Near the end of his life, in jail and reflecting on his fall from grace, Oscar Wilde recorded the shame he felt during his libel trial for ruining the reputation of a famous surname.
His parents had bequeathed “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”, he wrote. “I had disgraced that name eternally ... I had dragged it through the very mire.”
Were he to pass his former home on Merrion Square today, however, the playwright might reflect ironically that it is now called Oscar Wilde House.
He might also be reassured that, in his own great posthumous fame, he shares the spotlight with the aforementioned parents. On one of Dublin’s most be-plaqued houses, both his mother – the poet Jane “Speranza” Wilde – and his father William get billing in their own rights.
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As reader John Lyons reminds me, this coming weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the death of William Wilde, whose many talents the ornate plaque struggles to fit in. A man of boundless energy, he was, it proclaims, an “aural and ophthalmic surgeon, archaeologist, ethnologist, antiquarian, biographer, statistician, naturalist, topographer, historian [and] folklorist”.
He was also a serial philanderer, whose own life ended in a disgrace that strangely foreshadowed his son’s, although the plaque doesn’t find room for that.
Born in Roscommon, William grew up the son of a country doctor. This gave him early practice for his main vocation. According to one of Oscar’s biographers, Hesketh Pearson in 1946, the teenage William Wilde showed great aptitude for “dressing the wounds of his father’s patients, inflicted in the course of those free fights with which Irishmen so often terminate a day’s fun”.
Aged 17, he began an apprenticeship with Dublin’s best-known surgeon. Five years later, he accompanied a recovering patient on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, visiting Madeira en route and writing a book about it that earned enough money to fund further studies in London, Berlin and Vienna.
Also on that voyage, he dissected porpoises thrown on to the ship during a storm, resulting in another scholarly book.
Back in Ireland, as his career took off, he found time to double as a scholar of the country’s antiquities, topography and folklore. While assistant commissioner to the 1841 and 1851 censuses, he researched and wrote a history of disease in Ireland.
By 1870, he was both a knight of the realm (elevated by Queen Victoria who had also appointed him her personal oculist) and a founding member of Isaac Butt’s Home Government Association, forerunner of the Home Rule League.
But by then too, in addition to his official family, he had fathered several children out of wedlock.
He acknowledged and supported two daughters born from one of his affairs, Emily and Mary Wilde, even if respectability demanded their upbringing be quietly farmed out to his brother, an Anglican clergyman in Monaghan.
They were in their early 20s when both died there in a horrible accident. At a Halloween ball, Emily’s dress caught fire, and when Mary rushed to help, so did hers.
Both succumbed to the burns and are today buried in a picturesque rural graveyard under a euphemism elegant even by Protestant standards: “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in death they were not divided”. Although reportedly distraught, William could not attend their funerals.
Then there was his misadventure with Mary Travers, the 19-year-old daughter of family friends, one a Trinity College professor. It was, biographers agree, consensual, if unbalanced – he was nearing 50 at the time.
But when the young woman developed ambitions to replace Lady Jane (in keeping with her role as an oculist’s wife, the Bohemian Speranza turned a blind eye to his various affairs), Wilde tried to end it.
Twice he encouraged Travers to emigrate and supplied the fare. Twice she kept the money and stayed. Then she wrote a pamphlet about a clearly identifiable surgeon “Dr Quilp”, who had seduced his young female patient with chloroform, and distributed copies outside the Wilde family home.
When Lady Jane wrote to her parents to complain about the harassment, Travers sued for libel. The jury found in her favour but awarded the minimum damages – a farthing – while ensuring Wilde paid all costs.
Summing up drily, as a “layman”, Pearson suggests the jury thereby “charged Wilde from two to three thousand pounds for seducing a girl whose virtue they valued at a farthing”. He adds: “In any profession but the law this would be regarded as profiteering”.
The case nevertheless ruined William. He first withdrew from public life and then gradually, as personal tragedies added to the humiliation, gave up on everything else. According to Pearson: “his energies had been exhausted too early ... and the Travers case was a knock-out blow to an already spent man”.
Visited regularly on his sickbed by an unidentified woman in black, while Speranza again looked the other way, William died at his home on April 18th, 1876. He was only 61.
