Free Franny Moyle by Constance: The Tragic, Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde Page B

student friends. For him, being in the company of young people was like being in a dream full of ‘bright young faces, and grey misty quadrangles’. He found himself intoxicated by the enthusiasm of these young men.

    Constance Lloyd by Louis Desanges, 1882.
    The artist had painted the Prince of Wales just a few years earlier.

    John Horatio Lloyd, Constance’s grandfather who lived in Lancaster Gate. Wealthy and well connected, he invented the Lloyd’s Bond: a type of investment bond on which the development of the railway system became particularly dependent.

    Horace Lloyd, Constance’s father. Part of the Prince of Wales’s social set, he could ‘have taken on any expert in one of the three games, chess and billiards and whist, and beaten him in two out of three’.

    Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde. Oscar’s mother was an Irish poet whose pen name was ‘Speranza’.

    Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, was an esteemed eye and ear surgeon. He had a colourful private life and a brood of illegitimate children in addition to Oscar and Willie, his legitimate sons with Speranza.

    Otho Holland Lloyd, Constance’s brother, taken in about 1884 when he would have been twenty-eight.

    Constance aged twenty-four, on holiday at Delgaty Castle, Aberdeenshire, August 1882. According to a note on the back, the picture was taken by ‘Mr Burton, Son of the Scottish Historian’.

    Oscar the bachelor, wearing his hair long. According to Constance, her relatives in London disapproved of his appearance ‘because they don’t choose to see anything but that he wears long hair and looks aesthetic. I like him awfully much but I suppose it is very bad taste.’

    Constance in an ‘aesthetic’ dress in the period before her marriage to Oscar. Otho considered her loose dresses with wide sleeves ugly.

    A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 by William Powell Frith. Oscar is featured in the foreground to the right, with a lily in his buttonhole. To the left, a young woman, dressed very much as Constance did at this time, wears a green puffed-sleeved dress, on which she has pinned the badge of Aestheticism: a sunflower.

    Oscar the married man, photographed in 1885, with his hair curled in what he described as his ‘Neronian coiffure’.

    Consistent with the Lady’s Pictorial descriptions of her honeymoon wardrobe, Mrs Oscar Wilde is seen here in one of her’large white plumed hats’ and ‘somewhat quaintly-made gowns of white muslin, usually relieved by touches of golden ribbon’.

    Suddenly in the spotlight after her marriage to Oscar, Constance featured in the press when she manned a charity flower stall at the ‘Healtheries’ in 1884. She is seen wearing one of the latest ‘rational’ outfits: a divided skirt.

    As Constance and Oscar’s home in Tite Street soon became acknowledged as a hub of cultural and social activity, the Wildes’ ‘artistic’ marriage became the source of caricature in the press.

    Oscar photographed in 1889. While his private life took on new sexual dimensions, Oscar’s public profile was essentially conventional in the mid to late 1880s. His dress was no longer bohemian, but traditional with just a dandyish twist.

    Robbie Ross, c .1887, when he was the Wildes’ lodger inTite Street. At around this time he and Oscar embarked on an affair.

    No. 16 Tite Street (right) , which Oscar and Constance leased in 1884. In conjunction with architect Edward Godwin they converted the conventional new build into a‘House Beautiful’. The walls were painted white and polished; the floor covering kept pale and plain; internal dividing doors were replaced by curtains; and slim, sparse furniture contributed to a sense of space and calm.

    Vyvyan Wilde in a Cossack costume aged about three.

    Constance and Cyril photographed in 1889 when Cyril would have been about four. Cyril was the