Franny Moyle (26 page)

There were those who revelled in the failure of Constance and her associates.
Punch
, the magazine that had always been unkind to Oscar, offered his wife no sympathy whatsoever. In June, as soon as Lady Sandhurst's appeal was lost, the magazine published a satirical poem at Constance's and her fellow feminists' expense:

The (County Council) Paradise and the (Liberal) Peri teased:

At three a Peri at the gate

Of Eden stood disconsolate;

And as she listened to the Springs

Of talk within in torrents flowing,

And caught the light upon her wings

Through the half-opened portal glowing,

She sighed to think her subject race

Should e'er have lost that glorious place.

‘How Happy' exclaimed this outcast fair,

‘Are the many male members who wrangle there,

'Midst flowers (of speech) that freely fall;

Though I of the School Board now am free,

And parochial portals open for me,

The County Council were worth them all!

Though sweet an “At Home” graced by

Gladstone oration,

Of the Women's Liberal Federation,

In the Grosvenor or the Memorial Hall;

Though dear are the platforms your sweet tones haunt,

Mrs Oscar Wilde, Mrs Ormiston Chant,

Let the Earl of Meath make it clear – I can't –

How the County Council outshines them all!'

The Sandhurst affair proved a huge drain on Constance. The bouts of ill health and sleepless nights that had plagued her as a young woman had never properly left her. Now they were worse. There is also some suggestion that the mobility issues she suffered in the 1890s were already presenting. By March 1889, Constance found herself in the grips of an illness.
²⁴
Exhausted, she dispatched herself to Brighton for ten days' rest, probably into the care of her mother, who lived there. But the poor relationship Constance had with Ada Swinburne-King could scarcely have been improved by the fact that Mr Swinburne-King had recently left his wife of ten years in favour of a solitary life in Hastings. Hardly surprising, then, that the sojourn did not provide the intended rest cure. Weeks later Constance was ill again.

‘I am going to write a few lines,' she explained to her friend Juliet Latour Temple in June 1889, adding: ‘if they are very stupid you must put it down to my having had 30 people here to talk to this afternoon. I have been very ill again, but I am going to try and mind-cure myself well this time.'
²⁵

As part of a programme of self-help Constance decided to read J. H. Shorthouse's
Golden Thoughts
, she explained to her friend. Based on the writings of the seventeenth-century ‘spiritual guide' and ‘Quietist' Miguel Molinos, this was a book that invited inward contemplation, meditation and reflection as a means to achieving a higher understanding. All one had to do was find a place that would enable quiet meditation.

Constance, earnest as ever, chose to try out some ‘golden thoughts' in a church she increasingly frequented, St Barnabas, Pimlico, just a few minutes from her own home. But as so often seemed to happen to Constance, her best-laid plans were confounded. ‘How can one be
a Quietist in London? I never get a moment's real quiet,' she complained to Juliet. ‘This morning I went to St Barnabas and thought I should be quiet there but carpenters came in and sawed wood till I went away!'
²⁶

What did seem to relieve her sleeplessness and anxiety were trips to the theatre with Oscar and his friends. Fortunately these were still frequent and a source of great joy for her. She was a regular at the Lyceum to see Irving and Ellen Terry, often dining with them after shows, and always enchanted by Terry, who was becoming a good friend. And humour helped Constance relax. She admitted that she laughed so much at one production of
Nerves
, an adaptation of
Les Femmes nerveuses
, ‘that I had a good night's sleep which I seldom get, so I think I shall try this medicine again'.
²⁷

Finally an August holiday in Yorkshire with the journalists Emily and James Thursfield pulled Constance through this period of ill health. Constance got home on 31 August. Oscar was at King's Cross to meet her. He had had to wait since her train was an hour late. He discovered his wife ‘looking extremely well – much better than when she went away'.
²⁸
Constance was delighted to be home and full of fun. On seeing the boys she told a silly story that the voracious Oscar had eaten her bread and butter – which made the extremely sensitive Cyril burst into tears.
²⁹
‘However he was consoled and sent to fetch some more.'
³⁰

Constance did not wait to throw herself into events once again, keen to show her socialist sympathies for any who cared to see. While Constance had been enjoying the Yorkshire moors with the Thursfields, London had become the battleground for a group of dockers, who, organized for the first time, were marching and striking for reform. A staggering ten thousand men downed tools. On 1 September the strikers, who had already been out for a fortnight, demonstrated in Hyde Park.

‘This afternoon I dragged Oscar to the Park to see the great meeting,' Constance told Emily Thursfield. ‘We saw a great part of the procession … with innumerable banners flying, all the people perfectly orderly with police marching by their sides. There were
representatives of all kinds of curious societies; one cart contained a Neptune with a long beard and a trident.' Constance spotted Robert Cunninghame Graham among the crowd of workers. Her political friend apart, the crowd comprised strata of society Constance rarely experienced, and never in this quantity. They ‘were very much in earnest', she noted, but also ‘very
unsavoury
'. In the midst of the rough workers she found herself almost overcome by the smell of the great unwashed and their ‘vile tobacco'. Nevertheless she was impressed by them. ‘One was in the presence of an immense power,' she said.
³¹

In the end the dockers had their day. Two weeks later, after striking for a month, their employers caved in to their demands and they returned to work. They had secured a new pay rate of 6d an hour and a hiring period of not less than four hours at a time.

More and more Constance saw political action in terms of her own personal quest to find meaning and purpose in life. And more and more she began to see parallels between Christian morality and socialism. ‘I have just been reading Tolstoy's
Work While We Have the Light
and feel more depressed than ever,' she would write to Lady Mount-Temple a little later; ‘I am more certain than ever that I am leading an absolutely useless life, and yet I don't see how to alter it.' Constance went on: ‘Mr Gurney says that the early Christians did not all have their goods in common and that the scheme of Socialism is a wrong one, but I am quite sure that the way we live now is wrong.'
³²

And so, determined to right the wrongs of her day, it was not long before Constance found yet another cause to take up – this time the launch of a new club for ‘progressive' women, one that might harness their shared ambitions to effect social change.

Women had been noticeable as members of London clubs since the early 1880s. And there were already a few all-female clubs. The Alexandra Club in Grosvenor Street was grand and catered for high-class women. The University Club for Ladies in New Bond Street catered for university-educated working women of more modest means. And the New Somerville Club in Oxford Street was a club
and college combined, providing lectures and talks alongside the standard offer of drawing rooms and a restaurant.
³³

One of the earliest gentlemen's clubs to accommodate women was that to which Oscar and Constance belonged, the Albemarle, founded in 1881. Constance was to be found there regularly, writing letters and meeting people. She and Oscar often dined there together. And she became involved in other aspects of club life too. In 1890, when the Albermarle expanded with the purchase of the neighbouring Pulteney Hotel, Constance was roped in as interior designer to fit out the new club house in suitably ‘artistic taste'.
³⁴

Constance's aesthetic contribution to the Albemarle must have only heightened its appeal. Despite the extension of its premises, its members remained concerned about its over-subscription. This sense of demand outstripping supply no doubt informed the decision by Constance and her friends to set up a rival women-only institution.

In March 1891 Constance, along with Lady Harberton, Lady Sandhurst and a few other of her radical friends, announced their intentions in a series of advertisements intended to recruit potential members. ‘It is proposed to start a Ladies Club with a view to furthering all movements for the advancement and enlightenment of women,' the notice in the
Woman's Herald
proclaimed. ‘It is thought that such a club consisting at first of small but comfortable premises, in some convenient situation, would supply a want generally felt by women of intelligence, and provide them with a recognised centre and social rendezvous. The many and varied movements for improving and advancing women's work suffer from lack of esprit de corps.'

In the end the club, which initially was going to be called the Century Club, was launched as the Pioneer Club and opened in Regent Street. It quickly became embroiled in sororial controversy. The members of the Pioneer Club fell out with their sisters at the New Somerville Club when the latter labelled them ‘political propagandists'. The Somervillians were duly punished. In August clubs typically closed for cleaning for a week or two. The tradition was for a system of reciprocal hospitality between institutions with members who found themselves temporarily inconvenienced invited to use
the facilities of other establishments. But in August 1892 the press enjoyed the spectacle of ‘the poor Somervillians wandering up and down … quite melancholy and homeless' after the founders of the Pioneer refused them such hospitality and took the Writers' Club instead, quite clearly out of spite.

‘The Pioneer is very advanced,' a bemused journalist observed, ‘to discuss its character in the current phraseology in which radicals and socialites love to describe themselves. The members are all women with opinions that agree as to the urgent necessity of reforming society by turning the world upside down as soon as possible, and a good deal of that readjustment of property-owning which is colloquially known as “robbing Peter to pay Paul”.'
³⁵
But even though its radical credentials proved unpalatable for some women, within a year the club had gathered a sufficient membership to support a move to bigger premises in Cork Street.

Israel Zangwill, the celebrated Jewish novelist and humorist, known to be sympathetic to the feminist cause, took the Pioneer Club as the inspiration for his comedic novel
The Old Maids' Club
. Zangwill's version was in fact the complete antithesis to the real thing, a club for young, beautiful, single women, who absolutely abhorred ‘ideals' and vowed never ‘to take part in Women's Rights Movements, Charity Concerts or other Platform Demonstrations'.
³⁶
Zangwill's Old Maids' Club also swore ‘Not to kiss females', a commitment that suggests that the genuine articles in the Pioneer Club were very much in the habit of kissing one another, much to the consternation of their peers.

9

Qui patitur vincit

I
F YOU HAD
walked down Oxford Street at lunchtime on Friday 21 June 1889, proceeding from Oxford Circus to Marble Arch under the almost continual canopy of coloured awnings that once graced that thoroughfare, about half-way down you would have found a cluster of folk blocking the pavement, vying to press their noses up against the windows of no. 448. This group, drawn from hoi polloi working in central London, were enjoying the spectacle of a great crowd of celebrated women milling about inside, many of whom were smoking. This activity, normally the preserve of men, was causing particular consternation. Constance Wilde, in her signature Gainsborough hat and wearing a full-skirted velvet highwayman's coat, was in their midst. She, like a whole host of other notable ladies, was attending the opening of a new Dorothy's Restaurant.

Dorothy's was the initiative of one Mrs Cooper-Oakley, another of London's leading feminists, who also ran a milliner's business in Wigmore Street called Madame Isabel's. It was an innovation, a restaurant for women only. Although dining for upper- and middle-class women was already available at the various women's clubs, and although some conventional restaurants provided ladies' dining rooms discreetly located in upper storeys or side-rooms, Dorothy's was a bold modern proposition. Its door was right on the street, and it was open to all classes of women, from shop assistants to duchesses. Offering cheap wholesome fare for all, Dorothy's liberated the former from having to eat a bun in a shop and offered the latter a new kind of experience. You just bought an eightpenny dining ticket on
entrance, took a seat at one of the tables and waited for your ‘plate of meat, two vegetables and bread' to arrive.
¹
For an extra couple of pence you could also get pudding, and for a further penny tea, coffee or chocolate.

Dorothy's was a perfect example of how, in late Victorian London, Aestheticism, liberalism and feminist sympathies could collide. The first branch of the restaurant to open, in Mortimer Street, had cream-coloured walls with ‘aesthetic crimson dados' and had been made ‘gay with Japanese fans and umbrellas'.
²
The Oxford Street branch, which opened just months later, was a far more dramatic proposition, its windows hung with rich Indian curtains, its ante-room painted a deep red that offset luxurious couches, small tables and carefully selected ornaments, and its larger luncheon room featuring rows of simple tables set with glazed white cotton tablecloths surmounted by vases of fresh flowers.