The Fall of the House of Wilde (3 page)

They did not separate, nor did circumstances improve. They emerged from this difficult period to produce another child, Frances, only to see her die at three months. Once again house moves ensued. First to No. 3 Lesson Street in 1815, then two years later to No. 6, where they lived until 1823, when they become tenants of 34 Lesson Street. Whether the proceeds from the sale of the house at No. 6 were used to pay off Charles's debts or to finance his travels, either way he left for India in 1822 and never returned. Charles died in Bangalore in 1824, leaving Sara to cope with the twelve-year-old Emily, the ten-year-old John and the infant Jane, the baby he had fathered in 1821, a year before he left Ireland.

Jane never spoke of her father. In fact, she tried to erase him from her life by imagining herself born in 1826. Her real birthdate was 27 December 1821. Growing up fatherless in draughty tenanted rooms, mould-sodden from decades of damp Dublin weather and stripped of gilt, fostered in Jane dreams of glory. Certainly the tall, full-bosomed young woman, with dark eyes and brown-black hair, who poured her feelings into shapely sonnets, seemed to have come from more exotic origins than Lesson Street. To the ambitious Dublin girl, the historic world of Italy seemed a better option. Her ancestral origins, she claimed, could be traced back to the name Algiati, of which Elgee was but a corruption. And when asked if there might be some connection to Dante Alighieri, she obfuscated, suggesting it could not be ruled out. Jane held fast to the notion of autonomous creation – she was enough of a bluestocking to pull it off.

But Jane had real literary connections closer to home. Prominent among them was the novelist Charles Maturin, who was married to her aunt, Henrietta, her mother's sister. Everything about Maturin, his notoriety, his literary talent, his sartorial eccentricity – he wandered about town in dressing-gown and slippers – appealed to Jane. Maturin began life in 1782 in Dublin and later became a curate. In 1816 his play,
Bertram
, with Edmund Kean in the title role, ran for a remarkable twenty-two performances at Drury Lane and rewarded him with £1,000, at a time when his annual curate's salary was between £80 and £90. Financial comfort was short-lived, as Maturin used his fortune to assist his unemployed father and to pay the debts of a distressed relative, quite possibly Jane's mother. Far more troublesome than money for Maturin was a vilification of his morals from the influential Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge denounced the play as dull and loathsome, a ‘melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind', and only stopped short of calling it atheistic.
⁸
The Church of Ireland halted Maturin's clerical advancement. This allowed Maturin to devote more time to writing. His 1820 novel,
Melmoth the Wanderer
, is praised by literary historians for introducing a new dimension to Gothic sensibility in its move away from reliance upon external atmospherics to a deeper psychological probing. The alienated hero, Melmoth, lives as if bound by a pre-scripted life. This resonated with his great-nephew, Oscar, who would adopt the name Melmoth to conceal his identity after prison – and, for the cognoscenti, to ironically signify his doomed lot.

Though Jane was only three when Maturin died in 1824, she considered him a colourful and worthy enough ancestor to appropriate, and a bust of the writer was one of her most precious possessions.

2

Lust for Knowledge

William chose to explore medicine, and in 1832 began to study surgery at Dr Steevens' Hospital and medical theory at the Park Street School in Lincoln Place. It was a propitious moment in the history of Irish medicine, and during William's life Ireland became one of the leading centres of excellence in the English-speaking world.
¹

It was also a favourable time in European medical history. The Enlightenment had freed adventurous minds and ushered in the empirical method, so that students, hitherto restricted to lecture halls, received instruction in hospitals. A long tradition had trained physicians to value rational theory over empirical practice, so they became thoroughly conversant with Hippocrates or Galen but remained largely ignorant of humans in the flesh. Surgery was seen as a subordinate discipline, a manual or ‘mechanical' trade, fit for the dexterous and the inarticulate. This attitude, as with culture at large, was predicated upon the superiority of head over hand. So in this movement towards hospital medicine, surgeons – who in prestige had once trailed behind physicians, contemptuous of a surgeon's intimacy with the human body – now constituted a scientific vanguard.

By the 1830s, liberal changes had become fully institutionalised in Ireland and William joined other scientific youths who came from further afield to study medicine in Dublin's hospitals. Foremost among the latter stood Robert Graves, described as ‘the torch bearer of Dublin medicine', and without question one of the most important men in William's life – or even the most important.
²

Born into a family of outstanding scholars, Robert Graves's father, Richard, had his brilliance confirmed by Trinity College, where he held the chair in a number of disciplines: divinity, law and Greek. The family offspring included the twentieth-century poet, Robert Graves. Robert Graves, the physician, had also harboured artistic ambitions. Having graduated in medicine from Trinity in 1818, he took his brushes and easel and painted his way across Europe. Wandering across the Alps, he met an artist whose employment of the brush made Graves doubt his own talent. He had befriended a painter by the name of J. M. W. Turner, whose habit of doing nothing but feasting his eyes on clouds disquieted the diligent Robert, determined to record every detail in a sketch. Having seen the great Turner's work, he decided to devote himself more seriously to medicine, and accordingly, studied in Copenhagen and Berlin, and visited the medical schools of Vienna, Paris, Florence, Venice and Rome, where he learnt the most advanced practice of the time.

Back in Dublin, he criticised medicine for being disconnected from the patient and insufficiently humane. He recommended the introduction of ‘bedside teaching', a practice he had observed in Berlin. He believed the allocation of students to specific patients would usher in a more caring bond and afford the student a closer examination. Graves reminded his students that ‘one of the most important duties of a surgeon or physician is the practice of humanity', and to this end, he followed the German and French custom of using the vernacular when the patient's prognosis was positive and Latin when negative. Behind Graves's manifesto for change was his belief that there was no substitute for practical training. ‘Nature requires time for her operations; and he who wishes to observe their development will in vain endeavour to substitute genius or industry for time . . . Students should aim not at seeing many diseases every day; no, their object should be constantly to study a few cases with diligence and attention; they should anxiously cultivate the habit of making accurate observations.'
³
Though much of this may seem obvious now, Graves's teachings were deemed novel at the time.

Born nineteen years before William, Graves possessed a
savoir-faire
that probably impressed the provincial student from Roscommon. Tall, dark and dashing, Graves had finely chiselled features and a sharp eye. Under his tutelage William soon demonstrated rare ability. And, early on, Graves made William's handling of an Asiatic cholera outbreak in Kilmaine, north of Cong, in 1832, the subject of a lecture, highlighting it as illustrative of best practice. The seventeen-year-old risked infection by staying to nurse a sick villager until he died. William then dug the grave himself and buried the corpse, after which he returned to the lodging to burn the bed and clothes, and fumigate the building with sulphur and tobacco smoke. He thus managed to arrest the spread of the disease, as no further instances were reported.

Another man William befriended was the physician-cum-novelist Charles Lever. Nine years William's senior, Lever was the son of English parents, though born and raised in Dublin. Lever qualified as a physician in 1831 and practised for a few years in various Irish towns, but his extravagance forced him to look for a more lucrative position. He took up the post of physician to the British Ambassador in Brussels. His first novel,
Harry Lorrequer
, was a popular and financial success, and for a time Lever's name rivalled those of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. As John Buchanan-Brown notes, ‘Charles Lever was an exceedingly prolific writer who enjoyed a wide popularity in his own day, the pink covers of the monthly parts of his novels rivalling the yellows of Thackeray and the greens of Dickens.'
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Flush with money from his novels, Lever led the life of a diplomatic swell, spending time in Brussels, Bonn and Karlsruhe, until he returned to Ireland in 1842. He then took up editorship of
Dublin University Magazine
, where between 1842 and 1845 he published his novels in serial form. More at home in farce than irony, Lever's protagonists, in their constant pursuit of adventure and pleasure, resembled no one more than himself. By 1850, Lever was smiling less broadly than usual when he found himself out of step with the times. Fellow novelist William Carleton criticised Lever for being an insufficient observer of life, for fostering caricature to feed the English misconceptions about Irish ‘quaintness'.
⁵
Carleton's criticism took wing in Ireland and the tide of opinion turned against Lever. That Lever was not deaf to comment was clear from his change of theme. Though he deserted the ‘horse-racious and pugnacious' historical narratives for the more challenging and contemporary theme of the psychology of failed marriages, he failed to stem the decline in his status. William shared Lever's boundless energy, but not his boundless cheer. Over the years as William grew more intense and work-obsessed, Lever's horseplay and foolery began to grate and their friendship cooled.

William's ambition and need for adulation kept him close to his books. After four years in Dr Steevens' Hospital, he extended his training with an additional year in the Rotunda Hospital, studying midwifery. There he wrote his first medical paper, a treatise on spina bifida that was deemed innovative enough to be delivered to the Medico-Philosophical Society, a rare opportunity for an apprentice. Already he stood out among his classmates as a man destined to make a name for himself.

The years 1836–7 proved to be a momentous time in William's life. Just before his final examination, he caught a fever. His obstinate spirit, however, led him – against all advice – to sit the exams. He completed his paper and collapsed. A worryingly critical condition lasted for days until Graves stepped in. Graves thought he had contracted typhus and prescribed a glass of strong ale to be taken every hour. William eventually recovered – indeed, soon enough to cast doubt on his confrère's diagnosis. Despite illness, William had come first in the annual examination. Thinking he should take things easy for a while, and not wanting to lose this talented young man, the medical school appointed him as resident clinician and curator of the museum of Dr Steevens' Hospital. No sooner had William taken up the role than another twist of fate offered him the chance to travel. Graves chose him to accompany a patient on a health-seeking cruise to the lands of the Mediterranean and the Near East. Another factor might have influenced William's departure from Dublin in 1837 – he would soon become father to the first of his illegitimate children. In later years there would be at least two others.

*

Little is known about Mr Robert Meiklam, the man for whom William acted as medical attendant, other than that he was English. Nor do we know who else was on board the ship, called the
Crusader
. We do know William set sail on 24 September 1837. He produced a two-volume account of his travels,
Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and along the Shores of the Mediterranean, including a visit to Algiers, Egypt, Palestine, Tyre, Rhodes, Telmessus, Cyprus, and Greece.
But this is much more than a travel book: William states in the preface that he was not one to travel for ‘amusement'; his objective was ‘instruction'. He was a man of the Enlightenment; he thus turned every observation into an item of knowledge. His stated aim was to extend knowledge in all directions – geology, natural science, archaeology, ethnology – and to open up the possibility of new disciplines.

His plan showed that he was a man of his time. Napoleon's Expedition of 1798–1801 had opened up the Near East to Europe, but his dreams of conquest went beyond land. He wanted to gather the knowledge accumulated over the epochs for the benefit of France. To this end he founded the
Institut d'Égypte
, which funded the
Description de L'Égypte
, twenty-three volumes put together by scientists, historians and archaeologists, and published between 1809 and 1828. This work exemplifies the Enlightenment drive to systematise knowledge. Although the effort elicited a wide range of criticisms of detailed rebuttal, making its claim to completeness and comprehensiveness look dubious, it was nevertheless important in fostering a healthy debate – in which William partook. With this generic model in mind, no question was deemed unsuitable for William, nor could anything be ignored. Everything became something worth knowing, from the costume of an Algerian Bedawee to the way the Egyptian scarab beetle reproduces. Shaping his thoughts to contribute to this genre of writing, and to respect its decorum, William censors, or at least objectifies, his personal impressions. That said, he is never the dry pedant, and we do get glimpses of the man behind the scholar, as we will see.

One thing that left him helpless was the sea. As the ship laboured in heavy seas, he lay seasick for much of the first leg of the journey – all he could do was curse Neptune for giving him an inauspicious welcome to his domain. His fellow passengers, by contrast, weathered the storm with mariner's instincts. The violent seas lasted until his first stop at Corunna, where he watched the manufacture of cigars, and happily spent time on
terra firma
, observing birds and animals in the surrounding hills. In Lisbon he visited convents and churches, and informed himself of the country's religious history, discoursing with monks and friars. Portuguese cookery, wine, costume, architecture and climate all absorbed William's attention during the ten days he spent in the country. In Madeira, Tenerife and Gibraltar he indulged his interests in vegetation, wildlife, botany, geology and geography. The flora and fauna of Madeira, the limes, orange groves, coffee plantations, wide-spreading bananas and thousands of the rarest plants and exotics were beyond his expectation. There he compared notes with a German botanist before moving on to Tenerife. Smoking innumerable cigars, and after many glasses of wine and brandy, he and Mr Meiklam bedded down under coats and blankets before climbing to the peak of Tenerife at daybreak. They ascended on horseback to an elevation of 500 feet, and to his relief, William found his breathing became ‘perfectly free from all trace of asthma and cough'. The twenty-odd days he later spent on Gibraltar brought him back into the clutches of English society. He felt obliged to attend the governor's reception, but did so with clenched teeth –‘the monotony of the eternal Redcoats' inciting his ire.
⁶