Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 | Page 8

was for the jury to consider whether the letter was a libel and
if so what the amount of damages should be.
His Lordship recalled the jury at Mr. Butt's request to say that in
assessing damages they might also take into consideration the fact that
the defence was practically a justification of the libel. The
fair-mindedness of the judge was conspicuous from first to last, and
was worthy of the high traditions of the Irish Bench.
After deliberating for a couple of hours the jury brought in a verdict

which had a certain humour in it. They awarded to Miss Travers a
farthing damages and intimated that the farthing should carry costs. In
other words they rated Miss Travers' virtue at the very lowest coin of
the realm, while insisting that Sir William Wilde should pay a couple
of thousands of pounds in costs for having seduced her.
It was generally felt that the verdict did substantial justice; though the
jury, led away by patriotic sympathy with Lady Wilde, the true
"Speranza," had been a little hard on Miss Travers. No one doubted that
Sir William Wilde had seduced his patient. He had, it appeared, an
unholy reputation, and the girl's admission that he had accused her of
being "unnaturally passionless" was accepted as the true key of the
enigma. This was why he had drawn away from the girl, after seducing
her. And it was not unnatural under the circumstances that she should
become vindictive and revengeful.
Such inferences as these, I drew from the comments of the Irish papers
at the time; but naturally I wished if possible to hear some trustworthy
contemporary on the matter. Fortunately such testimony was
forthcoming.
A Fellow of Trinity, who was then a young man, embodied the best
opinion of the time in an excellent pithy letter. He wrote to me that the
trial simply established, what every one believed, that "Sir William
Wilde was a pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality and
cowardice (funking the witness-box left him without a defender!) and
that his wife was a highfalutin' pretentious creature whose pride was as
extravagant as her reputation founded on second-rate verse-making....
Even when a young woman she used to keep her rooms in Merrion
Square in semi-darkness; she laid the paint on too thick for any
ordinary light, and she gave herself besides all manner of airs."
This incisive judgment of an able and fairly impartial contemporary
observer[2] corroborates, I think, the inferences which one would
naturally draw from the newspaper accounts of the trial. It seems to me
that both combine to give a realistic photograph, so to speak, of Sir
William and Lady Wilde. An artist, however, would lean to a more
kindly picture. Trying to see the personages as they saw themselves he

would balance the doctor's excessive sensuality and lack of self-control
by dwelling on the fact that his energy and perseverance and intimate
adaptation to his surroundings had brought him in middle age to the
chief place in his profession, and if Lady Wilde was abnormally vain, a
verse-maker and not a poet, she was still a talented woman of
considerable reading and manifold artistic sympathies.
Such were the father and mother of Oscar Wilde.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] As he has died since this was written, there is no longer any reason
for concealing his name: R.Y. Tyrrell, for many years before his death
Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin.

CHAPTER II
The Wildes had three children, two sons and a daughter. The first son
was born in 1852, a year after the marriage, and was christened after his
father William Charles Kingsbury Wills. The second son was born two
years later, in 1854 and the names given to him seem to reveal the
Nationalist sympathies and pride of his mother. He was christened
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde; but he appears to have suffered
from the pompous string only in extreme youth. At school he concealed
the "Fingal," as a young man he found it advisable to omit the
"O'Flahertie."
In childhood and early boyhood Oscar was not considered as quick or
engaging or handsome as his brother, Willie. Both boys had the benefit
of the best schooling of the time. They were sent as boarders to the
Portora School at Enniskillen, one of the four Royal schools of Ireland.
Oscar went to Portora in 1864 at the age of nine, a couple of years after
his brother. He remained at the school for seven years and left it on
winning an Exhibition for Trinity College, Dublin, when he was just
seventeen.

The facts hitherto collected and published about Oscar as a schoolboy
are sadly meagre and insignificant. Fortunately for my readers I have
received from Sir Edward Sullivan, who was a contemporary of Oscar