Today, the 19th of April, is the anniversary of the death of Sir William Wilde, the father of Oscar.
Sir William was every bit as eminent as his youngest son. His achievements are listed on his memorial, which I visited recently. He was a prominent ear and eye surgeon, the "surgeon oculist to Queen Victoria", and founder of St. Mark's Opthalmic Hospital in Dublin. The Swedes awarded him the Order of the North Star and the British knighted him for his work on the census.
How this epitome of an establishment Victorian gentlemen fell for Jane Elgee, a revolutionary poet, and sired such a mould-breaker as Oscar Wilde, might not seem immediately obvious. But as well as being a doctor and a philanthropist, Sir William was a lover of history and literature, and particularly of the folk tales of the Irish. He accepted these stories as payment for the medical bills his poorest patients would otherwise have been unable to afford.
Sir William, like Oscar, was an infamous philanderer. He sired an illegitimate son and named the boy Henry Wilson (Wil-son, Wilde's son) and, with another woman, two daughters: Emily and Mary. Henry, like his father, grew up to be a doctor. The girls died tragically when their ballgowns caught fire at a Hallowe'en party.
And, also like Oscar, Sir William's love life led him to court. He had become involved with a young female patient, Mary Travers. How this entanglement began is not known for sure, but it ended in disaster. Mary Travers, feeling that the doctor has taken advantage of her, printed pamphlets about a lecherous physician named Quilp: a thinly disguised portrait of Sir William. When she engaged newspaper boys to distribute the pamphlets in the street it all got too much for Lady Wilde, who wrote an angry letter to Travers' father. A libel case swiftly followed, which Lady Wilde lost. The trial took Dublin by storm, and perhaps Oscar had these events in mind when he later sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel.
Although the monument in Dublin's Mount Jerome Cemetery also memorialises Lady Wilde and the couple's three children, only Sir William is buried there. Their first son, William, was buried in a paupers' grave at Kensal Green in London, as was Lady Wilde herself. Oscar, of course, is awaiting the final trumpet under Jacob Epstein's monument in Père Lachaise. Isola, who died of a sudden illness in childhood and a lock of whose hair Oscar carried with him until his own death, is buried in St. John's Churchyard, Edgeworthstown.
Sir William's monument is easy to find. Walk along the main path leading from the Mount Jerome Cemetery entrance to the church. Once you reach the church, turn left. You will reach the monument after a few steps.
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