Even as an Irishman Wilde set out to defy late Victorian stereotypes. On the English stage, and in the press, the Irish were often presented as feckless, drunken, sentimental and dirty ‘Paddies’. Wilde, like Parnell, always presented himself as calm, urbane, impeccably dressed; he also discarded his native brogue soon after matriculating at Oxford. Wilde’s philosophical and historical outlook, which was rigorously intellectual and scientific rather than emotional and intuitive, can also be seen in this context. ‘England is the land of intellectual fogs,’ he told Shaw, and he felt it was Celts like themselves who, contrary to popular prejudice, were best placed, because of their disinterested minds, to blow those fogs away.
In his 1895 appearances at the Old Bailey, Wilde seemed to revel in presenting himself as the subversive ‘Other’ of the late Victorian bourgeoisie, challenging, from the witness box, the ‘seven deadly virtues’ so dear to their heart. Rather than being diligent, he boasted in the courtroom of frittering his time away in restaurants. Where the bourgeoisie were thrifty, he proudly announced he spent £50 a week at the Savoy. Instead of associating with respectable members of his own class he socialized and slept with young men from the gutter. In preference to a noble life guided by notions of duty and responsibility, he declared that pleasure was the only thing one should live for, and self-realization the primary aim of existence. The fact that Wilde realized himself through homosexual rather than heterosexual relationships naturally made things much worse. At his first trial, the Pooterish men who comprised the jury – there was a stockbroker, a bank manager and several ‘gentlemen’ from Clapton – must have thought that the seven deadly sins were being paraded before them.
Wilde’s eventual conviction for ‘gross indecency’ caused a moral panic in late Victorian England. The nature of his offence was abhorrent to the respectable; moreover the trials had suggested that Wilde was a leading figure in a vast network of gentlemen who not only loved other men, but preferred men from the lowest orders. Only six years before Wilde’s trial, in what became known as the ‘Cleveland Street Scandal’, a brothel of boys working for the Post Office was revealed as the trysting place for members of the aristocracy, and even of the royal family. It was as if the hierarchies of power and society had been subverted and made rotten to the extent that aristocracy itself might be seen as a gigantic confidence trick. It was one of the first occasions, outside the enchanted realm of fiction, when the private lives of gentlemen, the staple of society, were investigated and found to be false and hollow.
These scandals and trials also represented, albeit in subliminal fashion, the overturning of sexual roles which the ‘New Woman’ and the loosening of the matrimonial laws pointed towards. It is no coincidence perhaps that Wilde himself was a supporter of the ‘New Woman’ to such an extent that soon after his conviction Punch announced: ‘THE END OF THE NEW WOMAN – The crash has come at last.’ The New Woman was the representative of advanced and adventurous ideas not unconnected in the public mind with decadent sexuality. The emancipated woman, as she was also known, challenged the conventional ideas of marriage, respectability, and legal and educational inequality. Cartoons in the satirical press were filled with images of women riding bicycles or wearing bloomers or sporting wire-framed spectacles; they were considered mannish or part of a ‘shrieking sisterhood’. Many wanted careers rather than continuous childbirth. It is interesting to note then that it is women who are the true protagonists of Wilde’s dramas, from Salome and Mrs Erlynne to Lady Bracknell and the Courtesan-Saint. They are witty and unafraid. They control the worlds Wilde portrays. They manipulate and dominate the men. So much has been said of Victorian patriarchy and the subjugation of women that it might be interesting to inquire into Victorian matriarchy and the subjugation of men. Females were the lawgivers of society – from the mansions of the West End depicted by Wilde to the back alleys of the East End – and their power was all the greater for being largely unacknowledged.
28
The terrible childbed
Salisbury’s cabinet prompted the great war at the end of the century. The Cape of Good Hope, known familiarly as the Cape Colony, was a British colony whose inhabitants were largely Afrikaners. The Orange Free State and Transvaal were neighbouring republics established by the Boers, the first Dutch-speaking settlers in southern Africa, in their quest for self-defence and self-definition. This led directly to the First Boer War, in which the British were soundly defeated and were forced to accept Boer control of the Transvaal under British suzerainty.
The discovery of diamonds made the Cape Colony rich under its prime minister, Cecil Rhodes, but then, fifteen years later, gold similarly transformed the fortunes of the Transvaal. English settlers rushed in with so great a thirst for the gold stuff that they soon formed the majority of the adult white population of what was still a Boer republic under the presidency of Paul Kruger. The English, known as ‘Uitlanders’, were obliged to pay 90 per cent of the taxation. They were susceptible to hastily imposed taxes, but they had no role in the government and no equality with the Dutch. So two hostile white tribes lived in the midst of a much greater black population. The tensions grew apace as the mining of gold became more and more successful.
This was the scene when plans were formed to invade the Transvaal and seize it for Britain. Leander Starr Jameson led a band of mercenaries into the territory in order to foment a rebellion among the Uitlanders and the rest of the British settlers. Five hundred men, with six Maxim guns, had invaded Kruger’s republic in order to overawe his people of the rifle and the Book. News of them reached the Boer government of Pretoria within a day, and they were still nowhere near their destination of Johannesburg, approximately 34 miles away. The raid, at the very end of 1895, was a complete failure from the start. Jameson and the other conspirators were surrounded and captured by the Boers who dispatched them to London for condign punishment. On the news of the defeat the Kaiser sent a telegraph to Kruger, congratulating him on his victory. The British press reacted furiously against this German slight, with headlines like ‘Get Ready’, ‘England Yet’ and ‘Hands Off’. The music hall refrain of the period was ‘We’re not going to stand it’. It served the German purpose, however, to whip up its own public opinion in response and to justify an increase in its naval power.
The Jameson Raid was financed and authorized by the magnate who had made a fortune out of diamonds, Alfred Beit, and by Cecil Rhodes himself. Yet it was generally believed to have been despatched at the instigation of the British politicians at Whitehall, particularly that of the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Salisbury, as prime minister, might have been suspected of knowledge if not of complicity, but it seems that he was only vaguely aware of the plans for the raid.
The lack of support for the British raid, which had all the characteristics of an invasion, and the universal obloquy which it attracted, emphasized what Arthur Balfour and others called ‘our national isolation’. The isolation had suddenly become more intense. Kruger and the Transvaal were the heroes of the hour, and the British were condemned as mischievous, incompetent, weak and, more precisely, conspiratorial. It seems probable that, after all, Chamberlain and the Whitehall gang had been in close contact with Rhodes and Beit. They were everywhere denounced.
These were the conditions leading to the Second Boer War, which was waged from 1899 to 1902. Some were ready and eager for battle. Jan Smuts, for the Boers, declared: ‘our volk throughout South Africa must be baptized with the baptism of blood and fire before they can be admitted among the great peoples of the world’. Kruger realized from the logistics of the Jameson Raid that his military forces, largely volunteer, were not altogether adequate. So he set about creating a viable military presence in the Transvaal. He was buying arms from Germany and elsewhere; Chamberlain informed Salisbury that Transvaal ‘had a stock of artillery, rifles and ammunitions of all sorts enough to furnish a European army’. The English were more conciliatory, and had appointed Alfred Milner as high commissioner for Southern Africa and governor of Cape Colony as a more sympathetic figure than his predecessor. Nevertheless, he was an English imperialist who considered himself to be part of ‘a superior race’ who ought to govern southern Africa.