Franny Moyle (24 page)

During her editorship of the RDS gazette Constance tackled many issues. She oversaw articles on the ‘Dangers of Women's Dress', she debated the term ‘Dress', she commissioned a piece on ‘Why Women Age Rapidly', which suggested that the inhibition of the lungs by tight lacing had much to answer for, and was constantly reminding her readers of the various forms of rational dress available, including the two most popular types of divided skirt, the Harberton ‘which is narrow … and has a narrow box pleat round it', and the Wilson, ‘which is about a yard and a half wide round each leg'.
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She also related news of pioneering women who chose to wear men's clothing ‘in the exercise of their profession', and published reviews on the more feminine ‘trouser dresses'. ‘Those who have worn these dresses have testified … to the delightful sense of freedom that results from the removal of petticoats.'
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She was also careful to remind her readers of the genuine tragedies that still occurred to women wearing what Constance termed ‘portable firetraps'. She recounted the story of Rosina Williams, aged thirty-six, from Camberwell, who ‘was in the front room in a basement when a spark set her clothing alight', and of Eliza Dixon, aged fifty-five, who, when linen on a clothes horse began to burn, attempted to extinguish the blaze but herself caught fire.
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Interestingly, the fascination that Japan held for Constance and many of her Aesthetic contemporaries was also reflected in the magazine. Members of the RDS were concerned to learn that many Japanese women were adopting Western dress, and ‘were anxious that they should first know that those who have studied the subject hold that there is great need of improvement in certain particulars'. The Japanese question was one that the RDS actively pursued. By the April 1889 edition of the magazine Constance was able to inform her readers that the RDS committee had met Mr Shimada, the Japanese editor of the
Daily News
, ‘who had undertaken to ventilate the questions raised by the Rational Dress Society in the columns of the Japanese paper'. Constance adds that ‘Letters have also been
received from a lady doctor in Russia, requesting admission to the Society … This Lady states that the subject of Rational Dress is exciting much interest in her country.'

By mid-1888 the appetite for politics that her involvement with the RDS had sparked in Constance was fully ignited. If the first four years of her marriage had been essentially ‘artistic', the years to come would be ‘campaigning'. What, alas, she could not have foreseen was that as she pursued further rights and a higher profile for her own sex, her and Oscar's paths would begin substantially to diverge. The interests of
The Woman's World
had aligned Constance and Oscar both socially and professionally. But this alignment would prove brief. Oscar would soon succumb to different temptations and ambitions, ones that would quickly alienate him from the world in which his wife would continue to invest.

8

‘Not to kiss females'

‘M
Y CHILDREN ARE
growing and thriving splendidly, though unfortunately my nurse has taken it into her head to be married this July which is to say the least of it, annoying,' Constance informed Otho in March 1888.
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Her brother, having left Nellie, was still in Switzerland with Mary. Brother and sister found themselves further apart from one another than ever before.

Baby is quite strong and fat and long, and he can walk and is beginning to talk. Cyril adores me and Vyvyan more or less dislikes me and adores his father but I suppose this will come right in the end. People say he is pretty, but he was prettier when he was waxy and white and delicate. He is not as tall as Cyril was but is very much fatter. What you have lost by parting from your dear two boys, it's only the babes that keep one young and fresh and happy.
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Oscar and Constance were in some respects forward-thinking parents. Unlike many of their class and generation, they spent time playing with their children, and Constance certainly would do many of the domestic chores that others left to a nanny. Her letters are full of accounts of her taking her children to doctors, to tea parties and shopping for toys and clothes. Even when they were babes in arms, Oscar found his sons compelling,
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and as they grew older, he indulged his own sense of fun in the games he enjoyed with them.

Vyvyan remembered his father playing with his sons with childlike delight, down on his knees pretending to be a lion or wolf. ‘And there was nothing half hearted in his methods of play,' Vyvyan admitted:

One day he arrived with a toy milk cart drawn by a horse with real hair on it. All the harness undid and took off, and the churns with which the cart was filled could be removed and opened. When my father discovered this he immediately went downstairs and came back with a jug of milk with which he proceeded to fill the churns. We then all tore round the nursery table, slopping milk all over the place, until the arrival of our nurse put an end to that game.
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But alongside what seems like their modern approach to parenting, the Wildes could also be very Victorian. In addition to their parents' attentions, the children were attended to by nurses and governesses. And they were often dispatched to stay with friends and relatives, normally on the basis of some need, be it to do with a particular ailment that would benefit from better air or in connection with some character-forming exercise.

Constance took to heart the public debate on health. She was obsessed with the health of her children, and the effect of London fog on them was of particular concern to her. Constance worried particularly over Vyvyan, who she was convinced was sickly. He was often sent to Reading to stay with Constance's friend Jean Palmer, the wife of Walter Palmer, of Huntley & Palmer biscuits. Despite his tender age, these rest cures could mean weeks away from home on a regular basis, a routine that Constance described to Georgina Mount-Temple in her letters:

I am sending Vyvyan to stay by himself with Mrs Palmer for a month in hopes that complete change of surroundings may do him good. His nurse thinks he is going to have a ‘St Vitus's Dance' as she calls it, but I don't think he is really so bad as that. Nurse will take him tomorrow, and stay with him till Monday and- then come back to Cyril.
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Constance notes how furious Cyril would be with her ‘for taking his little play-fellow from him'. Despite such rebellions, Constance was in the habit of separating the boys. They would often holiday in different locations, and when it came to their education later on, different schools were chosen for them.

With her nursery staff engaged, Constance had sufficient time to continue to pursue her interests. In addition to her writing for children, and her commitment to the cause of Rational Dress, as the 1880s drew to a close she began to focus on new projects. Constance's strident views about dress reform had revealed her as a truly political animal. The genes of one-time MP John Horatio Lloyd were surfacing not in Otho but in his sister, and now, along with a group of other pioneering women, she began to take on other high-profile political causes.
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‘I have been political lately,' she informed her brother in March 1888. ‘It has become the fashion to have political parties in London and some of the swells manage to get Gladstone, so I have seen a good deal of him lately and have heard him speak too, which was a real treat.'
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Just a month after this boast Constance found herself with Gladstone yet again. On the evening of 16 April 1888 the Marylebone branch of the Women's Liberal Association held a political party at the home of a Mr and Mrs Blyth in Portland Place, which enjoyed the attendance of ‘the best known liberals in the Borough'.
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Oscar and Constance were there, and one imagines that on this occasion Mr Wilde, finding himself on his wife's home ground, was there very much at her bidding.

The Liberal Gladstone held tremendous appeal for Constance. Not only was he a supporter of women's rights, but his wife Catherine was in the process of organizing the regional Women's Liberal Associations, of which Constance was a member of the Chelsea branch, under a national banner: The Women's Liberal Federation.

In addition to his sympathy for female equality, Gladstone was an ardent supporter of Home Rule for Ireland. And this was also a cause to which Constance subscribed. But Constance's version of Liberalism was far more radical than that of her hero Gladstone. A few months before this particular date with the great man, Constance had signalled just how extreme her liberal leanings might be when she attended the trial of Robert Cunninghame Graham.

Cunninghame Graham was a Scot who had been brought up largely overseas. But in the early 1880s he returned to the UK to pursue a political career. A regular attendee at William Morris's socialist gatherings, he quickly developed radical socialist ideals that placed him at the most controversial limits of the politics of his day. In the 1886 general election he became a Liberal MP on a ticket that called for the abolition of the House of Lords, universal suffrage, widespread nationalization of mining and industry, the disestablishment of the Church of England and Home Rule for Scotland. Within a year of his election he had gained considerable notoriety as the first MP to swear in the Commons, uttering the word ‘damn', and subsequently found himself suspended.

But it was Cunninghame Graham's ardent belief in the right to free speech that put him in the dock in December 1887 and increased his notoriety further. On 13 November 1887 protesters in favour of Irish Home Rule had marched on Trafalgar Square. The protest had been prompted by the recent imprisonment of the editor of the Irish nationalist newspaper
United Ireland
, William O'Brien, who had been campaigning on behalf of Irish tenants against their forced eviction by landowners. Several British radicals, including Cunninghame Graham, joined the protest, only to find themselves at the heart of what would become known as ‘Bloody Sunday'. As the protest apparently began to turn into a riot, the British police and military in attendance applied such force that there were over a hundred casualties. Cunninghame Graham himself was badly beaten, arrested and taken to Bow Street.

On 30 November 1887 Cunninghame Graham was tried alongside a Mr John Burns for their involvement in the riot. Constance was one of three women supporters that the national press noted as attending the trial in a show of support. The other women were Mrs Graham and Mrs Ashton Dilke, a notable campaigner for women's suffrage. Oscar, busy in Tite Street making plans for
The Woman's World
, did not attend. His own date with the Bow Street dock was yet to come.

Cunninghame Graham was eventually sentenced to six weeks'
imprisonment in Pentonville for his part in the Bloody Sunday riots. The friendship between Constance and his family never weakened. Cunninghame Graham would go on to live with Constance's great friend Walter Harris in Morocco, and Constance continued to mention members of the Graham family in her letters well after the event.
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These radical tendencies of Mrs Oscar Wilde soon found wider expression. Indeed on the very day that Constance had taken Oscar to meet Gladstone in Portland Place she had also attended a ‘conference of ladies' in Victoria. This time it was the Women's Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Association. And Constance was giving a paper ‘in which she offered a number of practical suggestions to wives, mothers and school mistresses'.
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Like her journalism, Constance's public speaking was commonsensical and no-nonsense. She was an inherently practical person, who considered how political belief might be translated into practical action. Her thesis was that war might be avoided and peace promoted if instilled at the earliest possible opportunity, as children were educated.

The
Pall Mall Gazette
reported her suggestion that ‘children should be taught in the nursery to be against war'. Constance did not want nurses and mothers to ban toy soldiers and guns, as some of her peers were apparently advocating, but she did believe that mothers could instil a dislike of war in their offspring. More importantly, she felt that as part of their schooling children should be exposed more ‘to great international questions of the day'.

The Women's Liberal Federation quickly provided Constance with a regular public platform on which to express her liberal political views. It was not merely international peace that Constance dared to take on, but also the question of Irish Home Rule. At the 1889 annual conference of the WLF Constance gave a paper on this subject in which she pointed out ‘that self-governing nations were not in the habit of tolerating outrages in their midst, and she was convinced that, given Home Rule, so far from the sister country aiding or
abetting any foreign conspiracy against us, she would prove our best friend and virtual sea wall against invasion from the West'.
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In some ways, her appearance on political platforms had become Constance's response to her early desire to go on the stage. Serious and studious by nature, she must have worked hard to improve her stage presence and public speaking, efforts that some critics made note of. ‘I was astonished and delighted to notice yesterday … how very much Mrs Oscar Wilde has improved in public speaking,' one critic noted after a WLF event. ‘She was always graceful and always charming, but now there is an earnestness and an ease about her which is the result of practice in platform speaking, and I shall not be surprised if in a few years Mrs Wilde has become one of the most popular among “platform ladies”.'
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But Constance the public speaker, whose activities were often reported nationwide, did not attract unanimous praise. One correspondent for the
Birmingham Daily Post
found himself horrified by Constance and her WLF associates, who took ‘subjects most vital to the existence of the Government' and ‘discussed and dismissed them' in what the ladies' maids denominate ‘the twinkling of a stay-lace'. Mrs Wilde was accused of ‘solemn trilling' upon subjects with which she had ‘no concern'.
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