Franny Moyle (22 page)

The Leadenhall Press had built a reputation for publishing high-quality illustrated books and children's books, many of which were facsimiles of eighteenth-century editions. The firm was run by Andrew Tuer, who had a particular sympathy with the Aesthetic and liberal-minded set in which Constance moved. In addition to his children's literature, he published work by the feminist writer and poet Emily J. Pfeiffer, whom Oscar invited to contribute to
The Lady's World
. Pfeiffer's book was illustrated by none other than Edward Burne-Jones and Jimmy Whistler. Speranza's friend Anna Kingsford had written a Theosophical text,
The Perfect Way
, which was also published by Tuer. A passionate collector, Tuer had his own impressive stash of antiquarian books, which often provided the source of his company's facsimile reproductions. His own collection of Japanese stencils also allowed him, in collaboration with Liberty & Co., to produce a facsimile stencil book, enabling those Aesthetes who could not afford the services of a Godwin or Whistler a DIY alternative.

‘Was It a Dream?' stands out among the other stories that Corkran assembled in
The Bairn's Annual
of 1887. Tonally it is quite different. The book generally features jungle animals, witches, moral tales of nursery tiffs and adventures featuring brave children. Constance's story, by contrast, takes art and dreaming as its subject matter. These preoccupations place it firmly as an ‘Aesthetic piece'. Dream-like, somnambulant paintings were the mainstay of the movement's painters, such as Edward Burne-Jones. The adoration of ‘Art for Art's sake' was articulated by the philosophers of the movement such as Walter Pater and, of course, Oscar himself.

Another aspect of the story that secures its claim to being part of the Aesthetic tradition is its fascination with Japan. ‘Was It a Dream?' is about a Japanese fan, an object that could well have come from A. B. Ya's store at the ‘Healtheries', or which could have travelled back with Mortimer Menpes from his own travels in that country.

In Constance's story the fan, decorated with a painted stork ‘flying
daintily' across it, is hanging in an imaginary nursery. One night the stork is magically brought to life by an angel who has come to bestow ‘sweet dreams' on the nursery's two infant occupants. In the sleepy atmosphere that Constance conjures, where the children slumber ‘with flushed faces and tossed golden hair on their downy pillows', the little stork complains to the angel, ‘I am fastened here for ever; and though the sky is always blue, and the almond blossoms are always pink … I still long once more to see the dear home where I was born, and the wife who was given to me, and the little ones who came after I left, and whom I have never seen!'
¹¹

The angel releases the painted stork with the aid of a magic pink feather plucked from her wings. With this empowering feather attached to its head, the stork is able to leave the fan in which it is imprisoned and fly to its homeland, on condition that it returns before the two sleeping children wake.

Constance provides a highly visual, painterly and idealized description of the Japan to which the stork flies. There was plenty of reference material in her own home in Tite Street and other neighbouring Aesthetic homes that she could have drawn on. Not only had the Japanese fanatic Mortimer Menpes given Vyvyan some of his etchings of that country as a christening present, but his own nearby Chelsea home was an
hommage
to the East. Interestingly, the little girl in Constance's story shares the same name as Menpes' own child: Dorothy. If this was not enough inspiration, in August 1886 Otho had given Oscar a book on Japanese art, which Oscar described in his thank-you note as ‘by far the best book on Japanese Art that I know', and one can imagine Constance studying this ardently before putting her own pen to paper.

Constance describes vistas of ‘grey-tiled houses' that ‘nestle in and out of the hill-side, each with its almond trees and its tiny rockery garden', a ‘little stream with gold fish in it' and ‘merry little girls clad in the richest rainbow hues, with eyes bright as stars, and smooth black hair dressed in butterfly fashion'.

The painted stork flies from one artefact into another. In the Japanese workshop in which he himself was painted he finds another
fan depicting ‘a mother-stork and all her little ones', and this, he concludes, is his wife and family. For ‘many hours' the stork talks to his family, and when the evening comes he realizes that he does not want now to return back to the ‘fog and the cold' of England. However, a little Japanese girl who can conveniently see him and understands the magic of the moment begs him to return to England to the children there, and then bring them back to Japan with him so she might play with them.

And so, because ‘the child looked at him so piteously and her smile was so winsome', the stork cannot ‘bear to refuse her'. But when he re-enters the nursery in London, the magic spell is broken. The angel's feather becomes dislodged from the stork's head, his power to weave between real and imagined worlds is suddenly gone and the stork simply adopts his former place, back in the fan, finding himself once more flying across ‘the blue sky with pink almond blossoms round him'.

Constance was delighted with the story and sent it to Otho. Typically for a woman who had a tendency to clumsiness, she managed to send her own copy of the book by mistake, one in which she had written an inscription, perhaps to Oscar or the boys. ‘I found that I've sent you my copy,' she wrote to Otho. ‘Will you either send it back when you have read it, and I will send you the other, or if you like better, cut the inscription out and send it. Tell me what you think of the story.'
¹²

Constance's first foray into fiction proved successful. The publicity her involvement in
The Bairn's Annual
solicited was quickly recognized. ‘I have today got an offer for another story and if it appears I shall send it to you,' she informed her brother. Quite what this subsequent tale was is unclear. If it was another single story, this author has not tracked one published in 1887 or ‘88. But what is certain is that within a year of ‘Was It a Dream?' Constance wrote an entire children's book,
There Was Once
.

This was for a different publisher, Ernest Nister. Nister came from Nuremberg, at that time the centre of the toy and colour printing industries, and he had built a considerable reputation as a publisher
and printer of highly coloured children's pop-up books. He ventured into the British market in 1888, with an approach to the children's publishing that was different from that of the more ‘artistic' and refined Leadenhall Press. In contrast to the grey, understated jacket of
The Bairn's Annual
, books from the Nister stable had brightly coloured sentimental images of plump girls and boys holding fat little puppy dogs or playing together. It was an altogether more commercial and mass-market proposition.

Constance must have been one of the first authors Nister signed in the UK. She was in good company, alongside writers such as Edith Nesbit and the then very popular and prolific Mrs Molesworth.

There Was Once
saw Constance re-tell a series of traditional nursery favourites that included the tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer and The Three Bears – in which, incidentally, Constance wrote about ‘Silver Locks' not the ‘Goldilocks' we are more familiar with today.

‘There was once, my children, a little girl who loved to coax her grandmother to tell her stories. She was not a fairy grandmother, but she could tell beautiful fairy stories,' Constance explained to her readers. ‘The little girl is grown up now, and the dear grandmother is gone, but there are still children who love the old fairy stories, so the little girl has written them out for you just as they were told to her.'

Although the thrilling short stories that Oscar published in 1887, with their intrigues reflecting the fashion for spiritualism, could have offered little inspiration for the whimsical tales of magic and dreaming that his wife wrote for children, there is undoubtedly a sensibility in Constance's choice of imagery and poignant tone that resonates with a set of fairy stories that Oscar would publish the following May,
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
.

While he did not publish them until 1888, Oscar had been telling fairy stories for years. He had been rehearsing ‘The Happy Prince' as far back as 1885, when he had related the tale to a group of Cambridge undergraduates when he and Constance went to visit Harry Marillier.
¹³
Apparently this was one of the first instances in which he tried out his tale of a statue of a Happy Prince standing high
in an old town who sees nothing but unhappiness around him. Recruiting the services of a little swallow, the Prince asks the bird to pluck the jewels embedded in him and deliver them to the needy around him. The little swallow does so, but in carrying out this service to the Happy Prince he is delayed in his return to Egypt to such an extent that he misses his chance for migration. The swallow, now in love with the Prince, pays the ultimate price for his sacrifice. At the end of the story, when the statue is stripped of its former glory, the pair kiss each other once on the lips before the little bird falls down dead at the statue's feet.

Oscar's verbal storytelling could be almost mesmerizing. According to a friend of Harry Marillier, Mrs Claude Beddington, on the night Constance showed her moonstones to Harry and Douglas Ainslie, Oscar went on to invent a tale about the fairies and sprites that lived in the heart of the stones. Oscar ‘wove fantastic legends of the mystical life within the cloudy shimmer', related Mrs Beddington, ‘and when the youth went to bed that night he had a dream of the moonstone people which was all verse and which seemed to him the loveliest music he had ever heard'.
¹⁴
Instances such as this could not have failed both to inspire and to inform Constance's own endeavours.

Constance may well have been inspired by Oscar, but he was certainly reliant on her assistance when it came to his literary endeavours, at the very least at a practical level. At the outset of their marriage Speranza had suggested that Constance could be the sort of wife who might work alongside her husband, correcting his proofs. Certainly Constance did provide some assistance in Oscar's career. She often visited his publishers on his behalf when he was away, and would provide useful translation services for him. Oscar put into practice Constance's skills as a linguist a few years later, when he asked her to translate some Dutch reviews for him.
¹⁵
But there is compelling evidence that she also worked with him in an even closer capacity.

Only in 2008 did a manuscript come to light that suggests just how closely the Wildes may have worked on certain projects. In that year
Lucia Moreira Salles, a collector, gave the Morgan Library in New York a beautiful red leather-bound volume of letters and manuscripts. The whereabouts of this bound collection had been a mystery to Wilde experts for over half a century, and on examining it they realized that it contained a draft of Oscar's story ‘The Selfish Giant', published as part of Oscar's
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
, which, although signed by Oscar, is written entirely in Constance's hand. The manuscript, written in ink, has some pencil corrections by Oscar that also differ from the final published version in certain details of grammar and expression.
¹⁶

The question, of course, is whether Constance, at a time when she was writing children's stories herself, was in fact the author of the story and subsequently gave it to Oscar. Is the manuscript evidence of a genuine collaboration? Or is it simply an instance of Constance providing some secretarial support, writing up a fair copy from Oscar's initial draft for his publishers?

Tantalizingly, there are several aspects of the text that suggest that the manuscript may reflect collaboration. Even if the general plot of the story is not Constance's own, some of the telling of it may be. Oscar's storytelling in
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
is intricate and embellished. It incorporates images that feel surprising and unique, and are combined with brilliantly detailed observation. His characters, even with the minimal amount of dialogue, have crisp, characterful voices. He provides moments of vividly imaged back-story that give his fantasy realm terrific depth, but above all his narrative is woven with witticisms and comments intended to raise a smile with adult readers just as much as children. Oscar would later say that his stories were intended as ‘studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into a fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy'.
¹⁷
All in all, his narrative techniques add up to something very vivid, rich and sharp but also very witty.

This deftness and knowingness in the storytelling are missing in ‘The Selfish Giant'. This story, by contrast, relies on a much more traditional narrative voice apparently directed more fully at children.
The imagery employed, although very similar to that in ‘The Happy Prince', tends to be blunter and less embroidered. In fact, the narrative voice and broad-brush imagery in ‘The Selfish Giant' are arguably closer to Constance's style in ‘Was it a Dream?'

So could it be that Oscar told the story to Constance and that she then rewrote it from memory for him? The final, published version of the story shows amendments to this manuscript that Oscar must have made, some of them rather significant in the way they alter the story's meaning.

If this seems like a possible explanation for the Morgan Library manuscript, then one other conundrum remains. The story of ‘The Selfish Giant' divides into two portions, the final section of the tale being overtly Christian and featuring a Christ-like child, bearing the stigmata, which revisits the giant at the moment of his death.