The Fall of the House of Wilde (5 page)

Throughout the journey William made good use of officials encountered at consular parties. The British vice-consul, Dr Walne, for instance, put him in touch with the chief medical attendant, Dr Pruner, at Cairo's hospital and medical college. Known as Casser-el-Ein, the hospital was founded during the reign of Muhammad Ali, the all-powerful pasha of Egypt. An Albanian from Thrace, Muhammad Ali gained power during the anarchy that beset Egypt after Napoleon's expulsion. Elected pasha (governor) in 1805, Ali reigned until his death in 1848 and during this time he set about building Egypt along European lines. To this end, he invited into Egypt an entourage of technocrats and scientists to transform the country. He also invested in scientific research, providing sizeable sums of money to attract international scholars to work in Egypt. As against the policy of economic laissez-faire then gaining ground in Britain, William commended Ali's policy of state investment, firmly believing in its power to transform society.

That said, William was less impressed with other aspects of Ali's reign. Most alarming was the high incidence of blindness: one-sixth of Cairo's inhabitants were either blind or partially sighted. Some men, William discovered, disfigured themselves to avoid conscription. But climate accounted for most instances of the disease. Sand, dirt and wind damaged the eyes and increased the likelihood of trachoma, an infection common in southern Ireland at the time. William studied several cases of the disease in Cairo, and the seven days he spent there paid rich dividends. This exposure to trachoma influenced his future decision to specialise in diseases of the eye.

Equally important for the future was what William learnt from his inspection of the medical school-cum-hospital. What impressed him in the hospital was the generous state support for training and research, which extended across all areas, from the students through to the pharmacy, the museum and the publishing house. It fostered in William dreams to do likewise. But he would need to enlist government support, which is probably why, when he produced his account, he focused on the comparison with Britain, to the latter's disadvantage. On the subject of the integration of medical training with medical provision he wrote, ‘this system, added to that of the general medical education here given, is one well worthy of imitation in Great Britain, and reflects no small credit on its founder, Clot Bey'.
¹⁶
(Antoine Barthelemy Clot was a French physician who went to Egypt in 1825.) Unlike many of his generation, William thought Europe had much to learn from the East.

After Egypt, William travelled on to Rhodes, Telmessus, Cyprus, Syria, Jaffa and finally to Greece. No place haunted William as much as Egypt. Jerusalem, so eagerly anticipated, was a disappointment. Confronted everywhere by hustlers peddling trinkets, he thought the country had lost its sacredness to commercialisation. William hated to see Eastern countries losing their character to the West. He shared the fantasy of many artists of his generation: that the people of the East retained their natural state, and feared that the march of Western influence would bring sameness everywhere. He visited the Orient just at the right time, he thought. The second half of the nineteenth century, during which France and Britain spread their imperial machinery, was to bear out William's fears. But his relish for collecting contained a paradox: he longed for places to keep their natural flavour, but saw no contradiction in appropriating objects from ancient sites, such as the urns of embalmed ibises, therefore robbing the countries of their heritage. Though many of the objects he took furnished research, they also furnished a cabinet of curiosities as memorabilia.

The contention that travels changes people applied to William. Ceaselessly confronting the world in the raw for almost a year had the effect of pushing him deeply into his shell. As he put it, ‘so exciting were the scenes witnessed during the day, and so perfectly absorbed was my mind in the object of my visit, that it seemed as if I were insulated from the world.'
¹⁷
William was most at home when lost in a world of research, as if this were his natural centre of gravity. Total immersion in Egyptian antiquity whetted his appetite for time travel. Not long afterwards, he would use this experience to start his exploration of ancient Celtic Ireland. But balanced against his urge to probe the ancient worlds, he had a burning need for success. Coming from a young man intolerant of philistines and of public authority, his ambition portended a bumpy road ahead.

3

Patron-cum-Scholar

After his travels, William took rooms at 199 Brunswick Street, Dublin, and started to practise general medicine and minor surgery. He also set about assimilating the vast heap of notes and materials he had collected on his travels. He began the
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
at the end of 1838 and finished it in 1839. This book is a great deal more than its title suggests. The narrative supports the disquisition of scholarly topics, like a platform built for a lecturer. The scholarly pieces of the book he turned into papers, some of which he delivered to the British Association for the Advancement of Science or the Royal Irish Academy; others he published in scholarly journals.

The body of the narrative concerns itself with the places William visited. He started with the gaze of the naturalist and expanded to take account of peoples and cultures. Diversity was what dazzled him – different habits, customs, rituals and religions. They awakened his ethnological eye. As we have seen, William displayed the generosities of the curious traveller, not warped by prejudice or petty judgements. His voice was impersonal. His allegiance to impersonality was bound up with scholarly decorum; an explosion of personality would weaken his credibility. As William pointed out in an appendix to his book, the gifted amateur enthusiast writing on the Orient had given way to the expert. While curt abridgements and a few self-indulgent longueurs make the work far from seamless, it displays a mind striving to understand the manifold interconnectedness of things, supporting the contention of his first biographer, T. G. Wilson, that William would have made a superbly original scholar. The book won him plaudits, and the first edition of 1,250 copies sold out rapidly, even at the relatively high price of twenty-eight shillings.
¹

William used this book to speak on public issues. In one of the appendices he called on Irish institutions to turn their attention to the Orient. That he was confident and precocious was obvious from the way the twenty-three-year-old took it upon himself to question the educational priorities of Trinity College. The time had come for Trinity to invest in natural science and philology, he said, in Semitic languages and Oriental studies, if the university was to keep abreast of other European institutions. (Time bore William out, for by 1850 every major European university offered study in some Oriental discipline.) Other organisations, such as the Royal Irish Academy, also came under his scrutiny. Was it realising its role? Was British science weakening in comparison to French and German? Did science have a moral role in society? Here William added his voice to the general debate in 1830s Britain. Would the new crop of scientists encourage sound religious belief or a risky secular materialism? At the time, deism, a belief in the moral teachings of Jesus but not his divinity, or natural theology, which held that the perceived elements of design in the natural world prove the existence of God, held sway.

Though William did not fully articulate his views, he appears to have subscribed to natural theology. He suggested theologians should be schooled in the principles of science to assist them in communicating the wonder of the natural world and the ‘magnificence' of divine creation. ‘Surely that education cannot be complete while the [divinity] student is in total ignorance of those wonders of the animal and vegetable creation in which in after life he daily calls his hearers to look as evidences of design, or as displaying the power and magnificence of their Maker.'
²
William returned to the neglect of science in education at very regular intervals, a neglect he thought really kept people from ‘seeing' the wonder of the world. After several years, when William gained distance from this younger self, he left behind the voice of certainty on religious belief. His reading of Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Christian theologian and philosopher, his membership of the Mystics (which appears to have been a dining club), his foray into superstitions and dark folk tales betoken a kind of scientific mysticism that left little room for a Christian God, or any kind of Maker at all. But as a young man, his upbringing and his instinct, both probably unconsidered, urged him to defend the idea of a benign Creator somewhere distantly behind the great unfolding scheme of nature.

William emerged into the public realm as an advocate for the promotion of science at the end of a decade that had seen Charles Babbage, the eminent engineer, mathematician and philosopher, campaign to popularise science in Britain. Babbage had led the move to set up the British Association for the Advancement of Science, established in 1831. Exasperated with the Royal Society's elitist approach to science, Babbage looked to Germany's decentralised system as a model for the future British Association. The first meeting was strategically located away from London, at York. The topics discussed ranged from comets through geological strata to marsupial mating habits. The first president, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, set the tone with a contentious keynote address about the furtherance and dissemination of science in Britain. By 1839, when William delivered his first papers to the British Association, over 2,000 attended and press coverage was extensive.
³

William presented three papers to the British Association meeting of 1839, held in Birmingham. In one paper, intended for the benefit of zoological collections, he spoke of a process he had invented for the preservation of fish in their natural shape and colours; in another, he considered the ethnology of the Guanches of Madeira; and in the final paper, he analysed the physical geography of the coast of Tyre. This topic received much attention. Sir Charles Lyell, the foremost geologist of his day, joined in the discussion and was magnanimous enough to state publicly that he would need to alter
The Principles of Geology
in recognition of William's findings.
⁴
The literary magazine, the
Athenaeum
, in the 31 August 1839 issue, applauded him. Delivering these papers gave William a foothold in the global fraternity of scholars, from which he would build an international reputation.

As advances to promote science proceeded in Britain, William pursued the cause in Ireland. At the Royal Dublin Society, the public became his captive audience for lectures on such topics as the anatomy of a chimpanzee, the gizzards of fish and the unrolling of mummies. Founded in 1731, the Society promoted agriculture, arts, industry and science. It relied upon the voluntary input of members. Talks like William's reflected democratic stirrings and the sense that ordinary people had a right to know what science was really about. Despite the abstruse material on which he spoke, William, it was said, flourished on the podium.
⁵

Now a seasoned public advocate, William soon became a familiar name in the pages of
Dublin University Magazine
, a journal exploring the interests of educated Protestants. Founded in 1833, the timing of its launch was propitious, coming in the aftermath of Catholic emancipation and amid the ongoing war by tenants against the payment of tithes to landowners on the produce of the land. Established by six Trinity men – including the lawyer and politician Isaac Butt, and the first English translator of Goethe, John Anster – the magazine remained independent of the university, despite its name. It enjoyed a string of distinguished editors, starting with Butt in the 1830s, who handed over to the physician and novelist Charles Lever, before passing on the baton to fellow writer Sheridan Le Fanu, who put his stamp on
Dublin University Magazine
during the 1860s.

The periodical covered many subjects – political, economical, philosophical and literary. International in scope, it was especially partial to German culture, featuring in-depth articles on German philosophy and literature. William's first contribution, in 1840, was a two-part article calling for the removal of Cleopatra's Needle to England, suggesting the English public subscribe a penny to cover the costs of transportation.
Dublin University Magazine
survived just long enough to bring Oscar Wilde to the public's attention, publishing his review of the opening exhibition at London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. The arc of its fortunes, from its rise in 1833 to its demise in 1877, marked the heyday of cosmopolitan Victorian Ireland.

William's education admitted him to the ranks of the Protestant intellectual elite – what one historian dubbed ‘the Dublin
savants
'. Education gave these men prominence in a society in which, even by the 1840s, over half the population remained illiterate. Many were too well educated for the few opportunities Ireland could provide. So with time on their hands, they branched into other fields, so that scientists wrote poetry, physicians novels, and painters turned to archaeology. William, for instance, devoted as much time to culture as he did to medicine. Like many of the Irish Protestants with whom he mixed, living ‘nobly' in Victorian Ireland meant living for culture. Being prodigiously erudite gave professional men the prestige hitherto enjoyed by the Irish landed aristocrats. Indeed, culture provided a security that had for centuries been bound up with land.

Politics also played a part in the emphasis on culture. After the Act of Union in 1801, almost 600 parliamentarians left Dublin for London, leaving a vacuum at the centre. Many scarcely returned to a country where outbreaks of violence were frequent, as legislation to end Catholic discrimination did nothing to improve the economic livelihood of Catholic labourers and tenants, nor much to change prejudices, entrenched for centuries. With few on the ground capable of modernising what was a pre-industrial country, a handful of educated Protestants took it upon themselves to give the country a different form of leadership. Thomas Davis's famous 1840 inaugural address to the Trinity College Historical Society crystallises this move. Davis, a writer and one of the founders of Young Ireland, a nationalist organisation, reminded his fellow men of their duty to the country –‘Gentlemen, you have a country.' He urged his audience to give the spiritual guidance that had once been given by the island's saints and scholars. Davis had in mind the growth of a new breed of men who would form the priesthood of a secular modern Ireland. He took his cue from Thomas Carlyle, who minted the idea of literature as a modern church, and culture as the glue to hold different sects together.
⁶
The notion that culture could harmonise an otherwise fractious country, that it could become a new form of politics, and one the erudite Anglo-Irish men could lead, marked the first stirrings of the Celtic Revival.