Who Was Dracula? (18 page)

Of course, once Wilde was convicted in the English court, a number of late Victorian authors expunged his name from their biographies or histories, befuddled by his status in society and choosing the path of least resistance. But for Stoker to omit any reference to Wilde demonstrates either the author's embarrassment or a coarse, careless attempt at revenge.

When it came to Oscar Wilde, Stoker had reasons for both embarrassment and revenge. Wilde's story was intertwined with Stoker's and, indeed, with
Dracula
's.

THE PLAYWRIGHT, “THE MYSTERY OF HIS SIN”

I
n his book
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
, Bram Stoker worked hard to include every famous person and surround Irving with fame. The book is often dismissed as hagiography.

But it is much more complicated than that. Like many of Henry Irving's most popular spectacles, the audience—the reader—becomes fascinated with the sheer stage management of this two-volume
Reminiscences
. This is Bram Stoker's show, told from his own “personal” perspective. Why have some events, people, and recollections been pushed into the spotlight and others hidden backstage?

It becomes apparent that a significant part of the story is who, or what, has been locked in the dressing room.

—

As the story favors Irving, the author has sometimes ignored his personal life, so Stoker barely mentions his own wife. She only factors into the story—“the wife”—when he discusses moving to London or meeting with Hall Caine. He never mentions his son, Noel. He omits mention of any of his novels or short stories, including
Dracula
.

Louis Austin and Austin Brereton, two employees who openly competed with Stoker for Irving's attention, aren't credited with any work at the Lyceum but have been relegated to Stoker's long list of guests at the Beefsteak Room. In
Personal Reminiscences
, this list of small type is just one step from complete exile.

Information about the play
The Medicine Man
has been expunged. In the index, the name of the play appears, but without a single page number next to it; that's a hint that information has been edited out. The only reference to the play is in a list of Irving's productions. At another place in the text, Stoker mentions the names of the authors preparing a work—it is simply “the play,” and never named.

Did he eliminate
The Medicine Man
because it was a failure? That's too simple an explanation. Stoker is surprisingly honest about Irving's financial mistakes and failed productions. He mentions other works that were “costly and unsuccessful” and demonstrates that he can be a gentleman, offering the famous actor a fig leaf for his decency when other failures are discussed: “Irving made himself a personal success; it was the play in each case that was not successful.” So
The Medicine Man
seems to present a case of exceptional embarrassment. This was the play produced in the shadow of
Trilby
and
Dracula
. Instead of taking Stoker's advice, Irving had chosen to commission
The Medicine Man
, a story wreathed in hypnosis, murder, and the occult.

More embarrassment has been omitted from
Personal Reminiscences
: George Bernard Shaw's name never appears. By rights, Stoker should have included him as a famous visitor to the Lyceum and an almost collaborator with Irving and Terry. But he found it difficult to deal with Shaw's nagging criticisms of Irving.

In the book, Stoker defended Irving against Shaw's charge that he had sought knighthood without mentioning Shaw's name; Stoker simply writes, “A statement was made. . . .”

Even worse, shortly after Irving's death, Shaw became infamous for his obituary of the actor. Shaw had been asked by a Viennese newspaper to write the obituary. One of his sentences returned to his usual criticism, with a dose of Shavian honesty: “Irving took no interest in anything except himself . . . and was not interested even in himself except as an imaginary figure in an imaginary setting.”

This phrase was badly translated into German for
Neue Freie Presse
and then badly translated back into English for the British press, where the sentence was published as, “He was a narrow-minded egoist, devoid of culture, and living on the dream of his own greatness.”

It was a misunderstanding that Irving's friends never quite understood nor forgave.

—

But the most astonishing omission in
Personal Reminiscences
was Oscar Wilde. Here, the exile was complete. His name was removed, the hints of his presence were erased, and the list of famous, glittering guests was scrubbed clean of Wilde. It is as if he had never existed in the London theater world.

Of course, as Wilde was one of the late Victorian theater's greatest figures—today we might conclude, the greatest figure—a childhood friend of Stoker, a suitor to his wife, Florence, a great admirer and associate of Irving, a frequent visitor to the theater and the Beefsteak Room, a famous wit who offered poems to Irving's guests, a loving friend and admirer of Terry—scrubbing the record of Wilde was a Herculean task. He was omitted for the same reason that many Victorians quietly red-penciled his name from memoirs or reviews. He had humiliated society with his homosexuality, his court case, and his jail sentence. Many of Wilde's friends regretted his time in the spotlight. When Stoker wrote his
Personal Reminiscences
, he did something about it. He simply pretended that Wilde had never played a part.

—

For decades, it was popular to suppose that
Dracula
had been inspired by events in Stoker's life. Jonathan Harker's cruel imprisonment in Dracula's castle was easily seen as a sad tribute to his friend Oscar Wilde, who was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years behind bars in 1895. But when Bram Stoker's notes for the novel were rediscovered in the 1970s in Philadelphia, researchers were amazed to find that Stoker had devised that part of the novel in 1890—“a prisoner for a time”—and almost certainly outlined Harker's confinement by the time he assigned all of the events to a calendar, in 1893. That was two years before Wilde's conviction.

Oscar Wilde arrived in London in 1880, two years behind his friend from Dublin, Bram Stoker. Through his association with Henry Irving, Stoker had started work at the top of his profession, quickly welcomed into society as a man that society had to know. But this instant prestige came with a cost. Stoker had sacrificed his literary aspirations—his experiments with poetry, theatrical criticisms, and short stories. His early novels were produced hurriedly and generated little interest.

Wilde arrived in London perfectly poised for a literary career—as the winner of the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for his poem “Ravenna,” as an essayist and critic. Those early achievements were gained at the rate of a gallop, in which every step seemed effortless and artistic. During the first decade of his career, some of Wilde's ambitious work had paralleled Stoker's.

For example, Wilde toured America in 1881 with a series of lectures and visited Whitman as a devoted fan of his poetry. He returned to England and offered a popular lecture, “Personal Impressions of America.”

Stoker met Whitman two years later, in 1884, and lectured on “A Glimpse of America” the following year.

Similarly, Stoker's first book of fiction was
Under the Sunset
, a book of fairy-tale stories inspired by his Irish upbringing. Wilde's first book was
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
, his own fairy tales, in 1888.

Like Stoker, Wilde also worked as a drama critic (Wilde wrote for the
Dramatic Review
) and an editor (Wilde edited
Woman's World
magazine).

If Stoker treated Wilde as an equal when they first met in London—two ambitious young men from Dublin—it became obvious that Wilde had surpassed him in achievements. Wilde was a guest at Lyceum dinners, having befriended Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. He was turning his attention to playwriting and submitted his first play,
Vera, or, The Nihilists
, to Irving and Terry in September 1880. At the Lyceum, Oscar Wilde walked through the front door, instead of entering through the stage door.

—

Oscar Wilde was often criticized in the press for his bold clothing tastes, his long hair, and his feminine traits—for wearing lavender gloves, carrying lilies, languidly drawling his vowels, or walking with a rhythmic, loose-limbed saunter. These were all codes for an artistic homosexual, the traits that earned Wilde parody in Gilbert and Sullivan's 1881 operetta
Patience
as the foppish aesthete, Bunthorne. It wasn't a secret among his friends that Wilde was homosexual. It could not have been a secret in the theatrical world, which had always depended upon talented homosexual artists, actors, writers, and designers and drew many homosexual fans. There was a tacit acceptance within this subculture.

In 1897, Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds published the English edition of their book
Sexual Inversion
—their term for homosexuality. Through their case studies, the authors categorized it as neither immoral nor criminal. Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann pointed out the hypocrisy associated with the charge in Victorian England; it was “common in the public schools which most of the legal personages . . . had attended.”

To the Victorians, who tried to be prudish, homosexuality could be dismissed as a youthful or adolescent fixation. It was the secret obsession of lovelorn young boys in public school, a simple phase of their development. This was basically the classical Greek model, as understood by the Victorians: a sometimes embarrassing, but accepted, rite of passage. This sweet, “innocent” boy-love might be ignored if it was part of an especially artistic temperament. Artists or actors were tolerated for their imaginative and childish tendencies. As in
Patience
, these people were sometimes perceived as merely funny—not a subject of morality, but a subject of comedy. In other words, homosexuality was quietly tolerated when it was associated with innocence and scorned when it was combined with experience.

Ellen Terry may have been more innocent than many in her profession. She once heard her friend Oscar Wilde blurt out to the actress Aimee Lowther, “Oh, Aimee, if you were only a boy, I could adore you.” Later, when Wilde, Terry, and Irving were sitting with a group of friends, she repeated the remark and impulsively asked, “Oscar, you didn't really mean it . . . !” An uncomfortable silence fell over the group. Someone quickly changed the subject. In the carriage home, Henry Irving explained the remark to Ellen Terry, who was reportedly “too innocent to take it in.”

Stoker, an older and closer friend of Oscar Wilde, and a man who monitored theatrical gossip as part of his job every day, could not have been so deceived.

—

The crime of sodomy had been illegal, but for many years other homosexual practices—including solicitation—were not. In 1885, Henry Labouchère's unexpected amendment suddenly outlawed “Gross Indecency,” any sexual activity between men.

The amendment did not apply to lesbians; a long-held myth—and only a myth—suggested that Queen Victoria dismissed this need for such a law, noting, “Women do not do such things.”

The Labouchère Amendment seems confusing because Labouchère had never expressed the issue as a cause and may have crafted the amendment as a plan to scuttle a bill. Labouchère had been a supporter of Wilde's, endorsing his tour of America, but Labby later was offended by Wilde as a ridiculous, artistic homosexual. In his magazine
Truth
, he reviewed Wilde's lecture on America and pointed out his “epicene” appearance and “effeminate” phrases. Listening to Wilde's discussion of America, Labouchère obsessively counted the word “lovely” forty-three times, “beautiful” twenty-six times, and “charming” seventeen times. In an article titled “Exit Oscar,” he predicted the imminent failure of Wilde's career.

Ironically, it was Labouchère who had guaranteed that failure. The Labouchère Amendment did very little to increase morality in society. It failed to snare Scotland Yard's Jack the Ripper suspect. But it inspired a cottage industry in blackmail, and it provided the trap that would demolish Wilde's career.

—

In 1878, Oscar Wilde had been engaged to Florence Balcombe in Dublin. This was when he presented her with a golden cross on a chain. When he devoted his time to Oxford University and their plans dissolved, Florence went on to marry Bram Stoker. Wilde received the cross as a memento of “the sweetest years of my youth.”

But in 1884, in London, Oscar proposed to Constance Lloyd. She was a quiet, modest beauty who came from a wealthy London family. Constance attempted to be a model modern woman but also pledged herself to Oscar's work and was humbled by his literary talents. She shared his tastes in art and fashion. The Wildes made their Tite Street home a showplace for their aesthetic tastes and a fashionable salon for London society. His marriage officially signaled to his society friends that he'd grown up and become a responsible man. The couple had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.

Oscar's marriage also signaled that there was no longer any rivalry over Florence. The Wildes and Stokers socialized together. Oscar accepted tickets to the Lyceum, dined with Irving and Stoker, and proffered tickets for the opening night of his 1892 play,
Lady Windermere's Fan
. He also sent inscribed copies of several of his books to Florence.

—

In July 1889, the Metropolitan Police arrested a fifteen-year-old telegram delivery boy named Charles Swinscow on suspicion of some petty thefts. The boy was found with eighteen shillings, a suspicious amount for a telegraph boy, but Swinscow insisted on his innocence. Finally, in an effort to clear his name, he explained how he'd earned the cash. “I got the money by going to bed with a gentleman at his house.”

He explained that a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, near Oxford Street, had been the source of cash for a number of willing telegram boys. When the police made their arrests, Chief Inspector Abberline (who later became famous during the Jack the Ripper case) questioned the boy who had been recruiting others, a telegraph employee with the unfortunate name of Henry Newlove. Newlove admitted his part but shrugged off his responsibility. “I think it is hard that I should get into trouble while men in high positions are allowed to walk free.” He then named a group of prominent men: Lord Arthur Somerset, the Earl of Euston, and Colonel Jones. A group of policemen kept watch on the house and were dumbfounded to see the widening range of the scandal. In the subsequent months, there were strong hints that Prince Eddy, Albert Victor, would be implicated. Eddy was the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, a grandson of Queen Victoria.