The Fall of the House of Wilde (21 page)

Certainly, he was impatient and cantankerous, but he was both of those before the trial and often for good reason – the shambles over the catalogue was reason enough. And the ‘dirty' claim seems baseless: William's outrage at the fatalities caused by dirt in the maternity ward in Austria, or at the spread of disease caused by the dirt in Egypt or in a poor rural home in Ireland, illustrate the attention he paid to hygiene. And whether the trial dealt him ‘a terrible blow', one cannot know for sure, but evidence shows he was not a man to court public opinion; William Carleton, we recall, said as much. Nor did he feel bound by bourgeois conventions – his illegitimate children are sufficient testimony. So if he did go west more often, it was not to hide from Dublin society, but for his love of the place – his ‘beloved Moytura', as Jane phrased it – which comes through in the book on the area he was writing at the time,
Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands.

Jane took the practical step of managing public opinion. For instance, she wrote to Rosalie Olivecrona two weeks after the trial closed, and included press cuttings to show the support they had received.

You of course know by this of the disagreeable law affair in which we have been involved. I sent you a few extracts from the various papers . . .

The simple solution of the affair is this – that Miss Travers is half mad – all her family are mad too. She was very destitute and hunted our house to borrow money and we were very kind to her as we pitied her – but suddenly she took a dislike to me amounting to hatred – and to endeavour to ruin my peace of mind commenced a series of anonymous attacks. Then she issued vile publications in the name of Speranza accusing my husband. I wrote to her father about them and she took an action for libel against me.

It was very annoying but of course no one believed her story – all Dublin now calls on us to offer their sympathy and all the medical profession here and in London have sent letters expressing their disbelief of the, in fact, impossible charge. Sir Wm will not be injured by it and the best proof is that his professional hours never were so occupied as now. We were more anxious about our dear foreign friends who could only hear through the English papers which are generally very sneering on Irish matters – but happily all is over now and our enemy has been signally defeated in her efforts to injure us.

I have a book of poems out. I shall try to send them to you. Thanks for two magazines, but your translation of ‘The Exodus' [a poem written by Jane on Irish emigration] has not arrived yet . . .
²

Life went on as before. Rosalie published ‘The Exodus' in her magazine and Jane wrote in March 1865 complimenting her on the ‘beautiful' translation, and thanking her for the generous introduction preceding it.

And the Wilde home was still the port of call for visiting Scandinavians and scholars. In June 1865, for instance, Baron and Baroness Dübin came from Sweden. Jane and William took the Dübins to Bray for the day, and on another day, Jane told Lotten in a letter dated 8 June 1865, they ‘had a large party of gentlemen to meet the Baron at Merrion Square – and Odin's horn was filled with punch & handed around for each to drink
skål
to Sweden and the Baron & Sir W wore the Order of the Star in honour of Gamla Sverige'. She went on to say that ‘Dublin is very crowded just now. We were at a Ball to meet the Prince of Wales given at the Lord Mayor's.'
³
And she finished by pressing Lotten to visit Ireland.

Then fate dealt the Wildes a cruel blow. In February 1867 Isola caught a fever and, when she seemed to be getting better, her parents sent her to breathe fresher air in Longford, where William's only surviving sister, Margaret, lived with her husband, Reverend Noble. But no sooner was Isola in Longford than she suffered a relapse. By the time Jane and William arrived, Isola was beyond hope – they watched her die. The following announcement appeared in all Dublin papers.

Wilde – February 23 at Edgeworthstown Rectory, after a brief illness in the 10
^th
year of her life, Isola, the beloved and only daughter of Sir William and Lady Wilde.

Meningitis was thought to have been the cause of her death.

They buried Isola in Longford. It took Jane weeks before she could speak of Isola's death. That April she wrote to Lotten.

I write to you in deep affliction. You will see by the paper I send that we have lost our darling only daughter . . . [she was] the most lovable, hope-giving child – She had been a little ill with fever in the winter – but recovered – Then we sent her for a change of air to her uncle's – about 50 miles away – There she had a relapse and sudden effusion on the brain. We were summoned by telegraph and only arrived to see her die – Such sorrows are hard to bear. My heart seems broken – Still I have to live for my sons – & thank God – They are as fine a pair of boys as one would desire. But Isola was the radiant angel of our home – & so bright & strong and joyous. We never dreamed the word death was meant for her. Yet I had an uncontrollable sadness over me all last winter – a foreboding of evil – & I even delayed writing to you till I felt in my heart more of energy & life – Alas! I was then entering the shadow which now never more will be lifted . . .

But for that glorious promise of scripture – ‘The dead shall arise' – I think I would sink down in deep despair – Sir William is crushed by sorrow. Isola was his idol – still he goes on with his work – & is even now writing a book to be published very shortly on ‘Lough Corrib and its Islands' – for the daily work must be done & the world will not stop in its career even tho a fair child's grave lies in its path . . .
⁴

The doctor who attended Isola described her as ‘the most gifted and lovable child' he had come across. He also recalled Oscar's ‘lonely and inconsolable grief seeking vent in long and frequent visits to his sister's grave in the village cemetery. . .'
⁵

The shock of his little sister's death stayed with Oscar, then twelve years old. He would later write a poem in remembrance, ‘Resquiescat'.

Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The lilies grow.

All her bright golden hair

Tarnished with rust,

She that was young and fair

Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,

She hardly knew

She was a woman, so

Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,

Lie on her breast,

I vex my heart alone,

She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear,

Lyre or sonnet,

All my life's buried here,

Heap earth upon it.
⁶

And when Oscar died, found among his belongings was an envelope containing ‘My Isola's hair'.

To add to their woes, through 1866 and 1867 William suffered one bout of illness after another, with no diagnosis. William's constitution had never been robust, but it was deteriorating. Jane wrote to Lotten on 10 July 1866, ‘Sir William is better tho I think his health will never again be strong or vigorous.' Lotten too was ill and William's doctorly advice to her was what he himself practised. It was ‘to keep your spirit up by amusements – & whatever can strengthen your nervous system – not to fret – but to go out and interest your mind in those intellectual subjects for which you have so much taste and talent'. Being ill was part of William's life, best captured by Jane's letter to Lotten on 26 June 1867, ‘he is very sick & very much overworked'.
⁷
William never let sickness interfere with his feverish work schedule.

In the autumn of 1867 William's book,
Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands
, was published in Dublin by McGlashan and Gill. It sold well and a second edition followed in 1872.
Lough Corrib
tells the history, archaeology, literature and anecdotes of the area. It still serves as a useful companion for the serious explorer, and was timely, as travellers became more interested in the west of Ireland in the late 1860s and 1870s. In the introduction William states he is writing for ‘intelligent tourists', for readers curious enough to appreciate architectural, historical and literary knowledge. He had no intention of serving up ‘imaginary conversations in broken English, to amuse our Saxon friends'.
⁸
William's remarks were addressed to those travellers for whom the west of Ireland was a distant cauldron into which they often tossed their prejudices, ignorance and jokes – largely because it was still so underdeveloped. More often than not, travellers saw the west as a step back to the primitive. And along with the view of Ireland as primitive went the figuring of Ireland in the ‘Saxon' mind – as the locus where the id still ran riot in fantasy and violence, oblivious to the censoring superego. As one literary historian said, Ireland was like ‘the Tennysonian nightmare of a Nature red in tooth and claw, obdurately resistant to refinement'.
⁹
Many thought it a country bereft of culture.

Thus does William set out to inform the reader of the region's history and culture. The book furnishes information on the demographics, history and topography, together with the architectural structure and illustrations of the monasteries, castles and ruins around the lake and the islands of Lough Corrib. It treats the landscape as a text to be deciphered. One aspect of history William dwells on is the Battle of Moytura, recounted in the oldest Bardic legend. William wanted to prove the battle had in fact taken place. If evidence could be found, it would prove that the Irish plains had been inhabited in the year 3303 
BC
, the purported year of the battle.

Taking his cue from the descriptions of places and events in a fifteenth-century manuscript, William searched the fields between Cong and Knockma. The evidence he found suggested the most likely spot for the burial place of one of the young warriors was his own land. And sure enough he found an urn, inscribed ‘cairn of one man', as the narrative stipulated. He removed one large flagstone followed by another, and came upon a small chamber formed of stones. Then came his eureka moment – a single urn of baked clay containing incinerated human bones. This was too much of a coincidence for him not to take it as proof that these were the remains of the young hero. ‘Here, no doubt, the body of the loyal Firbolg youth was burned, and his ashes collected and preserved in this urn. Perhaps a more convincing proof of the authority of Irish or any other ancient history has never been afforded,' wrote William. He was never gullible; one can only assume that his characteristic scholarly scepticism was swayed by the emotion of finding the earliest evidence of Irish remains on his land. ‘There it stands to this day,' he wrote in
Lough Corrib
, ‘about 50 feet high, and 400 in circumference – an historic memorial as valid as that which commemorates the spot on the shore of Attica, where the Athenians fell beneath the long spears of the Persians on the field of Marathon.'
¹⁰

Was there any truth to this constitutive story? William's speculation was no different from that which took the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, to the plains of Greece with Homer's
Iliad
as his guide. When in 1876 Schliemann found a hoard of treasures, exquisite jewellery and decorated weapons, he erroneously assumed he had come upon the tomb of Clytemnestra, and located ancient Mycenae.
¹¹
The event made world news, Schliemann a celebrity, and it had to wait for Carl Blegen in 1938 to prove Schliemann wrong. Admittedly, Ireland was hardly Troy, nor were the bards a match for Homer.

It was, sadly, all fantasy – the Battle of Moytura was but a legend. It was subsequently established in a book published in 1943 that the names William transferred from Cormac Ó Curnín's fifteenth-century manuscript to the ancient monuments of the district never existed in the traditions or topography of Cong. Still, the energy and determination William brought to the whole endeavour shows he had not lost his mania for the impossible. The unearthing of the Battle of Moytura had become a personal affair; I suspect he would have felt indignant if others took it less seriously. Notwithstanding the widening range of archaeological and antiquarian activities in the mid-nineteenth century and their increasing cultural authority, the image of figures ferreting in ruins, focusing on what seemed trifling distinctions, often made them the subject of the satirist's pen. Certainly, the obsession with which William went about the Battle of Moytura would have kept satirists' wits busy. He poured his ambition into reconstructing the original battle, determined to break new ground in ancient history. In 1866, he had presented his findings in a paper to the Royal Irish Academy, and included a retraced itinerary of the battle in
Lough Corrib
.

Shortly after
Lough Corrib
was published, William organised his friends and colleagues from the Medico-Philosophical Society to visit, hoping to show to advantage Moytura and the agreeableness of the terrain about which he had written. Much hullabaloo surrounded the evening, which was consecrated with poteen. Age and work had not reduced his capacity for wry humour, and William famously pinned the names of his guests to their pillows lest they bore any ‘obfuscation of intellect' and lost the direction to their beds. The time-conscious William set out an itinerary for the next day, with the party inspecting all the local antiquities and fitting in time to cast a line in Lough Mask before returning to Dublin. The gathering became notorious and entered the annals of the Society's history.
¹²

*

In the mid-1860s the Fenian movement stirred public debate in Ireland. Early in 1866, Jane told Lotten, ‘I myself believe that 1866 will be a year of fate and doom, especially to England.' In July, she wrote: ‘We are expecting a great uprising & revolution here. A great fear prevails – but as we are both national favourites I fear nothing personally – still, times of sorrow trouble our life . . . You are a great nation – I envy you – we are so poor, oppressed & downtrodden.'
¹³
The fact that revolutionary politics worried Jane was a sure sign of change. The Fenians would not be partial to Jane, or to the Anglo-Irish in general, deemed as not Irish enough.