that Helen, whose death Clarke witnessed, is the daughter of the Mary
on whom he had experimented. Mary had given birth to her nine
months after that night, never regaining her reason and dying shortly
after the birth. Raymond knows that he was wrong to have 'ruined the
reason of a human being by a foolish experiment, based on an absurd
theory' (pp.119-120). He had forgotten that 'when the house of life is
thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name,
and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare may not
express. I played with energies which I did not understand' (p.120).
Clarke witnessed the end of it when he saw the death of Mrs Beaumont/
Helen Vaughan:

> The blackened face, the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witnessed, surprises me but little. (p.120)

Raymond knew what he had done as soon as Helen was born. When the child was five years old, he surprised it several times 'with a playmate, you may guess of what kind'. He had sent Helen away; the rest of her story is now known to him; and now 'she is with her companions' (p.120).

Through its employment of various journeys, *The Great God Pan* dissolves several boundaries, including those between past and present; science and myth; reason and the supernatural; moral constraint and sexual indulgence; self-control and abandonment.

Growing up

In MacDonald's work, too, physical form changes. Creatures are alterna-
tively – or at once – human and animal. Gender is unstable. These
instabilities press readers to look anew at the confused shapes; at the
collapsed meanings. There is an element of the divine in the process.
Rather than feeling defeated by Darwinian evolution, MacDonald
appropriates science to poetry and poetry to God. There is no science
without hypothesis, he writes, and 'the construction of any hypothesis
whatever is the work of the imagination'.²⁹ In his works of the 1860s,
MacDonald emphasised the childlikeness of God and condemned in
contemporary Evangelicalism the 'tyranny of stupid logic over childlike
intuitions'.³⁰ Certain of his writings (such as *Lilith*) reflect his belief
that the spiritual and physical worlds are not completely separate.³¹
Lack of fixity in MacDonald's work is not a direct response to social confusion, but rather an expression of religious conviction. In Hein's words, MacDonald 'had little esteem for attempts to achieve doctrinal preciseness in areas in which Scripture itself is vague'.³² Hein quotes from a sermon in which MacDonald

> affirmed that Christians in general were 'far too anxious to be definite, and have finished, well-polished systems, forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite the surer it is to be wrong – the more impossible it is to be right.' The evident reason why no system of thought could be 'right,' in any exclusive sectarian sense, was simply that the mind was capable of containing it.³³

Fairy tales provide MacDonald with a form that allows for openness. As Raeper puts it: 'MacDonald happily invited an imaginative participation in the meaning of his stories. Such openness is a marked difference from the intrusive adult voices intent on laying down the law in the Victorian nursery.'³⁴ In *Lilith*, Vane is transported to a fantastic world, into and from which he journeys several times. But the absence of definition to shapes conveys MacDonald's moral concerns. His desire to avoid a closed way of viewing God and nature leads to an openness that extends beyond a religious conception to an intellectual one that has implications for ways of reading his narratives and seeing the world. Knoepflmacher claims that MacDonald 'resembles those modern symbolists for whom the very instability of interpretation provided a fertile source of meaning' and that '[h]is very best stories operate within a new space, a borderland in which old certitudes must be dismantled before they can be reinvigorated'. Knoepflmacher goes on to state that: 'MacDonald's fairy tales dramatize a struggle for endurance, a permanence that can only be achieved through full immersion into uncertainty and flux.'³⁵

But just as the real and the fantastic rub against and enter each other in MacDonald's tales, so the physical world is present in his theological speculations. Hein notes that MacDonald hated the phrase 'getting on', which summarised the materialism of the Evangelicals, who 'had come to feel that economic gain was the just reward for righteous living'.³⁶ He never approved of the 'perennial desire of the middle class to rise in the world of trade and affluence'.³⁷ Like Wilde, his tales often moralise against the worship of money. MacDonald was attracted to Christian Socialism and lived for some years in poverty. He met Charles Kingsley, admired his work, and was friends with both Octavia Hill and John Ruskin. He was himself involved with efforts to alleviate the lot of the poor.³⁸ It would be quite wrong, then, to dismiss MacDonald's tales as
simply other-worldly. McGillis is right to notice the element of subversion
in his writing (which feature he shares with his friend Lewis Carroll):

MacDonald's work, especially *The Princess and Curdie*, recognizes the need to examine and question the myths with which Victorian society orders itself. The separation of rich and poor and the Victorian view of female dependence and fragility are two social myths with which MacDonald is concerned. He does not provide his young readers with an easy escape into fantasy; rather, he encourages them to think about social and spiritual matters. MacDonald's children's books are as much about growing up in this world as they are about preparing ourselves for heaven.³⁹

MacDonald's tales are more directly reflective of society than Carroll's
Wonderland.

The fantastic jostles with the everyday in MacDonald, and his readers
are meant not only to learn from this relationship, but to do so by
thinking for themselves about it. The relative absence of a didactic voice
means that readers are invited actively to engage with the narrative.
Whether this means that the process is any less manipulative is debatable
– it is, after all, another strategy aimed at the same end: the moral
improvement of the reader. However, it probably is true to claim, as
McGillis does, that in MacDonald's work '[t]he most sought-after change
is change in people'; and, as Raeper does, that it 'transforms the minds
of those who read him'.⁴⁰ His writings are designed so that transfor-
mation should apply to those outside the tale as much as to those within
it: indeed, the physical alterations witnessed in many of his characters
symbolise the consequences of moral improvement or degeneration.
Religious conviction can, as McGillis suggests in the above quotation,
directly affect one's dealings with society. Raeper draws out the wider
appeal of change: 'The longing for transformation that many of his
readers feel finds fulfilment in the movement from unbelief to belief,
in peasants becoming noblemen, in women becoming corpses, witches,
angels or saints.'⁴¹

MacDonald's eschewal of single interpretations imbues his writing with
a quality that has been seen both as modernist in its symbolic richness and
as an anticipation of postmodernism in its open-endedness.⁴² McGillis
sees the latter in MacDonald's avoidance of closure in his stories.
Beast-selves

One of MacDonald's best-known works is *Lilith* (1895). It explores the relationship of the fantastic to the real; of the divine to the secular; of beauty (moral and physical) to ugliness; of children to parents; and of man to woman. In an oft-quoted remark from his introduction to the novel, C. S. Lewis proclaims that what MacDonald 'does best is fantasy — fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic'.⁴³ But despite Lewis's explanation that the 'quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live' (p.xii), such a statement might distract from the material detail of that reality.

The novel begins: 'I had just finished my studies at Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday from work before assuming definitely the management of the estate' (p.5). Education, work, property, and class are signalled from the start as significant. The next sentence informs us that the narrator was an orphan: 'My father died when I was yet a child; my mother followed him within a year, and I was nearly as much alone in the world as a man might find himself' (p.5). One might be tempted to launch from here into Freudian readings – as some critics have been: MacDonald was eight-years-old when his own mother died, and Hein records, a touch superfluously one suspects, that he was 'deeply affected by his mother's death'.⁴⁴ MacDonald's father lived on well into his son's adulthood, however, and in any case MacDonald is using the narrator's parentless upbringing for two main purposes: first, to set up a movement that is completed at the end of the book when he meets with everyone's true parents, Adam and Eve; second, to place him as a man who has no place. I mean by this latter comment that the narrator, whom we shall know as Vane, lacks (apart from his time at Oxford) the usual marks of social status, an absence that allows MacDonald to judge the man positively by his own (moral) qualities.

In a scene-setting which in its air of the Gothic and its evocation of a house and family 'of some antiquity' recalls Poe and Hawthorne (p.5), MacDonald further loosens the narrator's ties. Rather than providing stability, the lineage confirms one's own impermanence:

> Nothing surely can more impress upon a man the transitory nature of possession than his succeeding to an ancient property! Like a moving panorama mine has passed from before many eyes, and is now slowly flitting from before my own. (pp.5-6)
It is a curious passage, because this kind of possession can only be
transitory if seen from the viewpoint of the individual. In fact, the
condition described by Vane here is that of family ownership; of
inheritance. In that sense, ownership can only be seen as temporary
if there is a threat to unearned wealth. That the narrator is an orphan
allows MacDonald to show him looking at 'his' property anew. The
fresh perspective introduces an impression of impermanence that reflects
the larger insecurity of the aristocracy. Of course, MacDonald intends
a Christian homily contrasting earthly riches with spiritual wealth. At
the same time, a potentially radical message about the fragility and
ultimate irrelevance of material goods is delivered. The commentary is
soon made more explicit. When he finds himself in another world – that
which lies through the mirror in the garret – Vane wonders: ‘how was
life to be lived in a world of which I had all the laws to learn?’ He has
the following thought:

> I had never yet done anything to justify my existence; my former world
> was nothing the better for my sojourn in it: here, however, I must earn, or
> in some way find, my bread! But I reasoned that, as I was not to blame in
> being here, I might expect to be taken care of here as well as there! I had
> had nothing to do with getting into the world I had just left, and in it I
> had found myself heir to a large property! If that world, as I now saw, had
> a claim upon me because I had eaten, and could eat again, upon this world
> I had a claim because I must eat – when it would in return have a claim
> on me! (pp.23–24)

Entry into this other world affords Vane the reflection that he owes his
original world a debt. He has done nothing to deserve the property that
he has inherited. He is the undeserving rich. MacDonald's moral seems
to go beyond the Victorian creed of self-help and radically to criticise
those who feed off society without paying anything back. The spongers
and scroungers, he rightly suggests, are those whose considerable wealth
is made at everyone else's expense. Vane's continued hope that he can
be given unearned food in his new world blatantly contradicts his new
realisation that things are best worked for.

The narrator knows little more of his ancestors than that several of
them were given to study, as he himself is. He is constantly seeing and
looking for

strange analogies, not only between the facts of different sciences of the
same order, or between physical and metaphysical facts, but between physical
hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the metaphysical dreams into
which I was in the habit of falling. (p.5)
The house, which he has not seen from the time his guardian took him away as a child until he returned to take possession of it around a month before, has a large library. The latter contains a portrait of one of his ancestors and is, he hears tell and sees for himself, haunted by a Mr Raven – librarian to Sir Upward – who passes through the closed door from the library to a closet. Vane learns the identity of the ghostly old man from his (Vane’s) butler, who also informs him that an ancient woman of the village had said that Upward was ‘a great reader ... not of such books only as were wholesome for men to read, but of strange, forbidden, and evil books; and in so doing, Mr. Raven, who was probably the devil himself, encouraged him’. Upward and Raven, the woman had said, had suddenly disappeared and Upward was never seen again, but Raven ‘continued to show himself at uncertain intervals in the library’ (p.9).

One day the narrator follows the old librarian through passages, up a winding stair, and into the main garret where he faces a tall old-fashioned mirror that ‘reflected neither the chamber nor my own person’. In it he sees a strange and wild landscape and a ‘large and ancient raven’ with which, stepping closer to observe it, he finds himself ‘nose to beak ... in the open air, on a houseless heath’ (p.11). He has entered

a world, or call it a state of things, an economy of conditions, an idea of existence, so little correspondent with the ways and modes of this world – which we are apt to think the only world, that the best choice I can make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of what I would convey. I begin to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind. Already I have set down statements I would gladly change did I know how to substitute a truer utterance; but as often as I try to fit the reality with nearer words, I find myself in danger of losing the things themselves, and feel like one in process of awaking from a dream, with the thing that seemed familiar gradually yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until its very nature is no longer recognisable. (pp.12–13)

The suggestion that there exists beyond Vane’s everyday world a realm that is more real – or more true at least – risks making our material world less important than it is. At worst, and in some other nineteenth-century writers, this way of thinking forces an acceptance of worldly hardship in exchange for the consolation of spiritual reward. Such a view is pernicious when the hardship is caused by social conditions that could be ameliorated with effort, but is less so when held of incurable sickness. One often witnesses the latter attitude in MacDonald’s
reactions to his own frequent illnesses and the deaths of his children
and friends; and, as has been remarked earlier, MacDonald did show
an active interest in assisting the poor and was himself helped from
poverty many times by gifts and loans from friends. There is thus
some reason to free him from the charge that his belief in another,
higher world is as socially conservative as that of some. A virtue of his
ideas as communicated in the quotation above is that they invite us
to consider the adequacy and appropriateness of language to describe
one's environment and one's experiences in it. The fitness of narrative
itself is thus called into question. It is not just a matter of word games
however. MacDonald is making a serious point about social position.
Vane's journey into the other world enacts a kind of rebirth. When
asked by the raven who he is,

> I understood that I did not know myself, did not know what I was, had
> no grounds on which to determine that I was one and not another. As for
> the name I went by in my own world, I had forgotten it, and did not care
> to recall it, for it meant nothing, and what it might be was plainly of no
> consequence here. I had indeed almost forgotten that there it was a custom
> for everybody to have a name! (p.14)

Name in nineteenth-century society, as we have seen in *The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*, for example, means more than a forename
and surname. Rather, it is one's social status and moral reputation. The
narrator's efforts to remember his name are in vain, because in his new
place one's character will define one's shape afresh. This revisionary
impulse of MacDonald's is hardly confined to *Lilith*. Hein notes that
MacDonald often railed against the hierarchy of the British class system:

> His indignation was prompted not by a desire to do away with it – he was
> not especially democratic in his thinking – but by the perception that it
> seemed persistently to invert an hierarchy of true being. In a more ideal
> society people would be arranged on a social scale according to their moral
> and spiritual qualities, so that power and influence would be in the hands
> of truly worthy people. So it will be in the kingdom of God.⁴⁵

Such an outlook clearly has radical potential.

As does Wells in *The Time Machine*, MacDonald uses the new world
in which Vane finds himself as a defamiliarising device. Raven tells
the visitor: 'if you understood any world besides your own, you would
understand your own much better' (p.25). The suggestion is that a larger
vision is necessary in order to comprehend one's ordinary environment.
Travel, in both the actual and metaphorical sense, is meant here.
Another defamiliarising device employed is that of beastliness. More explicitly than in many of the other texts examined in the present volume, *Lilith* utilises animality for obvious symbolic purposes. ‘Every one ... has a beast-self’, Vane is told by Raven,

and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping serpent-self too – which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth, he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many selves more – all to get into harmony. You can tell what sort a man is by his creature that comes oftenest to the front. (p.30)

Vane’s journey will see him encountering many kinds of beasts in his new symbolic landscape, which represents (among other things) the ‘burial-ground of the universe’, presided over by the raven, who ‘was sexton of all he surveyed!’ (p.27). It is a place, we shall see more clearly later, that seems to hold those who are dead and awaiting resurrection. When Vane flees and finds himself back in his library, he asks: ‘Which was the real – what I now saw, or what I had just ceased to see? Could both be real, interpenetrating yet unmingling?’ (p.37). His question invites us to speculate on the relationship between the material and spiritual worlds and encourages us to look for the divine in the mundane. Significantly, the library is one of the ways into and out of the other world; and when he had been walking with the sexton in a cold place, Vane had observed aisle upon aisle of couches on which sleeping things lay. He had wondered: ‘Was this the sexton’s library? were these his books? Truly it was no half-way house, this chamber of the dead!’ (p.33). The idea of books as a passage between worlds is reinforced when Vane reads a manuscript of his father’s that someone has left out. In it his father recorded a visitation, soon after his own father’s (Vane’s grandfather’s) death, from Mr Raven, his great grandfather’s (Sir Upward’s) librarian. Raven talks of the other world, his home, to which he has now established a right of way through the house. ‘A book’, Raven remarks, ‘is a door in, and therefore a door out.’ That world is not a better one throughout, but is ‘so much another that most of its physical, and many of its mental laws are different from those of this world. As for moral laws, they must everywhere be fundamentally the same’ (p.40). MacDonald’s message here would appear to be that we must practise or aspire to moral goodness consistently: that there is a universal morality, a continuum. Books, with their imagination and their poetry (which we must remember includes science), provide a bridge to this other world; the one that connects with our own. Raeper notes that libraries figure large in the writings of MacDonald, who referred in *There and Back* to
a ‘bookscape’. They are places ‘filled with knowledge and mystery’.⁴⁶

*Lilith* embodies this principle, and it exhibits a transformation of genres. Raeper points out that MacDonald ‘adapted the Gothic conventions to his own ends’.⁴⁷ Its use of the manuscript is just one element of the Gothic (another being the old house with its mysterious garret and the ghostly comings and goings through the library). Additionally, Raeper notes that

> many of the preoccupations of the Gothic novel are MacDonald’s own – its horror of and fascination with sex, the obsession with the supernatural and immortality, the exploration of the divine and demonic potentials of the human spirit, and the whiff of charnel-houses and graveyards.⁴⁸

Fantasy, writes Raeper, ‘is supremely the literature of transition, for one thing actually changes into another, though the fear was that one could become either an angel or a beast’. While ‘[o]ne of Darwin’s legacies was a fear of the bestial nature within’ and obvious figures for these were the vampire and werewolf, ‘[i]n MacDonald the constant association of women with predatory cat-like creatures reaches its purest expression in *Lilith*, who actually possesses the ability to change herself into a leopardess’. Raeper continues: ‘MacDonald’s symbols for women – corpse, ghost and cat – expose his own inner anxieties, but, according to a Jungian model, they can be applied to the human psyche at large.’⁴⁹

The religious overtones are clear, if symbolic. And there are traces of science fiction, such as when Vane’s father reports Raven speaking ‘much about *dimensions*, telling me that there were many more than three, some of them concerned with powers which were indeed in us, but of which as yet we knew absolutely nothing’ (p.41).⁵⁰ This seems distinctly Wellsian. As with other texts examined in the present book, the narrative structure of *Lilith* displays, as well as describes, transformations. MacDonald develops a generic admixture that brings changes to conventional styles and forms. The composition reflects this: ‘No fewer than eight pre-publication drafts of *Lilith* exist, and the story underwent many mutations between the first drafts and the published book.’⁵¹ MacDonald’s purpose seems to be to direct attention to the interrelationship of the two (or more) worlds. This aim becomes apparent, also, during a conversation that Raven has with Vane about the meaning of home. When Vane asks Raven to tell him the nearest way home, Raven replies:

> ‘I cannot ... you and I use the same words with different meanings. We are often unable to tell people what they *need* to know, because they *want*'
to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we
said.' (p.45)

If this is read as a speech against multiple meanings, it would be at odds
with MacDonald's stress on the imagination and on the coexistence of the
two worlds. And so it should be taken rather as a desire for harmony, the
importance and desirability of which MacDonald underlines elsewhere
in his writings.

Like Wells's Time Traveller, Vane breaks off from his narrative to
comment on it and on his situation. MacDonald has his narrator
explain the problems of communicating the experiences of one world to
another. Vane's remarks anticipate by a century scholarly observations
on the pitfalls of cross-cultural communication. Studies of travel and
translation have shown how travellers who journey from one culture to
another can only describe the unfamiliar through terms that are familiar.
Concepts, people, creatures, plants, and so on, that are encountered for
the first time must either remain alien or be rendered less strange by
being translated into a known language and taxonomy. MacDonald's
mind may be on the spiritual or metaphysical here, but his adventures
in fantasy mean that his use of travel and shape-shifting motifs helps
make the point for him. Thus, Vane states, for example:

> Here I interrupt my narrative to remark that it involves a constant struggle to say what cannot be said with even an approach to precision, the things recorded being, in their nature and in that of the creatures concerned in them, so inexpressibly different from any possible events of this economy, that I can present them only by giving, in the forms and language of life in this world, the modes in which they affected me – not the things in themselves, but the feelings they woke in me. (p.46)

Even this, Vane confesses, he does 'with a continuous and abiding sense
of failure'. He finds it impossible

to present more than one phase of a multitudinously complicated significance,
or one concentric sphere of a graduated embodiment. A single thing would
sometimes seem to be and mean many things, with an uncertain identity at
the heart of them, which kept constantly altering their look. (p.46)

He is unsure of the ability of himself or of any of the 'communicating
media of this world' to convey even to 'one who knew the region better
than myself' the 'reality of my experience' in the other, strange world
(pp.46–47). While Vane is in no doubt that he 'was actually regarding a
scene of activity, I might be, at the same moment, in my consciousness
aware that I was perusing a metaphysical argument' (p.47). Like the
appearance and significance of the world that Vane has visited, the implications of this passage are manifold. MacDonald applies to the motifs of shape-shifting and transformation a reflection on the problems faced by travellers who wish to report back on the things they have seen. He employs this commentary to suggest the impossibility of passing on accurate knowledge of the spiritual world. Two issues besides the lack of a single fixed meaning are involved here: what can be known and what can be communicated to others. These matters are taken up in MacDonald's next chapter (number 10, 'The Bad Barrow'), in which Vane finds himself with an 'attendant shadow', a 'bird-butterfly' which 'flew with a certain swallow double' and whose 'wings were very large, nearly square, and flashed all the colours of the rainbow'. Vane is so entranced by their splendour and beauty that he stumbles over a rock and lies stunned. When he comes to, 'the creature was hovering over my head, radiating the whole chord of light, with multitudinous gradations and some kinds of colour I had never before seen'. He continues, but hits another stone as he cannot take his eyes off the being:

> Fearing then another fall, I sat down to watch the little glory, and a great longing awoke in me to have it in my hand. To my unspeakable delight, it began to sink toward me. Slowly at first, then swiftly it sank, growing larger as it came nearer. I felt as if the treasure of the universe were giving itself to me – put out my hand, and had it. But the instant I took it, its light went out; all was dark as pitch, a dead book with boards outspread lay cold and heavy in my hand. I threw it in the air – only to hear it fall among the heather. Burying my face in my hands, I sat in motionless misery. (p.47)

Vane's words are an expression of the huge gulf between superficial and real knowledge; between books and experience; between the mundane and the spiritual worlds. An attempt to capture the latter in the former is bound to fail. It is no wonder that Vane is left in sad stillness; his progress halted. Of course, there is an irony in MacDonald's using a book, *Lilith*, to make his point about the inadequacy and comparative sterility of books compared with deep knowledge, but it may be countered in his defence that the world of which he writes is infinitely more meaningful.

As he walks on, Vane is confronted by several monsters, 'hideous creatures, no two alike', that threaten him, but from which he is saved by the light of the moon that paralyses them (p.49). They include an animal like a tiger and another like a worm. 'In some of them, beauty of colour enhanced loathliness of shape: one large serpent was covered from head to distant tail with feathers of glorious hues' (p.49). Heading for the hills as the moon descends, Vane sees a woman with a white mist
floating about her, which she tries to grasp and wrap around herself. She is beautiful, but her face exhibits such pride and misery that Vane can scarcely believe what he sees. Her eyes are dead. Suddenly she falls and writhes in pain:

> A moment more and her legs, hurrying from her body, sped away serpents. From her shoulders fled her arms as in terror, serpents also. Then something flew up from her like a bat, and when I looked again, she was gone. (p.50)

Fleeing in terror, Vane is pursued by many dark objects, the leading one of which ‘threw himself upon me with a snarl of greedy hate’ (p.50), but they fall in the angry light of the moon. In the next chapter, ‘The Evil Wood’, Vane resumes his journey in the strange world. His passage through it is reminiscent of Pilgrim’s ordeals in the book by Bunyan that influenced Macdonald and of which he was ‘passionately fond’.⁵² MacDonald’s writing however is more textured, combining spiritual elements with intellectual and artistic modes, including the Gothic, Romanticism, and psychological reflection, unavailable to the seventeenth-century author. These ingredients are present, for example, in Vane’s description of looking at a forest at twilight:

> Presently, to my listless roving gaze, the varied outlines of the clumpy foliage began to assume or imitate – say rather *suggest* other shapes than their own. A light wind began to blow, it set the boughs of a neighbour tree rocking, and all their branches aswing, every twig and every leaf blending its individual motion with the sway of its branch and the rock of its bough. Among its leafy shapes was a pack of wolves that struggled to break from a wizard’s leash: greyhounds would not have strained so savagely! I watched them with an interest that grew as the wind gathered force, and their motions life. (p.52)

In his fancy he sees in the shape of another mass of foliage a group of horses’ heads and forequarters, their necks moving with the wind. The Gothic takes over as we read of the heads:

> how gaunt, how strange! – several of them bare skulls – one with the skin tight on its bones! One had lost the under jaw and hung low, looking unutterably weary – but now and then hove high as if to ease the bit. (p.53)

Above these floats the ‘form of a woman, waving her arms in imperious gesture’. Vane is unsettled by these shapes and at the thought that they might ‘overpower my brain with seeming reality’ (p.53), but darkness then descends and he falls asleep once more. He hears and in the moonlight discerns a furious battle between skeletons and phantoms: ‘Bones of men and horses lay scattered and heaped; grinding and crunching them under
foot fought the skeletons.' In this 'battle of the dead' (p.53), a ghastly parody of worldly conflicts, presided over by the woman he had seen before and who urges its participants to slay one another,

skeleton jaws and phantom-throats swelled the deafening tumult with the war-cry of every opinion, bad or good, that had bred strife, injustice, cruelty in any world. The holiest words went with the most hating blow. Lie-distorted truths flew hurtling in the wind of javelins and bones. Every moment some one would turn against his comrades, and fight more wildly than before, *The Truth! The Truth!* still his cry. (pp.53–54)

The suggestion is that those who fight proclaiming to have right on their side may not, in fact, possess such legitimacy. As we shall see, this is only one of many instances of MacDonald's use of the dream or fantasy world to cast critical light on our everyday one. As Filmer notes, 'for MacDonald, the spiritual is inseparable from the psychological and the social'.⁵³ In a way, the world into which Vane has travelled seems more real for its stripping away of superfluities so that we see the essence of things and the contrast between what is professed and actuality. The text's criticisms, in which travel and animality play a central role, assume more direct commentary on social and economic arrangements as Vane's journey continues. When he is befriended and fed by children who call themselves the Little Ones and Vane a good giant, he is told that some grow up to be bad giants (though rather like Wells's Eloi they show little curiosity, understanding of causality, or desire to change). His response to hearing that '[t]he bad giants are very proud of being fat' is: 'So they are in my world ... only they do not say *fat* there, they say *rich*' (p.66). The exchange occurs after the children had watched Vane picking and enjoying an apple or two and then freed him after he had been taken captive and set to labour by two giants, one of whom 'growled like a beast' (p.57). Vane is tempted to stay with his small friends, but concludes that: 'I must rise and continue my travels, in the hope of coming upon some elucidation of the fortunes and destiny of the bewitching little creatures' (p.68). His resolve to leave is strengthened – for his sake and that of the children – after a beating by one of the giants. One of the children warns him to beware of the Cat-woman, the giant woman who lives in the desert, but Lona, who has assumed the role of protector of him and of her fellow children, whispers that the Cat-woman will not hurt him.

MacDonald has Vane learn about himself and about the society he has left behind. The lessons that *Lilith* offers have the tale conform to Farah Mendlesohn's model of the portal-quest narrative: i.e. that more
than other categories of fantasy, it embodies the genre's reliance on a moral universe; 'that it is less an argument with the universe than a sermon on the way things should be, a belief that the universe should yield to moral precepts'.⁵⁴ The narrative's suggestions for improvement in *Lilith* operate on personal, social, and spiritual levels. All are linked. One of the conclusions Vane draws from his experiences in the other world is that he should spend less time by himself. Hungering after 'the voice and face of my kind – after any live soul, indeed, human or not, which I might in some measure understand', Vane recoils from the 'hell of horror' of wandering alone, 'a bare existence never going out of itself, never widening its life in another life, but, bound with the cords of its peculiarities, lying an eternal prisoner in the dungeon of its own being!' He regards

with wonder my past self, which preferred the company of book or pen to that of man or woman, which, if the author of a tale I was enjoying appeared, would wish him away that I might return to his story. I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking! 'Any man,' I said now, 'is more than the greatest of books!' I had not cared for my live brothers and sisters, and now I was left without even the dead to comfort me! (pp.83–84)

One of the sights that Vane sees is a 'mouldering carriage of ancient form' (p.88), with the skeletons of a horse, coachman, and, inside, of two people who awaken as Vane looks in on them. They are a promiscuous Lord and his former wife. Raven tells Vane:

> The male was never a gentleman ... and in the bony stage of retrogression, with his skeleton through his skin, and his character outside his manners, does not look like one. The female is less vulgar, and has a little heart. But, the restraints of society removed, you see them now just as they are and always were! (pp.93–94)

Raven goes on to inform Vane that they had been the handsomest couple at court and still seem to regard themselves as such. 'They felt themselves rich too while they had pockets, but they have already begun to feel rather pinched!' Now that they cannot escape each other and there is no one else of their kind, 'they must at last grow weary of their mutual repugnance, and begin to love one another! for love, not hate, is deepest in what Love "loved into being"'. They will 'by and by develop faces, for every grain of truthfulness adds a fibre to the show of their humanity' (p.94).

Vane, whose experiences have made him 'like a child, constantly
wondering, and surprised at nothing' (p.94), is not put out by the
appearance of Raven, even when the latter's coat-lapels fly out, and 'I
thought the metamorphosis of *homo* to *corvus* was about to take place
before my eyes' (as it soon does) (p.95).

The incident described above illustrates MacDonald's combination
of spiritual inquiry, moral examination, and social criticism. His use
of the fantastic supplies him with a landscape in which these elements
commingle in ways that seem at once as strange and familiar to us
as they do to Vane. The beasts that the protagonist encounters on his
journey enable MacDonald's reflections on religion, society, and ethics.
Often these are at the expense of the wealthy. For example, when Vane
speaks with a woman of Bulika who is sheltering from the Princess's
leopardess, he asks her many questions, as an inquiring traveller would.
She tells him that the people of Bulika 'never did anything except dig
for precious stones in their cellars. They were rich, and had everything
made for them in other towns.' It is, she says, a disgrace to work. In
reply to Vane's asking her how they were rich if none of them earned
money, she replies that 'their ancestors had saved for them, and they
never spent. When they wanted money they sold a few of their gems.'
Asked about the poor, she responds: 'I suppose there must be [some],
but we never think of such people. When one goes poor, we forget him.
That is how we keep rich. We mean to be rich always' (p.120). The object
of MacDonald's satire is the British aristocracy.

Near the end of his journey, Vane finds (in a chapter titled 'The
Journey Home') that harmony has been achieved: 'The world and my
being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and macrocosm were
at length atoned' (p.243). After his meetings with all of the creatures
listed above and many others, including a great white leech ('a pale
savage' [p.111]), and often finding himself dangerously close to being a
meal for them, Vane is at the head of the army of the Little Ones and
animals that invades the giants' city and subsequently effects Lilith's
repentance through Mara, the Lady of Sorrows. Lilith is then laid to
peace with Lona, the daughter whom she had earlier killed, and with
other children. In the final chapter, 'The Endless Ending', Vane, who
has Mara much with him, occupies a dream-like state, waiting to wake
into the life beyond. He has not sought the mirror again, but sometimes
when he looks at his books, 'they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their
solid mass, and another world were about to break through' (p.251). He
has glimpses, sensations, or memories of that other world and now he
waits, asleep or awake, for that final awakening.
Lilith herself embodies transformations: ‘the persona of Lilith herself has ... a long and complex history, changing and reappearing in various works of literature throughout the nineteenth century, and forming and reforming throughout MacDonald’s own work as well’. She was ‘[o]riginally a character in Jewish mythology, probably based on an earlier Babylonian figure’.⁵⁵ She was Adam’s first and insubordinate wife. She has been figured as Lamia, vampire, demon, and succubus; as sin in *Paradise Lost*; and as siren. In Raeper’s words: ‘Lilith had a changeable identity therefore and writers, finding little basis for her existence, found it possible to clothe her in many different guises.’ She provides, argues Raeper, ‘a hermetic key to the understanding of all [MacDonald’s] work, for he was always dogged by this sinister figure’.⁵⁶

In many ways MacDonald’s works seem very different from those considered elsewhere in this volume. His tales purport to take his readers into another world, a fantastic realm with spiritual richness at a time when many of his contemporaries doubted. Similar themes and impulses to those present in the works discussed in previous chapters are apparent, however, and he offers sharp social and moral observations. No less than in those other texts, metaphors of travel and beasts propel the meaning: even if that is that there is no single meaning. The fascination with shape-changing and with the relationship between different worlds (the spiritual and the everyday; life and death) reflects an uneasy mixture of insecurity, desire, and uncertainty. Carole Silver argues that ‘[t]he Victorian study of fairy lore acts as an excellent reflector of both the dominant ideas and the concealed anxieties of the era’.⁵⁷ We might extend the observation to Victorian fairy tales themselves.

## Notes

<footnote n="1">1 The quotation is from George MacDonald, *The Princess and the Goblin* (1872). See George MacDonald, *The Princess and the Goblin* and *The Princess and Curdie*, edited and with an introduction by Roderick McGillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.97.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 William Raeper, *George MacDonald* (Tring: Lion, 1987), p.308. Raeper adds that: ‘It is the failure of the Victorian moralists to see this that caused their tales to be so dull and constricting’ (p.308).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Diane Purkiss, *Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories* (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p.4.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.315.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.195.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.125.</footnote>
7 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.182.

8 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.194.

9 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.210.

10 Quoted in Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.86.

11 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.329.

12 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.321.

13 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.11.

14 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.368.

15 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.372.

16 Farah Mendlesohn, *Rhetorics of Fantasy* (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), p.xix. The other categories identified by Mendlesohn are the Immersive Fantasy, Intrusion Fantasy, and the Liminal Fantasy.

17 Kath Filmer, 'Introduction', Kath Filmer, ed., *The Victorian Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in the Mythopoeic Fiction of the Victorian Age* (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991), pp.1–12 (p.3).

18 U. C. Knoepflmacher, 'Introduction', in George MacDonald, *The Complete Fairy Tales*, edited and with an introduction and notes by U. C. Knoepflmacher (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p.vii.

19 Knoepflmacher, 'Introduction', p.vii.

20 Rolland Hein, *George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker* [1993] (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1999), p.27.

21 Hein, *George MacDonald*, pp.35–36. Hein is remarking here specifically on MacDonald’s imaginative reworking in his Scottish stories of ‘materials from his own past’, but the point applies more generally.

22 MacDonald, 'The Fantastic Imagination', in *The Complete Fairy Tales*, p.7.

23 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, pp.145–146.

24 MacDonald, 'The Fantastic Imagination', pp.7–8.

25 MacDonald, 'The Fantastic Imagination', p.7.

26 Knoepflmacher, 'Introduction', p.xii.

27 George MacDonald, 'The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture' (1867), in *A Dish of Orts* [1893] (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996), p.16.

28 Arthur Machen, 'Introduction', in *The Great God Pan* [1894] (London: Creation Books, 1996), pp.17–18. Further page references will be given parenthetically.

29 MacDonald, 'The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture', p.13.

30 George MacDonald, *Malcolm* [1875], quoted in Hein, *George MacDonald*, p.57.

31 See Hein, *George MacDonald*, pp.256, 268–269, 271, 281–283.

32 Hein, *George MacDonald*, p.130.

33 Hein, *George MacDonald*, p.129.

34 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.313.

35 Knoepflmacher, 'Introduction', p.xix.

36 Hein, *George MacDonald*, p.58.

37 Hein, *George MacDonald*, p.125.

38 Raeper, on the other hand, suggests that MacDonald was 'probably at heart the kind of aristocratic old Tory that Ruskin was' and that while '[h]e certainly believed in bettering the lot of ordinary people, and hoped that the quality of their lives would be transformed ... he did not link this into any political transformation such as the Webbs or Karl Marx sought'. Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.262.

39 McGillis, 'Introduction', p.xv.
40 McGillis, 'Introduction', p.xvi; Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.202.

41 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.202.

42 McGillis identifies what he calls MacDonald's 'prescience for what we think of as the postmodern spirit' (p.xvi).

43 C. S. Lewis, 'Introduction', in George MacDonald, *Lilith: A Romance* [1895] (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1981), p.ix. All further page references to *Lilith* are to this edition and will be given parenthetically. Lewis's preface first appeared, in slightly longer form, in 1946.

44 Hein, *George MacDonald*, p.32.

45 Hein, *George MacDonald*, p.445.

46 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.186.

47 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, pp.199, 201.

48 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.199.

49 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.201.

50 The words of the manuscript are italicised by MacDonald; 'dimensions' is not, thus giving it an emphasis that I have indicated here through italics.

51 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.367. For more on the variants, see Raeper, pp.420–422 and David L. Griffith, 'George MacDonald's Lilith A: A Transcription' (MA Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2001).

52 C. N. Manlove, *Modern Fantasy: Five Studies* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p.60.

53 Kath Filmer, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci: Cultural Criticism and Mythopoeic Vision in Lilith', in Kath Filmer, ed., *The Victorian Fantasists*, pp.90–103 (p.98).

54 Mendlesohn, *Rhetorics of Fantasy*, p.5.

55 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.365.

56 Raeper, *George MacDonald*, p.366. Raeper further notes that 'MacDonald sometimes ... describ[ed] women as demons or vampires' (p.367).

57 Carole G. Silver, *Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.57. Silver lists among these ideas and anxieties '[c]oncerns about change and growth in children, about the status of women in marriage and divorce, about the discovery of new and alien racial groups, and about the sources of evil, occult and natural' (p.57).
Oscar Wilde: ‘an unclean beast’¹

Butterfly and ape

Appropriately, given his propensity for role-playing, Oscar Wilde attracted a variety of animal comparisons. These may have been largely forgotten now, replaced by the baser images of his three trials, which supplied another infamous conjunction of sex and animality.² In 1895 Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensberry for libel. Queensberry was the father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas and had accused Wilde of 'posing as a somdomite [sic]'.³ Wilde was himself then prosecuted for, and convicted of, committing acts of indecency in private with members of his own sex, an offence which, under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, carried a sentence of two years' imprisonment with hard labour. After the jury failed to agree on most counts, Wilde faced a retrial. Part of what was felt to be at stake is clear from a review of Max Nordau's *Degeneration* (which was published in an English translation in 1895) that appeared in the *Weekly Sun*, three weeks after Wilde's conviction and sentencing. As Ed Cohen observes, the notice drew an implicit contrast between Wilde's behaviour and Nordau's book, which it described as 'a manly, healthy, and badly-needed protest against some of the inanities and – the word is not too strong – bestialities which raise their barren and brutal heads in the literature of our time'. The reviewer declared Nordau's work to be 'entitled, therefore, to the admiration of every honest, pure, and manly man'.⁴ Cohen affirms that while the review made no direct mention of Wilde it had him in its sights: the condemnation of inanities and bestiality makes this clear.

The review reads like a desperate attempt to salvage some sense of masculinity in the face of Wilde's effeminacy. Its tautology of ‘manly man’ reeks of nervous desperation and insecurity. But alongside this concern to protect the boundaries of gender and sexuality is the horror of a breakdown in class positions. Cohen shows that the press coverage of the trials reported defence counsel Edward Carson's questioning of
Wilde about inappropriate liaisons with socially inferior men. These men
were younger than Wilde, less well educated, and 'out of employment':

of their antecedents Wilde professed to know nothing ... in the manner
of their introduction to Wilde and his subsequent treatment of them all
were in the same category, leading to the same conclusion that there was
something unnatural and what might not ordinarily be expected in the
relations between them.⁵

Cohen deduces from this that Wilde's social crime was to flout the
distinctions between the classes that those in 'polite' society thought
it necessary to maintain. Carson's intention in questioning Wilde was
meant, Cohen believes, 'to suggest that the very fact of these relationships
was improper'.⁶

Wilde's disturbance of class positions is further discussed by Joseph
Bristow. Drawing on the work of Regenia Gagnier, Bristow notes of
Lord Henry Wotton in *The Picture of Dorian Gray* that he and most of
Wilde's dandies are

men who were born into the landed classes, and yet who have the prerogative
to mock the idleness of the rich.

... Everywhere Wilde's dandies are at once aristocratic in their bearing,
and yet in jeopardy of losing their reputations.⁷

That last sentence suggests the precariousness of the upper classes and
the disparity between self-perception and actual status. Wilde's wit, with
its irony and parody, is born of, and exploits, this disjunction. His life
and writing act as a vehicle from which one can observe the changing
class landscape of Britain, and this is no less pronounced than the shifts
in gender that are more commonly surveyed in examinations of Wilde
and his work. Had the relationships between the classes not already been
permeable in some respects, the outrage at Wilde's conduct might have
been more contained.

The public perception of Wilde reveals, if obliquely, the confusion of
class. In his classic study of the 1890s, Holbrook Jackson, considering
Wilde's position in early 1895 'at the height of his fame and power', writes
that despite the flattery, amused attention, and luxury of success, Wilde
never won public respect. Jackson quotes from a contemporary article
that voices 'popular suspicion' of Wilde:

> Where he does excel is in affectation. His mode of life, his manner of speech, his dress, his views, his work, are all masses of affectation. Affectation has become a second nature to him, and it would probably now be utterly impossible for him to revert to the original Oscar that lies beneath it all. In
fact, probably none of his friends have ever had an opportunity of finding
out what manner of man the real Oscar is ... For the present ... we may
content ourselves with the reflection that there is no serious danger to be
apprehended to the State from the vagaries of a butterfly.⁸

The light, flighty, colourful creature is rather different from the
'sedulous ape' Wilde played to Balzac earlier⁹ and from Arthur Symons'
later description of Lautrec's portrait of Wilde: 'The face is bestial.'
Symons' vituperative comments are aroused by disgust with Wilde's
'vices' and 'perversions'. Symons judges Wilde to be suffering from

one of those sexual inversions which turned him into a kind of Hermaphroditus
... As he grew older the womanish side of him grew more and more evident.
Lautrec saw him in Paris, and in the appalling portrait of him he shows
Wilde, swollen, puffed out, bloated and sinister. The form of the mouth
which he gave him is more than any thing exceptional; no such mouth ought
ever to have existed: it is a woman's that no man who is normal could ever
have had.¹⁰

Symons's revulsion at the prospect of androgyny testifies to a deep
discomfort with the unsettling of boundaries; the commingling
of elements that convention prefers kept separate. In a fascinating
re-evaluation, Bristow has argued that the image of the effeminate
homosexual man to which Wilde contributed, if not himself formed, was
'firmly established in the public imagination' only after Wilde was sent
to Reading Gaol.¹¹ Through Wilde one can see that gender and sexuality
exhibit changes in shape and identity akin to the larger social changes
outlined above and within previous chapters of the present study.

The unthreatening image of the butterfly and the condemnation of the
beastly ape as abnormal and corrupt indicate the polarity of responses
to Wilde and the uncertainty about where to place him. As Jackson
shows, Wilde cultivated artificiality and valued it above nature; but
that society should be so bothered by this is surely a sign of its own
confusion about the real and the false, nature and the unnatural. To a
large extent, this must be due to social structures and conventions having
themselves been increasingly exposed as artificial. Class movements, as
well as gender and sexuality, contributed to this. Symons' attribution of
bestiality seems quite opposed to the comparison with a butterfly. Where
the latter denotes a light prettiness, suggesting effeminacy,¹² the former
indicates a heavy masculinity. The choice of such very different creatures
to describe Wilde signals ambivalence about him and his audience.
These diverse perceptions are rooted in the economic environment.
Wilde's enduring wit has made him seem transcendent, while his status
as iconic persecuted homosexual has focused attention on the sexual
body. The material elements of the world that Wilde inhabited are often
overlooked, even though they are intertwined with those more celebrated
aspects. 'Neither to myself nor others', wrote Wilde to his publisher
Leonard Smithers in 1897 after being freed from jail,

am I any longer a joy. I am now simply an ordinary pauper of a rather low
order: the fact that I am also a pathological problem in the eyes of German
scientists is only interesting to German scientists: and even in their works
I am tabulated, and come under the laws of *averages!* *Quantum mutatus!*¹³

Bristow starkly summarises Wilde's predicament: 'his drastic transformation from a dandified art critic whose plays entertained thousands of theatre-goers to a debased pervert gathered such momentum in the late 1890s that there seemed no way of reversing the process'.¹⁴ As if to demonstrate how unstable the connection was between circumstance and personal image, Jackson follows Robert H. Sherard's view of Wilde, in late 1894, as declining in spiritual beauty and 'oozing with material prosperity'. He writes that Wilde's friends observed, alongside his successes as a playwright, 'a coarsening of his appearance and character'.¹⁵ Sherard and Jackson's is the more romantic view in that it perpetuates the idea of wealth causing corruption. Whether what helped destroy Wilde was his becoming ostentatiously prosperous or a pauper, the importance of the economic situation is unarguable.

Bristow underlines Wilde's 'acute awareness that the dandified man of
letters is likely to be defeated by the puritanical attitudes of late Victorian
England that sought to transmogrify many a forbidden pleasure into a
form of monstrosity'.¹⁶ He sees Wilde as compromised with those forces
and warns against assuming that Wilde was, by virtue of his socialist
politics, his Irish nationality, and his homosexuality, an entirely opposi-
tional figure.¹⁷ He believes Wilde's stance to be tactical and labels him an
'insider dissident: a figure who provoked the commonsensical mentality
of bourgeois England by entertaining it from within its ranks'.¹⁸ The
tussle over position, meaning, and value will form the focus of the
discussion of Wilde's selected writings in various genres that takes up
the remainder of this chapter.
## Two tales

### i) Bulls, bears, and the butterfly

Many of Wilde's short tales are characterised by a morality that often involves images of animals and insects and turns upon episodes of transformation. They may be aimed at children, but that ought not to blind us to their economic references. Several of the tales are relevant to our discussion. One of them reveals this in its very title. In 'The Model Millionaire', a young man, Hughie Erskine, visits the studio of his painter friend, Alan Trevor. Erskine had every accomplishment except that of making money and lives on

> two hundred a year that an old aunt allowed him. He had tried everything. He had gone on the Stock Exchange for six months; but what was a butterfly to do among bulls and bears?¹⁹

This butterfly has no vocation. It possesses looks, but no substance. In addition to these six months on the Stock Exchange, Erskine had spent a little longer as a tea-merchant before getting bored, as he did subsequently with selling dry sherry: 'Ultimately he became nothing, a delightful, ineffectual young man with a perfect profile and no profession' (MM, p.77).

Wilde's portrait of Erskine finely draws the predicament of the young man whose demeanour is out of step with his material circumstances. The picture is emblematic of a type that belongs to the period: the man who experiences a disparity between his accustomed or anticipated social status and his actual financial standing. Erskine has been left little by his father apart from his 'cavalry sword and a *History of the Peninsular War* in fifteen volumes'. He is in love with Laura Merton, the daughter of a retired Colonel who had served in India: 'They were the handsomest couple in London, and had not a penny-piece between them' (*MM*, p.77). Erskine's prospective father-in-law has ruled out any talk of engagement until Hughie has 10,000 pounds of his own. Erskine's worth is in his looks – a showy but insubstantial wealth.

When Erskine visits Trevor he discovers him painting the portrait of a wizened old beggar, whose apparel and piteous appearance excite his sympathy. His feelings towards the itinerant are heightened when he is told that the artist will earn 2000 guineas for the painting while his model is paid only a shilling an hour. Erskine is moved by this injustice to present a sovereign to the old man while Trevor is absent from the
room. Apart from a few coppers, the money is all that he has on him. The gesture means that Erskine will be unable to afford to ride in hansoms for a fortnight, but he feels that the 'forlorn and wretched' old man needs the money more than he himself does (MM, p.79).

Through Erskine's generosity, Wilde criticises the exploitation of the poor by the rich and asks awkward questions about their treatment in art. Later that night, Trevor tells Erskine in the Palette Club that: 'What you call rags I call romance. What seems poverty to you is picturesqueness to me' (MM, p.80). This is a discomfiting remark from which one may infer that even in politically sympathetic representations of poverty an aesthetic response is what matters. At this point the tale seems to be self-conscious: it, too, appears to include the poor in its larger frame. But the story at once grows more difficult. When accused by Hughie of heartlessness, Trevor insists that '[a]n artist's heart is his head ... and besides, our business is to realize the world as we see it, not to reform it as we know it' (MM, p.80). A serious point is thus made about the role of the artist. Before this can be pondered, however, Wilde makes ostentatious play with the plot, having Trevor reveal to the now-embarrassed Erskine that the beggar was in fact his (Trevor's) great friend Baron Hausberg, who

is one of the richest men in Europe. He could buy all London tomorrow
without overdrawing his account. He has a house in every capital, dines off
gold plate, and can prevent Russia going to war when he chooses. (MM, p.80)

Hausberg had commissioned Trevor to paint him as a beggar and seemed
greatly amused by Hughie's present. When told of this gift by Hughie,
Trevor bursts into laughter and predicts: 'you'll never see it again. *Son
affaire c'est l'argent des autres.*' At best, he thinks, '[h]e'll invest your
sovereign for you ... pay you the interest every six months, and have a
capital story to tell after dinner' (MM, p.81). But Trevor (though not, I
think, the reader, for the twist seems quite predictable) is to be surprised.
He had told the Baron about Erskine's frustrated love and the Baron
sends Hughie a cheque for 10,000 pounds allowing the wedding, at
which the Baron makes a speech and Trevor is best man, to take place.
Trevor concludes that '[m]illionaire models ... are rare enough; but, by
Jove, model millionaires are rarer still' (MM, p.82).

The ending seems an evasion: the serious glance at poverty that the
tale offered is averted by the humorous failure of recognition. Indeed,
it might be deduced from the twist that the moral of the story is that
charity should not be given, because it can so easily be misdirected. Even
a more sympathetic interpretation might be that charitable gestures are worth making, because they may benefit the donor. More than this, the tale provokes questions that it leaves unanswered: we do not really know why the Baron wants to dress as a beggar; we are ignorant of his nationality and where he lives. We are aware that he is an aristocrat who is still very rich, though both the scale and the preservation of his wealth are unusual.

Ultimately, the tale is like the butterfly itself: decorous and flighty. All the same, through its protagonist's momentary anger and discomfort it encourages in its readers a consciousness of poverty and reflection on the relationship between art and its subject. If the moral seems confused, the archness of the ending supplies an uneasy closure which, in its contrivance, draws attention to the tale's unresolved problems.

## ii) *The swallow*

A tale similar to 'The Model Millionaire' is 'The Happy Prince' (1888). Here, instead of the butterfly, the narrative is piloted by a bird. In an unnamed city stands a statue of the Happy Prince, covered in fine gold leaf, with two sapphires for eyes, and a ruby on his sword-hilt. The Prince is encountered by a swallow whose migration to Egypt has been delayed by a now-broken courtship of a Reed. The swallow discovers the Prince weeping and is told by the statue that: 'When I was alive and had a human heart ... I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter.' The Prince never bothered to inquire what lay beyond the walled garden in which he played since 'everything about me was so beautiful'. But after he died he was 'set up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of the city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep'.²⁰ Once again this tale rests on the discovery of poverty and gains its effects from the juxtaposition of wealth and deprivation. The Prince detains the swallow by persuading him to perform a series of charitable deeds on his behalf, distributing his jewels to the poor. One of his sapphires is bestowed on a little match-girl whose matches are spoiled through having fallen into the gutter and who faces a beating from her father. (The year of the story's first publication, 1888, was the year of the match-girls' strike.) Giving away his sapphire eyes has left the Prince blind. The swallow, feeling a warm glow from his charitable missions, tells the Prince he will stay with him always, though the Prince's moral
detention of him has meant that winter has now set in. Pronouncing that '[t]here is no Mystery so great as Misery', the blind Prince asks the swallow to fly over the city and to tell him what he sees.

So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets. (HP, p.143)

The swallow's journey enacts what nineteenth-century writers and campaigners from the late 1840s onwards, and with renewed determination in the 1880s and 1890s, saw and showed to others: the unequal ownership and distribution of wealth.

The swallow tells the Prince of two little boys lying in each other's arms under a bridge for warmth. They have been told by a watchman that they cannot lie there and have had to move out into the rain. In a move that symbolises what might happen if the monarchy were divested of its wealth, the Prince instructs the bird to take off, 'leaf by leaf', the fine gold with which he is covered and to 'give it to my poor; the living always think that gold can make them happy' (HP, p.144). When the swallow brings the gold to the children, they become happy and cry that they now have bread. But as the snow and then the frost bite, the swallow dies. As he does so, the Prince's leaden heart breaks in two, an event that the narrator flatly and unconvincingly attributes to the 'dreadfully hard frost' (HP, p.144). The next morning the Mayor sees the now-unadorned statue of the Prince and decides, as do the Town Councillors, who always follow his lead, that it should be pulled down because it looks so shabby. The sight of the dead swallow at the statue's feet causes the officials to issue a proclamation forbidding birds to die there (meaning, one assumes, in the city, rather than just around the statue). The Mayor and all the Town Councillors then quarrel among themselves over the wish of each to have a statue of himself erected to replace the one of the Prince. That has now been melted down in the furnace – except for the leaden heart, which will not melt and is discarded on the dust-heap where the swallow's body also lies. The tale ends with God ordering one of his angels: 'Bring me the two most precious things in the city.' The angel returns with the leaden heart and the dead bird:

'You have rightly chosen,' said God, 'for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me.' (HP, p.145)
It is a complex ending. God’s words subvert worldly notions of wealth. The golden city over which He rules is one in which the gold is transmuted: it is not at all the same substance that is worshipped in the mundane world, but instead constitutes a kind of spiritual richness. It offers an alternative set of values to the life that the Prince and his subjects previously lived. Characteristically, Wilde realises this other world by keeping to the theme word ‘gold’ but changing its meaning. However, two complications emerge from the construction of this divine alterity. The first has to do with its separation from the material world and the second concerns its ambivalent moralism.

First, from the beginning of the tale, Wilde has already clearly introduced the question of the relationship between aesthetics and materialism. The second paragraph of the tale (all of whose paragraphs are short), further describing the statue of the Happy Prince, reads thus:

> He was very much admired indeed. 'He is as beautiful as a weather-cock,' remarked one of the Town Councillors who wished to gain a reputation for having artistic tastes; 'only not quite so useful,' he added, fearing lest people should think him unpractical, which he really was not. (HP, p.137)

The implied narrative disdain of those who confuse art with usefulness is reinforced near the end of the tale, when the denuded statue is pulled down and the University's Professor of Art remarks: "As he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful ..." (HP, p.145). By this stage the narrator has had the Prince exhibit a quite different kind and standard of beauty, one that exposes the superficiality of views such as the Professor's. In showing the poverty of those, Wilde risks succumbing to a conventional morality, one that he confuses with a more radical challenge to the social order. Again, though, as with 'The Model Millionaire', the conclusion seems ambiguous. On the one hand, the moral might be that those who give selflessly to people in need will find an eternal reward. On the other hand, if we do take this to be the moral, then such acts of charity cease to be altruistic because they are motivated by the promise of a spiritually richer life. From a socialist perspective, these acts achieve nothing: they do not affect the structure of social arrangements and they lead to the self-destruction of the do-gooder, who is survived by the uncompassionate pragmatist. In John Stokes's words: 'Wilde's parabolic fantasies [are] simultaneously liberating and repressive.'²¹

Stokes outlines the transformation and progression that take place in Wilde's fairy tales. Mentioning 'The Young King' and 'The Happy Prince', after a short consideration of 'The Portrait of Mr. W. H.', he notes that in these stories, 'Wilde outlines two realms of beauty: the
transient and the permanent, the meretricious and the meritorious'. Stokes observes that Wilde gives no sign that charitable (or 'noble') acts will gather any reward other than the *de facto* achievement of a higher aesthetic ideal:

> The progression is rather from an innate capacity to appreciate beautiful things to an awareness of what the creation of that beauty involves in human terms, to a final point, reached only after suffering and sacrifice, when a transcendent beauty is attained. The fairy-tales tell of the refinement of the Aesthetic principle; the beauties of the moral life, which in themselves compensate for nothing, are only discovered when Aesthetic indulgence has been transformed.²²

According to Stokes, Wilde's '[a]esthete-martyrs achieve their transcendence only after partial confrontation with repressed knowledge – the knowledge of “cost”.²³ This process is exemplified by the Happy Prince's discovery of the poverty and misery in his city. Stokes neatly traces a dialectic in the tales:

> If satisfaction is at first unwittingly at the expense of others – their labour and their suffering – in its later moral phase it is at the expense of the Aesthete himself – the renunciation of beauty; finally, in the dream of art and sympathy reconciled, transcendence becomes collaborative, since the Aesthete's charity is rewarded by admiring love, and the quality of beauty is attributed to his personality.²⁴

That, of course, is what happens at the end of 'The Happy Prince' and also at the end of 'The Young King'. But I am not sure that the synthesis or even the thesis and antithesis are quite as ordered as Stokes would have it. The journey of the swallow is very complicated – its migration to the land of sensuality and riches in Egypt is interrupted by its shorter but more revealing journeys within the city, which repeat the Prince's own intellectual and perceptual journey outside his walled garden. The resolution Stokes detects is highly plausible: the Prince and the bird are rewarded with God's love for their sacrificial charity, endowing them with beautiful personalities. Yet if this is Wilde's conclusion, it is hardly sufficient to tie up the loose threads that remain. For those readers who are not ready to accept God's love (or who do not accept that there is a God to love), the collaboration looks a party too short. For those who do believe in God's love, the matter of worldly reform may still call for something more structural than individual charity. If Stokes is implying that Wilde has found an answer to his own continuing exploration of the relationship between
Art and Life, aesthetics and materialism, it can only be a balance that fits Wilde's personal interests and views.

## Essaying beasts

It is not only in his short fiction that Wilde expresses his meaning through or against animals. The bestial is evident in his critical writing also and contributes to a similar oscillation between radicalism and conservatism. In 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' (1891), Wilde espouses an individualism that is to be arrived at through Socialism. His argument manages to combine an urge to help the working classes with a loathing of their uncultured lives. Wilde was not alone in this. Among other writers, his contemporaries H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and George Gissing conjoined a radical politics with a personal distaste for the objects of their political cause. Although Wilde's theories of art and society seem more idiosyncratic, some of his beastly images belong to a familiar menagerie. For example, he writes of the mob as a monster, hardly a novel description, but one that communicates a particular anxiety throughout the 1880s and 1890s as a result of the growing unease about the unemployed and striking workers, whose presence was noted in the introduction to the present book.²⁵ However, apart from that image, Wilde strikes an individual note. True, when he writes about those 'great many people' who 'do the work of beasts of burden' and amongst whom 'there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilization, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life' (SM, p.3), he sounds as if he is voicing the disdain felt by any number of the middle and upper classes, but he departs from this point to make two statements that are more radical. The first is that the work that the poor are 'compelled to do ... is quite uncongenial to them', and the second is that they are 'forced' to it 'by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want' (SM, p.3, my emphasis). Wilde insists that the poor are exploited — they have to perform these brute labours, because they have 'no private property of their own' (SM, p.3). It is not that these people are suited only to the performance of such deadening tasks; it is that they are given no choice by those who do possess private property. They are brutes not by nature, but by social organisation:

> From their collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity. But it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the infinitesimal atom
of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient. (SM, p.3)

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Wilde distinguishes between the character and situation of the poor: he does not assume that the poor are inherently or innately degraded because they live lives of degradation. Nor does he have any truck with the idea of the deserving poor as conventionally laid down by Henry Mayhew and subsequent commen-tators. Although his comments look predictable at first, they take a subversive turn:

> the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discon-tented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannize over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. (SM, p.4)

Wilde goes beyond criticising acts of charity: he recommends that the poor take exactly the kind of action that their social superiors so dreaded. Claiming that it 'is both grotesque and insulting' to say that the poor should practise thrift, he declares:

> Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. (SM, pp.4-5)

In Wilde's view, if the poor are bestial it is not because they are essentially animal-like or because their environment makes them unavoidably so; rather, they should fight to assert their humanity. For Wilde, in 'The Soul of Man', animality does not signify the working classes and the unemployed so much as it signifies a rotten social order. It is *that* which is beastly. Of course, it may be argued that Wilde is simply posturing; that his argument is typically designed both to cause moral shock and display his wit. Some of his carefully structured phrases (for example, the chiasmus of 'it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg') resemble the kind of aphorism to be found in his plays.
Yet even if his sincerity is doubted, it is better to adopt the posture than not. Such is Wilde's conviction (or posture) that he declares 'agitators are so absolutely necessary' *because* they 'are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them' (*SM*, p.5).

Wilde argues that ‘Individualism … is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a result the State must give up all idea of government.’ It must, he says, leave people alone. He disparages democracy as ‘simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people’. His justification for his corruption of Lincoln’s dictum is that ‘all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.’ Abuses of authority create a ‘good effect’, because they induce the ‘spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it’, but

[w]hen it [authority] is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralizing. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like *petted animals*, without ever realizing that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. (*SM*, p.13, my emphasis)

Wilde's criticism of democracy for pampering its subjects into unoriginality marks his own originality. There may be a suspicion that in much of his writing this is bound up with a kind of intellectual posturing; a cerebral dandyism; but in his prison and post-prison writings, one cannot doubt that his experience has given his imagery a deep sincerity. When, in 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', he describes the prisoners as apes, he is one of them: 'Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb/With crooked arrows starred,/Silently we went round and round,/The slippery asphalted yard ...'²⁶ This is by no means the privileged labelling of the Other by the more fortunate that we see in naturalistic writing or sociological commentaries. And when the subject and dedicatee of the poem, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, who had premeditatedly killed his wife, meets his punishment, '[t]hey hanged him as a beast is hanged'.²⁷ Wilde's remarks earlier in the poem force a sympathetic identification of himself with Wooldridge:

> A prison wall was round us both,
> Two outcast men we were:
> The world had thrust us from its heart,
> And God from out His care:
> And the iron gin that waits for Sin
> Had caught us in its snare.²⁸

John Stokes points to a troubling aspect of this identification: 'In his efforts to place himself in some appropriate relationship to a condemned man Wilde suppresses the knowledge that the man's crime – murder – is of a radically different kind from his own alleged offences.'²⁹ Yet Wilde's purpose is surely to expose conditions that are hidden both from human and divine eye:

> This too I know – and wise it were
> If each could know the same –
> That every prison that men build
> Is built with bricks of shame,
> And bound with bars lest Christ should see
> How men their brothers maim.³⁰

> There, where 'lean Hunger and green Thirst/Like asp with adder fight',³¹
> the 'vilest deeds' flourish and the good wastes away.³²

It is evident from Wilde's letters to the press after his release from prison that he has seen and felt jail to be a brutalising, bestial place. And it is clear from his having already written in 'The Soul of Man' that 'a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime' (SM, p.13), that his critical eye is on the society that makes victims of its criminals.

In his post-prison letters, Wilde again subverts the usual animal imagery. Instead of regarding the inmates as essentially brutish, as many observers and commentators of the time would have done, he believed them dehumanised by their treatment:

> Deprived of books, of all human intercourse, isolated from every humane
> and humanising influence, condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all
> intercourse with the external world, treated like an unintelligent animal,
> brutalised below the level of any of the brute-creation, the wretched man
> who is confined in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane.³³

In his first post-prison letter, Wilde narrated the case of a man who had indeed been driven to lunacy by the conditions of his punishment. Wilde writes that a few days previously he (Wilde) had been

> startled by the prison silence being broken by the most horrible and revolting
> shrieks, or rather howls, for at first I thought some animal like a bull or a cow
> was being unskilfully slaughtered outside the prison walls. I soon realised,
> however, that the howls proceeded from the basement of the prison, and I
knew that some wretched man was being flogged. I need not say how hideous
and terrible it was for me ...

The next day, Wilde's last Sunday in prison, he sees the victim of the
flogging 'at exercise, his weak, ugly, wretched face bloated by tears and
hysteria almost beyond recognition'. Wilde observes the man 'grinning
like an ape, and making with his hands the most fantastic gestures'.³⁴
The man 'was a living grotesque'.³⁵ This is neither the patronising
classification of the middle-class observer nor the shocked self-disgust
of the discoverer of the ape within. It is instead and emphatically the
political protest against society of one who has witnessed and suffered
its operations.³⁶ Degeneration is externally forced on people by the
society that has marginalised them. Wilde's animal imagery, like his
aphorisms, employs commonly used terms, but undermines their usual
meanings. This can be illustrated with another simian simile. In his
second post-prison letter, Wilde complains that prisoners are allowed to
see their friends only four times a year for twenty minutes each visit:

> Under the present system the prisoner is either locked up in a large iron cage or in a large wooden box, with a small aperture, covered with wire netting, through which he is allowed to peer. His friends are placed in a similar cage, some three or four feet distant, and two warders stand between, to listen to, and, if they wish, stop or interrupt the conversation such as it may be ... To be exhibited, like an ape in a cage, to people who are fond of one, and of whom one is fond, is a needless and horrible degradation.³⁷

In a departure from the way that contemporary criminologists, social
commentators, and novelists wrote of such people, Wilde is saying that it
is society that makes apes of its outcasts. 'And outcasts always mourn', he
wrote in the 'Ballad of Reading Gaol'.³⁸ After this realisation his lighter
wit may have been displaced, but his radical overturning of beastly
referents as they were normally employed shows greater continuity of
method than has sometimes been supposed. What links his pre- and
post-prison writings, besides the manner of his wit, is his gaze at the
backcloth of society against which people stand. His focus is on the
social context of his characters, not on their behaviour and attitudes
separate from it. 'Authority is as destructive to those who exercise it as
it is to those on whom it is exercised', he writes.³⁹
Each bestial sense

Since Wilde acted his own life as though it were an artistic production, it
is appropriate that the beastly epithets used by and about him correspond
to the changes in his situation. On 24 April 1882, Wilde visited the
Lincoln penitentiary in Nebraska. Viewing photographs of the inmates,
he said of one prisoner: 'here's a beast, an animal ... nothing of the
man left'. Reinforcing this conventional view of criminal appearance,
Wilde wrote to Helena Sickert: 'They were all mean looking, which
consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face' (E,
p.191). It would not be until his incarceration that such straightforward
acceptances of criminal physiognomy and conduct would be complicated.
Henry James, who met Wilde in North America early in 1882, described
him as 'an unclean beast' (E, p.171).⁴⁰ On its front page, the *Washington
Post*, again during Wilde's North American tour, juxtaposed a drawing
of Wilde holding a sunflower with one of a 'citizen of Borneo' holding
a coconut (E, p.168). Whistler drew a caricature of Wilde as a pig.⁴¹
Wilde's homosexuality was, of course, at the heart of the transformation
in his circumstances, but it would be quite wrong to overlook the role
played by material (economic and political) conditions. After all, it was
society that criminalised him. Again, his own usage reflects his moral
ambivalence. Ellmann quotes Wilde as telling Robert Sherard the day
after he, Wilde, picked up a (female) prostitute: "'What animals we all
are, Robert'". It is a highly conventional utterance of the commonplace
view that the excitement and gratification by women of males' sexual
urges brings out the beast in men. The impression is reinforced when
Ellmann quotes, straight afterwards, from Wilde's poem 'The Sphinx':
'You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be'
(E, p.206). Yet if we compare this with Ellmann's summary of Wilde's
view - 'Wilde had always held that the true "beasts" were not those who
expressed their desires, but those who tried to suppress other people's'
(E, p.406) - we get back to the idea of Wilde taking conventional imagery
and overturning it. When Wilde was ill during the last few months
of his life and suffering from '[t]he mussel poisoning - as he persisted
in calling it - which had begun in the summer of 1899 [and which]
had brought great red splotches on is arms, chest, and back', causing
irresistible itchiness, he said to Robert Ross, 'I am more like a great ape
than ever' (E, p.544). Of course, the self-applied label is generated by
the humorous image of Wilde scratching himself as an ape does, but the
humour is uncomfortable and describes a wholly different creature from
the butterfly of Wilde's younger days.

Wilde's antagonist, the Marquis of Queensberry, wrote to his son,
Lord Alfred Douglas, calling him, Douglas, a 'reptile' (E, p.423); he sent
to his daughter-in-law (the wife of his son Percy) an illustration from a
popular weekly of an iguanodon, commenting: '[p]erhaps an ancestor of
Oscar Wilde' (E, p.446); and he threatened to shoot Wilde like a dog
(E, p.428). None of this is to suggest for a moment that Wilde is unique
in being compared to an animal or in comparing others to animals. But
the variety of animal similes and metaphors employed by and about him
is unusual and indicates the difficulty of pinning him down. Ellmann
writes that 'Wilde prided himself on living a life not double but multiple'.
Ellmann elaborates thus: 'He could be with Parnell and Gladstone one
night, with Wilson Barrett and Ellen Terry the next, with young men
the next. And Constance, with his children, was always there to neglect
or not' (E, p.267). The brief list concisely indicates the range of Wilde's
social movement, and this is important. It would work against him in
court during his suit against Queensberry for libel when cross-examined
by Queensberry's barrister, Edward Carson, who questioned Wilde about
his liaisons with

Charley Parker and his brother, one a valet, the other a groom, whom Wilde
had met through Taylor. Asked if he knew their occupations, Wilde replied,
'I did not know it, but if I had I should not have cared. I didn't care twopence
what they were. I liked them. I have a passion to civilise the community.'
This was the opposite of his condemnation of the general reading public,
and Carson was quick to fasten upon 'the valet and the groom' as strange
companions for an artist ...

...

... He vividly contrasted Wilde's artistic élitism with his democratic taste for common boys. (E, pp.424–425)

It is possible that had Wilde restricted his choice of sexual partners to
members of his own class he would have caused less of a scandal and
escaped punishment, though Queensberry's rabid behaviour makes that
unlikely. What does seem true is that Wilde's cross-class relationships
aroused greater disapproval than would otherwise have been the case. In
addition to Wilde's multiple sex lives, however, were the multiple aspects
of his social position and character. Transformation is central to these,
and in many of them money is crucial.

Ignoring for present purposes Wilde's move from Dublin to Oxford
and his relationship to Catholicism, his first major transformation came
with his marriage and becoming homosexually active, and the second
with his imprisonment. In both, money played a part: in the first,
because his own and his brother's relative impoverishment led their
mother to encourage them to find marriage partners of means; in the
second, because the laws of the time encouraged blackmail.

Ellmann writes that after Wilde's seduction in 1886 by Robert Ross,
which both men represented as Wilde's first homosexual encounter,
Wilde was changed:

> For Wilde homosexual love roused him from pasteboard conformity to the expression of latent desires. After 1886 he was able to think of himself as a criminal, moving guiltily among the innocent ... Up to that time Wilde could think of himself as misunderstood; now he had to promote misunderstanding. (E, pp.261-262)

According to Ellmann, '[h]omosexuality fired his [Wilde's] mind. It was
the major stage in his discovery of himself' and it gave him a 'changed
outlook' (E, p.265). His journalistic writings of these years (Ellmann
speaks of '1886 on, but especially in 1887 and 1888') constituted

> a way of organizing his attitudes towards literature, art, nature, and life; they
> exhibit a freshness not often present in his earlier work, as if to suggest that
> running foul of the law in his sexual life was a stimulus to thought on every
> subject. At last he knew where he stood. His new sexual direction liberated
> his art. It also liberated his critical faculty. (E, p.270)

The second major transformation of Wilde's life came with his
imprisonment. Ellmann reports many of his visitors commenting on the
drastic change in his appearance and quotes his sister-in-law Lily, who
visited him on 22 October 1895, as writing: 'He is very altered in every
way' (E, p.462). Wilde's wife, Constance, wrote to her brother that her
husband 'is an absolute wreck compared with what he was' and told
Edward Burne-Jones, who recorded her remark in his diary entry for 22
February 1896, that 'he was changed beyond recognition' (E, p.468). The
physical signs of these changes were observed by Wilde's few visitors: he
grew thinner, his graying hair had been cut shorter (a particular cause
of his low morale), and he would often cry. Robert Ross wrote to Oscar
Browning on 12 November 1895, after seeing Wilde for the first time
since his arrest, and describes the prisoner thus:

> Mentally his condition is much better than I had dared to hope though his
> mind is considerably impaired. Physically he was much worse than anyone
> had led me to believe. Indeed I really should not have known him at all.
> This I know is an ordinary figure of speech, but it exactly described what I
experienced. His clothes hung about him in loose folds and his hands are like those of a skeleton. The colour of his face is completely changed, but this cannot be altogether attributed to his slight beard. The latter only hides the appalling sunken cheeks. A friend who was in court would not believe it was Oscar when he first came in.⁴²

The occasion of Ross's visit was the proceedings against Wilde for bankruptcy, the second and final stage of the hearing for which occurred on 12 November 1895. Then, Wilde's friends having failed to raise the sum required to pay off his debts, 'he was officially declared bankrupt and his affairs put in the hands of a receiver' (E, p.462). There can be no doubt that the possession or lack of money both accompanied and helped bring about the changes in Wilde's fortunes. In an essay on Wilde, Regenia Gagnier quotes Karl Marx's dictum that 'capital [was] not a thing, but a social relation between persons'.⁴³ Money was an important currency in Wilde's relationships with people. This was especially so after his release from prison when he was constantly having to borrow from friends (and to beg from strangers). It is also a theme of Ellmann's biography that, prior to Wilde's imprisonment, Douglas drained Wilde, both emotionally and financially.

Additionally and crucially, Wilde feared greatly for his sanity.⁴⁴ Later, Wilde himself would say that '[p]rison has completely changed me' (E, p.508). And on another occasion he is reported to have declared: 'I died in prison' (E, p.474).

A changed Wilde would lead to a changed art. He affirmed after his prison sentence the attitude he had displayed in the years before it, that '[m]y life is like a work of art' (E, p.508). Appropriately, for one who was so completely altered by his incarceration, his post-prison writing would also be drastically affected. In his last year in jail he wrote (from January to March 1897) *De Profundis*. In July 1897, two months after his release, he began 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', which he completed in October. It was published in February the following year. Apart from these, his post-prison letters to *The Daily Chronicle* in May 1897 and March 1898 are his only significant prison and post-prison works. All are characterised by an explicit concern with the experience and effects of prison life. The frivolous side of his wit had been killed off.

*De Profundis*, Wilde's extraordinary autobiographical letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, is a critical document in Wilde's life and thought. In it he advises Douglas to 'let the reading of this terrible letter – for such I know it is – prove to you as important a crisis and turning-point of your life as the writing of it is to me'.⁴⁵ Near the beginning of this long
communication, Wilde writes: ‘You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an artist as I am ...’ (p.40). But in his manuscript Wilde had originally written ‘was’ instead (p.206). This switch of tense attests to his struggle to cling to his primary identity. Part of the fascination of *De Profundis* is that it shows Wilde coming to terms with the changes in his life. Transformation becomes a major theme of the letter; transformation in both life and art, a linkage that is unsurprising given Wilde’s long-standing connection of the two. Moreover, Wilde roots change in its material context: a sad refrain throughout the document is his having been brought to bankruptcy by Douglas’s bleeding of his money. He calculates that ‘between the autumn of 1892 and the date of my imprisonment I spent with you and on you more than £5000 in actual money, irrespective of the bills I incurred’ (p.43).⁴⁶

In *De Profundis* Wilde insists on the transformative powers of art. He does so to such an extent that the work performs what it observes: the alteration, through art, of one’s environment. In the progress of the letter, Wilde makes of his immediate surroundings a base for a new beginning in his life. In place of the ostentatious display of wealth and aesthetic objects is an almost austere attention to the soul. The letter, then, contains the elements that are the focus of the present book: the journey (at least as metaphor), transformation, and images of bestiality. Wilde refers to Queensberry’s ‘bestial and half-witted grin’ and his ‘apelike face’ (p.131) and calls him an ‘ape’ (p.81). In that first description, class is also involved since he writes of Queensberry thus: ‘the stableman’s gait and dress, the bowed legs, the twitching hands, and the hanging lower lip’ (p.131). The latter image has racial connotations, too: Africans and other ‘savages’ were often labelled as possessing the same feature. Wilde’s class-based sneer at Queensberry is unpleasantly difficult to reconcile with his own cross-class liaisons, which he himself described as ‘feasting with panthers’. Mixing the metaphor, he represented himself as a ‘snake-charmer’, luring the ‘brightest of gilded snakes’ whose ‘poison was part of their perfection’ (p.132). But his intention seems to be to open a gap between the Marquis’ and society’s sense of his (Queensberry’s) status and his actual level. The designation of Queensberry as an ape is meant similarly to undermine society’s view of itself. ‘I who appealed to all the ages’, writes Wilde, ‘have had to accept my verdict from one who is an ape and a buffoon’ (p.81). Thus Wilde reverses the charges: he indicts society for allowing the genius of his art to be crushed by the ape Queensberry. The simian epithet scorns society for permitting degeneration to occur: instead of having evolved from the ape, Wilde’s
contemporaries are in thrall to it. Because of the close identification of
his life with his art, Wilde was able to present an attack on one as an
attack on the other.

In a much-quoted passage, Wilde announces: ‘I was a man who stood
in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.’ There follows
what might appear an immodest, but is probably an accurate account of
his genius and accomplishments, including his statement that: ‘I altered
the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said
or did that did not make people wonder’ (p.95). He therefore claims to
effect change in others. Wilde’s near two years in prison have led him
to ‘find hidden away in my nature’ humility – ‘the ultimate discovery at
which I have arrived; the starting point for a fresh development’ (p.96).
His new-found humility ‘is the one thing that has in it the elements of
life, of a new life, a *Vita Nuova* for me’ (p.97). If this new birth sounds
like a resurrection, the affinity with Christ does not stop there. The
sense of humility supplies another link, but so, too, do the emphases on
spiritual richness within material poverty and on the poetry of suffering.
Although Wilde insists that he has found religion of no consolation,
his self-identification with Christ grows stronger as the letter goes on.
‘Sorrow ... and all that it teaches one, is my new world’, he keens, as he
reminds us: ‘I used to live entirely for pleasure’ (p.104). Part of Wilde’s
transformation is an emotional one, but it affects his understanding of
art, also: ‘sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable,
is at once the type and test of all great Art’. There might appear to be
continuity with Wilde’s former views. He writes that: ‘What the artist
is always looking for is that mode of existence in which soul and body
are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward:
in which Form reveals’ (p.105). In fact, there has been a fundamental
alteration in Wilde’s thinking on art. Where before he had delighted in
disjunction, masks, and lying, he now insists on wholeness:

> behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask
> ... Truth in Art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered
> expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with
> spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to Sorrow. (pp.105-106)

No more can there be for Wilde a joyful, teasing display of difference
between what is said, how it is said, and what is meant. If he is adopting
a mask, he wears it consistently.

Invoking Pater and Wordsworth, Wilde announces: ‘I see a far more
intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and
the true life of the artist.’ He goes on to confess his pleasure that ‘long
before Sorrow had made my days her own and bound me to her wheel',
he had written in *The Soul of Man* that

he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself,
and had taken as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the
prisoner in his cell but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and
the poet for whom the world is a song. (p.109)

Mention of his earlier essay underlines what Wilde would have us
believe: that his present situation is a development rather than a recasting
of his life. Wilde proceeds with his ever closer identification of Christ
with art. He writes both of Christ's humility and his own. When he
remarks that '[a]bove all, Christ is the most supreme of Individualists'
(p.113), the reader cannot but be reminded of his earlier pronouncements
on individualism (for example, and especially, in *The Soul of Man*), and
his offering himself as an embodiment of it. But when he goes into
more detail we can appreciate how the comparison with Christ is made
through Wilde's changed circumstances:

> It is man's soul that Christ is always looking for. He calls it 'God's Kingdom'
> ... and finds it in everyone. He compares it to little things, to a tiny seed,
> to a handful of leaven, to a pearl. That is because one only realises one's
> soul by getting rid of all alien passions, *all acquired culture*, and *all external
> possessions* be they good or evil. (p.113, my emphases)

It is not easy to imagine the pre-prison Wilde recommending that we
eschew all acquired culture and certainly not all possessions. Wilde's life
and work before he was jailed depended on a choosy but conspicuous
consumption. There *is* a transformation here, and it coincides – probably
consequentially – with destitution. Wilde absorbs his new criminal status
into a long-standing preoccupation of his by proffering himself as a kind
of martyr.⁴⁷

Just as Wilde's life underwent a transformation, so too did his views on
art and his own artistic practice. In 'The Decay of Lying' (published in
1891), he had written of the restrictions of the 'prison-house of realism'.⁴⁸
Now that he had first-hand experience of an actual jail his attitude
changed. His few prison and post-prison writings show – even in their
lack – the difficulty he now faced in avoiding realism. Suddenly, the
'monstrous worship of facts' seemed not so grotesque.⁴⁹
A monster without a myth

Continuing this examination of beastly imagery, travel metaphor, and transformation we now turn to a brief discussion of Wilde's plays. Their radical edge has been softened by their enduring popularity with theatre audiences. In fact, Wilde's dramas provide a cutting vision of the role of money in society. His subject is largely the effect of wealth on conduct. He wittily exposes the discrepancy between conventional morality and upper- and upper-middle class behaviour. In *The Importance of Being Earnest* the incongruities do not stop there. Wilde takes the familiar form of the comedy of misunderstanding and invests it with complexities so that it operates on a deep economic level, too. Some of the characters lack the money to go with their social standing. Others, who do possess wealth, lack the moral precepts that warrant their position in the social hierarchy. None of them has any moral consistency. When they fall in love they do so playing at romance or following fortunes. Early in the play Algernon announces to Jack: 'I happen to be more than usually hard up.'⁵⁰ But Jack himself is in debt, owing the Savoy nearly 700 pounds. Ironically (one of many ironies), he can afford to pay the bill – he has, in the words of Jack, 'heaps of money' (I, p.362) left to him by 'Old Mr. Thomas Cardew' (I, p.361) who adopted Jack as a young boy. The reason Jack will not pay the bill (until a solicitor arrives demanding it) is that he has invented a dissolute younger brother in London, whom he has to visit to keep in order. This brother he calls Ernest, and it as Ernest that Algernon has known him: 'my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country' (I, p.361). Ernest does not have heaps of money, but 'is one of those chaps who never pays a bill. He gets writted about once a week' (I, p.362). The charade is matched by Algernon, who has a fictitious friend in the country, Bunbury. Light-hearted these imagined characters may seem to be, but they testify to a serious question about identity. Algernon remarks to Jack: 'it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about' (I, p.363). Algernon's apparently flippant observation underlines Wilde's own views on the importance of individualism and suggests the difficulty of achieving this. Another beastly image emphasises the point. Of Lady Bracknell, Jack declares: 'Never met such a Gorgon ... [sic] I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair' (I, p.370). In other words, Lady Bracknell is a hideous creature without the status of one. Whether because of her character or the age in which she lives, or
both, she does not excite. She is a mundane monster, and this, Wilde seems to imply, is what her flat society has produced.

If Wilde mocks the superficiality of love in modern society through Gwendolen and Cecily – the women suggest they can love Jack and Algernon respectively only so long as they believe each is called Ernest – he exposes through Lady Bracknell the empty materialism of her world. She gives her consent to the marriage between Cecily and Algernon only when she learns from Jack that Cecily has '[a]bout a hundred and thirty thousand pounds in the Funds' (IV, p.409). Jack says this with studied casualness, the better to reveal Lady Bracknell's motives. She soon denies that she approves of mercenary marriages, but her words almost immediately on being told of Cecily's fortune are: 'Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her' (IV, p.409). Similarly, her assessment of Jack's suitability as Gwendolen's husband depends both on his wealth and his family. On the former count she is satisfied, but on the latter she is not. His disclosure that he was brought up by the late Mr Thomas Cardew, who had found him in a handbag he had mistakenly been given in the cloak-room at Victoria Station, prompts her to forbid any further intercourse between Jack and Gwendolen. As Wilde has her put it: 'You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter ... to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel' (I, p.370). Wilde makes Lady Bracknell gloriously pompous, but the laughs he extracts at her expense should not mask the play's seriousness about class. Lady Bracknell exclaims a little earlier in the same speech:

> To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary deficiencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to? (I, pp.369-370)

Wilde may be poking fun at Lady Bracknell here, but he is identifying a class anxiety that runs through the play. Those who wish to escape from its implications may find refuge in his humour, divorcing it from the circumstances that have generated it; but to do so would be foolishly to ignore the basis of the drama, just as Lady Bracknell herself does '[n]ot approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance' (I, p.368). Worry about one's position drives the action and consumes the characters. 'What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death', complains Lady Bracknell, 'land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up' (I, p.368). This
is why she is satisfied that Jack's income is mainly from investments. He does have a country house with about 15,000 acres, 'but I don't depend on that for my real income. In fact, as far as I can make out, the poachers are the only people making anything out of it' (I, p.368). The decreasing profitability of land was a fact of the time and the apprehension that the 'lower' classes were usurping one's rights was commonly held. Speaking to Cecily in defence of his name (which she still believes is Ernest), Algernon comments: 'it is rather an aristocratic name. Half of the chaps who get into the Bankruptcy Court are called Algernon' (III, p.396). It may be a joke, but it speaks of the fading fortunes of the upper class. Wilde would follow them into the court. Algernon's declaration that '[n]o gentleman ever has any money' (II, p.385) has a double-edged truth to it: gentlemen were losing their money and many of those who had money were losing their gentlemanliness. Later, Gribsby, the solicitor who serves the writ from the Savoy on Algernon (who is posing as Ernest), talks of the comforts of jail: it is 'fashionable and well-aired; and there are ample opportunities of taking exercise at certain stated hours of the day' (II, p.386). The following dialogue then occurs:

ALGERNON: Exercise! Good God! No gentleman ever takes exercise. You don't seem to understand what a gentleman is.

GRIBSBY: I have met so many of them, sir, that I am afraid I don't. There are the most curious varieties of them. The result of cultivation, no doubt. (II, pp.386-387)

In such seemingly light-hearted exchanges we discern the connectedness of Wilde's characters to the society they would prefer existed only with a capital 'S', and the connectedness of his play to the time that Wilde would prefer his art to transcend.

In *Lady Windermere's Fan* wealth (or its lack) and status are likewise to the fore. Early in the first act, when Lady Windermere voices her annoyance with Lord Darlington for having paid her elaborate compliments the previous evening, he smilingly excuses himself thus: 'Ah, nowadays we are all of us so hard up, that the only pleasant things to pay *are* compliments. They're the only things we *can* pay.'⁵¹ They may not *all* be hard up – Lord Windermere's wife discovers that her husband has been making payments totalling at least 1,700 pounds to Mrs Erlynne – but enough of them are for it to be a concern.

In both plays financial confusion is mirrored by social and personal uncertainty. In *The Importance of Being Earnest* the plot twist is provided by the revelation (to the characters and the audience) that by birth
Jack is Algernon's brother and Lady Bracknell's nephew and his name really is Ernest. In *Lady Windermere's Fan* the secret of the play (known only to Lord Windermere and Mrs Erlynne and quickly deduced by the audience) is that the notorious Mrs Erlynne is mother to Lady Windermere, who believes her mother to have died when she, Lady Windermere, was a child. Wilde was not alone in dealing with orphans and discoveries of birth in his writings, but his treatment of them allows him to focus on the question of worth within and outside society. Dickens (whom Wilde spoke of less than positively) also did as much, but Wilde's unconventional views on morality and individualism mean that in an unsentimental, almost dispassionate way, he can examine the superficiality of character and society: that is to say, the judging of someone's character by their blood relations and material value. Much of the humour arises when Wilde shows just how ridiculous such assessments are. Yet it is an observant, uncommitted humour because it has nothing else to offer in their place. Moral worth counts for little to Wilde, because to him morality is a matter of style.

'[A]ll men are monsters' (I, p.427), exclaims the Duchess of Berwick early in the play. She is referring to their unfaithfulness. But Wilde seems more concerned with society's beastliness. In charting Mrs Erlynne's fall and limited rise he examines the effects of materialism and convention on estimations of personal worth apart from these things. He explores the corrupting influence of social and economic factors on individual growth. Since these are debilitating, they also inhibit social development as society is composed of individuals competing for recognition. Wilde's orphaned characters (orphaned in fact or by belief) afford multiple views of who they were, who they might have been, what they have become, and what in future might happen to them. Wilde shows that characters are socially determined.

Perhaps the play that most communicates class anxiety is *A Woman of No Importance* (written during August and September 1892, first produced in April 1893, and published in October 1894). Gender issues are also prominent, evidenced in its very title. The swing of power away from the aristocracy to the middle classes is addressed early in the first Act when Lady Caroline Pontefract, who gets the name of the M. P. Mr Kelvil not quite right, remarks: 'He must be quite respectable. One has never heard his name before in the whole course of one's life, which speaks volumes for a man, nowadays.'⁵² The change in circumstances is underlined shortly afterwards when she comments to Hester Worsley that: 'In my young days ... one never met anyone in society who worked
for their living. It was not considered the thing.' Her addressee, an American, replies simply: 'In America those are the people we respect most' (I, p.466). Hester is described by Lady Hunstanton as 'an orphan. Her father was a very wealthy millionaire or philanthropist, or both, I believe, who entertained my son quite hospitably, when he visited Boston. I don't know how he made his money, originally' (I, p.470). By contrast, Lord Alfred Rufford has, like his peers, no money.

It was only three years after the writing of this play that Wilde was himself declared bankrupt. (The naming of Lord Alfred might be significant: the play was written within eighteen months of Wilde's meeting Lord Alfred Douglas, who drained Wilde's finances; but I am less interested in such biographical speculation than in the type of person and predicament this character represents.)

The play questions the meaning of importance. It moves towards an inversion of its title. Thus, at the end of Act One, when Lord Illingworth sees Mrs Arbuthnot's handwriting and is reminded of her – though he does not yet know it is her hand – he dismisses her as '[a] woman of no importance' (I, p.477). At the end of the play, after Lord Illingworth has unwillingly turned his son against him and been made to realise that his money cannot buy filial affection, he is dismissed by Mrs Arbuthnot as '[a] man of no importance' (IV, p.514).⁵³

Although Wilde rightly rejoices in the diminution of Illingworth, his sympathies do not seem to lie altogether with Mrs Arbuthnot, who appears stubborn and over-protective of her grown-up son. Neither parent enjoys complete authorial or audience support. But if, in his survey of upper-class marriage, Wilde cannot provide an answer, he can at least ask pertinent questions. In *A Woman of No Importance* these centre on the effects of money upon marriage. Lady Caroline insists that men should be kept in their 'proper place', which is looking after their wives. If they are not married, they should be compelled to by law. If they are in love with someone else who may be tied to another, they should 'be married off in a week to some plain respectable girl, in order to teach them not to meddle with other people's property'. To this, Mrs Allonby replies:

> I don't think that we should ever be spoken of as other people's property. All men are married women's property. That is the only true definition of what married women's property really is. But we don't belong to anyone. (II, p.478)

This glance at the debates about married women's property shows that even after the 1882 Married Women's Property Act 'removed most of
the common law disabilities which denied a married woman the right to own property and earnings',⁵⁴ unease still existed.

Marriages in Wilde's plays are often tarnished by money. Many matches were made for financial gain and have been dulled by the pursuit or possession of wealth. This is nicely illustrated in the following from *A Woman of No Importance* when Mrs Allonby tells Lady Hunstanton: 'my husband is a sort of promissory note; I'm tired of meeting him' (II, p.479). Wilde understands – and shows his audience – that all human relations are defined by, and conducted through, economic relations. As Terence Brown has noted in a brief but suggestive introduction to the plays, 'Wilde does not flinch in the matter of money'.⁵⁵ Money is as central to the plays as it is to the characters' lives.

## A changeful life

Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, a frequent commentator on his grandfather, has written of the difficulty in pinning Wilde down. He refers to the latter's fascinating and confusing duality:

> the Anglo-Irishman with Nationalist sympathies; the Protestant with life-long Catholic leanings; the married homosexual; the musician of words and painter of language who confessed to André Gide that writing bored him; the artist astride not two but three cultures, an Anglo-Francophile and a Celt at heart.⁵⁶

Holland notes that on top of all this is 'the question of which facets of the Wildean dichotomy were real and involuntary and which were artificial and contrived for effect'.⁵⁷ Yet in addition, Holland observes, there is the unreliability of Wilde's biographies, Ellmann's monumental volume included. Their inaccuracies and lacunae are not helped by Wilde's own deceits. Holland quotes from a letter in which Wilde exposes his own fib about his circumstances, told in order to extract money from Ross, and he compares different statements by Wilde offering contradictory accounts of time spent with (or without) Frank Harris in Napoule. (Again, it seems the lie is to Ross and is designed to extract money.) Holland invites biographers to consider carefully '[t]his manipulation of the truth for financial advantage'.⁵⁸ Because of our uncertainties about Wilde, many of them fostered by his own pronouncements and behaviour, and because of the fragmentary views we get of him, so that contradiction and confusion seem to abound, Holland remarks that Wilde's duality is now 'more of a plurality'.⁵⁹ The multifarious beastly
labels that were attached to him through the progress and transformation of his life reflect this. Their variability and the fluctuations in his fortunes (both metaphorically and materially) are further evidence that Wilde 'saw that the "self" ... was socially constructed'.⁶⁰ And *this* means that the self was buffeted by the winds of economic and social change. So, therefore, the terms used to describe it had regularly to be revised. In Wilde we see the complicated effort to retain the shape of the self against the prevailing forces. He remarks of Christ that: 'He felt life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death.'⁶¹ That is how Wilde tries to accommodate the changes in his life. It suits the originality of his art and person and it is reflected in the variety of animal imagery applied to and by him.

## Notes

1 Henry James, quoted in Neil Sammells, *Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde* (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), p.55. Sammells repeats the quotation from H. Montgomery Hyde, *Oscar Wilde* [1976].

2 For a detailed account of the trials, see H. Montgomery Hyde, *The Trials of Oscar Wilde* [1948, 1962] (New York, NY: Dover, 1973).

3 Richard Ellmann, *Oscar Wilde* (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p.412. Further page references will be given parenthetically preceded by *E*.

4 *Weekly Sun*, 16 June 1895, quoted in Ed Cohen, *Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities* (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), p.17.

5 *Evening Standard*, 4 April 1895. Quoted in Cohen, *Talk on the Wilde Side*, p.166.

6 Cohen, *Talk on the Wilde Side*, pp.166–167.

7 Joseph Bristow, *Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885* (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), p.37.

8 Quoted from *Pearson's Weekly*, 27 May 1893, in Holbrook Jackson, *The Eighteen Nineties* [1913] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), p.70.

9 This unattributed quotation is to be found in Jackson, *The Eighteen Nineties*, p.67.

10 Arthur Symons, 'Sex and Aversion', in Karl Beckson, ed., *The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art in the 1890s* (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), pp.146–147. Quoted in Bristow, *Effeminate England*, p.17.

11 Bristow, *Effeminate England*, p.2. Wilde's sentence, as Bristow reminds us, was two years in solitary confinement with hard labour.

12 Interestingly, the same image was used to describe Aubrey Beardsley. Jackson quotes H. C. Marillier: "'Poor Beardsley! His death has removed a quaint and amiable personality from among us; a butterfly who played at being serious, and yet a busy worker who played at being a butterfly.'" Jackson, *The Eighteen Nineties*, p.88. That two apparently effeminate writers of the period should be so labelled is, I think, more than coincidence. The *OED* includes among its definitions of the word '[a] vain, gaudily attired person ... a light-headed, inconstant person' and 'vain, inconstant, frivolous'.
13 Oscar Wilde to Leonard Smithers, 11 December 1897. In Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, eds, *The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde* (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p.1006. A version of this from an earlier edition of Wilde's letters is quoted by Bristow, *Effeminate England*, p.18. Holland and Hart-Davis footnote the Latin thus: '*Quantum mutatus ab illo* (How changed from what he once was). Virgil, *Aeneid*, II, 274.' Wilde applies the Latin to himself to convey his own sense of transformation.

14 Bristow, *Effeminate England*, p.18.

15 Jackson, *The Eighteen Nineties*, p.71. Jackson reports Sherard's description of Wilde as 'bloated' (p.71).

16 Bristow, *Effeminate England*, p.20.

17 Bristow, *Effeminate England*, p.20.

18 Bristow, *Effeminate England*, p.21.

19 Oscar Wilde, 'A Model Millionaire. A Note of Admiration', in *Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories* [1891] (London: Penguin, 1994), p.77. Further page references will be given parenthetically with the abbreviation 'MM'.

20 Oscar Wilde, 'The Happy Prince', in *Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories* [1891] (London: Penguin, 1994), p.139. The tale was first published in *The Happy Prince and Other Tales* in 1888. Further page references will be given parenthetically with the abbreviation 'HP'.

21 John Stokes, *Oscar Wilde* (Harlow: Longman for the British Council, 1978), p.22.

22 Stokes, *Oscar Wilde*, pp.21–22.

23 Stokes, *Oscar Wilde*, p.22.

24 Stokes, *Oscar Wilde*, p.22.

25 Oscar Wilde, 'The Soul of Man', in Oscar Wilde, *The Soul of Man and Prison Writings*, edited and with an introduction by Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.29. Further page references will be given parenthetically as 'SM'. For the application of 'monster' to the French Revolution, see Chris Baldick, *In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Chapter One.

26 Oscar Wilde, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' (1898), in Oscar Wilde, *The Soul of Man and Prison Writings*, edited and with an introduction by Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.182, lines 433–436. I discuss this poem further in "A Sonnet Out of Skilly": Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"", *Critical Survey* 11, 3 (1999), 40–47.

27 Wilde, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', p.185, line 511. The information on Wooldridge is taken from Murray's endnote in Wilde, *The Soul of Man and Prison Writings*, edited and with an introduction by Isobel Murray, p.220. The poem's inscription begins 'In Memoriam/C.T.W.' (p.169).

28 Wilde, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', p.174, lines 169–174.

29 Stokes, *Oscar Wilde*, p.46.

30 Wilde, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', p.186, lines 547–552.

31 Wilde, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', p.187, lines 583–584.

32 Wilde, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', p.186, line 559.

33 'Wilde's Second Post-Prison Letter to the *Daily Chronicle*, in *The Soul of Man and Prison Writings*, edited by Isobel Murray, p.191. The letter was published on 24 March 1898.

34 'Wilde's First Post-Prison Letter to the *Daily Chronicle*, in *The Soul of Man and*
*Prison Writings*, edited by Isobel Murray, p.166. The letter was published on 28 May 1897.

35 Wilde, 'First Post-Prison Letter', p.167.

36 The first post-prison letter was written in defence of a warder who had been 'dismissed by the Prison Commissioners for having given some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child' (p.159). The scope of the letter widens into a protest against the inhumane treatment of children in prison. Their 'terror', writes Wilde, 'was quite limitless' (p.160). They are locked in their solitary, dimly lit cells for twenty-three hours per day, and Wilde recalls 'a child's face ... like a white wedge of sheer terror' that had 'in his eyes the terror of a hunted animal' (p.161). Wilde's attack is fiercely against the society that inflicts such cruelty, not on what many of his contemporaries would presume to be the child's own animality.

37 Wilde, 'Second Post-Prison Letter', pp.193–194.

38 Wilde, 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', p.185, line 534.

39 Wilde, 'First Post-Prison Letter', p.160.

40 Ellmann infers that James saw in Wilde a threat, because 'James's homosexuality was latent, Wilde's was patent', and Wilde's 'flouting and flaunting' made it difficult for society to tolerate it by turning a blind eye to it (p.171).

41 Reproduced in Ellmann, *Oscar Wilde*, between pp.226 and 227.

42 Quoted in Ellmann, *Oscar Wilde*, p.461, unnumbered footnote.

43 Karl Marx, *Capital*, quoted in Regenia Gagnier, 'Wilde and the Victorians', in Peter Raby, ed., *The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.21.

44 These symptoms were noted by most of Wilde's visitors, but are also concentrated in Ellmann's summary of Robert Ross's impressions of Wilde after a year of his imprisonment. Ellmann, *Oscar Wilde*, pp.468–469.

45 Oscar Wilde, 'De Profundis', in *The Soul of Man and other Prison Writings*, edited by Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.72. Further page references will be given parenthetically.

46 Details of some of this expenditure are given in the letter.

47 On Wilde and martyrdom, see, for example, Karl Beckson and Bobby Fong, 'Wilde as Poet', in Peter Raby, ed., *The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde*, p.62; and John Stokes, 'Wilde the Journalist', in Raby, ed., *The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde*, p.76.

48 Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay of Lying', in *Intentions* [1891] (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1925), p.27. The essay first appeared in *The Nineteenth Century*, January 1889, and was revised for its publication in book form in *Intentions*.

49 Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay of Lying', p.8.

50 Oscar Wilde, *The Importance of Being Earnest*, in *Complete Works of Oscar Wilde* (Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), Act One, p.360. Further page references to the play will be given parenthetically, preceded by the Act number, and are to this edition. The edition gives the play in its full four Acts, including the second, which is often omitted from performances and from other texts after having been cut at the behest of Wilde's actor manager (p.352). The play was written in August and September of 1894, produced in January 1895, and published in January 1899.

51 Oscar Wilde, *Lady Windermere's Fan*, in *Complete Works of Oscar Wilde*, Act One, p.421. Further page references to the play will be given parenthetically, preceded by
the Act number, and are to this edition. The play was first produced in February 1892 and published in November the following year.

52 Oscar Wilde, *A Woman of No Importance* (Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), p.465. Further page references to the play will be given parenthetically, preceded by the Act number, and are to this edition.

53 The plot has a chance meeting between Lord Illingworth and Mrs Arbuthnot – the mother of their son, Gerald. Illingworth had made her pregnant, but had not kept his promise to marry her. She had left, refusing financial help. Again by chance, Illingworth has offered Gerald a post as his private secretary. Gerald wants to accept because it will boost both his income and social status, as well as broaden his horizons. It will involve geographical as well as social travel. Encouraged by Illingworth, once the latter has discovered – but not revealed to Gerald – the young man’s true identity, Gerald grows impatient with his mother for her opposition, which looks like (and in part is) a maternal clinging. However, when Illingworth tries to seduce Hester, whom Gerald loves, Gerald loses all respect for him. At this point, in the near violence of the moment (Gerald has threatened Illingworth), his mother reveals the secret of his paternity. Once he has been told the story of Illingworth’s deception of Mrs Arbuthnot, Gerald is more opposed to him.

54 J. F. C. Harrison, *Late Victorian Britain 1875–1901* (n.p.: Fontana Press, 1990), p.170.

55 Terence Brown, ‘Introduction to the Plays’, in *Complete Works of Oscar Wilde*, p.351.

56 Merlin Holland, ‘Biography and the Art of Lying’, in Peter Raby, ed., *The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde*, p.3

57 Holland, ‘Biography and the Art of Lying’, p.3.

58 Holland, ‘Biography and the Art of Lying’, p.9.

59 Holland, ‘Biography and the Art of Lying’, p.16.

60 Regenia Gagnier, ‘Wilde and the Victorians’, in Peter Raby, ed., *The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde*, p.20. Gagnier elaborates: ‘It was constructed through language ... It was constructed through social institutions ... And it was constructed irrationally, unconsciously ...’ I would place its economic construction (which is a part of Gagnier’s analysis) above these.

61 Wilde, ‘De Profundis’, p.121.
Conclusion

The preceding chapters have argued that the shape assumed by beasts
in the literature of the late 1880s and 1890s is moulded by the changing
identity of Britain at that time. The 1880s were a 'period of extraordinary
transition'.¹ The travels and transformations found in contemporary
writing provide a response to those critical years, one that also resonates
in more recent surveys and reviews of the period. This is illustrated in
the following brief quotation (one of many such), which sums up what
much of the foregoing discussion has shown: 'England in the 1880s was
in transition, shedding the skin of Victorianism and moving towards a
more modern age.'² The combination of social change, animal imagery,
and travel metaphors concisely expressed here encapsulates the main
themes of this book.

Before taking stock, let us glance at the forms taken by the early
progeny of the beasts we have observed so far. In the main, the next
generation, the descendants that inhabited the first third of the twentieth
century, quiver from the fear of sex and slaver over the threat of national
dissolution. John Lucas writes of the 1920s that: 'A deep anxiety underlies
or is to be found within much writing by men during this period, and
one of the ways it shows is in the depiction of women gone feral.'³ At
the very start of that decade, Edward Heron-Allen's short story 'The
Cheetah-Girl' was expunged from the collection *The Purple Sapphire
and Other Posthumous Papers* (1921) that it was meant to close. Under
the story's title a parenthetical note explains: '[The Publishers regret that
they are unable to print this M.S.].'⁴

In the title poem of Charlotte Mew's *The Farmer's Bride* (1916), 'the
young wife flees from her husband's sexual demands and is described in a
way that identifies her ... with a hunted animal: a leveret in her shyness,
her fears, and her "soft, young down"'.⁵ Lucas notes that the poem 'seems
to set in ... train a number of works in which women become feral
creatures'.⁶ We might list among these David Garnett's novella *Lady into
Fox* (1922), which, like his *A Man in the Zoo* (1924), unsettles with its
representation of animals. The protagonist of the former, Mr Tebrick, attempts to reconcile himself to his wife Sylvia's metamorphosis into a vixen. The narrator encourages a lack of understanding:

> A grown lady is changed straightaway into a fox. There is no explaining that away by any natural philosophy. The materialism of our age will not help us here. It is indeed a *miracle*; something from outside our world altogether.⁷

It may be written tongue-in-cheek, but the narrator desires us to accept the thing just as it is; the event happens and cannot be rationalised. In keeping with many twentieth-century animal narratives, *Lady into Fox* encourages both sympathy and empathy. Tebrick loves his wife, regardless of her altered state, telling her: 'Though you are a fox I would rather live with you than any woman.' He pledges fidelity, 'respect and reverence'. He does so, 'not because of any hope that God in His mercy will see fit to restore your shape, but solely because I love you. However you may be changed, my love is not' (p.14). But Mr Tebrick grows impatient with his foxy wife, whose increasing slide into animal ways he finds repulsive.⁸ When he begins to worry that she is losing what remains of her human characteristics he tests her by leaving her alone for five minutes with a present of flowers and a black-and-white rabbit. Before he steps outside the room to fetch a vase she shows no interest in the creature. When he returns he finds '[b]lood on the carpet, blood on the armchairs and antimacassars, even a little blood spurtled on to the wall, and what was worse, Mrs. Tebrick tearing and growling over a piece of the skin and the legs, for she had eaten up all the rest of it' (p.29). Shock and humour collide here, produced by Garnett's giving the fox its previous human appellation and marital title while it consumes the rabbit, staining the furniture red. Garnett's story introduces a second transformation as Tebrick's attitude towards his vulpine spouse changes. His vow of fidelity gives way to inconstancy, at least of feeling. Garnett thus shows that things - people - are not fixed. Furthermore, because the narrative itself presents Tebrick's reversal of view without commenting on the contradiction, it reveals a gap between intention and conduct; between declaration and behaviour. Promises are rendered unreliable; emotions and relationships are unsettled. It also creates distance between what is shown and what is said: Tebrick's growing distaste contravenes his declarations of love, but the discrepancy is not acknowledged. Mr Tebrick's own change advances with his retreat into misanthropy. He becomes a recluse, who 'had come to hate his fellow men and was embittered against all human decencies and decorum' (p.62). This state is
reached after his fox-wife has turned against him and fled into the wild. She had earlier bit his hand when he prevented her escaping through a tunnel she was digging, and her eyes 'held his, with their split pupils looking at him with savage desperation and rage' (p.56). The language of escape and entrapment is associated with marriage: the story posits the vixen's efforts to flee as an attempt to achieve freedom. Mr Tebrick asks his wife: 'Are you trying to escape from me? I am your husband, and if I keep you confined it is to protect you, not to let you run into danger' (p.48). His words are those of the patriarch who insists he knows what is best for his wife. Garnett employs his animal metaphor at this point to critique contemporary marriage and gender relationships.

Neil Jordan, who directed Angela Carter's *Company of Wolves* (1984) and co-wrote the screenplay with her, states of Garnett's *Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo* that:

> The presence of animals in both intimates a parable, a meaning, a lesson, but the power of both stories lies actually in their resistance to interpretation, in the inscrutable balance Garnett has achieved between a subject that is primitive, outlandish, and a style that is almost prim in its reserve, its rectitude.⁹

Jordan's first remark oversimplifies animal tales, which are often much more complex and ambiguous than parables. On the other hand, his suggestion that their strength resides in their challenge to interpretation reminds us of both the indeterminacy of meaning created by the transformations we have witnessed to date and the uncertainty that sits at the heart of much modernist art. Jordan's comment on the discrepancy between subject and style can be applied to the stories of Saki (H. H. Munro) in which the ill-fit is for effect and exposes an unease about the suitability of appearance to substance; of outward form to inner nature. The rift between expression and topic is discomfiting and ensures that the text cannot be read unthinkingly: illusions of natural fit are shattered.

Saki's dry wit has the bestial intrude into the English drawing room in a number of his short tales. The contrast between his elegantly mannered prose and savage humour complements his coupling of the domestic and the wild. In 'The She-Wolf' (1912, 1914), hostess Mary Hampton tells her guest Leonard Bilsiter, who has travelled across Eastern Europe, 'I wish you would turn me into a wolf, Mr. Bilsiter.'¹⁰ The story rests on the illusion of a transformation. Saki mocks the protagonist's pretensions to supernatural abilities. Bilsiter believes he has acquired mystical powers on his journey and as a result of his powerful imagination, but his fellow guest Clovis Sangrail secretly arranges for another guest to
bring to the property a wolf that he owns. This wolf they introduce as though Bilsiter really has changed his hostess into a she-wolf, much to Bilsiter's embarrassment and consternation. The tale does not relate a real transformation, but it parodies those stories in which transmutations are said to occur, and it makes fun of readers who accept the illusion. Clovis casually assumes superior gifts, claiming:

> I happen to have lived for a couple of years in North-eastern Russia, and I have more than a tourist's acquaintance with the magic craft of that region. One does not care to speak about these strange powers, but once in a way, when one hears a lot of nonsense being talked about them, one is tempted to show what Siberian magic can accomplish in the hands of some one who really understands it. I yielded to that temptation. May I have some brandy? The effort has left me rather faint. (p.128)

It is in part the incongruity of Sangrail's urbane calmness and the fantastical tale he tells that provokes Bilsiter into thinking that if he 'could at that moment have transformed Clovis into a cockroach and then have stepped on him he would gladly have performed both operations' (p.129). It is noticeable that here, as in Garnett's work and other examples of shape-shifting narratives from the 1920s, humour is prominent. The juxtaposition of the quotidian and the fantastic that in the fin de siècle Gothic generated fear and horror now gives rise to a sardonic smile.

The anomalous is at the heart of Saki's writing. Introducing a collection of Saki's tales, Tom Sharpe writes of how, in them,

> [c]ivilization has been overthrown and replaced by a strange supernature, and all this worship of instinct comes at us more forcefully because it emerges from the setting of house party and afternoon tea, and all the hallowed conventions of Edwardian society.¹¹

Sharpe's description inadvertently suggests a line connecting Saki to Machen and MacDonald: 'Step out through the French windows and you are in the realm of Pan and liable, unless you pay homage, to pay with your life for your arrogant belief in material progress and the virtues of middle-class respectability.'¹² There are obvious continuities with the late nineteenth-century works discussed in the previous pages, but, as ever, the new forms mark an adaptation to their own environment. The First World War increased the longing for escape as much as it hammered home the barbarity of a newly industrialised killing machine. The absurd combination of savagery and domestic interiors in Garnett's and Saki's darkly humorous tales owes something to this. It is evident,
too, along with the build-up to the Second World War, in Karel Čapek's satirical allegory, *War with the Newts* (1937), which – using, like *Dracula* and *The Beetle*, multiple voices and documents – recounts the discovery, exploitation, adaptation, and militarisation of the eponymous Newts. Human greed, politics, nationalism, and international rivalry produce another slave trade and violence on a world-wide scale. Indeed, there is a subdivision of beastliness here as the German emphasis on the racial superiority of the Baltic Newts has the country's press describing with contempt 'the degenerate Mediterranean Newts, stunted both physically and morally; the savage tropical Newts; and altogether the low, barbarian, and bestial Salamanders of other nations'.¹³

In the twentieth century, beastliness arising from travel is often linked with a threat to authority. That authority is generally white and male. The challenges to it are frequently posed by colonial subjects moving towards independence, nations with alternative political systems, opposing political and class interests, and women striving for liberation. Those pressures are present in the later nineteenth century, too, but they intensify in the twentieth. Expressions of a governing body as a weakened animal or under attack from wild creatures are rife. At the beginning of his travel book *Filibusters in Barbary*, which sees the author travelling to Morocco, Wyndham Lewis complains that

> [t]he sedentary habits of six years of work had begun, I confess, to weary me. Then the atmosphere of our dying European society is to me profoundly depressing. Some relief is necessary from the daily spectacle of those expiring Lions and Eagles, who obviously will never recover from the death-blows they dealt each other (foolish beasts and birds) from 1914–1918 ...

> Perhaps nothing short of the greatest desert in the world, or its proximity, would answer the case.¹⁴

Lewis seeks the sun, both literally and figuratively. He turns away from the cold and wet:

> England had its watercart on at full blast as I left; there had been no sun for ten months ... England, my England! I gasped, my face streaming with rain – Shall I return; or, like so many of your sons, become from henceforth an exile? I wished frankly to escape for ever from this expiring Octopus, that held me to it by my mother-tongue (unless America can be said to share, with England, that advantage over me).¹⁵

Lewis was one of those modernists who were troubled by the encroachment of tourism on travel. The rise of mass tourism from the mid-nineteenth century provokes its own bestiary. Paul Fussell notes 'how traditional
in anti-tourist fulminations animal images are ... And if not animals, insects'.¹⁶ By way of example, Fussell quotes from Charles Lever, Francis Kilvert, and Osbert and Edith Sitwell, but many more could be added to the list. Scorning the herd or the swarm is to individualise and humanise oneself.¹⁷

The impulse to travel and to do so in ways distinct from group tourism was also a reaction against the 1914–1918 war. In the decade after that conflict, many artists presented a vision of a world in which human behaviour and feelings were mechanised. D. H. Lawrence's characters are insentient victims of, or seek an antidote to, this machine state. In Lawrence's writing and that of several of his contemporaries, sex is a focus for this robotic condition, regarded either with disgust or as a revitalising remedy. John Lucas reminds us that in T. S. Eliot's poem *The Waste Land*, Tiresias 'emerges as the prurient, disgusted voyeur of the animal-like sexual couplings which such critics as F.R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks took to characterise relationships in the modern world: mechanical, sterile, joyless'.¹⁸ The decadence that was perceived – even sought and promoted – in these years heightened the atmosphere of animalistic pleasure. Lucas writes of the 1920s: 'Sex, drugs, dance music. Signs of the times, elements in the vortex of beastliness'.¹⁹ That which had previously been shunned or feared now enticed and was embraced with a frisson of danger. In art (visual and aural), the appetite for it is manifested in the appropriation and adaptation of indigenous culture. In music, what Lucas calls 'the fearful fascination of an earlier generation of European writers and artists with [the] heart of darkness' becomes 'modulated into or ... focused on what was commonly called "jungle music" – in a word, jazz'.²⁰ Drugs themselves became the means of achieving an altered state. When Kathleen Hale unwittingly takes hashish at a party in 1922 she experiences 'horrendous nightmares about colossal and malign elephants', and, on awaking the next morning, '[s]till under the influence of hashish, I was convinced that I had become an object of utter ridicule with a monstrous body and eyes that had totally disappeared behind puffed eyelids'.²¹

The year after the end of the First World War saw the publication of W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming', a poem that itself took on many forms as the poet revised it several times. Anticipating the Second Coming, the speaker remarks:

> The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

> When a vast image out of *Spiritus Mundi*

> Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

As darkness descends, the speaker now knows '[t]hat twenty centuries of stony sleep/Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle'. The original version closes with the threatening question: 'And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'²² Declan Kiberd proffers those last lines as examples of what he finds to be characteristic of 'many of Yeats's most memorable [ones]': that they 'are striking without being lucid'. The rough beast, Kiberd suggests, may be 'a divine agent of inspiration, heralding not only a new era but also new subjects for poetry'.²³ That may be, but it is an unsettling, even a sinister, image. Yeats's rough beast is of an indeterminate hue, symptomatic of modernism's amorphous shapes. Noting Yeats's preoccupation with Socialism and his apprehension of its spread in Russia, Germany, and Italy both during and after the war, Lucas identifies the slouching beast with the working classes, the 'plebs'. In Lucas's reading, 'Yeats' fear is that history now shapes and is shaped by "the roof-levelling wind" of democratic energies which will actively threaten and destroy a culture, a civilisation, where "all's accustomed, ceremoniousness".²⁴ We might record here that Churchill wrote to Mussolini, supporting his struggle 'against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism'.²⁵

Naturalistic descriptions of workers and the masses continue into the twentieth from the nineteenth century. In Ellen Wilkinson's 1929 novel *Clash*, miners are depicted as the victims of a voracious industrial monster:

> The coal-pit was the only thing in each village that mattered, the only part of life on which capital and care and brains were expended. Human beings were usually fed into its mouth at eight-hourly intervals, and just as regularly coughed up again. Now the wheels of the winding cage were silent, but the domination of the pit remained. On the refuse-heaps men, women and children grubbed, like maggots trying to find precious bits of coal to sell for bread.²⁶

In the opening section of *The Road to Wigan Pier* (1937), George Orwell writes of people like 'blackbeetles'.²⁷ But Orwell sees through the outer coat. He urges: 'if one remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes'.²⁸ Orwell's vision restores humanity to those who have been brutalised. Bernard Schweizer asserts that: 'For George Orwell, both the act and the rhetorical figure of travelling were linked with the idea of
social and political transformation.’ Travel was ‘also tied up with a sense of responsibility, of promoting a silenced perspective’.²⁹ If one accepts Schweizer’s case, Orwell reverses the processes that have been described in much of the present work; rather than Othering in his travels, Orwell strips away difference. But in Orwell’s travel writing,

guilt is the sign of an incomplete social transformation ... In facing the poor and the colonized, Orwell is constantly torn between his liberationist, egalitarian ideals and his bourgeois background. And each time the repressed middle-class consciousness rears its head, the result is an uncanny impression.³⁰

One might contend that in the self-consciously comic construction of domestic beastliness in Saki and Garnett, in the knowingly allegorical warning of the effects of slavery and exploitation in *War with the Newts*, and in the proletarian sympathies – however qualified or compromised – of Orwell, the beasts of the half century after the fin de siècle are less an object of fear or correction and more an artifice. If we have moved on, it may be at the cost of attention to the real causes of deformation, though to speak in terms of progress or regression is unwise. The pattern is uneven. The narrator of African American James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel *Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man* may hurl back the animal label often used against his people by writing of whites who commit a lynching – ‘Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts?’³¹ – but a century later a prominent and distinguished British commentator could write of young people who took part in rioting that they were wild beasts, with instincts only to sleep, eat, drink, have sex, and steal or destroy others’ property.³²

The processes discussed in this book are not unique to the last years of the nineteenth century, but the examples presented here display in concentrated form the operation of material contexts on cultural metaphors. The number of survivals from the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century is remarkable and testament to the profundity of the symbolic representation of social and economic forces and fears at the time, but the mutation of the originals reflects subsequent concerns, too. The creatures paraded between these covers serve to show that, in literature as in life, animals adapt to their environment. In literary texts, this means adaptation to form and genre, which respond in turn to their own context, and also to the society in which those works are produced. In the last fifteen years or so of the nineteenth century we witness the extraordinary coincidence of factors – economic, social, intellectual, and technological – that bore on the shapes of humans, the world they
inhabited, and how they travelled. On the cusp of the modern, they look both ahead and back. The economic catalysts so evident to nineteenth-century readers are largely erased from retellings, but remain preserved in the originals ready for excavation.

It is tempting to conclude by identifying a movement towards greater empathy with animals. Taking his lead from Kate Soper, Steve Baker discusses

> the diverse ways in which post-modern art has dealt with the animal across a spectrum ranging from the *animal-endorsing* to the *animal-sceptical*. These terms ... point to the complexity of what it is that is called 'animal' here. Animal-endorsing art will tend to endorse animal life itself (and may therefore align itself with the work of conservationists, or perhaps of animal advocacy), rather than endorsing cultural constructions of the animal. Animal-sceptical art, on the contrary, is likely to be sceptical not of animals themselves (as if the very existence of non-human life was in question), but rather of culture's means of constructing and classifying the animal in order to make it meaningful to the human.³³

Works such as Franz Kafka's *The Metamorphosis* (1915) take a more sympathetic view of the perspective and plight of the animal. In Kafka's tale finance is, as in so many of the works discussed here, central to the story. The family of the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, struggle to feed themselves when Gregor is unable to work as a result of his transformation. They then start saving money as a result of his cheaper living. Syed Islam cites Kafka as an example of what he calls a 'nomadic' as opposed to a 'sedentary' traveller: that is, Kafka is able to have his view altered by his engagement with the Other.³⁴ In such readings Otherness is not demonised, but is understood.

In academia, the growth in ecocriticism, often in conjunction with postcolonialism, may be taken to signal a greater recognition of, and sympathy with, the situation of the animal. Here, humans are the danger to the natural order, not themselves at threat from nature. Certainly, one may also deduce from works such as Baker's that modern and postmodern art interrogate the meanings we ascribe to the animal and the human; that art now is concerned with breaking down these categories in ways that develop our understanding, rather than identifying commingling as a threat. But this movement is a tendency, not the whole or even a general picture. Questioning and sympathy may exist and they may constitute a significant departure from art that is characteristic of the period we have been looking at, but many examples of the kind associated with late nineteenth-century representations continue to be produced.
Those similar cases notwithstanding, one would probably infer from cultural criticism that the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed more positive, less fearful views of the animal and self-critical explorations of the relationship between the animal and the human. Cary Wolfe refers to the 'radical revaluation of the status of nonhuman animals that has taken place in society at large' and to work in areas such as cognitive ethology and field ecology that has 'more or less permanently eroded the tidy divisions between human and nonhuman ... [which] in turn, has led to a broad reopening of the question of the ethical status of animals in relation to the human'.³⁵ Wolfe points to the irony, however, that an essentially humanist philosophy erases the very difference of the animal that those concerned with animal rights 'sought to respect in the first place'.³⁶ Donna Haraway writes of her belief that

> ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation. We are not one, and being depends on getting on together.³⁷

Moving beyond a positive attitude towards the Other, Haraway calls for recognition of ‘significant otherness as something other than a reflection of one’s own intentions’.³⁸ Derrida has problematised ‘the purity and indivisibility of a line between reaction and response, and especially the possibility of tracing such a line, between the human *in general* and the animal *in general*’.³⁹ Deleuze and Guattari have written on ‘becoming animal’, in which '[b]coming produces nothing other than itself ... What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes.’⁴⁰

Seemingly more enlightened views, such as Haraway’s and those of others who attempt to honour the difference of the animal, do not mean that horror is no longer generated from tales of transformation, as the original and sequel of the film *The Human Centipede* (2010; 2011) prove. Repeats and reworkings of familiar characters and creatures – Dracula and vampires, werewolves, Hyde – continue to appear. What does seem to happen though is that the dissolution of the boundary between the human and the beast becomes something increasingly to be desired or to be explored dispassionately rather than feared. Besides the popularity of ‘green’ issues and ecocriticism, there is the fact, observed by Baker, that

> Many postmodern or poststructuralist artists and writers seem, at one level or another, to adopt or to identify with the animal as a metaphor for, or as an image of, their own creativity. Whether it connotes a sense of alienation from the human or a sense of bodily freedom and unboundedness, this
willing taking-on of animal form casts the fixity of identity as an inhibition of creativity.⁴¹

What we can be sure of is that animals, journeys, and literary genres all inherit characteristics of their progenitors; and they combine original features with responses to their present circumstances. They change shape, but remain recognisable. Of course they are not simply 'out there'. Their meaning derives from the onlooker. No less than narrators do we define, classify, and judge. And this is often in the service of power: 'Society and the State need animal characteristics to use for classifying people', Deleuze and Guattari point out.⁴² Against this urge towards classification, the movement of genres (of animals and literature) can introduce fluidity. Metaphors, like actual travel, cross space and time and forge connections. They always speak of at least two conditions and inherent in them therefore is the potential to destabilise the very urge to fix that has impelled them. They can operate interrogatively or affirmatively, radically or conservatively.

Luckhurst claims that

for many critics, the phantasmagoric imagination of the Gothic actually begins to provide many of the metaphors for how we conceive of our modern subjectivity, mysterious to itself, labyrinthine, haunted by half-glimpsed spectres of memory and desire, never quite successfully burying its dead, fearful that all the skeletons in the closet will one day return.

Here he is hinting at the process by which we revivify texts and genres that might otherwise become or stay moribund.⁴³ Genres are in any case in flux, as are individual works within them. As John Frow observes, 'all texts are strongly shaped by their relation to one or more genres, which in turn they may modify'.⁴⁴ Genres are not fixed but dynamic. In Frow's words:

> because the range of possible uses is always open-ended, genre classifications are necessarily unstable and unpredictable. And this is so above all because texts do not simply have uses which are mapped out in advance by the genre: they are themselves *uses of genre*, performances of or allusions to the norms and conventions which form them and which they may, in turn, transform.⁴⁵

Like their subjects, then, the texts studied in this volume are themselves examples of unstable forms, with Stoker transforming the Gothic that he has inherited, MacDonald doing the same with fairy tales and the fantastic, Wells shaping the scientific romance, and so on. Journeys, beasts, and literary genres are all in motion. Their congruence in the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century at a time of extraordinary social
movement, political tension, and economic crisis has endowed us with a uniquely rich corpus that has survived its original setting, but that has been divested, in revivals, of its financial roots. In her *In Darkest London*, Margaret Harkness writes: ‘This is metaphorical language, but some things can only be expressed in metaphors.’⁴⁶ These beastly journeys, whose figures of speech reflect their origins and that have survived, if modified, in our own time, help demonstrate why.

## Notes

1 R. A. Biderman, ‘Introduction’, in Israel Zangwill, *Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People* [1895] (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2004), p.9.

2 Paul Begg, *Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History* (London: Longman, 2003), p.3.

3 John Lucas, *The Radical Twenties* (Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 1997), p.71.

4 Christopher Blayre, *The Purple Sapphire and Other Posthumous Papers* (London: Philip Allan and Co., 1921), p.211. Blayre was the pseudonym of polymath Edward Heron-Allen. I am grateful to Christopher Barker for informing me of the existence of ‘The Cheetah-Girl’ and to Ray Russell for supplying me with a copy of the text. The story was apparently dropped for fear that its treatment of sexual themes, including bestiality and lesbianism, would render the publishers liable to prosecution. Heron-Allen circulated it in a private edition of twenty copies and it was printed in *The Collected Strange Papers of Christopher Blayre* (Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 1998) and separately as *The Cheetah-Girl (Being the MS. Not Published with the Collection Under the Title of The Purple Sapphire) – Deposited By the Professor of Physiology in the University of Cosmopoli* (East Sussex: Tartarus Press, 1998).

5 Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.72.

6 Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.73.

7 David Garnett, *Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo* [1928] (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), p.2. Further page references will be to this edition and given parenthetically.

8 The OED’s first citation of foxy as meaning of a woman ‘attractive, desirable, pretty; sexy’ is from the United States in 1913.

9 Neil Jordan, ‘Introduction’, in David Garnett, *Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo* [1928] (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), n.p.

10 H. H. Munro, ‘The She-Wolf’, in *The Best of Saki*, introduced by Tom Sharpe (London: Picador, 1976), p.123. Further page references will be given parenthetically.

11 Tom Sharpe, ‘Introduction’, in *The Best of Saki*, p.8

12 Tom Sharpe, ‘Introduction’, in *The Best of Saki*, p.8.

13 Karel Čapek, *War with the Newts*, translated by M. and R. Weatherall (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1937), p.276.

14 Wyndham Lewis, *Filibusters in Barbary* (London: Grayson and Grayson, 1932), pp.vii–viii.

15 Lewis, *Filibusters*, p.3.

16 Paul Fussell, *Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars* (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1980), p.40.
17 See also Jean-Yves Le Disez, 'Animals as Figures of Otherness in Travel Narratives of Brittany, 1840–1895', in Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, eds, *Perspectives on Travel Writing* (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp.71–84.

18 Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.122.

19 Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.117.

20 Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.126.

21 Kathleen Hale, *A Slender Reputation: An Autobiography* (London: Frederick Warne, 1994), p.127. Quoted in Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.111.

22 W. B. Yeats, 'The Second Coming', in W. B. Yeats, *Selected Poetry*, edited by A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan, 1974), p.100.

23 Declan Kiberd, *Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation* [1995] (London: Vintage, 1996), p.312.

24 Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.138. Lucas explains that the phrase he has quoted comes from 'A Prayer for My Daughter', which follows 'The Second Coming' in the volume *Michael Robartes and the Dancer*.

25 Quoted in Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.173, n.62. Lucas is in turn quoting from Douglas Goldring, *The Nineteen Twenties; A General Survey and Some Personal Memories* (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1945).

26 Quoted in Lucas, *The Radical Twenties*, p.241.

27 Quoted in Bernard Schweizer, *Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s* (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p.161.

28 Orwell, quoted in Schweizer, *Radicals on the Road*, p.24.

29 Schweizer, *Radicals on the Road*, p.17.

30 Schweizer, *Radicals on the Road*, p.173.

31 James Weldon Johnson, *The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man* [1912] (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1960), p.186.

32 Max Hastings, 'Years of Liberal Dogma Have Spawned a Generation of Amoral, Uneducated, Welfare Dependent, Brutalised Youngsters', *Daily Mail*, 12 August 2011.

33 Steve Baker, *The Postmodern Animal* (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p.9. The Soper reference is to Kate Soper, *What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human* (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995).

34 Syed Manzurul Islam, *The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

35 Cary Wolfe, 'Introduction', in Cary Wolfe, ed., *Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal* (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p.xi.

36 Wolfe, 'Introduction', p.xii.

37 Donna Haraway, *The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness* (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p.50.

38 Haraway, *The Companion Species Manifesto*, p.28. Of course, however desirable and well-intentioned this stance, it also serves to affirm one's own ethical principles and to differentiate oneself from those who do not hold them, thus functioning as a means of self-definition as much as an observance of the distinctness of other species.

39 Jacques Derrida, 'And Say the Animal Responded?', translated by David Wills, in Cary Wolfe, ed., *Zoontologies*, p.128.

40 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, '1730: Becoming Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ... [sic]', in *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and*
*Schizophrenia*, translated and with a foreword by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p.238.

41 Baker, *The Postmodern Animal*, p.18.

42 Deleuze and Guattari, '1730: Becoming Intense, Becoming-Animal', p.239.

43 Roger Luckhurst, 'Introduction', in Bram Stoker, *Dracula* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) p.xiii.

44 John Frow, *Genre* (London: Routledge, 2006), p.1.

45 Frow, *Genre*, p.25.

46 Margaret Harkness, *In Darkest London* [1889 as *Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army*] (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2003), p.164.
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Index

'007' 13

agency, human 12, 19

Albert Victor, Prince 27

*Alice's Adventures in Wonderland* 149

allegory 142, 150, 201

*All Sorts and Conditions of Men* 2

animal imagery 2, 26, 30, 31, 39, 49, 50, 54, 59, 70, 74, 75, 79, 91, 165, 178, 179, 181, 193, 197, 198, 199, 202, 204

animality 2, 6, 20, 27, 30, 40, 50, 58, 61, 63, 68, 114, 122, 123, 124, 127, 130, 132, 154, 159, 165, 176, 180, 198, 202

animals 4, 18, 19, 20, 24, 31, 40, 57, 76, 78, 102, 109, 115, 116, 117, 120, 123, 124, 147, 157, 161, 169, 175, 177, 178, 197, 199, 202, 204, 205

Arata, Stephen 80

aristocracy and aristocratic rule 10, 14–16, 81, 82, 83, 103, 118, 151, 161, 166, 171, 189, 190

Armstrong, Eliza 64

*Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man* 204

Baker, Steve 205–207

Bakhtin, Mikhail 110; see also ‘chronotope’

Baldick, Chris 16, 123

Ball, Benjamin 26

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ 177–178, 183

Balzac, Honoré de 167

banking 45

Barrett, Wilson 181

Batchelor, John 135

beasts 1, 4, 5, 12, 18, 20, 24, 27, 30, 31, 39, 40, 42, 51, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 105, 126, 146, 154, 161, 162, 175, 180, 197, 201, 204, 207

Beer, Gillian 3, 18–26

*The Beetle* 7, 31, 70, 84–104, 131, 201

Begg, Paul 69–70

Belsey, Catherine 128, 130

Bennett, Arnold 30

Bergonzi, Bernard 118–119

Besant, Walter 2, 13, 59, 136; see also *All Sorts and Conditions of Men*

bestiality 1, 7, 12, 26, 31, 39, 48, 56, 61, 70, 74, 165, 167, 184, 208

Bloch, Maurice 11–12

Booth, William 7; see also *In Darkest England*

Botting, Fred 76–77, 81

Boulton, Ernest 27

Boyle, Richard 48

Brabazon, Lord 43

Brabourne, Lord 16

Brantlinger, Patrick 48

‘breadline’, use of term 40

Briggs, Asa 39

Bristow, Joseph 29, 166–168

Brooks, Cleanth 202

Broughton, Nancy 64

Brown, Terence 192

Browning, Oscar 182

Bunyan, John 158; see also *The Pilgrim’s Progress*

Burke, Edmund 16

Burne-Jones, Edward 182

Cannadine, David 10, 14

cannibalism 60, 111, 118–120

Čapek, Karel 200–201; see also *War with the Newts*

*Capital* 12

capitalism 1, 6, 11–12, 29, 41, 53, 59, 70, 78, 90, 117, 123, 126

*Captain Lobe* 53–61, 208

Carlyle, Thomas 142

Carroll, Lewis 149; see also *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland*

Carson, Edward 165–166, 181

Carter, Angela 199; see also *The Company of Wolves*

‘The Cheetah-Girl’ 197

*A Child of the Jago* 40, 49–53, 62
*Children of the Ghetto* 117

Christianity 57, 96, 126, 141, 148, 151; *see also*
Jesus Christ

'chronotope' 110, 112

Churchill, Winston 203

*A City Girl* 40

*Clash* 203

class distinctions 7, 17, 65–66, 134, 153, 166,
184, 188

Cleveland Street affair 27

Cohen, Ed 28, 165–166

colonialism 3, 15, 101–102, 103, 121–122, 201

*The Company of Wolves* (film) 199

Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 136

Conrad, Joseph 78, 108, 120, 125, 128;
*see also*
*Heart of Darkness*

copyright protection 13

Corelli, Marie 136

Crane, Stephen 51; *see also* Maggie

Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) 67, 165

Cromer, Lord 102

cycling 133, 134, 135–136

*Daily Chronicle* 183

*Daily Telegraph* 68

Darwin, Charles 6, 18–26, 111, 113, 114,
122–123, 155

Darwinism 5–7, 18–25, 43, 110, 120–121, 128,
147; *see also* Social Darwinism

Davidson, John 1, 4, 23

decadence 5, 26, 28–29, 43, 111, 114–115, 125,
202

'The Decay of Lying' 186

degeneracy and degeneration 7, 9, 26–27,
30–31, 42–44, 62, 75, 89, 111, 112, 115–116,
122, 125, 149, 165, 179, 184–185, 201

*Degeneration* 2, 26–27, 30–31, 165

Deleuze, Gilles 206–207

democracy and democratisation 14–16, 30,
47, 64–65, 83, 135, 153, 177, 181, 203

Dentith, Simon 5

*De Profundis* 183–186

Derrida, Jacques 206

diachrony 18

Dickens, Charles 7, 12, 39, 190; *see also*
*Our Mutual Friend*

Dilke, Sir Charles 27

Disraeli, Benjamin 16

Douglas, Anna Maria 181

Douglas, Lord Percy 181

*Dracula* 4, 7, 43, 70, 74–85, 88–90, 104, 201,
206

Dreiser, Theodore 61, 124; *see also*
*Sister Carrie*

Drumlanrig, Lord 27

Dryden, Linda 107, 126, 132

*The Earth* 23

ecocriticism 205, 206

effeminacy 29–30, 165, 167

Egypt, attitudes to 101–102, 104

Eight Hours Bill 86

'The Elephant Man' 4, 54; *see also* Merrick,
Joseph

Elias, Norbert 109

Eliot, George 128; *see also* Middlemarch

Eliot, T. S. 202; *see also* The Waste Land

Ellmann, Richard 19–20, 180–183, 192

Engels, Friedrich 58

evolutionism 18–19, 21–23, 25, 113, 115, 121,
124, 127, 130, 147; *see also* Darwinism

fairy tales 16, 140–142, 148, 162, 173, 174,
207

fantasy literature 99–100, 107, 125, 132, 141,
149, 150, 155–156, 159–160

*The Farmer's Bride* 197

femininity 27, 29, 61

feminism 27; *see also* New Woman
phenomenon

Fenian activism 42

*Filibusters in Barbary* 201

*fin de siècle* context 2, 5, 9, 13, 26, 28, 43, 44,
68, 107–110, 112, 131, 200, 204

*First and Last Things* 114

First World War 200, 202–203

Fishman, William 39–40

*Frankenstein* 16, 55, 84, 144

Freud, Sigmund 6, 27; *see also* Freudian

Freudian 6, 150

Frow, John 207

Fussell, Paul 201–212

Gagnier, Regenia 166, 183

Garnett, David 197–200, 204; *see also*
*Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo*

Gaskell, Elizabeth 7, 12, 39; *see also*
*Mary Barton*

gender 5, 9, 16, 28, 30, 55, 81, 88, 92, 95, 102,
110–111, 116, 133, 134, 147, 165, 166, 167,
190, 199

genres 6, 12–13, 107, 136, 155, 204, 207;
*see also* fairy tales; fantast literature;
Gothic literature; naturalism, literary;
realism, literary; science fiction; 'scientific romance'

Gide, André 192

Gissing, George 8, 12, 27, 30, 50, 61, 62–63, 136, 175; see also *The Nether World*

Glendening, John 131

Glover, David 75, 77, 80–81

Goode, John 63

Gordon, Charles George 42, 103

Gothic literature 6, 41, 43, 68, 76, 79–80, 82, 83, 84, 96, 104–105, 107, 132, 150, 155, 158, 200, 207

*The Great God Pan* 143–147

Guattari, Félix 206–207

Haggard, H. Rider 13, 116, 136; see also *She and King Solomon’s Mines*

Hale, Kathleen 202

'The Happy Prince' 171–174

Haraway, Donna 206

Hardy, Thomas 8, 30; see also *Jude the Obscure*

Harkness, Margaret 40, 53, 56–61, 208; see also *Captain Lobe and A City Girl*

Harris, Frank 192

Harris, Jose 14

Harrison, J. F. C. 14

Harvey, David 41

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 150

*Heart of Darkness* 75, 78, 108, 119, 129–130

Hein, Rolland 142, 148, 150, 153

Heron-Allen, Edward 197; see also 'The Cheetah-Girl' and *The Purple Sapphire*

Hill, Octavia 148

*The Hobbit* 128

Holland, Merlin 192

homosexuality 27–29, 46, 88, 90–92, 95, 167–168, 180–182, 192

*Hoopdriver's Holiday* 136

*The Human Centipede* (films) 206

Humpherys, Anne 40–41

Hurley, Kelly 101–102

Ibsen, Henrik 27, 136

imperialism 125, 128

*The Importance of Being Earnest* 187–190

*In Darkest Africa* 7

*In Darkest England* 7

*In Darkest London* 53–61, 208; see also *Captain Lobe*

*The Invisible Man* 136

Irving, Henry 84

Isis, cult of 85, 97, 98–103

Islam, Syed Manzurul 205

*The Island of Doctor Moreau* 4, 7, 43, 78, 107, 119–124, 140, 144

Jack the Ripper 28, 60, 68–70, 144

Jackson, Holbrook 166–168

Jackson, Rosemary 107, 129, 132

Jackson, Thomas 40

James, Henry 13, 56, 132, 180; see also *Washington Square*

James, Simon 12

Jarrett, Rebecca 64

Jay, Arthur Osborne 51

Jekyll and Hyde see *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*

Jesus Christ 66, 126, 178, 185–186, 193

Jewish communities 54, 60, 80; see also *Jewishness*

Jewishness 88

Johnson, James Weldon 204; see also *Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man*

Jones, Gareth Stedman 42–43

Jordan, Neil 199; see also *The Company of Wolves*

Joyce, James 30

*Jude the Obscure* 8

Jung, Carl 155

Kafka, Franz 205; see also *The Metamorphosis*

Keating, Peter 1, 8–9, 12–13, 22, 30

Kennel Club 24

Kiberd, Declan 203

Kilvert, Francis 202

*King Solomon's Mines* 116

Kingsley, Charles 25, 148

Kipling, Rudyard 13, 136; see also ‘.007’ and ‘Wireless’

Kirk, Neville 14

Kitchener, Horatio Herbert 103

Knoepflmacher, U. C. 141–143, 148

Labouchere Amendment 46

Labour Party 17, 60

*Lady into Fox* 197–199

*Lady Windermere's Fan* 189–190

Lang, Andrew 49

Lautrec, Henri de Toulouse 167

Lawrence, D. H. 30, 202; see also *The Rainbow*

Leavis, F. R. 202

Ledger, Sally 28