The Fall of the House of Wilde (8 page)

Jane Elgee, Oscar's mother, first came to public attention by writing poetry and articles for a literary journal called the
Nation
. Her first contribution was in 1846 when she was twenty-five. She wrote under a pseudonym, using either John Fanshawe Ellis or Speranza. One of her first poems, ‘The Faithless Shepherds', written at a time when famine was extreme, takes as its central theme the failure of moral leadership. The poem imagines landlords as cold, disengaged, inhumane – failing in their social duty.

Dead! Dead! Ye are dead while ye live;

Ye've a name that ye live – but are dead.

Neither counsel nor love did ye give,

And your lips never uttered a word

While swift ruin downward sped,

And the plague raged on undisturbed

. . .

Not a thought in the dull, cold brains,

Of how ye should bear your part,

When summoned the strife to brave,

For your Country, with Death and the Grave.
¹

In ‘France in '93', published in the
Nation
on 27 March 1847, Jane took the bread riots during the French Revolution as analogous to the famine in Ireland. The poem pictures an Armageddon, as a volcanic surge of mass violence is the price paid by a negligent monarchy. ‘Ghastly fruit their lances bear –/ Noble heads with streaming hair'. . . ‘Royal blood of King and Queen/ Streameth from the guillotine;/ Wildly on the people goeth,/ Reaping what the noble soweth.'
²
Undoubtedly this was meant to discomfit those responsible or complicit in the mismanagement of famine. Such poems led many to condemn the
Nation
as subversive. Leigh Hunt, the English poet and journalist, liked the ‘trumpet-like music and political vigour' of the writings, but was startled by the vehemence.
³

Established in 1843 by Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy, the
Nation
was a literary journal designed to broaden awareness of culture. It was the vocal arm of the Young Ireland movement, whose motto was ‘Educate that you may be free'. Davis, the inspiration behind the movement, believed that political independence should be accompanied by mental independence and by the self-confidence that comes from education, self-expression and taking initiative. First the Irish had to free themselves from a colonial mentality, of playing slave-tenant to the master-landlord; only then would emancipation make a difference and political independence make sense.

In an article Jane wrote in 1846 on Daniel O'Connell, the politician and campaigner for Irish emancipation, she makes the point that seventeen years after emancipation, Catholics were still ‘a proscribed and outcast race'. ‘One generation had died in their fetters [the penal laws], another was passing away, and a third springing to manhood, the slaves of this atrocious system, which excluded the whole Roman Catholic nation from every benefit of the constitution.' She goes on to invoke politician Edmund Burke, ‘It was a machine, says Burke, speaking of the penal laws, of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity, of man.'
⁴

Jane's political views were independently formed. Her family were loyal to monarchy and Church. Airing political views, especially such radical ones for her background, was contentious, as is clear from a piece she wrote in the correspondence section of the
Nation.
‘While reading Lamartine's brilliant descriptions of the women who led French society at that period, one cannot help animadverting, par parenthese, on the absurd idea prevalent amongst us, that politics should not be discussed by a woman – as if the destiny of her country was not a nobler object for thought and subject for conversation than the gossip of a neighbourhood. French ladies are wiser.'
⁵
Impatient with drawing-room chit-chat, as her correspondence indicates, she earned a reputation as a bluestocking and enjoyed flaunting her learning.

Jane's ability to speak with confidence on society and politics came from her education. She was educated at home by a governess, though for how long we do not know. Her knowledge displays the idiosyncrasy of the autodidact. She was familiar with Hegel, and her comments on Herder, Fichte, Kant and Schlegel show her at ease with the German Enlightenment. She shared the contemporary fascination for the mystic philosopher, Swedenborg. And whether in translation or the original, she was well acquainted with the works of Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Cervantes, Calderón and the German poet, Jean Paul Richter. On Calderón and Richter she would produce in-depth essays, showing comprehensive knowledge of their works. She also had the most extraordinary gift for languages and contributed to the
Nation
translations of poetry from Russian, Turkish, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish, as well as Latin and Greek. Not surprisingly, she revered Shakespeare, Milton, Greek tragedians, Homer, Plato, Aristotle and the Bible. She loved the sound of Luther's booming words – ‘the deeds of few men can equal the strength of Luther's words' – calling his prose a ‘combat'.
⁶
John Knox, she also admitted into her ‘Pantheon'. Edgar Allen Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson and, above all, Byron stood out in her league of contemporary poets. She relished the opening on the world books gave her and described her mind as ‘a portal open to all points of the compass to receive influences'.
⁷
Being largely self-educated, she avoided the gender conditioning and limitations a school curriculum typically confers.

Jane wrote an article for the
Nation
in 1847 advocating toil as a vocation and
raison d'être
. ‘Work is holy,' she declared. She planned her own day to allow for the minimum of distractions. Though her work would not begin until 11 a.m. – as she admitted in an undated letter to a friend, John Hilson – if there were no callers she continued reading until lapsing into sleep around 2 or 3 a.m. She dressed for comfort, in a loose peignoir. What she had to show for all this labour disappointed her. In response to compliments from Hilson, she pronounced herself ‘no divine Priestess after all – merely a lamp-holder in the Court of the Gentiles'. He was wrong to name her ‘a professed Literateur'. ‘By no means my friend am I one – merely a proselyte at the gate.'
⁸

In late 1847 Jane visited Scotland. We know little about her visit other than she became attracted to John Hilson, a Scottish merchant and man of letters, and developed, as she put it, ‘a monomania on the subject of Scotch perfections'. Her visit was followed by an epistolary flirtation, at least on Jane's side. She never met Hilson again. The correspondence continued, but as the years passed it dwindled. Many of the letters are undated, and most were sent between 1847 and 1851. The last letter from Hilson that Jane refers to came in 1875, when he wrote to her of the death of his daughter. Nothing, however, remains of Hilson's letters to allow us to interpret the relationship from his perspective.

Hilson was a man of strong convictions who was concerned with politics and dabbled in socialist thought – he revered Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, Hilson's letters arrived a lot less often than Jane wished. ‘Do for Heaven's sake write on the back of an invoice – on a receipt – anything rather than you shrouding yourself like a Hindoo Deity in this vast formless silence with your finger on your lip for a series of ages.' Equally unwelcome was Hilson's puritanism. No matter: Jane flaunted her liberal tastes, her ‘passion for fine acting', telling Hilson she attended the theatre every night, knowing Hilson was ‘puritan enough to be shocked at this'. She shared with him her impatience with the dull-witted among whom she circulated, and spoke of ‘the grand gatherings of the Soulless where they polka and eat', and where her talk turned heads, ‘for it is singular how these dumb souls like to listen'.

On other occasions she tried to taunt him with a descriptive picture of herself dressed for a ball in ‘black lace trimmed with bunches of gold wheat – on the head a small mantilla of black lace fastened with gold wheat to correspond'. She knew her frivolity would grate – ‘How I like to drag people down to my level when I am not in soaring mood' – and assumed his ‘upper lip curled now worse than Byron's'. She continued, ‘so here is the earnest Gurth [Hilson's pen name] with his Carlyle congue [
sic
] and Emersonian eyes obliged to attend to my toilette . . . Now I know you are looking dreadfully scornful.'
⁹
If only they could meet again, she would charm him, or so she hoped.

Jane had managed to keep her identity under wraps since she began writing for the
Nation
. But disguise could only be temporary in a society as small and gossipy as Dublin. She consented to a visit from the editor, Charles Gavan Duffy, who had been trying to find out the identity of ‘John Fanshawe Ellis'. Duffy called at her home in Lesson Street in the summer of 1846. Writing his memoirs almost half a century later, Duffy remembered being stunned at Jane's self-assurance and charm.

[Jane's] virile and sonorous songs broke on the public ear like the plash in later times of a great wave of thought in one of Swinburne's metres . . . I was greatly struck by the first contribution, and requested Mr John Fanshawe Ellis to call at the Nation office. Mr Ellis pleaded that there were difficulties that rendered this course impractical, and invited me to visit him in Lesson Street. I did so immediately, not without a secret suspicion of the transformation I was about to witness.

A smiling parlour maid, when I inquired for Mr Ellis, showed me into a drawing room, where I found only Mr George Smith, publisher to the University. ‘What,' I cried; ‘my loyal friend, are you the new volcano of sedition?' Mr Smith only answered by vanishing into a back drawing-room and returning with a tall girl on his arm, whose stately carriage and figure, flashing brown eyes and features cast in a heroic mould, seemed fit for the genius of poetry, or the spirit of revolution. He presented me to Miss Jane Francesca Elgee, in lieu of Mr John Fanshawe Ellis. Miss Elgee . . . had probably heard nothing of Irish nationality among her ordinary associates, but as the strong and generous are apt to do, had worked out convictions for herself.
¹⁰

They soon struck up a friendship. Jane looked up to Duffy, who was eight years older. She described him to Hilson as ‘the most cultivated mind I know of in Dublin'.
¹¹
Book-sharing strengthened their bond, and discussions of Carlyle's thoughts peppered their correspondence. Duffy had accompanied Carlyle on a walking tour of Ireland, and lent Jane Carlyle's biography of Cromwell, but the book failed to impress her. ‘Not even Carlyle can make the soulless iconoclast interesting,' wrote Jane. ‘It is the only work of Carlyle's I have met with in which my heart does not go along with his words.'
¹²
Yet Jane was determined to finish what she had begun and requested the next two volumes. Carlyle's belief that dilettantism was almost a mortal sin and that the supreme justification of a man's life was honest work, solidly performed, spoke to Jane in her early years. Most frequently on Carlyle's lips was a quote from Goethe on the seriousness of life, ‘
Ernst ist das Leben.
'
¹³
And one surmises that Jane echoed Carlyle's counsel when she wrote in one of her essays: ‘Be earnest, earnest, earnest: mad, if thou wilt; Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven, And it thy last deed, ere the judgement-day.'
¹⁴
Oscar would come to satirise the Victorian watchword in his play,
The Importance of Being Earnest.

By the time Jane met Duffy, he had already led an eventful life. He had been imprisoned in 1843–4 alongside Daniel O'Connell on charges of sedition. Then he lost his close friend and political collaborator, Thomas Davis, who died on 16 September 1845, aged thirty-one. Davis and Duffy were both politically engaged in lobbying for repeal of the union of Britain and Ireland. With the death of Davis, the Repeal movement, as it was known, lost his conciliatory skills and fractured. Other factors contributed. In June 1846, Sir Robert Peel's Tory government fell, and the Liberals under Lord John Russell came to power. O'Connell tried to persuade the Repeal movement to support the Liberals. But on 15 June 1846, nationalist Thomas F. Meagher denounced O'Connell's move, suspecting the Repeal cause was being sacrificed to the Whig government in return for favours in the form of placements. O'Connell accused his opponents – most prominent among whom were William Smith O'Brien, Meagher and Duffy – of being secret enemies of the Catholic Church, and coined the term ‘Young Irelanders' to signify his distance from them.

Through Duffy Jane got more involved with the
Nation'
s circle of writers. One memoirist described the journal's offices as ‘a sort of bureau of national affairs, political, literary, industrial, and artistic'.
¹⁵
Jane found herself at home with their passion and their poetry, telling Hilson, ‘there is an earnestness almost amounting to fanaticism in the Patriotism of all the Young Ireland Party combined with great genius and a glowing poetical transcendentalism. They are all poets and I know of no genius outside their circle in Ireland.' She was particularly drawn to Meagher for his energy and daring – traits most glorified by Jane. She described him as ‘handsome, daring, reckless of consequences, wild, bright, flashing eyes, glowing colour and the most beautiful mouth, teeth and smile I ever beheld'.
¹⁶
Born in 1823, Meagher was the son of a wealthy Waterford merchant, who also sat in Parliament from 1847 to 1857. Educated by the Jesuits, first at Clongowes Wood, Kildare and then at Stonyhurst, Meagher was a remarkable orator, and won notoriety for fiery speeches, leading Thackeray to dub him ‘Meagher of the Sword'. William Smith O'Brien was older, born 1803. He was the second son of Sir Edward O'Brien, and had been educated at Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge. He was MP for Limerick and leader of Young Ireland. Charles Trevelyan, treasurer of the Whig government during the famine, compared the Young Irelanders to the ‘
jeunes gens de Paris
'. ‘They were public-spirited, enthusiastic men, possessed . . . of that crude information on political subjects which induced several of the Whig and Conservative leaders to be Radicals in their youth. They supplied all the good writing, the history, the poetry, and the political philosophy, such as it was, of the party.'
¹⁷
Indeed, Smith O'Brien and Meagher spent time in Paris discussing revolutionary tactics.