wilde brought in his trusted lawyer George Lewis, that really clinched the affair. By June they were lovers (p.203).

In August 1892 the family hired a farmhouse near Cromer for Wilde to complete ‘A Woman of No Importance’ only for Bosie to invite himself for a day and end up spending weeks. In the autumn Constance’s feckless brother Otho flees his creditors to the Continent to live under the family middle name of Holland (this would be the identity Constance adopted after Oscar’s disgrace).

His character and behaviour were changed by Douglas. While Constance would be staying at Babbacombe with Georgiana, Wilde was extending his network of handsome young gay friends, who themselves had contacts among regular ‘renters’ or gay sex workers. In spring 1893 she went for a break to Italy. Wilde regularly popped over to Paris, partly to supervise production of Salome, partly for gay socialising.

Bosie casually gave away the gifts Oscar lavished on him, including clothes. He gave a suit to gay compadre and unemployed clerk Alfred Wood, which still had in the pocket a candid letter Oscar had written him which Wood tried to blackmail Oscar with (p.217). While Constance was doing an Italian tour with a lady companion and improving her skills with a Kodak camera, Wilde was staging orgies and holding court among adoring young men and being blackmailed.

Nonetheless Oscar still wrote loving letters to her and Moyle points out that most biographies of him fail to take into account how attached he remained to her right till the end.

Oscar’s behaviour in every respect had changed. At the curtain call of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ (20 February 1892) he had provoked the audience not so much by ironically thanking them for their good taste nor for wearing a metal buttonhole, but for smoking as he did so, which was still regarded as impolite. At the first night of ‘A Woman of No Importance’ (19 April) 1893 most of the audience applauded but there were hisses and boos. Rumours were spreading of his transgressive lifestyle and Oscar again taunted the audience.

In June 1893 the Wildes hired a house at Goring. Bosie hired the staff who were insubordinate and sometimes drunk. For the first time Constance felt alienated. And for the first time Wilde started to be rude to her in front of others (p.211). The Belgian poet Pierre-Félix Louÿs who Oscar dedicated ‘Salome’ to cut off his friendship with Wilde when he witnessed the latter deliberately reduce Constance to tears in a hotel room in front of Bosie (p.223).

By August Wilde was exhausted by Bosie’s neediness, greed and tantrums and fled to France. Constance’s perpetual absence from Tite Street began to look like flight. Everything which warmed the first few years of their marriage had ended. On the rare occasions either returned there it felt an abandoned shell.

In the letters we have of hers, the ones she sent friends such as Georgina, she commonly refers to Oscar’s absences or holidays due to him being unwell. Moyle floats the theory that Constance may have been advised by one or more friends or doctors that Oscar’s homosexuality was an illness which could be cured. Alternatively, it might have been a comforting way of hiding from herself and others what she either suspected or knew to be true i.e. he had fallen out of love with her and in love with a disastrous young man.

Later Moyle quotes a letter where Constance describes herself as a ‘hero worshipper’. Nowadays maybe she’d be called a people pleaser. She had set Oscar up on such a high pedestal maybe she was just psychologically incapable of taking him down again.

Finally Wilde fled Bosie to Paris and, according to De Profundis, on the train there realised what a mess he had got his life into. He wrote to Bosie’s mother (who he was in regular correspondence with) suggesting that young scoundrel be sent to Egypt to join the Diplomatic Service. After hiding from Bosie for a month he returned to Tite Street and Constance in October 1893 determined to turn over a new leaf. She revived the house, hired new staff, they started attending plays together (three in one week) and reverted to being a celebrity couple. While Bosie was away from November 1893 to February 1894 all was like old times.

Then Constance made the worst mistake of her life. Bosie had been bombarding Oscar with letters to be allowed to see him again. Now he telegraphed Constance and Constance, writing that she felt it unbecoming of Oscar to ignore his friend, encouraged him to go and meet Paris. Catastrophe. As soon as they were reunited the pair fell into their old ways, ruinously expensive dining, sleeping together, posing ostentatiously. When he returned to London Oscar had reverted to being his cold self again.

Enter the Marquess of Queensbury

But a new element entered, Bosie’s almost insanely angry and vengeful father, John Sholto Douglas, the eighth Marquess of Queensbury. Queensbury began bombarding Wilde with messages telling him to cease his relationship with his son. He visited Wilde in Tite Street for a furious confrontation where Queensbury threatened to have Wilde horsewhipped and Wild threatened to shoot him. Bosie bought a pistol which he carried round with him and let off in the Berkeley Hotel, an incident covered in the newspapers which added to Wilde’s by-now seriously tarnished reputation (p.240).

I was interested to learn that in the summer of 1894 Wilde consulted a lawyer about taking out a restraining order on Queensbury or suing him for libel – in other words the step he was to take a year later. I.e. the 1895 libel action wasn’t a spontaneous act but rather the fulfilment of a long-considered one.

Constance takes the family on holiday to Worthing. At this time she conceived the idea of a book. I was prepared to be impressed by these signs of her authorial inventiveness so it felt bathetic when Moyle announces that it was to be…a book-length selection of Oscar’s best quotes, to be titled Oscariana. Not quite so original after all. But the main point is that, surprisingly, Constance seems to have fallen in with the young publisher tasked with helping to produce it, the general manager of Hatchard’s, one Arthur Humphreys. He was also trapped in an unhappy marriage and a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

During this holiday Oscar was sweet with the boys and sketched out the storyline for a play about a man who is beastly to his wife and drives her into having an affair. It was provisionally titled Constance and is evidence (or is it?) that he knew his wife had fallen in love with this Humphreys.

In any event the book was published privately the following year and the summer fling with Humphreys fizzled out.

September 1894

Anyway the Worthing idyll was ruined when Bosie invited himself to stay. In September 1894 Constance was upset by the publication of a novel satirising Oscar and his relationship with Bosie, ‘The Green Carnation’, by an author on the fringes of Oscar’s circle, Robert Hichens.

October 1894

In October Oscar stayed at the Grand Hotel Brighton with Bosie, a vacation he describes with horror in De Profundis. Meanwhile, following The Green Carnation, cartoons of Wilde and Bosie were published. On Constance and Oscar’s next visit to the theatre he was ostentatiously snubbed. December 1894 and the chickens were coming home to roost. Their checks were being bounced by the bank so they were both very anxious that Oscar’s next play, ‘An Ideal Husband’ which he was finishing that winter, would be a theatrical success.

Christmas 1894

At Christmas 1894 Constance had a fall which exacerbated her ill health. Moyle has periodically referred to her ill health, neuralgic pains in her side, being bedridden, intermittent paralysis, gout (p.10, 196).

January 1895

Premiere of ‘An Ideal Husband’. Oscar went on holiday to Algiers with Bosie.

February 1895

By 14 February, Valentine’s Day, he had returned for the first night of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest, a Trivial Comedy for Serious People’ at the St James’s Theatre. Oscar had been tipped off that the Marquess of Queensbury planned to make a speech from the stalls accusing Oscar of immoral relations with his son. He arrived with a bouquet of rotting vegetables but was prevented from entering the theatre by a cordon of police.

On 18 February Wilde arrived at his club, the Albemarle, to discover that the Marquess of Queensberry had been there a few days earlier and, finding Oscar absent, had scribbled on his card the famous words ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite’.

From here things unravelled quickly, as I’m sure you know and as is available in hundreds of accounts and at last half a dozen films. Because one or more servants at the Albemarle would have seen the accusation he couldn’t afford to ignore it: he was forced to take some action. He considered fleeing to the continent but was prevented by a very simple fact. The Avondale Hotel where he had been staying to be near the theatres where his plays were rehearsing and premiering, was owed money and had confiscated Wilde’s luggage as security (p.256).

Bosie arrived and, not thinking about Oscar’s safety, obsessed with the opportunity of putting his father, who he insensately hated, behind bars, advised Oscar to sue. When he said he had no money, Bosie (falsely) promised that he and his brother and mother would pay the court costs).

And so the well-worn story unfolded:

how the trial of Queensbury collapsed on the first day as evidence started to emerge that Wilde was ‘a somdomite’
how the evidence justified the public prosecutor in charging Wilde with gross indecency
how Wilde’s first trial failed when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict
how a second trial was held at which the jury (accurately) found him guilty of acts of gross indecency
how the judge, on an evil day, sentenced Wilde to two years hard labour

All was carried out under due process of the law, the evidence was plain to see, the jury did their duty, the judge awarded the sentence mandated by law – and yet this just goes to show that morality and right have nothing to do with law. It still feels like one of the darkest stains on the history of what is jokingly called British justice

Anyway, this is a book about Constance. How did all this affect her? During the build-up to the trial she was once again ill. She was diagnosed incapable of walking and needed care so went to stay with her aunt Napier.

It beggars belief that Wilde and Bosie were so sure of their case that Oscar let himself be persuaded to take the young egotist to Monte Carlo. Not only did they parade themselves in the most talked-about spot in Europe, but their holiday à deux was widely reported in the British press and could only confirm in the public mind all the Marquess’s accusations.

25 March 1895

Oscar and Bosie return to Britain.

28 March 1895

Trial date set for 3 April. While the pair had been gallivanting the Marquess of Queensbury had hired private detectives who had done an impressive job tracking down and getting evidence from an impressive number of Wilde’s gay sexual contacts.

1 April 1895

Constance’s last act for Oscar as a free man was to agree to accompany him and Bosie to the theatre, in a vain attempt, far too late, to rehabilitate his reputation or at least to put on a united front. So on the night of 1 April 1895 Constance put on one of her best outfits and the three of them arrived by carriage at the St James’s Theatre for a performance of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ determined to face down the mob. It’s hard for us to understand why Wilde clung on to Bosie’s company right to the last, and even harder to understand why Constance agreed to go with him and Bosie. Surely she should have insisted that just she and Oscar go as a couple in order to present a happy heterosexual face to the world.

3 April 1895

Wilde’s libel trial against Queensbury begins. By 5 April it has collapsed as the Marquess’s lawyers presented a litany of evidence proving Wilde’s homosexual associations with a long list of young men and male prostitutes.

24 April 1895

The entire contents of Tite street, all the family belongings, were sold at auction to pay Oscar’s creditors. Some things were simply stolen. Constance had kept all of Oscar’s letters to her in a blue binder. This vanished and all the letters with it.

26 April 1895

Start of the first trial, Oscar and Alfred Taylor charged with 25 counts of gross indecency and conspiracy to procure acts of indecency. Within a week it collapsed as the jury failed to agree a verdict. Oscar was allowed out on bail (provided by the Reverend Stewart Headlam). All his friends begged him to flee abroad. No hotel would have him so he stayed with his friend Ada Leverson. Constance visited him once and pleaded with him to flee. Like a fool he refused.

20 May 1895

Second trial begins. On 25 May he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to two years hard labour.

During Oscar’s imprisonment

Moyle shows how Constance’s friends and acquaintances divided, most sticking by her but some blaming her for being a bad wife in letting her husband carry on like this. Friends who visited described her as the most miserable woman in London. To her rescue came Edward Burne-Jones’s son, Philip, who offered her clear legal and financial advice. Moyle’s account shows how Constance’s behaviour was consistently motivated by concern to protect her children and secure their futures.

Money

The central point was that, if she were to die, all her money, property and income would revert to Oscar who, on the record of the past five years, would blow it all on his improvident lover leaving Cyril and Vyvyan with nothing. The key goal then, was to legally and financially separate from Oscar.

Name

At the same time, now that the Wilde name was irretrievably ruined and a curse on all who bore it, the best thing would be to change her and especially the children’s names. This she did, adopting the family name of Holland for herself and the two boys in October 1895 (p.284)

Exile

And, seeing as the lease on Tite Street had run out, all its contents had been auctioned off in the 24 April fire sale, there was nothing to stop her from going to live abroad and changing her name, which is what she did. Through her own family, but especially via Oscar, she had become good friends with some of the posh Brits who preferred to live abroad (notably Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, p.283).

She (and the boys) had already got used to a life largely lived moving around, staying with wealthy friends, at other people’s houses, sometimes at hotels. Now she shifted this way of life to the Continent and the last few chapters detail the impressive number of locations Constance lived at, sometimes with the boys, sometimes sending them to stay with relatives, or to boarding schools (in Germany), sometimes with her brother Otho, whose rackety life and second marriage had fallen down the social scale so that he was renting a few rooms in a house shared with the landlord.

June 1895 Glion near Lake Geneva

September 1895 Otho’s chalet in Bevaix

November 1895 Sori, outside Nervi on the Italian Riviera, to be near Brooke

Christmas 1895 Genoa for the operation

April 1896 Heidelberg

In her last year Constance divided her time between Heidelberg, Nervi and Bevaix. For a while she stayed with the Ranee of Sarawak at her villa, the Villa Ruffo.

September 1897 Villa Elvira, Bogliasco, near Nervi

Oscar and Constance

The story of Constance and Oscar’s relationship in the three years between his conviction (May 1895) and her death (April 1898) is complicated but makes for fascinating reading. She visited him in prison twice, first time on 21 September 1895, and was appalled at his condition, second time in order to be the person to tell him that his beloved mother, Speranza, had died in February 1896. She made him an offer to pay him (from her own straitened funds) £150 a year on his release. Basically, she continued to be a doggedly loyal and loving wife but was sorely tried and, eventually, alienated by the behaviour of Oscar’s advisers and friends.

One aspect of this was money. To recoup the costs of the trial Queensbury had forced Wilde into bankruptcy, compelling him to attend the Bankruptcy Court, in his prison outfit, on 24 September and again on 12 November. Here his debts were announced as £3,591 (most of which had been lavished on Bosie). What assets remained were placed in the hands of the Official Receiver. One of these was a life interest in Constance’s private income. Legally, this interest was now available to anyone to buy and it was to become a bitter bone of contention between the couple. Because Constance, not unreasonably, considered it hers, whereas Oscar’s advisers advised him to buy it so as to guarantee him some income.

Their rival bid in the spring of 1896 blocked her own (p.293). Robbie Ross wrote to explain that they were taking this step because they’d heard that Queensbury himself was bidding to buy it, but it felt to Constance like yet another betrayal. Advisors on both side became increasingly suspicious of the other side’s intentions. Constance became paranoid that their next move would be to legally remove the boys from her care, which she was prepared to fight tooth and nail.

The situation deteriorated until Constance instructed her solicitor to write Wilde a blunt letter telling him to do as she wanted or she would divorce him, the life interest would become null and void, and she would gain sole custody of the children. By now, a year into his sentence, Wilde was in very poor shape mentally and physically.

Under the false impression that his friends had gathered a sizeable fund to support him after his release he decided to play hardball and, in December 1896, told his solicitor to demand both the life interest and an increased dole of £200 per annum from Constance.

This was the last straw and Constance initiated legal proceedings which, on 12 February, awarded her custody of the children along with ‘a responsible person’. She named her neighbour from Tite Street, Adrian Hope, who she also made the sole beneficiary of her will.

Interestingly, though, her plans to divorce Oscar were stymied. It turned out that she should have done it straight after the trial and cited the legal evidence revealed in the trial as her grounds. By delaying for 18 months she had, in legal terms, condoned his offences and they could no longer be used as grounds for divorce. To divorce Oscar now she would have to bring a new court case which would probably require reviving much of the evidence from his trial. This, understandably, made her pause.

In April 1897 Wilde was preparing for his release and realised what a fool he’d been. He realised with a thump that his friends had not gathered a fund for him to live on, and that he would be almost completely dependent on Constance’s goodwill which his allies had, regrettably, alienated.

The net result of all these negotiations and misunderstandings was that in the month of his release, May 1895, Wilde was forced to sign a legal agreement with Constance’s solicitors agreeing to a) a legal separation b) the life insurance assigned entirely to Constance c) Constance agreeing an annual stipend of £150. This latter was dependent on Oscar not mixing with ‘disreputable people’ meaning, of course, Bosie. Oscar was humiliated but forced to sign it.

The year after prison

Wilde was released from prison on 20 May 1897. Constance died on 7 April 1898. In those 12 months the following happened. On the day of his release he took the boat train to France and took rooms in the Channel village of Berneval-sur-Mer. Oscar and she corresponded. Oscar invited her and the boys to come and meet him but she prevaricated. Partly this was because the boys were in boarding schools but partly the deterioration in her health.

Moyle describes this as a big mistake. A grand gesture was called for, a magnanimous reunion and mutual forgiveness. Instead Constance’s failure to reply left the weak and vulnerable Oscar open to the importunities of others chief among whom was, of course, Bosie. After taking the boys for a summer holiday to the Black Forest Constance moved into a new villa outside Nervi and began preparing it for Oscar’s visit and the Grand Reconciliation.

Imagine her horror when she received a letter from him asking the visit date to be put back till October (when the boys would be back at school) and stamped as coming from Naples. Naples! Notorious haunt of the person Constance now calls ‘the dreadful person’. It seemed to Constance that the nightmare had returned: Oscar had fallen back into his old addiction. He had chosen Bosie over her and over his sons. He was ‘as weak as water’. For the first time she snapped, her love broke. She realised she didn’t sympathise with his weakness. Now she despised him.

She wrote him a stern letter which doesn’t survive but we have then letter Wilde wrote in response to Robbie. This includes the very telling lines:

Women are so petty and Constance has no imagination. Perhaps for revenge she will have another trial: then she may claim to have for the first time in her life influenced me.

This is a revealing indication of Wilde’s true unadorned opinion of her. Meanwhile Constance had snapped and wanted nothing more to do with him. He had breached the terms of their legal agreement and so she cut off her allowance to him.

Christmas came and went with presents from friends. She went to see Vyvyan in Monaco. In January she learned that Wilde and Bosie had separated. In February she received a copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and was moved by it. She asked a mutual friend Carlos Blacker to find out where Oscar was. He tracked Oscar down to a cheap hotel in Paris and found a broken, querulous man who was only interested in cadging money. Moyle quotes a long letter which lays bare the money situation which was that Constance herself had very little and was still trying to pay off Oscar’s borrowings to old friends and so would now never give him money directly, but only pay his bills directly to the landlord of whichever hotel he was holed up in. He was utterly untrustworthy with money.

Constance’s death

I knew that Constance died before Wilde but maybe the biggest surprise of the entire book was the revelation that her doctors killed her in a botched operation.

Moyle has prepared the way by telling us all through the book about Constance’s poor health – gout, neuralgia, back and arm pains, partial paralysis and so on – and her occasional hints that there was a gynaecological aspect to her illness, though no details survive. (Elsewhere I have read the view that these were the symptoms of multiple sclerosis – and that ‘The second doctor was an Italian, Luigi Maria Bossi, who somehow thought that neurological and mental illness could be cured with gynaecological operations’ – etinkerbell. Moyle is nowhere as explicit this and doesn’t mention the multiple sclerosis diagnosis anywhere.)

Anyway, at Christmas 1895 she had gone to see a Dr Bossi, a gynaecologist in Genoa. This man claimed he could cure the creeping paralysis of her left side with an operation. She underwent an operation just before Christmas 1895, took a month to recuperate, but then did feel better.

Then a lot of water under the bridge, as summarised above. And then, in April 1897, she went to see Bossi again. On 2 April she underwent another operation. Moyle says the details are unclear. There is mention of the creeping paralysis, of tumours and the renewed hint of something gynaecological. She survived the operation but the paralysis accelerated and eventually stopped her heart. She had written to her brother and the Ranee to come see her but neither made it in time.

Otho blamed the doctors. He wrote to Lady Mount-Temple that the Italian doctor heading the clinic had suddenly mysteriously gone abroad. Nobody had told Constance how serious the operation might be. Friends and doctors in England had advised against an operation. They were right but then again, they weren’t the ones suffering from creeping paralysis and desperate to fix it.

Oscar was devastated. He wrote to Blacker ‘If only we had met once and kissed.’ If only Constance had made the effort to go see him in Dieppe, maybe he wouldn’t have fallen back in with Bosie, maybe they would have patched something up, she wouldn’t have cut off his allowance, he would have prevented her having the fatal operation.

Constance was buried on 9 April in Genoa’s Campo Santo cemetery.

Summary

I’m glad this book exists. Kudos to Franny Moyle for researching and writing it. I think she a little overeggs Constance’s achievements – in the middle sections making more of Constance’s literary or acting careers than they merit, towards the end making a big deal of her taking up photography when in fact she just appears to have taken half-decent holiday snaps, and so on.

But she doesn’t really need to. Constance’s achievements speak for themselves – being the loving supportive wife of one of the great writers of the day, decorating their house in a stunning modern style and hosting her fashionable at-homes, presenting a united aesthetic front at the theatre and art galleries, maintaining an interest in a host of causes from women’s rights and political involvement and the Liberal Federation through to the (to us) wilder reaches of spirituality, psychic research and the Golden Dawn. And much more.

It wasn’t a great life and Constance isn’t an interesting figure in any intellectual sense. Her writings are thin and her letters reveal a very run-of-the-mill, dutiful, limited and conformist personality. What evidence we have is that she hadn’t a clue about Oscar’s intellectual concerns; in no way was she anywhere near his intellectual equal. But that doesn’t matter.

Obviously being married to Oscar Wilde was a unique position, but in many other ways she’s a very representative figure of her time, particularly in her resistance to the restricted life dictated to women by the Victorian patriarchy and her restless search for other interests and activities and purposes to fill her life.

So many biographies are of kings and queens or great soldiers or great artists and so on. Constance wasn’t a great anything very much. In the end she’s remembered, like countless mothers through the ages, for her spirited defence of her children. But Moyle’s book shows us that, also like countless mothers through the ages, her life was much, much more than that.

And of course, her biography acts as a powerful corrective to the hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and half dozen movies which go on about Oscar Oscar Oscar. Their marriage had two people in it and Moyle has done a great job of bringing Mrs Oscar Wilde to life, presenting her as a sympathetic and valid person in her own right.

Coda: on biography

I’m glad I’m not famous and have achieved next to nothing in my life. Imagine 120 years after your death having all your private letters published, having every development in your private life, every mood, every emotion, every unwise word and silly decision, blazoned for all the world to read, allowing millions of complete strangers to assess and judge you. What a nightmare.

There’s something horrifying about the entire idea of biography.

Credit

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle was published by John Murray in 2011. References are to the 2012 paperback edition.

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by Simon on August 30, 2024 • Permalink

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De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1897)

You were my enemy, such an enemy as no man ever had…In less than three years you entirely ruined me from every point of view.
(De Profundis, page 181)

While in prison doing two years hard labour for ‘acts of gross indecency’ (May 1895 to May 1897), Oscar Wilde wrote an enormous letter to his erstwhile lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed ‘Bosie’. It is a very long, very detailed indictment of Douglas’s selfish, spoilt behaviour for the entire period of their affair (they were introduced in June 1891), including a detailed description the hectic days leading up to his fateful trial.

Wilde wrote the letter in January, February and March 1897, towards the end of his imprisonment (May 1897). Wilde was upset that Douglas didn’t bother writing to him in prison (‘I waited month after month to hear from you’, p.238) and then had learned to his dismay (as he mentions on the first page) that Douglas planned to publish Wilde’s letters without permission and dedicate poems to him unasked – just the most recent of the many abuses of their friendship which Wilde taxed Douglas with.

Wilde wrote it under the strict prison regime at Reading Gaol, on sheets of prison notepaper which he had to return to the warders every evening. He wasn’t allowed to post it to Douglas but was permitted to take it with him when he finally left gaol. He presented it to his most loyal friend, Robert Ross, who he had selected to be his literary executor, with instructions to have two copies made and send the original to its intended addressee, Douglas. Shrewdly, Ross sent Douglas only a typed copy of the letter with a covering note and Douglas later stated that, after reading the note, he burned the letter unread. Typical.

After Wilde’s death in November 1900, Ross published extracts from the letter in a 1905 edition of Wilde’s letters, under the Biblical title which Wilde himself had suggested. ‘De Profundis’ is Latin for ‘from the depths’ and the phrase comes from the Latin translation of Psalm 130, ‘From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord’, so entirely appropriate if a little melodramatic.

In the preface to the 1905 edition, Ross included an extract from Wilde’s instructions to him which included the author’s own summary of the work:

I don’t defend my conduct. I explain it. Also in my letter there are several passages which explain my mental development while in prison, and the inevitable evolution of my character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place, and I want you and others who stand by me and have affection for me to know exactly in what mood and manner I face the world. Of course, from one point of view, I know that on the day of my release I will merely be moving from one prison into another, and there are times when the whole world seems to be no larger than my cell, and as full of terror for me. Still at the beginning I believe that God made a world for each separate man, and within that world, which is within us, one should seek to live.

The version Ross published in 1905 was incomplete, less than half the manuscript with all references to the Queensberry family removed (for fear of libel from this super-litigious family), in effect removing almost the entire first half. Succeeding editions gave more of text until, in 1962, the complete and correct version appeared in the complete edition of Wilde’s letters, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. Interestingly it appears that the full text version is still not available online as it is still in copyright in the USA. If you Google it, you are taken to variations on the heavily edited, incomplete 1905 version.

Structure

The letter is traditionally divided into two parts but when I read it, I thought it falls into four.

Opening lines

HM Prison, Reading

Dear Bosie,

After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain…

Part 1. Wilde’s time with Douglas

In the first half Wilde describes in excruciating detail the pair’s relationship, with numerous descriptions of Douglas’s unbearably spoilt, selfish and exploitative behaviour, his insensate rages, his addiction to a:

world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed.

How Douglas’s presence and demands for attention prevented Wilde doing a stroke of work, how he destroyed the ‘intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace and solitude’ he needed to work.

My life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative.

While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my art and, in allowing you to stand persistently between Art and myself I give to myself shame and blame in the highest degree.

He describes how Douglas lived a recklessly extravagant lifestyle and expected Wilde to pay for everything. At various points Wilde tots up what this or that escapade cost him, numbers imprinted on his memory since, as a result of the first trial, he had been declared bankrupt and had to go through his accounts line by line with a Bankruptcy Receiver (p.157). He estimates that between autumn 1892 and May 1895 he spent more than £5,000 cash on Douglas, not counting bills.

Every day I had to pay for every single thing you did all day long. (p.228)

I blame myself for having allowed you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial ruin.

You demanded without grace and received without thanks.

According to Wilde he found Douglas’s behaviour so intolerable that they broke up every three months or so, on one occasion Wilde fleeing England altogether to escape him (p.162). Yet always, at that point, Douglas bombarded him with begging letters and his mother (a surprisingly regular presence in the letters) would beg Wilde to be kind to her son and so…he would forgive him and take him back only for the same pattern to repeat itself. Wilde, humbled by prison life, blames himself for his weakness as much as Douglas for his heedless selfishness.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. (p.154)

Most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me. (p.157)

Ethically you had been even more destructive to me than you had been artistically. (p.159)

The accusations lead up to a detailed description of their stay, in October 1894, at the Grand Hotel in Brighton (pages 164 to 167) where Wilde tenderly nursed Douglas through a bout of flu with flowers and books and choice food; but then, when he was better and Wilde, having moved to lodgings, went down with it, Douglas disappeared off to entertain himself, only returning to demand more money, leaving Wilde, weak and feverish, to fend for himself, and at one point uttering the famous words: ‘When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.‘ (p.168).

At one point Douglas became so furiously angry with Wilde for cramping his pleasures and approached the sick man’s bed in such a threatening manner, that Wilde fled the bedroom and didn’t return until he’d summoned the landlord for safety (p.166). Later Douglas wrote to him that it was an uglier moment than he imagined (p.167). Did he mean he intended to kill Wilde? Wilde thinks so. He wonders whether he had the pistol on him which he often brandished around, one time letting it off in a restaurant by mistake (p.175); or had seized a paperknife?

Wilde is portentous. The letter loses no opportunity to elevate this sordid and pathetic affair and his wretched exploitation by a spoilt brat, to the rank of some great work of art or a tragedy supervised by the Greek gods:

The gods are strange. It is not of our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place. (p.169)

The Fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our divided lives… (p.173)

He describes how, when Douglas sent him an undergraduate poem, Wilde replied with a letter intended to be a prose poem invoking the Greeks, how Douglas gave this letter to a friend who passed it to blackmailers who tried to extort money from Wilde and distributed letters round society, to the manager of a theatre staging one of his plays, how it was produced in court against him, used as evidence of his corrupting influence, and helped convict and send him to prison.

The story of his gift of the Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young to a magazine set up by an undergraduate friend of Douglas’s, who then published it alongside a number of gay stories, which were read out as evidence against him at the trial.

The centrality of HATE for his father, much stronger than love for anyone else, in Douglas’s character (pages 174 to 180).

Details of the selling-off of Wilde’s belongings including priceless presentation volumes by all the authors of his day (p.179).

Part one ends with Wilde concluding that the only way to deal with such a monster of selfish ingratitude is to forgive him. He must forgive Douglas for his own sake. Otherwise he will carry the poison of bitterness in his heart forever and it will kill him.

I am far more of an individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world. (p.195)

The notion of forgiveness is the hinge into the second part of this long, long letter, which deals with what Wilde has learned through his two long years of intense suffering.

Part 2. Court, goal, suffering and enlightenment

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

Having raked over their relationship and the events which led up to his arrest, trials and imprisonment, Wilde turns to consider the spiritual aspects of the experience, what he has learned, how he is managing it.

I have to make everything that has happened to me good for me. (p.197)

The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, or be for the brief remainder of my days one maimed, marred and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to accept it without complain, fear or reluctance. (p.197)

To reject one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. (p.197)

I saw then that the only thing for me was to accept everything. (p.207)

I am simply concerned with my whole mental attitude towards life as a whole (p.199)

I write this account of the mode of my being transferred here simply that it should be realised how hard it has been for me to get anything out of my punishment but bitterness and despair. I have, however, to do it, and now and then I have moments of submission and acceptance. All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns. So perhaps whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender, abasement, and humiliation. I can, at any rate, merely proceed on the lines of my own development, and, accepting all that has happened to me, make myself worthy of it. (p.219)

For a while this striving of acceptance of everything which has happened to you reminds me of Nietzsche and the myth of eternal recurrence. But then he changes the tone by moving to a whole hearted consideration of Jesus. With typical Wilde bravado, and consistent with the depiction of him in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde portrays Jesus as a romantic, individualist artist (much like himself).

Christ’s place indeed is with the poets. (p.205)

Like everyone else, he appropriates Jesus for his ideology, in this case his aesthetic and poetics. Thus Wilde interprets Jesus’ entire life as ‘the most wonderful of poems’, rewriting Jesus’ entire career in his late-Romantic purple prose.

Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power of not merely saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful things to him…

The Letter morphs into The Soul of Man Under Socialism when Wilde declares that Jesus was, above all, ‘the most supreme of individualists’ in fact ‘Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.’ (p.207) All his alleged teachings and philanthropy really were about just one thing – perfecting oneself.

But Wilde’s (mis)interpretation also generates new insights:

With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who are dumb under oppression, and ‘whose silence is heard only of God,’ he chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose tongues had been tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found no utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven. And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom suffering and sorrow were modes through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate and is made an image, he made of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in doing.

That Wilde could conceive and write this while ill and depressed, imprisoned, shamed and bankrupted, having lost his belongings, reputation, career and family, is impressive. What it shows to me is that his aesthetic philosophy wasn’t an add-on which he worked up for public effect, but ran through him to the core.

What it also indicates is a substantial change in style from the first ‘half’. There Wilde had come close to whining in a text dominated by autobiographical reminiscences. Here, as you can see, the text feels much more worked-over, burnished and melliflous, to reflect a careful development of thought very similar to his critical essays.

He has been reading the four gospels in their original Greek and quotes from them with his own translations.

He moves on to explain the superiority of Christ’s all-encompassing compassion to the brutality of most of the Greek gods and their myths. And then gives an aesthetic explanation for the entire conception of ‘prophecy’ (i.e. that Jesus was the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies) by saying:

Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

This has the neatness, stylishness, of his essays. If he ever writes anything artistic again, he will take as his theme ‘Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life’ (p.213). In his hands Jesus comes perilously close to sounding like Oscar Wilde:

If the only thing that he ever said had been, ‘Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much,’ it would have been worthwhile dying to have said it. His justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be.

And goes on to say that Christ ‘preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment’. I won’t quote it all but his rewriting of the antinomian Jesus is extremely persuasive. His interpretation of the salvation of Mary Magdelen just for a moment of pure love is moving, as is his reading of Jesus’s special mode of understanding the sinner:

In a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection.

This strikes me as a very profound insight, the most profound thing I’ve come across in Wilde. And yet, the next minute, he sounds a little silly, too like the provocative poseur of his pre-prison days:

There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.

You can see how that has been worked-up to arrive at the provocative punchline. Or:

Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something.

What is pretty obviously missing from all this is any sense of divinity, of God the father and Creator who, if you read the Gospels, Jesus is very much at pains to invoke. Wilde describes an almost secular Jesus, a preacher of self-awareness and self-development, even at the cost of personal pain. It’s no surprise that the Catholic Church refused to accept him when he left prison, despite repeated attempts. It was quite simply because he wasn’t a Christian.

Nowadays this type of positive self-overcoming is called mindfulness or resilience, and Wilde gives the same basic thought a number of very powerful expressions:

And for the last seven or eight months, in spite of a succession of great troubles reaching me from the outside world almost without intermission, I have been placed in direct contact with a new spirit working in this prison through man and things, that has helped me beyond any possibility of expression in words: so that while for the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember doing nothing else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, ‘What an ending, what an appalling ending!’ now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!’ It may really be so. It may become so. If it does I shall owe much to this new personality that has altered every man’s life in this place.

This was due, as the notes tell us, to the arrival of a new governor of the prison. The governor for Wilde’s first year had been a martinet who kept the letter of the law and subjected the inmates to fierce discipline. In July 1896 he was replaced by Major James Nelson who immediately set out installing a more humane regime.

In a structured passage he rejects morality, reason and religion. ‘My Gods dwell in temples made with hands’. Wilde reworks his doctrine of the acceptance of experience: all of it must be accepted and transformed, whatever its origin.

Part 3. Back to Bosie

These repeated exhortations to acceptance reach a climax and then there’s a transition to what I take to be the third part of the letter. This returns to the subject matter and style of part 1, namely a return to wringing his hands over the entire wretched Queensberry family, and a return to the more factual, documentary and accusatory tone of part 1. This time round it’s Douglas’s mother who gets extended criticism for her cowardice in refusing to speak directly to her son but writing Wilde begging him to do her dirty work – i.e. telling her son to pull himself together – for her, and ending all her letters with the same refrain: ‘On no account let Alfred know that I have written to you.’

Part 4. Practicalities

In the last few pages Wilde turns to two practical issues. First he describes the details of his bankruptcy which is genuinely harrowing. He can scarcely believe that Douglas thought it would be ripping good fun if Wilde was declared bankrupt because it would stop his father claiming his court costs. I.e. he didn’t think for a minute of the impact on Wilde, just about spiting his hated father. That’s motivated from start to finish of their wretched affair, Douglas’s hatred of his father, and Wilde found himself trapped in the middle, and was ruined for it.

Then he describes what he plans to do at his release, namely go straight to France to stay with close friends who have remained true and commune with nature. There is no place for him in England. He wants to be beside the sea and praises the ancient Greeks’ attitude to the primal elements of nature.

Then he reiterates the need for him to accept his past in order to move into the future. It has been an epic read. What it must have cost him to write! And so it ends.

Subjects

Prison life:

‘We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain and the record of bitter moments. Suffering – curious as it may seem to you – is the means by which we exist because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing, and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity’ p.164)

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing…

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more… (p.186)

To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day’s experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one’s heart is hard, not a day on which one’s heart is happy. (p.219)

The terrible incident at Clapham Junction where he was made to stand in prison clothes, in chains, waiting for the train to Reading while trainload after trainload of scurrying passengers mocked and jeered and then spat at him (p.219). Compare and contrast with the incident of Robert Ross doffing his hat to Wilde after his conviction.

What you learn from prison:

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are, and will be what they will be. (p.185)

Philosophising:

To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life which we realise at every moment (p.172)

Fine writing (p.176)

Literature the greatest art (p.188)

The purple pageant of my incommunicable woe (p.186), laurel and bayleaf )p.187).

Douglas’s appalling character

‘So full of terrible defects, so utterly ruinous both to yourself and to others’ (p.162)

Douglas takes advantage of his ‘proverbial good nature and Celtic laziness’ (p.158).

Douglas’s extravagance (pages 156 to 157, 172).

Douglas stops Wilde working (pages 154, 155, 156).

Douglas’s rages (pages 158, 166).

Douglas’s terrible translation of Salome (pages 155, 160, 161).

I knew quite well that no translation, unless one done by a poet, could render the colour and cadence of my work in any adequate measure… (p.161)

Douglas gives careless gifts of suits away to his gay lovers and rent boys, their pockets still filled with incriminating letters. Some of the recipients used them to try and blackmail Wilde, and then were produced in court, linking him to the world of rent-boys which his young lover had led him into.

You had left my letters lying about for blackmailing companions to steal, for hotel servants to pilfer, for housemaids to sell. (p.182)

The Marquess of Queensbury – epileptic fury (p.167), vendetta (pages 174 to 175).

I who appealed to all the ages have had to accept my verdict from one who is an ape and a buffoon. (p.184)

Details of the days surrounding the trials – ‘Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles’ (p.158), ‘You forced me to stay to brazen it out’ (p.159). Douglas taunts into launching the action against Queensbury; when Wilde says he has no money, Douglas says his family will pay the costs so that ‘I had no excuse left for not going. I was forced into it’ (p.171)

At one point Wilde anticipates W.H Auden’s great poem, Musee des Beaux Arts:

There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God, but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest,

Thoughts

Gripping

De Profundis is by far the most gripping and ‘real’ thing Wilde ever wrote. All his letters are wonderful, and reading Wilde’s correspondence is to be touched and inspired by such a warm, humane, literate and educated presence – but ‘De Profundis’ is something else. It plunges you straight into a realistic depiction of a tortured, modern relationship with none of the artifice or elaboration which makes the plays or essays or Dorian Gray so artificial and false. (OK, there’s a fair amount of artifice in the description of his philosophy, invoking Jesus and the Greek gods, but in the core passages devoted to Douglas and his terrible father, and Wilde’s litany of humiliations, it feels immediate and lacerating.) I half expected rereading it for this blog to be a chore but I was absolutely gripped and absorbed.

Beggars

Was ever such an extensive character assassination committed to paper? After reading the content, it is astonishing that – as if deliberately dramatising his ongoing addiction to this vile young man – despite the letter’s vivid portrait of Douglas’s despicable character which emerges, Wilde starts the letter ‘Dear Bosie’ and ends it ‘Your Affectionate Friend’.

And it quite beggars belief that after writing the longest indictment any writer ever wrote of their one-time lover – decrying his extravagance, selfishness and ruinous improvidence – Wilde got back together with Douglas. He wrote asking to see him as soon as he was freed from prison and the pair went to briefly live together in Naples, until the friends and family of both men forced them to part. Among countless other passages of flaming criticism, Wilde writes:

It would be impossible for me now to have for you any feeling other than that of contempt and scorn, for myself other than any feeling of scorn and contempt. (p.192)

And yet…he went running back to this object of scorn and contempt. If the letter itself didn’t convey this, the fact that he reunited with such a worm suggests it was a profound psychological addiction, like heroin or cocaine, rather than a healthy, reciprocal relationship.

But why, that’s the great question. Bosie was a monster of selfishness, given to epic rages, nowhere near Wilde’s intellectual equal, completely unsympathetic to his artistry and utterly ruinous for his concentration and writing – why did Wilde keep going back to him, and went back after the wretched worm had utterly ruined his life? It absolutely wasn’t his personality or intellect or even looks. Was he great at some particular sexual kink? But Douglas, in his later memoirs, denied that they even had sex, saying most of what they did was kissing and cuddling and Bosie’s main activity was lining up rent boys and like-minded young men for Wilde to take his pleasure with. Why? Why did he go back to him?

Letters to be published

That said, there’s something peculiar about baring one’s soul, and listing every argument from a long and stormy relationship, with a view to its eventual publication. The letter is a gruesomely detailed description of a deeply troubled relationship but, you can’t help wondering, even here, was Wilde performing? Was he writing with an audience in mind? Yes, most definitely. It combines a detailed chronology of their affair and of the events leading up to the trials with passages of moralising about love and beauty and art and the soul which are quite clearly aimed at a wider audience, as crafted as anything (as I suggested above).

Homosexual absence

Initially I thought the letter completely suppressed any mention of homosexuality or the acts of ‘gross indecency’ Wilde was convicted of, probably for legal, social, all kinds of reasons. But slowly I realised I was wrong. The ‘issue’ is referred to half a dozen times, most clearly in an anecdote towards the end.

First of all, Wilde refers four or five times to the reason he and Douglas met in the first place, which is that Douglas, while an undergraduate at Oxford, wrote him a letter asking for his advice and help with a problem of a particular nature.

I told her [Douglas’s mother] the origin of our friendship was you in your undergraduate days at Oxford coming to beg me to help you in very serious trouble of a particular character. I told her that your life had been continually in the same manner troubled… (p.163)

Our friendship really begins with you begging me in a most pathetic and charming letter to assist you in a position appalling to anyone, doubly so to a young man at Oxford… (p.169)

I would not have expected or wished for you to have stated how and for what purpose you had sought my assistance in your trouble at Oxford… (p.184)

When Edward Levy, at the very beginning of our friendship, seeing your manner of putting me forward to bear the brunt, and annoyance, and expense even of that unfortunate Oxford mishap of yours, if we must so term it, in reference to which his help and advice had been sought, warned me for the space of an hour against knowing you, you laughed. (p.190)

Ten seconds searching on the internet tell me that in the spring of 1892 Douglas was being blackmailed by a young man over an indiscreetly gay letter he had sent him. Douglas wrote to Wilde asking for help, Wilde travelled down to Oxford and spent the weekend at Douglas’s lodgings. Back in London he consulted his solicitor, George Lewis, who advised resolving the problem by paying the blackmailer £100.

But this sequence of events is nowhere referred to in De Profundis and this leads to several thoughts. One is that, if course Wilde doesn’t make anything explicit in the letter: 1) he was a gentleman and gentlemen don’t discuss sex of any variety; 2) he regarded it as beneath his dignity and certainly beneath the moral purpose of the letter; 3) anything he wrote could possibly be used against him in yet another prosecution.

The second thought arises from something intriguing I read about ‘De Profundis’ which is that gay consciousness had barely begun. A man was a gentleman and he may or may not have peculiar tastes but a) no-one talked about it b) there was a less clear-cut line between gay and straight than was to be drawn during the twentieth century (and now, in the 21st century, is being blurred and elided again). So Wilde may never have thought of himself as homosexual but merely a gentleman who enjoyed Uranian activities.

The third thought is that this absence of sex does something funny to the text. It’s packed with accusations against Douglas, including lots of financial details, descriptions of his horrid family etc, then moves on to discuss spiritual and psychological development. And yet, all the time, it (almost completely) ignores the elephant in the room. A huge letter rotating around his prosecution and conviction and imprisonment and yet which…never directly addresses or refutes the prosecution case or evidence.

But as you read on, slowly slowly the love that dare not speak its name does make an appearance in asides and references. Is homosexuality what he’s referring to here, where he writes of a meretricious article Douglas had written for the Mercure de France, that:

Along with genius goes often a curious perversity of passion and desire?…[that] the pathological phenomenon in question is also found amongst those who have not genius. (p.183)

Later:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. (p.194)

And, in one of the rare references to the actual court case:

When your father’s Counsel desiring to catch me in a contradiction suddenly produced in court a letter of mine, written to you in March ’93, in which I stated that, rather than endure a repetition of the hideous scenes you seemed to have such a terrible pleasure in making, I would readily consent to be ‘blackmailed by every renter in London’, it was a very real grief to me that that side of my friendship with you should incidentally be revealed to the common gaze. (p.185)

‘That side of my friendship with you’ = gay sex. The entire long letter could be seen as Wilde’s attempt to deny ‘that side of my friendship with you’ (sex) and focus overwhelmingly on love, psychology, and then Christ and penitence. But according to modern accounts Wilde had lots of sex with lots of rent boys, servants and others, and he often coerced them into the act. In De Profundis Wilde suppresses all of that. Or, by his own lights, was he simply being a civilised gentleman and not mentioning it, preferring (still) to come across as artist by concentrating on character, emotion and so on?

When I told you that even that unfortunate young man who ultimately stood beside me in the Dock had warned me more than once that you would prove far more fatal in bringing me to utter destruction than any of the common lads I was foolish enough to know, you laughed, though not with much sense of amusement. (p.190)

‘I was foolish enough to know‘? He did a bit more than ‘know’ them. Later in life, Douglas said that the pair rarely if ever had sex and the relationship was mostly restricted to kissing and stormy arguments, but at the same time frankly admitted that the pair mostly procured gay partners for each other.

The references build up. Wilde describes how boring Douglas’s conversation was:

…and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one topic round which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me… (p.161)

Since he was not an intellectual, pretty uncultivated and not interested in Wilde’s work, would this one fascinating topic have been…gay sex? Did Bosie beguile Wilde not by any physical acts at all, but with his knowledge of forbidden sins i.e. gay sex and the gay underworld?

Towards the end of the long letter comes the only place (I think) where Wilde directly addresses the issue:

A great friend of mine — a friend of ten years’ standing — came to see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting malice, still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures and strange passions, and that unless he accepted that as a fact about me and realised it to the full I could not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his friendship on false pretences. (p.230)

Justification for consorting with lowlife

And then the danger – Wilde wanted to walk on the wild side, to play with fire.

People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But they, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approached them, were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. 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…I didn’t feel at all ashamed of having known them. They were intensely interesting… (p.221)

This is fine as artistic justification but it doesn’t address the central accusation, that he had widespread and systematic gross indecency with lots of young men, many of them boys, some borderline children (aged 15 and younger).

Wilde the abuser

For unscholarly but modern indictments of Wilde’s exploitative behaviour, see:

It’s Time For The Left To Stop Idolizing Oscar Wilde. He’s A Pervert by Nick Sheppard
Just Wilde about the boys (review of ‘Andre and Oscar: Gide, Wilde and The Art of Gay Living’) by John R. Bradley

Getting over it

Towards the end of ‘De Profundis’, Wilde launches into another sequence of pages trying to analyse how Douglas created such havoc in his life. He keeps coming up with formulations and saying ‘That’s it’, and being content for half a page… before coming round to the subject again and setting off on a whole new analysis. It is clear that, in writing the letter, Wilde was still very much working it through and this is what gives it – despite the artful passages I’ve mentioned – its psychologically gripping quality. He writes that at moments he has accepted the past and is ready to move on, but the sheer length of the letter, not to mention its repetitive analyses of the same traumas and wounds, shows that he was far from cured.

Credit

Page references are to the 1979 Oxford University Press edition of the Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.

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by Simon on August 28, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Autobiography, English literature, Literature

Posted by Simon on August 28, 2024

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Oscar Wilde’s anti-English attitudes

Oscar Wilde was Irish through and through, born of Irish parents, raised and educated in Dublin. His father was Ireland’s pre-eminent eye and ear surgeon and his mother was a fiery Irish nationalist who wrote poems about an independent Ireland under the nom-de-plume of Speranza or ‘Hope’. (In De Profundis Wilde writes that his mother ‘intellectually ranks with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and historically with Madame Roland’, DP p.224). Wilde was raised in an atmosphere sympathetic to anti-British rebels and revolutionaries.

So although he moved to England and, after some struggle, established himself as a writer in London’s competitive literary world, and although he invoked and catered to the English upper classes in all his entertainments, he was consistently, sometimes astonishingly rude about the English, sometimes straightforwardly insulting.

I searched his works for quotes mentioning ‘England’, ‘English’, ‘British’ and ‘this country’ to build up a collage of his opinions.

The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)

English philistinism:

…the stupidity and hypocrisy and Philistinism of the English…

…the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women…

English law:

So completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person…

When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity…

English charity:

In the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…

The arts in England:

In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England.

And a really sustained broadside against the stupidity and vulgarity of the English public, he turns to their attitudes to ‘the classics:

This acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this: When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England.

You can see how he engineers a position from which he can regard the accusations of ‘immorality’ routinely made against his work, with pride.

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.

Therefore:

On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are.

And the attempt to be genuinely, unselfishly sympathetic is particularly difficult in that particularly selfish, unsympathetic nation, England:

In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.

Which explains why her greatest artists had to flee:

Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

The Critic as Artist (1891)

I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

ERNEST: I have a foolish habit of reading periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly valueless.
GILBERT: So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrity weighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother — that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us from time to time.

There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours. With us, Thought is degraded by its constant association with practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any one thing?

England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions.

The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

I need hardly say, Ernest, how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.

England has done one thing; it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force. But Wisdom has always been hidden from it. Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.

How little we have of this temper in England, and how much we need it! The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. It was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect. The author of the Origin of Species had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. If one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne. We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity. Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

The Decay of Lying (1891)

Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come.

Robert Elsmere is of course a masterpiece — a masterpiece of the genre ennuyeux, the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious non-comformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas.

In the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah’s ark, or Balaam’s ass, or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism.

The dreams of the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr Myers’s two bulky volumes on the subject and in the Transactions of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing things that I have ever read. There is not even a fine nightmare among them. They are commonplace, sordid and tedious.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Of Lord Henry’s uncle, Lord Fermor:

On succeeding…to the title [he] had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. He had two large town houses, but preferred to live in chambers as it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at his club. He paid some attention to the management of his collieries in the Midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth. In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of Radicals. He was a hero to his valet, who bullied him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn. Only England could have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to the dogs

‘There is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.’

LORD HENRY: ‘If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman — always a rash thing to do — he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself. Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.’

DORIAN: ‘I know how people chatter in England. The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander. In this country, it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.’

BASIL: ‘England is bad enough I know, and English society is all wrong.’

LORD HENRY: ‘Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues. You, as a good Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.’

Mr. Chapman began to talk in a loud voice about the situation in the House of Commons. He guffawed at his adversaries. The word doctrinaire — word full of terror to the British mind — reappeared from time to time between his explosions. An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. He hoisted the Union Jack on the pinnacles of thought. The inherited stupidity of the race — sound English common sense he jovially termed it — was shown to be the proper bulwark for society.

‘The inherited stupidity of the race’. Did Wilde actually hate the English?

Lady Alice Chapman, his hostess’s daughter, a dowdy dull girl, with one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, are never remembered; and her husband, a red-cheeked, white-whiskered creature who, like so many of his class, was under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas.

Some of this is just wit and banter, but still…

‘You don’t like your country, then?’ she asked.
‘I live in it.’
‘That you may censure it the better.’
‘Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?’ he inquired.
‘What do they say of us?’
‘That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop.’
‘Is that yours, Harry?’
‘I give it to you.’
‘I could not use it. It is too true.’
‘You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a description.’
‘They are practical.’
‘They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.’
‘Still, we have done great things.’
‘Great things have been thrust on us.’
‘We have carried their burden.’
‘Only as far as the Stock Exchange.’
She shook her head. ‘I believe in the race,’ she cried.
‘It represents the survival of the pushing.’

Obviously the word ‘burden’ rings bells for anyone familiar with Kipling’s 1899 poem, The White Man’s Burden, and is a kind of pre-emptive mockery of it.

‘My dear boy, they have only been talking about it [Basil Hallward’s mysterious disappearance] for six weeks, and the British public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months.’

‘By the way, what has become of that wonderful portrait he did of you?…Oh! I remember your telling me years ago that you had sent it down to Selby, and that it had got mislaid or stolen on the way…What a pity! it was really a masterpiece. I remember I wanted to buy it…It belonged to Basil’s best period. Since then, his work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist.’

De Profundis

(Page references are to the 1979 Oxford University Press paperback edition of The Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.)

Writing about Jesus, Wilde says:

His chief war was against the Philistines. That is the war every child of light has to wage. Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of Jerusalem in Christ’s day were the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own.

Christ mocked at the ‘whited sepulchre’ of respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He would not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals. He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies. He took sabbatarianism as a type of the things that should be set at nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with utter and relentless scorn…

In a completely different vein, Wilde execrates Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, and his motives for bringing the court case against Wilde, namely to get his name in the papers.

To pose as a champion of purity, as it is termed, is, in the present condition of the British public, the surest way of becoming for the nonce a heroic figure. Of this public I said in one of my plays that if it is Caliban for one half of the year, it is Tartuffe for the other… (p.226)

And on the same subject:

The fact that your father loathed you and you loathed your father was not a matter of any interest to the English public. Such feelings are very common in English domestic life and should be confined to the place they characterise: the home. (p.232)

No great conclusions to make. Just awe at the sustained animus and occasional real vitriol of Wilde’s attacks which are easy to overlook in the broader contexts of the essays and plays. And helps you understand the widespread support for his prosecution which came from a public he had been bating and insulting for years. On Clapham Junction station, standing chained in prison clothes, the crowd jeered and spat at him. It was an appalling experience but was he really all that surprised?

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by Simon on August 19, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Literary criticism

Posted by Simon on August 19, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/19/oscar-wildes-anti-english-attitudes/

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young by Oscar Wilde (1894)

Factual background

In mid-1891 the poet Lionel Johnson introduced Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, Johnson’s cousin and an undergraduate at Oxford at the time. Friendship turned to intimacy and by 1893 Wilde was infatuated with Douglas. In 1894 Douglas and some Oxford friends founded a journal, The Chameleon.

Wilde had been introduced to these friends and had been involved in the meeting which chose the magazine’s title. To support his young lover’s venture, he contributed a set of 35 witty paradoxes and epigrams, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, which he had originally intended for the Saturday Review.

Six months later, in May 1895, Wilde was involved in his two trials and this set of epigrams and his involvement in The Chameleon were brought up and used against Wilde. The Chameleon was, indeed, a magazine conceived as promoting what were called ‘Uranian’ i.e. gay themes. All but two of the thirteen items in the first issue concerned homosexuality. As well as Wilde’s (relatively harmless) epigrams, there were two poems by Douglas, including ‘Two Loves’ which contrasts heterosexual and homosexual love, and refers to gay love by the now-famous phrase ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.

The magazine also included ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’, a short story which describes the sexual affair between an 28-year-old priest and a 14-year-old boy, which ends with their discovery and joint suicide. Because all the items were anonymous, Wilde was charged, in court, with writing this clearly illegal and immoral story when, in reality, he had actually disapproved of its inclusion in the magazine.

(Wilde refers to the way his generous help and support was turned against him, in his long letter De Profundis, page 170 of the Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1979 OUP paperback edition.)

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Time is a waste of money.

One should always be a little improbable.

There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

To be premature is to be perfect.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right and wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.

The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

Commentary

The most obvious thing about this list of smart epigrams is their similarity to the list of apothegms he added as the Preface to the book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891. Scholars point out that many of his critical essays began as collections of apothegms which he arranged into a ‘logical’ or at least rhetorical order, and then created prose to link them together. It indicates the way the epigram was the basis of his way of thinking and writing.

As to the content, the epigrams include many variations on familiar Wilde themes, namely that 1. the aim of life is to become an individualist, to be yourself, 2. the most important thing in life, more than all the Victorian shibboleths of sincerity and duty and honour and all the rest of it, is to be stylish and this involves the maximum amount of artifice.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.

As in the Preface, some are more effective than others. For example, ‘Time is a waste of money’ strikes me as barely worth the ink, whereas ‘One should always be a little improbable’ strikes me as being sly and stylish and true.

Something like ‘Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions’ clearly addresses issues of great importance in the late nineteenth century, which not many of us care about these days. Science is clearly science and dominates 21st century society; and if people want to have religious beliefs, that’s fine. But the two no longer clash head-on as they did for so many Victorian and Edwardian social thinkers.

‘The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated’ has the polished confidence of the product of a good public school and Oxford, and the reference to exams indicates the eternal undergraduate: ‘In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.’

Wilde studied Classics at Oxford and the late-Victorian aesthetes were obsessed with their suave version of Greek mythology, so there are the usual references to classical myth: ‘It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.’

It was hardly original in 1894 to lump together industry, factories, serious work, the philistine middle class, bourgeois earnestness and oppose them to the stylishness of the aesthete and dandy. These themes had been developed, in their different ways, by Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater as long ago as the 1870s. High-minded Latin-quoting poets who despised anything which smacked of industry, hard work and earnestness had been around for decades. Wilde’s contribution was to take the attitude to its logical extreme and create an entire worldview, worked out across essays, stories, fairy tales, fiction and plays, going out of his way to mock bourgeois earnestness and turn all its values on their heads.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
Industry is the root of all ugliness.

And by contrast valuing only the utterly artificial, paradoxical, whimsical and unearnest:

The condition of perfection is idleness.

You can see how many of these snappy sayings would appear when read out by an extremely earnest and literal-minded prosecuting lawyer in a Victorian court. Disastrous. Moreover note the second part of the title – ‘for the young‘ and published in an undergraduate magazine. Wilde could hardly have done more to play into the hands of those who accused him of consciously and deliberately setting out to corrupt the nation’s youth.

Having read them half a dozen times, I think the improbable one is my second favourite. My favourite is:

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

I think what Wilde is implying is that the only important things go on in the life of the mind i.e. the imagination, whereas the real world is ultimately trivial. I find that a sympathetic idea. But I take it at a deeper level, too: Nothing really matters. You’re going to die, I’m going to die, our children and grandchildren will die. Things matter for a bit, maybe, while anyone remembers them. But eventually all of us will be compost on an over-heated planet and all these words and the thoughts they record will have disappeared like morning dew, like grains of sand lost in the boiling desert which the earth is destined to become. For the time being, though – enjoy.

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by Simon on August 7, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Literature

Posted by Simon on August 7, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/07/phrases-and-philosophies-for-the-use-of-the-young-oscar-wilde/

The Picture of Dorian Gray: Introduction by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd CBE (born in 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic. He’s noted for maybe two things: 1) his abiding interest in the history of London and in writers based in London, and 2) his astonishing, daunting productivity. He’s written no fewer than 18 novels and and 45 non-fiction books, 6 of them about Dickens, others about Shakespeare, Blake and Chaucer, and three or four books about London and the Thames.

Anyway, back in 1983 Ackroyd’s second novel was titled ‘The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde’, a fictional diary attributed to Wilde’s last year, 1900. Ackroyd is famous for the research he does into his subjects and so it made sense when Penguin commissioned him, off the back of his novel, to write the introduction to the 1985 Penguin Classic edition of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

It’s only nine pages long but it’s so packed with ideas and insights that they’re worth itemising and sharing.

Real-life models

The painter Basil Hallward and the lolling aesthete Lord Henry Wotton are possibly based on a painter Wilde knew at Oxford, Frank Miles, who introduced him to the homosexual aesthete Lord Ronald Gower. Wilde himself made the typically pithy claim that:

‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.’

Critical reception

Some reviewers were scandalised by Dorian. Ackroyd quotes one reviewer, Charles Whibley in the Scots Observer, saying ‘Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten’, the ‘again’ referring to Wilde’s essay The Portrait of Mr W.H. which describes Shakespeare’s admiration of a handsome boy actor. He goes on to strongly imply Wilde’s homosexuality when he wrote ‘he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys’ which was a reference to the 1889 Cleveland Street scandal, when a homosexual brothel was uncovered in Cleveland Street, largely staffed by young telegraph boys earning a bit on the side.

Rewriting Dorian

The accusations unnerved Wilde and between its publication in Lippincott’s magazine in July 1890, and the book publication in 1891, he added no fewer than new chapters of a much more conventional Victorian nature (chapters 3, 5, 15, 16, 17, 18).

Is Dorian an unconscious confession?

The book is based on the character’s double life and some critics believe it represented not just an image of Wilde’s own secret homosexuality, but a deep-seated need for confession. An entry-level Freudian interpretation would suggest that Wilde wanted to be found out and, possibly, punished.

Robert Ross introduces Wilde to gay sex

Ackroyd describes Wilde’s education and early years as conventional, marked only by his flamboyant posing as London’s leading aesthete. He married an eligible woman (Constance Lloyd) in 1884 and quickly had two children in 1885 and 1886. According to Ackroyd it was in 1886 that Wilde met young Robert Ross who pursued and seduced him, introducing him to homosexual practices and helping him to become part of a ‘Uranian’ circle in London.

Wilde’s experience of being snubbed

By five years later rumours circulated about him and he was snubbed in some circles and this is, of course, the kind of snubs Dorian Gray is described, by Basil Hallward in his long speech, as experiencing in the novel. In other words, Basil’s description incorporates types of social ostracism which reflected Wilde’s own experiences.

Wilde’s superstitiousness

Wilde was an intensely superstitious man who visited palmists and fortune tellers (the subject of his brilliant short story, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime). Which helps account for the sense of predestined doom which hangs over the novel right from the start.

‘There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows… Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are — my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks — we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.’

The theme is repeated again and again. A hundred pages, once he has realised that the picture will absorb his sins:

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

Ackroyd points out that one of Wilde’s references to the novel in the long letter he wrote in prison which came to be titled De Profundis, is precisely about this sense of dark destiny.

Doom that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray.

On their second meeting in July 1891 Wilde gave a copy of the novel to the young man he had fallen in love with, Lord Alfred Douglas, handsome and impetuous, as if prefigured by Dorian.

Dorian crystallises Wilde’s reputation

According to Ackroyd Dorian was a success and crystallised Wilde’s reputation. Previously he was known, if at all, for his moralising fairy stories and his clever essays. Ackroyd cites Philippe Julian who wrote that after the publication of Gray: ‘the name of Wilde became a synonym for all that was most unhealthy.’

Wilde’s sustained attacks on the English

Throughout his writings Wilde continually criticises and baits English society (so much so that I’ve devoted a whole blog post to it). For example, if Dorian leads a double life which echoes Wilde’s own concealed homosexuality, he also symbolises the sexual hypocrisy which foreigners (especially the French) saw as a fundamental aspect of English society.

‘I know how people chatter in England. The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander. In this country, it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.’

National traits

In its indebtedness to the mood or French decadence and its reference to a ‘poisonous’ book clearly based on the famous decadent novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Still, it’s not really true to claim it, as Arthur Ransome did, ‘the first French novel to be written in the English language.’ Not least because, as Ackroyd suggests, the book’s wit is Irish and its melodrama is very English. Talking of melodrama…

Wilde’s vulgarity and sentimentality

As Ackroyd pithily puts it, ‘There was always a streak of vulgarity in Wilde’s imagination…and he was rarely able to refrain from taking a readily available convention to excessive lengths’. Thus the storyline involving Sibyl Vane, and then the attempted revenge of her brother James, has more in common with the melodrama of Victorian popular novelist Hall Caine than the studied objectivity of Flaubert. Wilde routinely mocked Victorian melodrama and sentimentality but both infect this book.

Learning how to synthesise plot and epigrams

Wilde’s essays had overflowed with showy epigrams. Ackroyd suggests that it was in Dorian Gray that Wilde learned how to integrate the witty repartee and shiny epigrams into a dramatic storyline. He suggests that Gray amounted to a kind of breakthrough which allowed him to embark on the four social comedy plays which made him famous.

Personally, I’m not so sure. Having just read Wilde’s major essays I can vouch for the way the epigrams are well integrated into them and already occur at ‘dramatic’ points in the argument. Also, of course, half the important essays were already dialogues, a format he used to dramatise the flow of his argument – so he was already well on the road to drama before Gray.

And lastly, the storylines and epigrams are not well integrated into the first couple of plays, particularly A Woman of No Importance where the storyline and pages and pages of epigrams are plonked next to each other and not integrated at all.

Epigram versus tragedy

But having introduced the idea of a tension between the shiny epigrams and the tragic storyline, Ackroyd uses it to make a deeper point, which is the way the epigrams stand for and epitomise the ideology of Individualism which he promoted in all his works – while the tragic storyline undermines and unmasks that worldview.

Wilde clearly loves the world of drawling dandies and clever repartee and yet the entire thrust of the novel is to reveal it as shallow and inadequate to the tragic depths of life. As Ackroyd puts it:

In his fiction, he raised up a world in his own image and then condemned it for its emptiness and follies. (Introduction p.xiv)

Despair

It’s not only the experiences of living a double life and of being snubbed that Wilde recycled from his own life. Ackroyd says that Wilde’s correspondence is surprisingly full of expressions of exhaustion and despair, of being burned out. He could hold a table enthralled in fascination at his brilliant wit and captivate an audience with his elaborate pose as a dandy and an aesthete, wittily promoting the need of art for art’s sake. And yet his letters show that he was also capable of deep depression, when all his achievements seemed like dust.

The novel acts out this almost manic-depressive alternation, with its contrasts between the drawing room and dinner party banter whenever Lord Henry is onstage, and the profound gloom which envelops the final third of the novel, after Basil’s murder.

Is Dorian an emblem of imperial despair?

And Ackroyd goes on to extrapolate the tragic end of Gray onto British culture as a whole, suggesting that it epitomises a certain kind of emptiness many found in English society at the very peak of its power and pomp. He relates it to the harrowing emptiness which dominates Joseph Conrad’s early novels, and which, despite all his bluster, also underlies Kipling – the worry that the whole vast effort is pointless, a nagging sense of the futility of life.

Although Wilde was to have four more years of cultural fame and celebrity, Ackroyd suggests that the novel can be taken as a symbol of the sterility and emptiness which dominated not just his private moods, but the values of British imperial society as it reached the height of its pomp (generally taken to be the empire-wide celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897).

Personally, I demur. Plenty of Gothic tales about futility and despair were written in other eras, i.e. there’s nothing unique about stories of decline and fall to the end of the nineteenth century. I would suggest that we associate the era with fictions of doubt and even despair is because they were so well written.

That it wasn’t an era of particular decadence, but that the literature of decadence was just so pithy and powerful – and this has more to do with the rise of short, focused genre fiction (detective fiction, ghost stories, fairy stories – all three of which Wilde had tried) than with a particular worldview.

And the rise of short, punchy genre fiction has more to do with new printing and marketing techniques, the growth of the reading public, the proliferation of magazines catering to different tastes, than with some culture-wide sense of doom.

Class indictment

Far more pertinent, I think, is the idea the novel is an indictment of the English ruling class. To Keir Hardie and other activists of the trade union and socialist movements, to socialists and promoters of all the campaigns for a better society, Wilde’s book must have seemed (as it was intended to be) an expression of supreme aristocratic arrogance. Sure, Dorian gets his come-uppance, but the instigator of the whole thing, Lord Henry Wotton, doesn’t, and the sense you get is of an irredeemably arrogant class cocooned in its privilege and luxury.

That would be the case from the Left. But from the Right, for true-blue Imperialists would have been just as offended. What did someone like Kipling make of it, the man who devoted the first 10 years of his career to lauding the men who built and maintained the British Empire at such high personal cost?

You can imagine all kinds of Brits, from right-wing imperialists to left-wing socialists joining in condemnation of the irresponsible frivolity of the parasite class which Wilde depicts in all his essays, this novel and the four plays.

130 years later, more and more books are being written about the rapacity and greed of the British Empire, its looting treasure from four continents, its brutal wars against native peoples, its inbuilt racism and so on. Reading Dorian makes you wonder whether this was what all that effort and exploitation was for? For posing layabouts like Lord Henry and spoilt young men like Dorian to fritter their riches away on worthless lives?

Or is this to fall into Wilde’s trap? Is thinking like this to adopt the dull, vulgar, philistine mindset which he devoted his life to combating, as he argued for the freedom of the mind-spirit-imagination against the killjoys, busybodies and philistines who are always, in every generation. trying to guilt trip us about ‘poverty’ and ‘politics’ and ‘duty’ and so on?

Does it work?

Yes. It may be melodramatic in conception but it is brilliant in execution. Wilde knew that it was a classic in his own lifetime and it’s been treated as one ever since.

Thoughts

Intelligent introduction, isn’t it? Ackroyd is full of interesting ideas and insights. Unlike many scholarly introducers, Ackroyd flatters the reader’s intelligence and talks up to us. I’ve read a lot of rubbish introductions. This is an excellent one.

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The short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 to 1930) wrote some hundred and twenty short stories, excluding the 56 Sherlock Holmes stories and the 17 or so Brigadier Gerard stories. The excellent Société Sherlock Holmes de France website estimates the total number of all Conan Doyle’s fictions as 239, for he also wrote some 20 short novels. His first story was published when he was 20, the last when he was 70.

For boys

The overall affect is rip-roaring adventures for boys. None of them are really for adults, none of them have much psychology, much interiority, and the plots – though superficially gripping – are all wound up in a brisk few final paras. They anticipate hundreds of adventure movies and comics and graphic novels. They are short and punchy and great fun.

Reassuring

Even the horror and science fiction stories, though they ostensibly deal with the bizarre and grotesque, are ultimately reassuring because there is never any doubt as to the good sense and decency of the narrator(s). It is always a man and he is always soundly for the Empire and the natural fair play of the British, innately superior to all other nations and divinely ordained to rule vast tracts of the world and over their occasionally troublesome natives (and, quite often, over the great unwashed back here in Blighty).

Many of the stories exemplify that specially British sense of justice and fairmindedness which, in the mind of Imperialists, justified, indeed demanded, our Imperial role and which, similarly, justified the existence of a landed aristocracy with its Justices of the Peace, Lord Lieutenants and whatnot.

(For a thorough depiction of this deeply conservative worldview see my review of Andrew Young’s biography of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902.)

G.M. Young, historian of the Victorian era, writes about ‘the most precious element in Victorian civilisation, its robust and masculine sanity’, and Conan Doyle is a kind of quintessence of this, a charmingly unreflective, unquestioning, untroubled supporter of everything British.

Conan Doyle comes over as everyone’s favourite uncle, full of rattling good stories and anecdotes – but nobody for a minute takes any of his opinions seriously. He is Mr Chips.

Magazines

The stories were written for money to be published in the impressively wide variety of magazines which flourished in the 1890s. They were reprinted in numerous subsequent collections. One of the collections was titled Round the Fire Stories and that perfectly captures the Boy Scout ambience of so many of them.

The 1880s and 90s were a golden age of little magazines, created to feed the appetite of the middle and lower classes who had been taught to read as a result of the 1870 Education Act and its sequels, who, due to the wealth-creating effect of the Second Industrial Revolution, increasingly had the means to buy cheap titles.

Conan Doyle’s most effective outlet was the Strand magazine (established 1891), packed with articles, news and stories by leading writers of the day, all for the bargain price of one shilling in which he continued to publish to the end of his career.

These magazines demanded sensational storylines, glamorous protagonists, short, sharp doses of the mysterious, the macabre, the haunting or the humorous, and this well-defined format and sensation-seeking audience should be kept in mind when reading Conan Doyle’s stories.

Themes

Patriotism

‘I do not go so far as to say that the English are more honest than any other nation, but I have found them more expensive to buy.’ (The Lost Special)

‘He was a villain, but he was a Briton!’ said the captain, at last. ‘He lived like a dog, but, by God, he died like a man!’ (The Slapping Sal)

No more striking example could be given of the long arm and steel hand of the British law than that within a few months this mixed crew, Sclavonian, negro, Manila men, Norwegian, Turk and Frenchman, gathered on the shore of the distant Argentine, were all brought face to face at the Central Criminal Court in the heart of London town. (The Tragedy of Flowery Land)

The British Empire

The colonies, especially Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, are the playground of white men – the justification of the Empire goes without saying i.e. that native peoples should have their land taken and their goods stolen doesn’t occur. See Doyle’s good-humoured and open-handed pamphlets justifying the Second Boer War, which simply don’t consider the possibility that the British might have been motivated solely by power politics and greed. In The Green Flag even mutinous Irish republicans, when faced with the fuzzy wuzzies, turn out to be the stoutest defenders of the British Empire.

London

‘…now gradually overtaken and surrounded by the red brick tentacles of the London octopus.’

London is always growing, throwing out ever-expanding avenues of redbrick terraces. The ones so many of us still live in to this day.

Women

Chivalry is the way the patriarchy, men, reassured themselves that they deserved to be in charge, that it was OK to keep women in powerless subjugation. Chivalry was men’s reply to women demanding the vote or control of their own lives: look, we defer to you in everything sweet ladies, why on earth would you need the vote?

‘Ladies are in danger of losing their privileges when they usurp the place of the other sex. They cannot claim both.’ (Doctors of Hoyland)

Women in Conan Doyle are tall, stately, and the most beautiful woman in England. Defending their ‘honour’ is the motivation for quite a few of the stories.

Diamonds

Diamonds seem to be the treasure and currency of choice, the bigger the better, and feature in his very first story, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley as well as The Stone of Boxman’s Drift, Our Midnight Visitor, The Club-Footed Grocer.

Comedy

A constant throughout is Conan Doyle’s bluff good humour. Rising to overt comedy in the GP reminiscences and Brigadier Gerard stories, or just lying low, purring in the background. Constantly, pervasively there is his confidence and solidity, as ubiquitous as his splendid Edwardian moustache.

Crime

Crime of the most sensational and puzzling sort, of course, for example, The Story of the Lost Special or The Story of the Lost Watches.

Sensation

The stories were published in popular magazines which often contained sensational news or features. The stories take this tone from their surroundings. Nothing is subtle or underplayed. Everything is the most sensational scandal in London or England or the world.

Stanniford, the banker! I remembered the name at once. His flight from the country some seven years before had been one of the scandals and sensations of the time. (The Sealed Room)

Such was the position of affairs when, upon the evening of Monday, June 21st, there came a fresh development which changed what had been a mere village scandal into a tragedy which arrested the attention of the whole nation. (The Black Doctor)

It’s the same breathless sensationalism which characterises the Holmes stories and give them their delightful, thrilling sense of (utterly spurious) importance.

Scandal

Scandal and the fear of scandal is a motivation in these and the Holmes stories to a degree which is hard for us to understand. The reputation of upper middle class people was so important that they were willing to kill or die to preserve it. Just the hint that some misbehaviour in a former life abroad might revisit someone in respectable England causes numerous Conan Doyle protagonists to drop dead of horror. The Jew’s Breastplate is a particularly preposterous example of a story driven by this ludicrous sentiment.

Secret societies

Secret societies flourished in the 1880s and 1890s. They merged in the public mind with terrorist groups such as nihilists, anarchists, Fenians, even the violent suffragettes. They are routinely offered as explanations when some crime, especially a murder, goes unsolved and were so familiar a subject that Conan Doyle can make a comic story about a chemist who is mistakenly invited to give a lecture about dynamite to a group of nihilists.

Murder

Plenty of people get murdered and the murders are horrible and yet, in some difficult-to-define way, romantic and exciting. They upset the characters – but they don’t upset us, because they are so transparently the engines of a rattling good yarn.

Horror

The great horror trope of the pale ghastly face at the window occurs in scores of the stories – Uncle Jeremy’s Household, A Pastoral Horror – and melodramatic horror is one of the commonest emotions: ‘… and she realized, with a thrill of horror, that what she had taken to be a glove was the hand of a man, who was prostrate upon the floor.’

And now I come to that portion of my story which fills me even now with a shuddering horror when I think of it (The Striped Chest)

This could be the epigraph to many of the collected stories.

The 1880s

The Mystery of Sasassa Valley (September 1879)

‘Tell it? Oh, certainly; but it is a longish story and a very strange one; so fill up your glass again, and light another cigar, while I try to reel it off.’

The opening words sets the tone for the entire oeuvre. Jack Turnbull as an old man recalls how he and Lucky Tom Donahue, two young lawyers who packed in study to emigrate to South Africa, took their cue from a native tale of a haunted valley and discovered the weird glowing was given off not by demons but by diamonds!

The American’s Tale (December 1880)

“Deuced rum yarn!” said young Sinclair. Hard core Western redneck Jefferson Adams regales a posh English literary club with a tall tale about a feud in 1870s Arizona between cool Brit called Scott and short-fused Alabama Joe which ends with Joe being eaten alive by a giant Venus flytrap plant!

A Night Among the Nihilists (April 1881)

‘By the way,’ he remarked, as we smoked a cigar over our wine, ‘we should never have known you but for the English labels on your luggage.’

Robinson, a clerk in a corn merchant’s, is sent to Russia to open up trade with a major landowner. There is a mix-up and he is introduced into a secret society of Nihilists and saved just as he is rumbled, when the police burst in!

That Little Square Box (December 1881)

‘Dick was just the man I wanted; kindly and shrewd in his nature, and prompt in his actions, I should have no difficulty in telling him my suspicions, and could rely upon his sound sense to point out the best course to pursue. Since I was a little lad in the second form at Harrow, Dick had been my adviser and protector.’

The narrator is a nervous, solitary, literary type who, when he boards the ship from Boston to London, overhears two foreign men whispering about a secret box and when to set it off, thinks he is hearing anarchist/terrorists. In fact, they are releasing racing pigeons!

The Gully of Bluemansdyke: A True Colonial Story (December 1881)

‘The two men lapsed into silence for some time, moodily staring into the glow of the fire, and pulling at their short clays.’

New Zealand in the 1850s. A posse is formed to hunt down seven men who bushwhacked the young sons of two old-timers. A paean to the rugged spirit of the emigrant colonial trooper. Trooper Braxton and his capture of the Bluemansdyke murderers. The Australia stories are linked.

Bones, The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice (April 1882)

Comic tale. ‘

Boss, with the keen power of calculation which had made him the finest cricketer at Rugby in his day, had caught the rein immediately below the bit, and clung to it with silent concentration.’

Another tale of derring-do in the New Zealand outback, but lightened with romance and humour, as two English miners, posh John ‘Boss’ Morgan and herculean Abe ‘Bones’ Durton save the life of pretty young Miss Carrie Sinclair who transforms the life of mining shanty Harvey’s Sluice.

‘With these few broken words the strangely assorted friends shook hands and looked lovingly into each other’s eyes.’

Reminiscent of Paint Your Wagon. Climaxes with a big shootout as the pals save Miss Sinclair from bushrangers.

Our Derby Sweepstakes (May 1882)

Two men compete for the hand of the fair Miss Eleanor Montague and decide the winner of the Derby will win her hand. Told in 1st person by Eleanor in an impersonation of a Victorian airhead.

That Veteran (September 1882)

Very amusing. A gentleman on a walking holiday in Wales pulls into an inn where he is regaled with stories of the Crimean War and a soldier’s career by one sergeant Turnbull until his head is swimming and he passes out. The soldier is a fake, a criminal, who has drugged him and stolen his watch.

My Friend the Murderer (December 1882)

A further New Zealand story: the prison doctor narrator (Conan Doyle/Watson) hears the life story of Maloney, the Bluemansdyke murderer who escaped the rope by turning queen’s evidence and had sundry adventures trying to escape revengers as he fled to Australia, England, France and then back to Oz where he finally dies in a bar brawl.

The Captain of the Polestar (January 1883)

‘Being an extract from the singular journal of John McAlister Ray, student of medicine’. He is the doctor on the Polestar which travels unwisely far into the northern, Arctic ice fields, supposedly in search of whales, but in fact driven by the haunted captain Nicholas Craigie who is pursuing the phantom of his murdered sweetheart which flees across the ice.

See an interesting article about the story’s origins in Conan Doyle’s actual Arctic voyage aboard the whaler Hope.

Gentlemanly Joe (March 1883)

The narrator is a young man working at a bank along with four other blue-bloods and the vulgar, jumped-up son of a bookie who they ironically name Gentlemanly Joe. They mercilessly rib him, especially when he falls in love with little Miss Cissy who is in fact engaged to one of them. Then comes the night of the great fire when the Newsome house burns down and it is big strong Gentlemanly Joe who breaks down the door and rescues Miss Cissy. Though she marries her fiancée she and the others will never forget Gentlemanly Joe!

The Winning Shot (July 1883)

A genuinely eerie supernatural story. One Octavius Gaster arrives at a charming upper class household in Dartmoor where Lottie Underwood is due to marry her sweetheart. He casts clouds over the gathering, defends spiritualism, has a newspaper cutting implicating him in black magic, falls in love with Lottie, which leads to a fight with Charley and he is evicted. Then the great shooting match between soldiers at locals where Gaster turns up and, at the climax of the match, appears to make Charley shoot through a phantasm of himself, killing himself. The spookiest thing is that after weeks of delirium Lottie is seen getting into a train with him.

Selecting a Ghost (December 1883)

Comic story told by a preposterously pretentious narrator Mr d’Odd, a successful grocer who has bought a big old house and now wants a ghost to go with it so he asks his brother-in-law in London to find one, resulting in a crook from London coming down and pretending to be a purveyor of ghosts who audition for him as he drinks some magic potion. When he awakes, he has of course been robbed.

The Silver Hatchet (December 1883)

‘On the 3rd of December 1861, Dr. Otto von Hopstein, Regius Professor of Comparative Anatomy of the University of Budapest, and Curator of the Academical Museum, was foully and brutally murdered within a stone-throw of the entrance to the college quadrangle.’

Then another victim is found. Then the friendship of two medical students who stumble across a silver-handled ax and, as he holds it, one goes homicidally mad. They are arrested it and the police inspector handling it also becomes homicidal. It is cursed:

‘Ever evil, never good, Reddened with a loved one’s blood.’

The inclusion of the students makes it seem like the short melodramatic plot of an Austrian operetta.

An Exciting Christmas Eve or, My Lecture on Dynamite (December 1883)

Odd tone of tale about a short bespectacled Herr Doctor Otto von Spee to whom lots of accidents occur, the final one being kidnapped on Christmas Eve to deliver a lecture on gunpowder to a secret, presumably revolutionary, society which climaxes with some sample guncotton being detonated and Dr von Spee escaping.

J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement (January 1884)

Remarkably powerful fiction which claims to be a true account of what happened on the Marie Celeste (discovered drifting December 1873): the boat is slowly taken over by an evil half-caste – Mr. Septimius Goring – who along with two black sailors murders all the white crew and passengers, steering to a remote African settlement where he lords it over the natives instead of to Portugal. When the natives see the lucky charm an old slave gave him in America their superstitious reverence forces Goring to set Jephson adrift and so be picked up by a passing ship.

The Heiress of Glenmahowley (January 1884)

First person narrative. Bob Elliott and John Vereker are two unsuccessful lawyers marooned in a pub in the west of Ireland, passing the time being unpleasantly racist about the locals when the publican tells them of a local widow who is fabulously wealthy and her beautiful young daughter the heiress. Comedy as both men pretend not to be interested but next day climb over the big spiked wall, tumbling into the ditch and scrambling through briars to try to woo and win the beauty. It is made plain he English narrator is a pompous preening twerp.

The Blood-Stone Tragedy: A Druidical Story (February 1884)

The narrator begins to discuss the recent case of Williams the druid when the other man in the railway carriage says, Hush, don’t mention the word, it might wake my sleeping wife. And then proceeds to tell the story of how his then fiancée got lost in the mountains and fell into the clutches of a maniac who thinks he is a druid and plans to sacrifice her at midnight.

John Barrington Cowles (April 1884)

Longer and more psychologically penetrating than usual: the narrator’s friend falls for an ice cold beauty who is associated with two men who went mad, with cruelty to her dog, with tyranny over her mother, the daughter of a soldier in India who indulged in black magic. She beats a mesmerist at a public lecture and then, at the height of their engagement, she reveals something hideous to John Barrington Cowles. He raves that she is a werewolf. He goes down with brain fever and then is taken by the narrator to the Isle of May to recover. One night with a storm approaching, JBC hears her calling and runs to his death over a cliff.

The Cabman’s Story: the Mysteries of a London ‘Growler’ (May 1884)

A London cabbie tells a few of his colourful experiences like carrying a corpse, and carrying a forger. Nice ventriloquism of the cabbie, similar to My Friend The Murderer.

The Tragedians (August 1884)

Young Mr Barker the narrator enters the happy life of the Latour family in Paris, the widowed Madame, young Rose and brother Henry the would-be actor. In another part of town the famous actor and seducer of women, Lablas, wins at cards and plans the abduction of Rose. Barker and the brothers are walking home late when they encounter Lablas and accomplices abducting Rose. Fight. Broken up with the promise of a duel. And, as Henry had just got the role of Laertes opposite Hamlet, the duel is fought for real onstage in a scene which rises to real intensity and power.

Crabbe’s Practice (December 1884)

Pure comedy as two medical students cook up a fake drowning and electrical resuscitation to boost Crabbe’s practice.

The Man from Archangel (January 1885)

1st person narrator. Lonely young scientist John M’Vittie inherits money and a barren stretch of property in Scotland to which he moves to carry out his obscure experiments. One stormy night a schooner is shipwrecked on the shore and, out of character, he rows out and saves a beautiful young damsel who doesn’t speak English. Days later a tall, brown-faced, red-shirted, leather-booted pirate-type comes snooping claiming the woman is his bride. But she hates him. He and his crew kidnapped her from her wedding.

The Lonely Hampshire Cottage (May 1885)

3rd person. Very moody landlord John Ranter is advised by his doctor to retire and moves to a remote cottage where he beats his wife and is a byword. Then a strange sailor appears, walking to Southampton, in need of a bed for the night. Ranter offers it and slowly unravels that the stranger has struck it rich in California and bears dollars and gold. In the middle of the night he creeps up the stairs to murder him but is caught by the stranger who reveals himself as Ranter’s runaway son.

The Great Keinplatz Experiment (July 1885)

Professor von Baumgarten is an expert on mesmerism and spiritualism and carries out an experiment with his daughter’s fiancé and his student, Fritz von Hartmann, to see if souls leave the body during hypnosis. They do, but re-enter the wrong bodies, the professor’s soul entering the student’s body and vice versa, with hilarious consequences. Played for laughs, this reminded me of a Laurel and Hardy short.

The Parson of Jackman’s Gulch (December 1885)

1853 in this rough mining settlement 150 miles from Ballarat when a pastor arrives and wins over the miners by reading the Bible whenever they blaspheme. His campaign climaxes with the first ever sermon in the back of the pub where he proceeds to lock them in and reveal himself to be the noted bushranger Conky Jim while his partners rob the assay office of its entire haul of gold.

The Fate of the Evangeline (December 1885)

1st person. John Vincent Gibbs reveals the true story behind the loss of the ‘Evangeline’, namely that, rejected in love he had become an anchorite on a remote Scottish island when who should turn up but his erstwhile fiancée, mercenary father and calculating suitor, all of whom he overhears, before swimming out to the yacht Miss Lucy is sleeping aboard, cutting the painter and absconding with her. The schooner is run down in the Irish Sea by a freighter bound for Australia where they make a new life and, ultimately, write this ‘true account’. Quotes the Scotsman quoting Edgar Allen Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, on the necessity of eliminating the impossible etc.

Touch and Go: A Midshipman’s Story (April 1886)

1st person. It is 1868 and the narrator was a lad of 14 back on the banks of the river Clyde from his first journey as a seaman. He, his sister and cousin fool old Jock their minder and take a sailing boat out for a pleasure run alone and on impulse decide to sail to the mouth of the river where a storm pushes them out into the Irish Sea. Caught in heavy waters they are like to drown when they are rescued by a steam launch, dried and slept and dropped on the beach of the Isle of Man.

Cyprian Overbeck Wells : A Literary Mosaic (December 1886)

1st person. Humorous: the narrator Smith fancies himself a writer and after 10 years a clerk leaves his job to write a masterpiece, decides to read all English literature to give himself a boost: then one night hallucinates a tableful of the great novelists who proceed to tell a story in tag.

Uncle Jeremy’s Household (February 1887)

1st person. Long one. Student Hugh Lawrence goes to Dunklethwaite House in Yorkshire to stay with his friend John Thurston who is staying with old eccentric, poetry-obsessed Uncle Jeremy and the nanny, Miss Warrender, an attractive Indian young woman, orphan of a famous Indian chief, and Uncle J’s amanuensis, the tall creepy Copperthorne. Hugh becomes curious about the troubled relationship between secretary and nanny and puzzled by her sometimes savage demeanour until one night, he overhears their conversation in the greenhouse and discovers she is the daughter of a Thuggee leader, worships a goddess of murder, killed her adopted father’s daughter and the little girl Uncle J had adopted; and now they both plan to murder old Uncle J as the secretary has got himself named in the will. In the end a) Miss Warrender escapes having b) tasked a wandering Indian stranger in the village to murder Copperthorne.

The Stone of Boxman’s Drift (December 1887)

3rd person. The early 1870s in the Vaal valley near Kimberley, South Africa, barren land except for the diamonds and therefore wild prospectors from all over the world.

Headley Dean, with his crisp, neatly-trimmed hair and beard, his quick, glancing eyes, and his nervous, impulsive ways, had something of the Celt, both in his appearance and in his manner. Eager, active, energetic, he gave the impression of a man who must succeed in the world, but who might be a little unscrupulous in his methods of doing so. Big Bill, on the other hand, quiet, unimpressionable, and easy-going, with a sweeping yellow beard and open Saxon countenance, may have had a stronger and deeper nature than his partner, but was inferior to him in fertility of resource, and in decision of character in all the minor matters of life.

A morality tale whereby the Celt comes over selfish and greedy when they find a huge carbuncle. In their struggle it bounces into a bottomless pit. The dim Saxon reveals he had found it earlier and placed it for the Celt to discover, who is then covered in guilt and shame.

John Huxford’s Hiatus (June 1888)

John works in a cork factory in Brisport which is forced to close down by competition from south America. He is offered a job in Canada and leaves his weeping fiancée, promising to write. Within days of arriving he is attacked and beaten over the head in a low dive. He recovers but has amnesia. He rises by hard work to be a rich man and, upon hearing Devon voices down at the docks, suddenly remembers everything. He sails over the sea and is reunited with his sweetheart who has stayed true to him these past seventy years.

The 1890s

The Ring of Thoth (January 1890)

Third person. An Egyptologist in the Louvre stumbles upon a 4,000 year old Egyptian who discovered the secret of eternal life and now is going to end his life in the arms of his mummified love.

A Physiologist’s Wife (September 1890)

3rd person. Social comedy/satire in which cold-hearted rationalist and scientist Professor Ainslie Grey marries one Mrs. O’James. A younger colleague is due to marry his daughter, until he meets the new Mrs Grey and is stunned to realise she is his first wife from Australia who ran off and left him and was drowned in a shipwreck. In fact she didn’t take the boat but came to England to start a new life. Cold rationalist Professor tells them to go be happy and reunited. He dies of a broken heart.

A Pastoral Horror (December 1890)

1st person. Murder in a beautiful Alpine valley. An Englishman awaiting the outcome of a bankruptcy case in England has moved to the isolated village of Laden where he is witness to several gruesome murders of peasants. The one other educated man in the village is the curé, Father Verhagen. So imagine everyone’s horror when it turns out to be him, going insane.

The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (December 1890)

1st person. 1885. James Upperton moves to an isolated cottage on the Yorkshire Moors to study but becomes embroiled with several mysterious people, Miss Cameron, the Italianate beautiful young woman staying in the boarding house he puts up in, and the self-styled surgeon of Gaster Fell who is the only neighbour, who warns him to bolt his door at night and who he sees cruelly mistreating a wizened old man. One stormy night his front door creaks open and a ghastly evil figure is revealed by lightning. Chased off by another man. In the cold light of day it turns out the old man is clinically and violently insane and being ‘cared’ for by his son and daughter, the surgeon and mysterious young lady.

Our Midnight Visitor (February 1891)

1st person. A long atmospheric story set on the small isle of Uffan near Arran. The scenery and mood painted very well in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson. A stranger appears, a wealthy American calling himself Digby, dropped by his yacht who comes to stay with young MacDonald and his bad-tempered father. The narrator’s suspicions mount until a newspaper cutting reveals that Digby is Frenchman who has stolen a fabulous diamond and is on the run.

A Straggler of ’15 (March 1891)

A patriotic portrait of Corporal Gregory Brewster, last survivor of the battle of Waterloo. Superpatriotic and vivid description of working class Chatham. This was turned into a play, as describe in Andrew Lycett’s biography of Doyle.

The Voice of Science (March 1891)

3rd person. Drawing room comedy as Mrs Esdaile’s son Rupert takes advantage of the new ‘phonograph’ to record a message listing the conquests and cheating of his sister Rose’s fiancé, Captain Beesley, who mysteriously runs out the French windows and down the drive never to be seen again.

The Colonel’s Choice (July 1891)

Colonel Bolsover marries young Miss Hilda Thornton despite rumours and the attempt of friends to dissuade him. Several years of happiness follow but then Captain Tresillian appears from India and, in a confrontation scene, he reveals that he and Hilda were engaged but he was penniless. A fire breaks out at Melrose Lodge and the colonel saves his wife then nobly steps into the flames to give her a better life.

A Sordid Affair (November 1891)

A hymn to honest working women. Mrs Raby is trying hard to support her ex-drunk husband by dressmaking. She makes a beautiful dress for a posh client but her husband steals it, pawns it and gets blind drunk, forcing Mrs Raby to spend all her savings buying the original dress from its Bond Street shop in order to keep her promise to her client. Then she recovers her husband from the gutter and takes him home.

Oh, blind, angelic, foolish love of woman! Why should men demand a miracle while you remain upon earth?

A False Start (December 1891)

3rd person. Comedy about young Dr Horace Wilkinson who has several false starts of first patients including the gas man and an impoverished gypsy before he called quite by mistake to the house of the local millionaire. Turns out to be a comedy case of mistaken identity in which Wilkinson shines nobly.

Out of the Running (January 1892)

Pretty young Dolly, farmer’s daughter, has two suitors Adam and Elias and in a number of scenes we meet them and hear her mother’s opinion about which one to take. Dolly thinks it is Adam leaves a dog rose on her window sill every morning and so accepts him. There is an accident with the hayrick which crushes the orphan inarticulate farmhand Bill. Next morning, unable to walk, he crawls to her window to leave another rose sprig and is found there dead. Dolly distraught. Hardy territory.

The Great Brown-Pericord Motor (March 1892)

3rd person. Short, grotesque story of two inventors who fall out over a flying machine they’ve created. They fight and one is killed in the struggle. Pericord attaches Brown’s body to the machine and sends it off out to sea, then goes mad. ‘He walked swiftly down the stair and was quickly reabsorbed into the flood of comfortless clammy humanity which ebbed and flowed along the Strand.’

De Profundis (March 1892)

Strange and gruesome. Starts with a hymn to the British Empire and its insatiable need for British men. Then the tale of John Vansittart a planter from Ceylon who visits the narrator, goes staying with his friends, marries suddenly but just before departing comes down with smallpox. He sails early and is due to be met by his wife and friend at Falmouth; the ship goes on to Madeira and JV appears in a vision to the narrator out of the calm Atlantic waves…

A Regimental Scandal (May 1892)

A tale of our fine men in the Army, specifically rich Major Errington who tries to help Colonel Lovell when his shares crash by cheating against himself at cards – until it is revealed. Far from being a scandal this is a hymn to how jolly decent the British Army is.

A Question of Diplomacy (summer 1892)

Comedy. The Foreign Secretary, laid up with gout, is outwitted by his wife who arranges for his daughter’s fiancé to get a position in Tangiers and for the daughter to accompany him and for them to get married asap, all against the FS’s wishes.

Lot No.249 (September 1892)

At an old Oxford college a fat evil undergraduate has been conducting experiments, bringing a 4,000 year old mummy back to life, and increasingly using it to terrorise his enemies – before a steady young sporting chap steps in and stops it.

Jelland’s Voyage (November 1892)

Henry Jelland and Willy McEvoy get into serious debt in a trading port in Japan, and steal the money from their employer who’s on a long trip. When he unexpectedly returns they steal more money to buy a yacht, which is then pursued by the irate employer until the men shoot themselves but their empty yacht is then carried by storm into the wastes of the Pacific.

The Los Amigos Fiasco (December 1892)

A very short light-hearted comic-horror piece about a town which tries to execute a man with electricity by increasing the voltage, but only succeed in giving him superhuman life.

The Green Flag (June 1893)

The Irish Question:

For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a distance looked upon the foe as though he might, in truth, be the friend; but when they have been put face on to him, and when their officers have dashed to the front with a wave and halloo, those rebel hearts have softened and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the mad Joy of the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish comrades.

In faraway Sudan a British force is overcome by attacking dervishes, the square collapses, things are going badly, when the Republican leader Dennis Connolly unexpectedly rallies the Irish contingent and dies saving the day. Propaganda how even dissidents within rally to the Empire when faced with opponents from without.

The Slapping Sal (August 1893)

An 18th century yarn.

‘He was a villain, but he was a Briton!” said the captain, at last. “He lived like a dog, but, by God, he died like a man!’

A British man o’war is struggling against a more powerful French ship but is saved by the mutineers of another British boat, the Slapping Sal and their fierce leader Hairy Hudson who turned out to be a true Brit.

The Case of Lady Sannox (November 1893)

A dashing surgeon is having an affair with a high society lady, is called late at night to operate on the wife of a Turkish merchant; he horribly disfigures the woman, then it is revealed it is his high-born lover and the merchant her husband who has taken a horrific revenge.

The Lord of Château Noir (July 1894)

During the Franco-Prussian War a French aristocrat terrorises a Prussian officer in vengeance for his dead son.

Round The Red Lamp (1894)

A collection 15 stories themed around medicine, the red lamp being the sign of a GP.

A Medical Document (October 1894)

Three old doctors – a GP, a surgeon and an alienist – sit around discussing eerie cases. There’s passing reference to the way popular fiction uses very rare or vague conditions (‘brain fever’) but rarely actually common diseases (typhoid). And how fiction rarely uses those outbreaks of vice which are so common. I think he’s talking about sex.

Behind the Times (October 1894)

Comic, warm-hearted memoir of an old-fashioned doctor way behind modern scientific times, but with a magical healing touch and bedside manner.

His First Operation (October 1894)

Comic, warm-hearted memoir of a young student attending his first operation and fainting.

The Third Generation (October 1894)

Seasoned Dr Horace Selby is visited by Sir Francis Norton who, it quickly transpires, is infected with syphilis. He explains the taint comes from his hard-living Regency grandfather. He is due to marry the following week. The doctor suggests creating a sudden reason to go abroad and cancel the nuptials. But next morning Dr Selby reads that the noble aristocrat has thrown himself under the wheels of a heavy dray and died, in order to spare the damsel and kill the hereditary taint. True Brit.

Sweethearts (October 1894)

The doctor in a seaside town meets an old man on a bench who wastes and declines over three consecutive days. Finally he reveals it is because he is waiting for his wife, his childhood sweetheart, to return. I wonder whether Conan Doyle’s readers found this sickly sweet, or lapped it up.

The Curse of Eve (October 1894)

The nondescript life of Robert Johnson, gentleman’s outfitter, is turned upside down when his wife begins her labour. He chase all over town for one doctor, and then again for a second opinion. After an all-night vigil, his son is delivered.

Lives had come and lives had gone, but the great machine was still working out its dim and tragic destiny.

The Doctors of Hoyland (October 1894)

Dr James Ripley of Hoyland in Hampshire is astonished when a lady doctor moves to the town. Quickly she establishes herself a practice and ends up treating Ripley himself after he fractures his leg falling from a carriage. His initial sexist resistance to a female doctor is completely overcome by close experience of her ability and he inevitably falls in love with her. Thankfully, Conan Doyle foresees the utter hopelessness of such a resolution and has her remaining devoted to Science, departing for further education in Paris, leaving the country doctor sadder and wiser.

The Surgeon Talks (October 1894)

Like A Medical Document this consists of paragraph-long anecdotes: how they removed the ear from the wrong patient; how most people receive the diagnosis of impending death nobly etc. The woman who hides her cancer form her husband.

‘…Besides, [a doctor] is forced to be a good man. It is impossible for him to be anything else. How can a man spend his whole life in seeing suffering bravely borne and yet remain a hard or a vicious man? It is a noble, generous, kindly profession, and you youngsters have got to see that it remains so.’

The Parasite (December 1894)

‘He has to thank his phlegmatic Saxon temperament for it. I am black and Celtic, and this hag’s clutch is deep in my nerves.’

A Foreign Office Romance (December 1894)

Introduces the figure of the comically garrulous old Frenchman who would mutate into Brigadier Gerard. Here he is named Alphonse Lacour, assistant to the French ambassador who is finalising a treaty with the English Foreign Secretary when a messenger arrives to say the French have handed over Egypt i.e. lost their bargaining power; at which Alphonse kidnaps the messenger and drives him up and down in a carriage reciting the Koran until it is too late, the treaty is signed, and Alphonse flees back to France a national hero.

The Recollections of Captain Wilkie (January 1895)

On a train an experienced doctor carries out some Holmesian analysis of the man sitting opposite. He reveals himself to be a reformed professional thief and recounts a number of his adventures. The collection-of-anecdotes story.

The Three Correspondents (1896)

Incredibly Kiplingey. Three newspaper correspondents riding through the heat of Egypt to join the army. Racial stereotypes:

‘Mortimer was Saxon—slow, conscientious, and deliberate; Scott was Celtic—quick, happy-go-lucky, and brilliant. Mortimer was the more solid, Scott the more attractive. Mortimer was the deeper thinker, Scott the brighter talker.’

And Anerley the nube. They are attacked by four Arabs who they shoot, Anerley is wounded. But it is he who finds the Arabs’ camel and beats his colleagues back to the telegraph station to send a famous despatch to his paper.

Tales of the High Seas: I. The Governor of St. Kitt’s (January 1897)

Set in the early 18th century, time of pirates in the Caribbean and among all the pirates the most feared and savage is Captain Sharkey. Captain Scarrow of the ship Morning Star is told that: a) Sharkey is captured and due to hang next morning, b) ordered to take the governor of St Kitts back to London.

The governor is duly rowed out the next morning and off they set and he proves a jovial guest who can hold his liquor and tell a good yarn. Having crossed the Atlantic to Beachy Head he rips off his disguise to realise that he is Captain Sharkey, who had cut the governor’s throat and stolen his clothes! With his loyal mate he departs on the only seaworthy boat left and Scarrow watches them commandeer a fishing barque and disappear.

Tales of the High Seas: II. The Two Barques (March 1897)

Stephen Craddock, an American Puritan gone bad, volunteers to the governor of Kingston to lead an expedition to trap Sharkey when his boat is reported as drydocked on a remote island, with a similar boat painted to look the same. Doubles. Craddock and crew go hunting for him ashore for several days, then return to their own ship, only to find it is Sharkey’s own Happy Delivery. They imprison him and sail to Kingston where they are greeted as victorious heroes and are about to capture the governor and leading citizens, when heroic Craddock breaks free of his bonds, dives into the sea, and raises the alarm before being shot and drowned by Sharkey.

Tales of the High Seas: III. The Voyage of Copley Banks (May 1897)

Captain Sharkey murdered Copley Banks’s wife and two children. He plans his revenge, hiring a crew of wrong ‘uns and himself becoming a pirate then fast friends with Sharkey before tricking him aboard his ship, tying him to the muzzle of a gun and booby trapping it all with gunpowder. Boom! End of Captain Sharkey.

The Striped Chest (July 1897)

Captain Barclay and mate Allardyce go aboard a Portuguese barque which has foundered in a storm. It is abandoned except for a corpse they find. They carry to portable cargo aboard their ship, including an enormously heavy chest which has a note on saying, Don’t open. The second mate, overcome by greed, is discovered dead with his head cloven in like the corpse on the wreck. As the first mate goes to open it Captain Allardyce pulls him back just as a mechanism springs out to crush his head. This is a genuinely atmospheric and powerful story.

The Fiend of the Cooperage (October 1897)

Mr Meldrum, skipper of the private yacht The Cooperage, puts into an island off Sierra Leone where two Brits are maintaining a trading outpost (compare with Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands). The nautical terms and atmosphere of the island very well described. But something evil is haunting the island, scaring the negro servants, and stealing away a man every third day… Meldrum and Dr Spelling stay up all night in a tropical thunderstorm to find out what…

The New Catacomb (1898)

Two archaeologists in Rome, one of them a dashing bounder just returned from a failed elopement with an English girl. His colleague takes him at night to a new catacomb then traps him there; for he had loved the girl he had ‘ruined’.

The Confession (January 1898)

She looked down at the grating, and shrank in terror from the sight. A convulsed face was looking out at her, framed in that little square of oak. Two terrible eyes looked out of it—two eyes so full of hungry longing and hopeless despair that all the secret miseries of thirty years flashed into that one glance.

Very short. A Jesuit priest accidentally reunited with his long-lost love who has herself taken the veil, and they bemoan the doomed love affair which separated them.

The Story of the Beetle-Hunter (June 1898)

This and the following stories make a set in the Strand of longish, factual stories about mysterious crimes, Holmes stories without Holmes. An unemployed doctor answers an advert in the Standard and goes for an interview with Lord Linchfield who requires a strong man with a good knowledge of beetles. They go by train to Pangbourne to Delamere Court, home of tall eccentric beetle expert Sir Thomas Rossiter. In the middle of the night Rossiter sneaks into their bedroom and attacks the dummy figure in the bed. They are able to accost him and show that he is subject to mad fits, as his wife had claimed.

The Story of The Man with the Watches (July 1898)

A long puzzle concerning that could almost be a Holmes mystery. A man and lady enter a train to Manchester, having refused to enter a carriage with a bearded man smoking. At Manchester all three are gone, and a young man no-one can account for is found shot dead. The article describes the various theories of police detectives before quoting a long letter form one of the protagonists which explains what happened. It is one of Doyle’s favourite tropes, the ‘revenge from overseas’. A Holmes story without Holmes.

The King of the Foxes (July 1898)

The setting is a crew of old fox hunters telling yarns and one tells the story of Wat Danbury, whose doctor had told him to lay off alcohol before he began hallucinating, who goes an epic hunt, finally being the only rider left as he enters spooky woods to find himself confronted by a monster giant fox, the king of foxes, killing the hounds. He flees home and never touches a drop again.

The Story of The Lost Special (August 1898)

‘It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning, that when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth.’

A foreigner hires a special train from Liverpool to Manchester. it never arrives but vanishes into thin air. As in The Man with the Watches the story takes the form of an official report, collating the puzzling crime and then revealing the unriddling solution.

The Story of the Sealed Room (September 1898)

‘It was in the course of one of these aimless rambles that I first met Felix Stanniford, and so led up to what has been the most extraordinary adventure of my lifetime.’

Lawyer sees a young man nearly run over by a cab and helps him into his decayed big house. Discovers his father was the banker who ruined lots of people and disappeared. There is one room sealed shut which the absconded father wrote the son not to open till he was 21. A few months later the young man arrives at that age and the lawyer is present at the unsealing of the door where they find the father’s body, dead these seven years. He committed suicide in shame but didn’t want his poorly wife to know.

The Story of the Black Doctor (October 1898)

Another very detailed and forensic crime mystery which the narrator examines in detail, weighing all the evidence in the mysterious murder of the dark-skinned doctor of Bishop’s Crossing near Liverpool. A Holmes story without Holmes.

The Story of The Club-Footed Grocer (November 1898)

‘With every fresh incident I felt that I was moving in an atmosphere of mystery and peril…’

Stephen is invited by letter to visit his disreputable uncle who used to be a ship’s chandler in Stepney but was attacked and beaten and, when the attacker was gaoled, moved to a remote cottage in the Lake District. Thence Stephen goes to discover the pirate has been released from gaol, gathered his crew and is besieging the uncle. There’s a showdown in which the uncle leaps to his death and the stolen diamonds are – cunningly – discovered to be hidden in his club foot boot heel.

The Brazilian Cat (December 1898)

The protagonist visits his cousin, Everard King, at his country pile where he has housed his large collection of Brazilian flora and fauna, especially the prize exhibit, a huge black puma. Despite warnings from the collector’s wife, the protagonist allows himself to be locked in to the animal’s cage. He manages to survive and when evil Everard returns in the morning it is he and not the protagonist who is killed. And as a result, the protagonist inherits the land, house and title.

The Retirement of Signor Lambert (December 1898)

A grim and sadistic story in which, like The Case of Lady Sannox, a jealous husband arranges the disfigurement of a lover; in this case the strong-minded self-made man Sir William Sparter discovers a letter from his wife to a celebrated tenor, Signor Lambert. He teaches himself about neck anatomy, goes to the tenor’s house, chloroforms him and permanently damages his vocal cords.

A Shadow Before (December 1898)

‘Before’ meaning before the Franco-Prussian War. We are in Ireland, 1870, and City financier (i.e. gambler) John Worlington Doddshorse, ordered by his doctor to treat the stress of incipient bankruptcy, stumbles across the biggest horse fair in the land. He sees two different men in the hotel opening lengthy telegrams which appear to be in code. Then witnesses them paying way over the odds for the horses brought to sale. He telegrams his colleague in the City – sells all French and German stocks – there’s going to be a war.

The Story of The Japanned Box (January 1899)

The old crumbling Thorpe Place in the Malverns in the heart of England, where the narrator goes as tutor to the children of old weathered Sir John Bollamore. He was a hellraiser in his youth but reformed by his sweet wife who died. But the narrator hears a woman’s voice coming from his rooms, and so do the servants. He thinks Sir John a reprobate and hypocrite until he falls asleep in an alcove of the room (ah, that old ruse, like the narrator of The Ring of Thoth) and accidentally sees Sir John open and play a phonograph of his dying wife’s voice.

The Story of The Jew’s Breastplate (February 1899)

Preposterous chauvinist tosh in which a young curator is given responsibility for a museum of antiquities only to receive an anonymous letter warning that it might be burgled. Which it duly is the the urim and thurim breastplate of the ancient Hebrews tampered with. The narrator lies in wait with the young curator and they are astonished to discover it is the eminent archaeologist and former curator, Professor Andreas, who is damaging the breastplate. Why? Because his daughter is in love with a cad who had already stolen the jewels and the former curator is ham-fistedly tying to replace them in order to prevent a ‘scandal’, shame and disgrace.

The Story of B.24 (March 1899)

Cast entirely as a written submission to a court of appeal, it is from a burglar who is tempted to burgle the grand house of Lord Mannering but discovers Lady Mannering waiting to aid and abet him so furious is her hatred of her husband and she then proceeds to stab him to death and blame the burglar.

A True Story of the Tragedy of Flowery Land (March 1899)

Grim unrelenting account of the mutiny of rebellious Malays aboard a British barque, they murder the captain and captain’s brother and first mate and Chinaman, pilot the ship to South America, scuttle it and go ashore. Nonetheless they are betrayed and end up standing in a London court and are hanged.

The Story of the Latin Tutor aka The Usher of Lea House School (April 1899)

The narrator gets a job at a dodgy sounding school in Hampstead and is astonished at the rudeness with which the only other master treats the Head. Things come to a head when he hears them fighting and intrudes, only to discover the repellent master is the Head’s son!

The Story of The Brown Hand (May 1899)

After a successful career in India a surgeon retires to England where he is haunted by the ghost of an Indian whose hand he promised to keep safe after having to amputate it. the hand was lost in a fire. the ghostly Indian searches for it every night. The protagonist goes to a surgeon in the East End and obtains a hand recently amputated from an Indian sailor and returns with it to the country house where the ghostly Indian finds it, politely bows to the surgeon, and departs for ever. Which is why the protagonist is made the surgeon’s heir.

The Croxley Master (October to December 1899)

A long and very persuasive account of a poor but educated doctor’s assistant, starved of funds, who is persuaded to take part in a boxing match against the local champion. If the plot is contrived the writing conveys real atmosphere. Depiction of the mining community reminds me of DH Lawrence whose first novel, The White Peacock, was published only 12 years later.

‘Work was struck at one o’clock at the coal-pits and the iron-works, and the fight was arranged for three. From the Croxley Furnaces, from Wilson’s Coal-pits, from the Heartsease Mine, from the Dodd Mills, from the Leverworth Smelters the workmen came trooping, each with his fox-terrier or his lurcher at his heels. Warped with labour and twisted by toil, bent double by week-long work in the cramped coal galleries or half-blinded with years spent in front of white-hot fluid metal, these men still gilded their harsh and hopeless lives by their devotion to sport. It was their one relief, the only thing which could distract their minds from sordid surroundings, and give them an interest beyond the blackened circle which enclosed them. Literature, art, science, all these things were beyond their horizon; but the race, the football match, the cricket, the fight, these were things which they could understand, which they could speculate upon in advance and comment upon afterwards. Sometimes brutal, sometimes grotesque, the love of sport is still one of the great agencies which make for the happiness of our people. It lies very deeply in the springs of our nature, and when it has been educated out, a higher, more refined nature may be left, but it will not be of that robust British type which has left its mark so deeply on the world. Every one of these raddled workers, slouching with his dog at his heels to see something of the fight, was a true unit of his race.’

The 1900s

The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce (January 1900)

Sent out to command one of the front line garrisons in south Egypt against incursions by the Mahdists, young Joyce is taken in by a wandering Arab who they nearly torture to get him to speak and turns out to be the senior head of intelligence in disguise. They all joke about it over a fine meal then cigars. No irony when Doyle writes that, in riposte to the successes of fanatical Islam, ‘ten years of silent work in Cairo, and then all was ready, and it was time for civilisation to take a trip south once more, travelling as her wont is in an armoured train.’

Playing with Fire (March 1900)

Account of a séance including an artist who had been painting a unicorn. At the height of the séance the ectoplasm forms a unicorn which goes rampaging through the house!

An Impression of the Regency (August 1900)

A brief powerful vignette of the Prince Regent and his gross companions larking about when the mad George III bursts in, lowing like an animal, to appal them all.

The Leather Funnel (1902)

The narrator visits a friend in Paris who suggests objects which have witnessed powerful scenes affect our dreams. As an experiment the narrator sleeps with a battered leather funnel by his bed and has a nightmare of a woman being tried and then beginning a course of water torture. Screaming himself awake, his friend shows the historical documents proving he has witnessed the torture of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a real historical woman, a poisoner and murder!

There’s a hiatus in my list of Conan Doyle’s short stories between 1902 and 1908, as this is a period when he wrote and published six Brigadier Gerard stories as well as 13 Holmes stories (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere) and two novels, Waterloo and Sir Nigel. Then:

The Pot of Caviare (1908)

Set during the Boxer Rebellion (overlapped with the Boer War 1899 to 1901) in the absurd little legation of Ichau where a handful of white men and woman hold out against the encroaching fanatics. The American professor tells the German colonel about the last time he survived a siege because he was a doctor but he was forced to witness rape and torture. Never again. They both realise the relief column is delayed three days. Almost certainly they will be overrun. The colonel bids the professor put arsenic in the prized caviar. The others think it is a celebration dinner. They all eat it and die but, in is dying moments the professor hears the shots of the relief column which does arrive to save them!

The Silver Mirror (August 1908)

Classic diary format. A boring accountant is set a demanding task of combing 20 big ledgers to find evidence against a forger but, as the work intensifies he begins to feel he is going mad because he starts to see visions in the big old mirror he keeps on his side table. Each night the same scene emerges from a mist, assuming steadily clearer shape and showing some atrocity from remote history…

The Home-Coming (December 1909)

The first of the historical stories. 528 AD in Constantinople. 10 year old Leon is the daughter of the Empress Theodora, her love child who she abandoned at a monastery before rising to become consort to the great Emperor Justinian. When the old Abbot brings Leon to Constantinople the wicked eunuch sees his chance to control the Empress, and she must make a cruel choice…

The Lord of Falconbridge (August 1909)

1818. Tom Cribb has retired from prize fighting to become a publican but his son is in the fancy. A strange woman enters and offers the son £50 to train for a fight. Despite misgivings Tom Spring trains, then is instructed by the woman to catch a stagecoach to Tonbridge where he is taken to a remote country house. Here walks the brutish husband of the mystery woman and it is he she wishes Tom to fight, and so they fight, Tom eventually overcoming the brute. He is abandoned by the fair lady but rescued by the landlord of the pub he change coaches in, a devoted fan of the fancy.

The 1910s

The Terror of Blue John Gap (August 1910)

Dr John Hardcastle is on a rest cure in Derbyshire, and finds out the hard way that local lore about a monster inhabiting a deep ancient cavern is in fact true.

In 1911 Conan Doyle published a collection bringing together a number of historical tales, The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales. His interest in history is stimulating, even if he used the different settings for more or less the same tales of derring-do and romance. In the preface he wrote:

It has seemed to me that there is a region between actual story and actual history which has never been adequately exploited. I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give, and fictitious characters and conversations might illustrate them; but none the less the actual drama of history and not the drama of invention should claim the attention of the reader. I have been tempted sometimes to try the effect upon a larger scale; but meanwhile these short sketches, portraying various crises in the story of the human race, are to be judged as experiments in that direction.

Fine words, but what they mean in practice is Doyle selects tableaux from the past which form an improving picture, in which noble sentiments may be vapoured forth. His ‘history’ stories are the equivalent of the luxuriously smug, hyper-realistic paintings of the late Victorian Olympians such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Frederick Leighton and Albert Moore. They are pre-Modern in that there is no threat to the narrator’s psyche, to his sturdy Edwardian values. No matter how gruesome or bloody the events described, they are profoundly unthreatening. This is their main selling point and appeal, as it is of the Holmes stories.

The link with contemporary art is also pointed by the way the stories are, mostly, illustrated by fine late-Victorian and Edwardian illustrators who depict a world of tall, manly men and lovely chaste Victorian women, threatened by stunted foreign or working class villains.

The Last Galley (November 1910)

146 BC. Boy scout tableau of the final Phoenician galley returning to Carthage after the fleet has been destroyed by Rome. Watched by Carthaginians from their terrace, one of them has met a strange prophetess in the Land of Tin (Cornwall) who predicted that the Romans would succeed Carthage as Queen of the Sea but that people form her own island would, in time, become rulers of a great empire. It ends with the Romans destroying and sowing salt into the ruins of Carthage, and with the same message as Kipling’s Islanders:

And they understood too late that it is the law of heaven that the world is given to the hardy and to the self-denying, whilst he who would escape the duties of manhood will soon be stripped of the pride, the wealth, and the power, which are the prizes which manhood brings.

Through the Mists I: The Coming of the Huns (November 1910)

Unusually detailed impression of the Christian heresies of the mid-fourth century, the Donatists, Arians and Trinitarians, is the backdrop to a Greek leaving his city to go be a hermit in the mountains beyond the river Dniester where, one day, he witnesses the arrival of the Huns. He kills a Hun who enters his cave then rides in a frenzy to the nearest Roman outpost to warn them.

Through the Mists II: The First Cargo (1910)

A Roman who’s remained behind in Britain writes to one who’s returned to Italy to describe his first meeting with the Saxons who British king Vortigern has invited to come and defend them. There is strong racial stereotyping as the narrator contrasts the strong, practical, democratic Saxons with the weak-minded, impetuous, unwarlike Britons (who will go on to become the Welsh and Cornish).

The Last of the Legions (December 1910)

The last Roman governor receives the order to leave (410) and then, ironically receives a deputation of Britons calling for independence. When they learn that they suddenly are going to become independent the beg the Romans to stay but it is too late. A parable on the various movements demanding independence from the British empire i.e. Ireland, India.

Through the Mists III: The Red Star (January 1911)

630 in Constantinople, three successful merchants reminisce, and one remembers being on a long caravan trail through Arabia when they meet the caravan of Mohammed and his followers and how he stays up all night listening to the charismatic leader. Interesting insight into how 1911 saw the Prophet.

The Contest (March 1911)

A comic story of Nero who set sail to Greece with an army of supporters to compete in singing competitions and is bested by a peasant goatherd who, however, is hustled off by his friends. A canny courtier tells Nero it was none other than the great god Pan in disguise which pleases the megalomaniac.

An Iconoclast (March 1911)

The year 92 in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in Rome. Senator Emilius Flaccus returns from boozing with the emperor to find his priceless statue has been damaged by a fanatical Christian. When the emperor arrives Flaccus decides to show him mercy and release Datus from his chains if he will only pray to the statue. But once again he attacks it, to the emperor’s amusement.

The Blighting of Sharkey (April 1911)

1720. Return to the antihero wicked pirate Jack Sharkey from the three Tales of the High Seas from 1897. The crew are mutinying when a rich merchantman is seen and boarded. They kill all the passengers except a fine Spanish maiden but back in Sharkey’s cabin she strokes them all with her leprous hand. This clinches the crew’s decision to mutiny and they set Sharkey and the girl adrift in an open boat.

Through the Veil (April 1911)

A decent married Scottish man and wife are shown round he recent excavations of a Roman fort and later that night they both dream powerfully that they are participants in the storming of the fort by Picts some 1800 years previously.

Giant Maximin (July 1911)

210 AD. The fate of the eight-foot giant Theckla told in three scenes: who sees the Roman Army marching by and runs down to join it, becoming the bodyguard of the Emperor; 25 years later who is there when the Army mutinies against the emperor Alexander and is unexpectedly proclaimed emperor himself; who fails to cultivate Rome and the politicians and loses the love of the army as it starves, and so is killed by the very legionaries who raised him to the purple.

One Crowded Hour (A Pirate Of The Land) (August 1911)

A light dash of social history. On the Eastbourne-Tunbridge road one Sunday night a masked man holds up three cars, taking the slim pickings of a don’t-you-know posh young chap, of two screechy actresses, and then he assaults a rich man in a big Daimler beating him insensible before stealing everything of value. Next morning the dashed young chap walks into the morning room of Sir Henry Hailworthy, of Walcot Old Place, Deputy-Lieutenant of the county and accuses him of being the highway robber. He admits it. The first two robberies were to disguise the third one, of a loathsome City spiv who diddled him out of his savings. The dashed young chap shakes his hand and agrees to forget about it. The title refers to the poem and the usually staid, respectable Deputy Lord Lieutenant and JP quotes it to express his excitement at pretending to be a highway robber.

Most of 1912 was taken up with the serialisation in the Strand of the great adventure novel, The Lost World.

The Fall of Lord Barrymore (December 1912)

Very entertaining story about London man about town Sir Charles Tregellis during the Regency. His sophisticated nephew appears and promises to do down his rival about town, the thuggish Lord Barrymore. And proceeds to do it. Told with great wit and gusto!

The spring of 1913 was taken up with the serialisation of the novella The Poison Belt.

How It Happened (September 1913)

Haunting short account of a man who is in an early car crash, recalling the lead-up to it and then, in the final sentences, realising he is dead!

Borrowed Scenes (September 1913)

A peculiar squib which seems to be satirising the style and the character of the contemporary author George Borrow.

The Horror of the Heights (November 1913)

Brilliantly gripping account of Captain Joyce-Armstrong, an airman who flies higher than any man before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters.

Danger! being the Log of Captain Sirius (July 1914)

A strange and disturbing story. The Captain Sirius works for a ‘small country’ which offends Britain which issues an ultimatum. He persuades his king to let him take his eight submarines and destroy British merchant navy, thus starving her. Predicts German tactics in both World Wars – but why was it published within days of the Great War breaking out?

As the Great War began, for September 1914 to May 1915, Conan Doyle was serialising the last of the four Sherlock Holmes novellas, the Valley of Fear.

The Prisoner’s Defence (January 1916)

An intense melodrama set in the present day, during the War. An officer is charged with murdering a beautiful woman but refuses to defend himself. Only a month later does he read out a prepared statement. He was in love with tall French blonde. On leave she pushed him so hard, he was indiscreet and mentioned an Allied offensive. Later he discovers she has written it all up and is posting it to her control: she is a German spy! They lock her in a room and he goes to alert the cops but on his return she tears past him on her motorbike (!). He shoots his revolver and kills her. The prisoner’s defence rests.

In 1917 Doyle published only one story, the Holmes spy tale His Last Bow.

Three of Them (April 1918)

After 3 and a half years of war, Conan Doyle could only bring himself to write five ‘stories’ which are really just chats between a kindly middle aged dad and his three adorable middle class children, Laddie, Dimples and Baby. If you were in a cynical mood the tweeness of these little sketches might make you puke. They certainly capture a fantasy of professional upper middle class living. The titles sum them up. I. A Chat About Children, Snakes and Zebus (April). II. About cricket (April) III. Speculations [about God and the Devil] (July). IV. The Leatherskin Tribe (August). V. About Naughtiness and Frogs and Historical Pictures (December).

‘Oh, Daddy, come and talk about cricket!’ Daddy was pulled on the side of the bed, and the white figure dived between the sheets. ‘Yes; tell us about cwicket!’ came a cooing voice from the corner. Dimples was sitting up in his cot.

A Point of View (December 1918)

An odd short squib wherein an American journalist, staying at an English country house, writes a piece wondering why any self-respecting man would be a servant. At a later stay the valet this was based on takes exception and makes it very plain that servants have self-respect and deserve respect: ‘I wish you would make them understand that an English servant can give good and proper service and yet that he’s a human bein’ after all.’

The 1920s

The Bully of Brocas Court (November 1921)

1878. Bareknuckle fighting has been outlawed but special rings and gloves not come in. Sir Fred Milburn is despatched to London to find someone who can stand up to Farrier-Sergeant Burton. He chooses the London fighter Alf Stevens. They are returning to Luton when their coach is stopped by an oddly-dressed pair of men in a dark dell who challenge them to a fight. So they fight and it’s honours even when they hear a howling from the woods and clear off. Later, at an inn, the landlord says they were fighting the ghosts of Tom Hickman and Joe Rowe, both killed in a carriage accident in the 1820s.

The Nightmare Room (December 1921)

A room is all Victorian sumptuous rugs and curtains at one end, completely bare at the other, with a divan upon which a beautiful but immoral woman is lounging. In bursts her husband declaring he knows about her affair with young Douglas; she must choose one of them. In bursts Douglas and the husband produces poison: Let’s play cards for her, old man. All written in the highest pitch of melodrama with everyone gasping or turning white. In the final line the director steps forward and shouts, Cut! It was all a scene from a movie 🙂

The Lift (June 1922)

Flight-Commander Stangate with his sweetheart has a premonition of evil. They ascend the big funfair lift with a motley crew of civilians. It jams 500 feet up. The wild-eyed bearded engineer reveals, from the girders, that he has arranged for it to plummet to their deaths as a sign to this wicked generation. At the last minute Stangate kicks down the wooden walls of the lift and helps the passengers onto the girders just as the madmen jumps into it and the cable snaps!

The Centurion (October 1922)

[Being the fragment of a letter from Sulpicius Balbus, Legate of the Tenth Legion, to his uncle, Lucius Piso, in his villa near Baiæ, dated The Kalends of the month of Augustus in the year 824 of Rome.] wherein he witnesses the siege and fall of Jerusalem, 70AD, and then talks to a centurion who was there when Jesus was crucified.

A Point of Contact (October 1922)

Tyre. 1100BC. In the noble stereotypes to which we are accustomed, Doyle paints a tableau, the moment when King David of the Israelites, come to buy building material for Jerusalem, meets Odysseus, refitting his ship before sailing on to Troy.

One of these men was clearly by his face and demeanour a great chieftain. His strongly-marked features were those of a man who had led an adventurous life, and were suggestive of every virile quality from brave resolve to desperate execution. His broad, high brow and contemplative eyes showed that he was a man of wisdom as well as of valour.

Billy Bones (December 1922)

One more in the twee three of Them series about Daddy and his three adorable children, Laddie, Dimples and Baby. Written as practical advice to daddies about how to create a Treasure Hunt.

The years 1923 to 1928 were taken up with a reduced turnover of 11 Sherlock Holmes stories and a couple of Professor Challenger novellas.

Spedegue’s Dropper (October 1928)

The Death Voyage (September 1929)

A long and detailed counterfactual in which Doyle envisions the Kaiser not abdicating but travelling to Kiel to inspire his Navy to set out for a final epic battle against the joint British and American fleets. What a strange story. And, like so many Great War fictions, it had to wait 11 years to be born.

The Last Resource (August 1930)

Kid Wilson is an American gangster in hiding in Soho. Late one night he tells his English crook hosts about an American town whose citizens form a committee, tell the chief of police to go away for a few days, round up all the crooks in town and machine gun them to death in a dance hall. It was only a dream 🙂 Interesting though, that that’s the kind of solution which people invoked to the out-of-control gangster violence of the Prohibition era.

The End of Devil Hawker (August 1930)

Back to the Regency period and another boxing story.

It was in these very rooms of Cribb that this little sketch of those days opens, where, as on a marionette stage, I would try to show you what manner of place it was and what manner of people walked London in those full-blooded, brutal and virile old days.

The Parish Magazine (1930)

Very funny light-hearted story set in the present day of a printer who is persuaded to publish an addendum to the parish magazine. Only when he receives letters from outraged local worthies and their lawyers does he actually read it and realise it is full of scandalous allegations and innuendoes about half the parish. After a sleepless night he is called to a mysterious meeting which turns out to be of the ‘Rotherheath Society of Bright Young People’ who have, in fact, not sent it out, fabricated the outraged letters to him, and did it all as a practical joke.

It is very fitting that his last published story should be one which continued to show the jovial good-humour which makes Conan Doyle such a good companion.

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by Simon on February 10, 2014 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on February 10, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-short-stories-of-arthur-conan-doyle/

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All posts tagged De Profundis

Prisons

Freedom

Charles Thomas Wooldridge

The ballad form

Six sections

Part 1 (16 stanzas)

Part 2 (13 stanzas)

Part 3 (37 stanzas)

Part 4 (23 stanzas)

Part 5 (17 stanzas)

Part 6 (3 stanzas)

Sales

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Melodrama

Late-Romantic diction

The central premise

Christian redemption

The power of details

Femicide

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The Portrait of Mr W.H.

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Enter Bosie

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