The Fall of the House of Wilde (6 page)

William would have had little difficulty in recognising himself as a member of the new brethren of cultural zealots. He believed there was pride to be salvaged in the revival of culture, that the resurrection of ancient Ireland would give people back some self-respect and dignity. But other, more pressing, factors nudged these men to act on behalf of the country: their stronghold had begun to appear less than secure. Sidelined by the London establishment for not being English, the Irish Protestants also had to face a rising Gaelic nationalist movement, many of whom considered their Protestant compatriots insufficiently Irish. This tension of identity may have been what prompted them to act. They just might, through this move, solve their own crisis of identity by trying to solve the country's somewhat different crisis of identity. Whatever the motive, their enthusiasm was genuine – they had a decent-minded determination to put the country on its feet.

In the revival of Celtic culture, it was George Petrie who influenced William the most. Petrie was as much a self-made man of the post-union era as William. Born in Dublin and educated at the arts school of the Royal Dublin Society, Petrie was twenty-six years William's senior, and cultivated enough as artist, archaeologist and musicologist to be considered something of a Renaissance man. Petrie gave William his first chance to work on an archaeological dig, and for a time became his tutelary spirit. Their first collaboration was the investigation of a bone-heap at Lagore in County Meath. They discovered it had been a lake dwelling; what was called a
crannóg
, a partially or entirely artificial island built in lakes or rivers as a form of settlement. These dwellings originated in the European Neolithic era and survived until the eighteenth century. This was the first of what turned out to be over 1,200
crannógs
unearthed in Ireland. Evidence allowed William and Petrie to build a picture of national history based on particularities, rather than theories. The artefacts recovered – military weapons, domestic utensils and ornamental objects – helped them to provide a systematic account of customs and local conditions. The objects went on display at the Royal Irish Academy in Grafton Street, and subsequently became part of the Academy's collection. On 10 June 1839, William delivered a paper to the Royal Irish Academy on the findings, ‘Antiquities Recently Discovered at Dunshanghlin'. After this contribution, the chairman, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, elected William, still only twenty-four, to the ranks of the Academy.
⁷
Founded in 1782 by gentlemen for scholarly pursuits, the Academy acquired Royal Charter four years later for the study of science, polite literature and antiquities in Ireland. The Royal Irish Academy had a broader remit than its English sister, the Royal Society, where the focus was on science. That breadth suited William's polymathic taste.

Mutual enthusiasm brought William and Petrie together. They complemented one another; where Petrie was collaborative and deliberate, William was autocratic and impetuous, and a stickler for detail. William publicly expressed his respect for Petrie in 1849 when he dedicated his first historical-archaeological travel book,
The Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater
, to him. In the dedication he gave Petrie the credit for instigating the Celtic Revival.
⁸
The literary critic Vivien Mercier endorsed William's view when he wrote of Petrie as being ‘more important in the long run than Thomas Davis, Douglas Hyde, or perhaps even Yeats' to cultural revival.
⁹
Respect for Petrie was widespread. A friend of William's, Dr William Stokes, praised Petrie for instigating ‘a national concordant feeling, in a country divided by religious and political discord'.
¹⁰

Enthusiasm for archaeology soon became infectious. The Stokes children, Whitley and Margaret, for instance, produced scholarly works on the topic. Born fifteen years after William, in 1830, Whitley Stokes went on to achieve more in Celtic studies than either William or Petrie. The knowledge Whitley acquired at Trinity in Sanskrit and comparative philology set him apart. Like William, whom he befriended and consulted on Celtic matters, Whitley possessed the wandering spirit and, having qualified as a barrister in London, left for India in 1862. There he drafted India's legal procedures and spent the better part of his days writing on Celtic studies, nine books in all. Whitley's sister, Margaret Stokes, born in 1832, followed Petrie into ecclesiastical architecture and produced a handful of scholarly works, leaving her last work,
High Crosses of Ireland
, incomplete at her death in 1900. The poet Samuel Ferguson was another Celtomane. He and Margaret Stokes often collaborated. Her first work was a set of illustrations for his poem ‘The Cromlech at Howth', published in 1861. The pursuit of archaeology frequently brought together the Stokeses, Petrie, Ferguson and William Wilde, and excursions to the Aran Islands, Ireland's ‘purest', most untouched spot, were not uncommon. At Aran they would collect stories, ancient songs, sayings, idioms, customs and popular manners, in order to document and preserve Irish oral history. Over fifty years later, in 1907, it was their indefatigable endeavours that stimulated J. M. Synge to write
The Playboy of the Western World
, a work which merges the local dialect into the English language to render more accurately the characters' thought and expression.

The first thrust in the renaissance of Celtic culture, putting Ireland on the European Celtic archaeological map, was Petrie's work on Irish round towers. Before Petrie made his discovery, the historical use of the round towers was a subject of wild speculation. For historians who believed civilisation ended on the shores of Britain, the towers were shrines where barbarians in animal skins gazed in worship at phallic symbols or, for historians with more exotic imaginations, the stone erections were temples of Vesta. Petrie challenged these lazy assumptions and proved that they functioned as Christian bell towers, or often as watchtowers and safe havens for those anticipating a future siege. Petrie's investigations, included in his book on
The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland
(1845), combated historical prejudices and almost certainly had a hand in reviving local interest in ruins and getting travellers to look beyond their blinkered views of the indigenous Irish.

Irish Celtic history had fizzled out almost to nothing before it attracted William and his coterie. William cherished ambitions to make it known and respected across the globe, seeing it as a rich source of untapped material. In the preface to
The Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater
, he wrote, ‘it may be regarded as a boast, but it is nevertheless incontrovertibly true, that the greatest amount of authentic Celtic history in the world, at present, is to be found in Ireland; nay more, we believe it cannot be gainsaid that no country in Europe, except the early kingdoms of Greece and Rome, possess so much ancient history as Ireland'.
¹¹

In this connection it is worth considering William's attitude to the myths of nineteenth-century nationalism. The first is that of the superiority of a particular tribal culture. William did not hold this view. His ‘boast' was of the richness of the Irish Celtic history available, not its pre-eminence. Another great myth was that of steady progress, with constant disparagement of the benighted past, which entailed the view of all earlier centuries as so many steps toward the superior life of the present and still more wonderful life of the future. William rejected this. For him, each culture has its own inner note, and one must have the ear to hear the different melodies. Diversity is what must be respected. What mattered to William was the internal development of a culture in its own habitat, towards its own goals; but because there are many qualities that are universal in people, one culture can study, understand and admire another. And this is what he saw himself doing for Celtic culture.

William's thunderbolts were reserved for those who dismissed or ignored Irish Celtic culture. The British historian, Thomas Baddington Macaulay, was one of those at the receiving end of William's ire for having omitted ancient Celtic literature in his preface to
Lays of Ancient Rome
. There Macaulay explained to the reader how much a people's ancient history and sense of nation was stored in poetic literature and metrical romances, a view William also held. Macaulay illustrated his point by citing literature from across the globe, but omitted any reference to the early poetic literature of ‘his neighbouring Island', as William put it. Though we do not know Macaulay's response to William's ticking-off, we do know that when Macaulay visited Ireland to tour the Boyne region, he invited William to accompany him. Macaulay had been sceptical of William's study of the Battle of the Boyne, supposing it owed more to fancy than fact. William proved him wrong, and dedicated the second edition of
The Beauties of the Boyne and the Blackwater
to Macaulay – no doubt with a note of irony.

4

Rising High

Ambition took William overseas again in 1840. It was not unusual for aspiring physicians to visit continental hospitals to further their education, and in the Dublin medical establishment, physicians globally trained were well represented. William planned to specialise in diseases of the eye and ear. He made London's Moorfields Hospital, known for its expertise in ophthalmology, his first stop before travelling on to Europe's top hospitals.

In London he assisted operations for the treatment of conjunctivitis, ‘ophthalmia' and trachoma. While there, he contacted Sir James Clark, who had achieved renown for his book,
The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases
. The book dealt with the advantageous benefits of climate on well-being at a time when ‘taking the waters' was
de rigueur
among Europe's haut bourgeois. William's
Narrative of a Voyage
added to this knowledge, in particular the analysis he had done on Madeira, a destination neglected by Clark. Twenty-seven years William's senior, Clark had led a vivid life. He had spent 1818 accompanying a consumptive patient to the south of France, during which time he met several pioneering European doctors, and through them had become familiar with the advantages of the new stethoscope before many of his generation. He settled in Rome in 1819, where he became the leading physician in ‘the English colony'. He tried to cure the dying Keats by putting him on a starvation diet of ‘a single anchovy and a morsel of bread a day', but his treatment failed to prevent the poet's painful death from tuberculosis in 1821.
¹
In due course, Clark returned to London, where he did not remain unnoticed for long. By the time William met him, he was the physician appointed to Queen Victoria.

Through Clark William met William Farr, who went on to pioneer the new science of statistics in England. Over the next decade, Farr in England and Wilde in Ireland would turn statistics into an invaluable tool to inform government policy – medical and otherwise. Clark had employed statistics to good effect in his book,
Medical Notes on Climate, Diseases, Hospitals, and Medical Schools in France, Italy, and Switzerland.
Quite possibly William got the idea from Clark to write a similar type of book on Austria, where he spent the next six months, training at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus, Vienna's general hospital. William's book makes use of statistics on everything from ethnic diversity to illegitimacy to support his analysis of the Austrian government's medical and educational policy. The book also offers a lot more. How far he wrote
Austria: Its Literary, Scientific, and Medical Institutions
to earn money, to further his professional reputation, or to genuinely influence state policy, as he claims in the preface, is unclear. What is clear is his determination to learn everything about Austrian government policy and its effect on society.

One of the topics upon which William dwelt at length was the rather anomalous treatment of illegitimacy in Austria. Convinced that government policy all too often reeked of the schoolmaster, William was pleased to find in Austria a system partial to illegitimate births. Indeed so partial that it gave them preferential treatment. William's interest in maternity came partly from the year he spent in Dublin's Rotunda, but also probably from his personal experience as the father of an illegitimate child. What impressed him in Austria was the dispensation allowed to unmarried women, who could enter hospital in strict secrecy, ‘masked, veiled, or otherwise disguised'. The women were not obliged to register, other than to jot down their name and address, which was kept in a sealed envelope and only opened if death required the police to inform relatives. And should the pregnant woman choose to stay veiled while giving birth, no doctor could insist on seeing her face. Families and fathers could not enter the ward without the patient's consent. Thus was the law and patriarchy kept at a distance. According to William, women in Austria did not lose class by giving birth to an illegitimate child, at least, he added, not ‘to the same extent as in other countries'. William praised the system as ‘among the many humane and charitable institutions of the imperial city'.

Even so, he was not blind to the many injustices hidden in the system. For instance, the law discriminated against married women, for they could only gain free admittance to maternity hospitals on proof of a certificate of poverty, whereas unmarried women, whether rich or poor, could enter without payment. The whole purpose of the policy was to deter infanticide. The statistics William gathered proved invaluable in showing that the change in the law had reduced the killing or desertion of infants, though concomitantly it increased the proportion of unlawful births, at the time standing at one illegitimate child to every 2.24 legitimate. Statistics throughout Europe reveal ratios similar to Vienna's, with Munich scoring the highest, so high that in 1838 the number of illegitimate births outstripped legitimate ones by 270 in total.