PB October/November 2023 October/November 2023 67
Gothic is in many ways the truest genre for
each of them. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
(1890) is based on ‘Melmoth’ whose assorted
narratives portray consecutive downfalls of
its doomed multi-life Faustian hero, one of
the earliest vampires
A
t the North-West corner of Merrion
Square in Dublin, you face notorious
poet Oscar Wilde’s reclining statue
and surrounding artefacts. He is
perhaps the most famous of our
artists, still the embodiment of wit 123 years after
his death. However, his mother, Jane Elgee Wilde
(1821-96), was a folklorist like her husband and
a poet like their son, and notorious in her own
ways. After her husband, Sir William, an ear
surgeon, died virtually bankrupt in 1876, she
joined her sons, Willie and Oscar, in London, in
poverty, Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’
atrophies aspects of Elgee’s artistry, using
measured stanzas of formal diction and rhyme,
in ballad form.
The mother-poet: son-poet requires their
reuniting on Merrion Square, with a statue to
both.
But the square requires a monument to another
family member also: Jane’s uncle, Charles
Maturin (1780-1824) is author of ‘Melmoth the
Wanderer’ (1820) and the principal originator of
Gothic literature, fearful and characterised by the
past haunting the present, in Ireland. Maturin
was legendary by Jane’s time, having been
recommended by Sir Walter Scott to Lord Byron.
He is mostly now out of print.
Gothic is in many ways the truest genre for each
of them. Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
(1890) is explicitly based on ‘Melmoth’, whose
assorted narratives portray consecutive
downfalls of its doomed multi-life Faustian hero,
making him one of the earliest vampires in
literature. Jane’s political ballads plumb abysmal
depths of disintegration, integration, tragedy and
triumph.
Their parallels merits a PhD study.
The most obvious point is physical. Oscar was
ungainly and gigantic. He came in at six foot
three to his mother’s six foot even. Maturin too
was tall.
And they were all big characters. Jane idolised
“everything” about Maturin: his “notoriety, his
literary talent, his sacerdotal eccentricity — he
wandered about town in dressing gown and
slippers” (O’Sullivan).
An obituary in the University Magazine
describes Maturin as “eccentric almost to
insanity and compounded of opposites – an
insatiable reader of novels; an elegant preacher;
an incessant dancer; a coxcomb in dress and
manners”. It could have been Oscar.
The Wildes too were incorrigible socialites
despite the infamous moodswings of William
who suered from manic depression and other
maladies.
Their invitations were extensive, and the
literary scene ‘came to them’: it included the
comic novelist, Charles Lever; poets Samuel
Ferguson and Aubrey de Vere; the mathematician
and astronomer, William Rowan Hamilton and the
archetypal novelist of the Famine, William
Carleton.
They were all proudly Irish. Oscar self-identified
as a “brilliant young Irishman out of Oxford”.
According to Richard Ellmann, the most brilliant
of his biographers, we can assume that “Lady
The call of
the Wildes
The logic of a sprawling Oscar Wilde on Merrion Square demands two further
statues: one of his mother, the poet Jane Elgee ‘Speranza’ Wilde and, no
less, of her uncle Charles Maturin father of Gothic literature in Ireland
By Kevin Kiely
Wilde communicated to her son both her
nationalism and her determination to embody it
in verse.”. Jane wrote, in what could constitute an
obituary: “I wore the mask of folly while I sang of
deepest woe.
But, courage! years may pass—this mortal
frame be laid in earth, But my spirit reign
triumphant in the country of my birth”. Piper and
Jeares define Maturin as ‘one of the earliest
distillers of that blend of nationalism and
romanticism which was to be so potent in the
nineteenth century”. The Anglican clergyman
Chrles Mturin: scerdotl eccentricity
CULTURE