‘It is too delightful altogether this display of fireworks at the end of my career…The dons are ‘astonied’ beyond words – the Bad Boy doing so well in the end!’
It is all too easy to think of Oscar Wilde as a fin de siecle phenomenon, something like the firework in his story “The Remarkable Rocket’, rising apparently from nowhere, exploding in a spectacularly self-destructive way and gasping as he went out, ‘I knew I should create a great sensation!’ In reality, he was brought up in what today would be considered a well-to-do, upper-middle-class, professional family, living in a fashionable area of Dublin, though not by the conventional parents that such a background might have suggested. His father, William Wilde, was a respected medical man specialising in maladies of the eye and ear, whose work on the Irish census of 1851, hailed at the time as a quite exceptional demographic study, is still in use today as source material for the study of the Great Famine. He was also passionately interested in the history and topography of Ireland and wrote two books on the subject, as well as one on Irish folklore, and catalogued in three volumes the antiquities of the Royal Irish Academy.
Oscar’s mother, Jane, was no less extraordinary in her way: she had played a leading role in the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s writing inflammatory, anti-English articles in the Nation under her pen name ‘Speranza’ and narrowly missed imprisonment alongside the editor, Charles Gavan Duffy, for sedition; she published poetry, essays, and translations from French and German; and she hosted a weekly salon to which came Dublin’s foremost doctors, lawyers, artists and literary figures, together with distinguished foreign visitors. The influence of these two remarkable parents, committed Hibemophiles both, he intellectually and she more emotionally, was to remain with Oscar Wilde throughout his life. Indeed, from prison he would write remorsefully to Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured not merely in Literature, Art, Archaeology and Science, but in the public history of my own country in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally.’
Jane Elgee and William Wilde were married on 12 November 1851 and their first child, William Charles Kingsbury, was bom on 26 September the following year. Jane was soon pregnant again and on 16 October 1854 she gave birth to her second child. He was christened Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie (he would later add the ‘Wills’ from his father), a veritable mouthful of names by which he was embarrassed at school, proud of at university and dismissive of in later life, saying, ‘As one becomes famous, one sheds some of them, just as a balloonist, when rising higher, sheds unnecessary ballast. All but two have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as “The Wilde” or “The Oscar”.’ If Willie had been christened with admirable restraint after his own father, Jane’s father and Jane’s mother’s family name, reflecting her new conformity, the new arrival was an excuse to restate her Irishness. Oscar and Fingal were respectively son and father of Oisin, the third-century Celtic warrior-poet and O’fflahertie, as he would occasionally spell it, was in deference to her husband’s links with ‘the ferocious O’Flaherties of Galway’.
The Wildes soon began to find that their house at 21 Westland Row, which backed on to Trinity College, was not only too small for the expanding family, but also lacked the social cachet which William’s growing status as a doctor demanded. Before Oscar was a year old they moved to an ample Georgian house around the corner at 1 Merrion Square and engaged six servants to run it, as well as employing a French maid and a German governess. The latter permitted the children’s education to take place at home until Oscar was ten, when he was sent with his brother to board at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen. It was from there that his first surviving letter was written. His mother had contributed a poem ‘To Ireland’ for the previous (August) issue of the National Review, a pale and short-lived imitation of the magazine of her former firebrand days, the Nation, and the young thirteen-year-old Oscar’s taste for clothes and radical politics is beginning to show.
To Lady Wilde
8 September 1868 Portora School
Darling Mama, The hamper came today, I never got such a jolly surprise, many thanks for it, it was more than kind of you to think of it. The grapes and pears are delicious and so cooling, but the blancmange got a little sour, I suppose by the knocking about, but the rest all came safe.
Don’t forget please to send me the National Review, is it not issued today?
The flannel shirts you sent in the hamper are both Willie’s, mine are one quite scarlet and the other lilac but it is too hot to wear them yet, the weather is so hot.
We went down to the horrid regatta on Thursday last. It was very jolly. There was a yacht race.
You never told me anything about the publisher in Glasgow. What does he say and have you written to Aunt Warren on the green note paper?
We played the officers of the 27th Regiment now stationed in Enniskillen, a few days ago and beat them hollow by about seventy runs.
You may imagine my delight this morning when I got Papa’s letter saying he had sent a hamper.
Now dear Mamma, I must bid you goodbye as the post goes very soon. Many thanks for letting me paint. With love to Papa, ever your affectionate son OSCAR WILDE
In 1871 he won an entrance scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, and went there armed with an exhibition from Portora. During the next three years he had the distinction of being made a Foundation Scholar and won many prizes for classics, including the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. He also came strongly under the influence of the Rev. John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919). This remarkable man (who later became Provost of the College and was knighted in 1918) was then Professor of Ancient History. His passion for all things Greek, his study of the art of conversation and his social technique all left their mark on his pupil.
In 1874, at the age of nineteen, Wilde crowned his Irish academic successes by winning a Demyship (scholarship) to Magdalen College, Oxford and in October, a week before his twentieth birthday, he took up residence there to read Classics. What Dublin had sowed, flowered intellectually in Oxford. He made the acquaintance of John Ruskin, Slade Professor of Fine Art, and having attended his lectures on Florentine Aesthetics in his first term, was soon persuaded to take part in his new mentor’s practical improvements to the countryside, and found himself rising at dawn to help build a country road. The reward was less in the toil than in the pleasure of breakfasting with Ruskin afterwards. The road, however, soon sank back into Hinksey Marsh but their friendship flourished. When Wilde sent him acopy of The Happy Prince in 1888 (see p. 108) he accompanied it with a note: ‘The dearest memories of my Oxford days are my walks and talks with you, and from you I learned nothing but what was good…There is in you something of prophet, of priest, and of poet.’
Soon after his arrival in Oxford Wilde read Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Pater was a young don at Brasenose College whom Wilde did not meet in person until his third year but on whose theories of art and aesthetics he was already starting to base his own flamboyant style. He found himself disturbingly attuned to the book’s philosophies, especially those in the ‘Conclusion’ in which Pater said: ‘Not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end’ and continued, ‘To bum always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’ He also declared that enrichment of our given lifespan consisted of ‘getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time’ and of having ‘the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake’. Writing from prison two decades later Wilde would refer to it as ‘that book which has had such a strange influence over my life’.
Ruskin and