The Ghost Club

Founded in London in 1862, the Ghost Club is the oldest paranormal investigation and research organization in the world. The organization is still active today and its members have included: Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats, and Siegfried Sassoon.

The Ghost Club was seven years in the making, having started as a conversation about ghosts between Cambridge fellows at Trinity college in 1855. Naturally, it attracted some banter in the Times, but with Charles Dickens and some Cambridge men among their ranks, the Ghost Club soldiered on.

The Davenport Brothers and their spirit cabinet (1870).

Like real-life Victorian Ghostbusters -- though maybe they were more like Myth Busters, the Ghost Club investigated spiritual phenomena, like the Davenport Brother's spirit cabinet. The Davenport Brothers were travelling American magicians and the spirit box was their most famous illusion. In the spirit box illusion, the brothers were tied inside the box with some musical instruments. When the box was closed, the instruments played, but when it was opened, the brothers remained tied in their original positions. The Ghost Club never published the result of their investigation.

Members of the Ghost Club (1882).

Following Dickens' death, the Ghost Club became inactive during the 1870s, but was revived on All Saints Day 1882. It remained a select and private organization of earnest ghost hunters, who really believed that ghosts existed. They met monthly and women were not admitted.

Investigations into the spirit world were referred to as 'physical research,' and the growing popularity of Spiritualism at this time attracted people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sigmund Freud to its meetings. Many members treated Ghost Club as a kind of refuge, where they were able to conduct the kind of research and have the kind of conversations that they were unable to have elsewhere.

At each meeting of the Ghost Club a list of all the members, dead or alive, was read. Deceased members were said to sometimes make their presence felt during this activity.

Sir Arthur Grey of Jesus College, Cambridge, immortalized the Ghost Club as "The Everlasting Club" in 1919 - a ghost story that, around Cambridge, some still believe to be true.

A Woman Called Horniman

Annie Horniman

William Butler Yeats was in his mid-twenties, living in London, had joined the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, when he met a rich older lady, who fell in love with him. The feeling was not mutual, but she pursued him the way he pursued Maud Gonne, and he benefitted financially from the relationship.

Annie Horniman was known as one of the 'Grand Dames' of 1890s London, though she would probably be called a 'cougar' today because she had a thing for young male artists. Today, we remember her primarily for her contributions to the world of theatre, most of which were made in pursuit of Yeats.

Of course, she loved theatre for the theatre as well. Her father thought is was sinful, but, when she was fourteen, her German governess secretly brought her and her mother to a production of the Merchant of Venice, which left a big impression on young Horniman. Her rebellious nature didn't end there. She supported women's suffrage, wore flamboyant clothing, smoked cigarettes in public, and somehow earned the nickname 'Hornibags.'

Horniman also pursued alternative religions, which is how she met Yeats through the Hermetic Order.

Charming young William Butler Yeats

According to William Michael Murphy in Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives (1995):

[Horniman] shared [Yeats'] interest in occult studies and in the drama and provided the financial help necessary for the staging of one of his early plays. She was a strait-laced, opinionated, righteous woman with a high opinion of her own talents that was shared by nobody who knew her. She possessed on deficiency in the pursuit of her dreams: she hated the Irish People, like many English middle-class possessors of inherited wealth believing herself inherently superior to the unwashed peasants who lived across the Irish Sea. She pursued Yeats as zealously as he pursued Maud Gonne, and with as much success. But because of her persistence she was to become one of the most influential participants in the formation of an Irish Theatre.

The theatre referred to there is the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

In founding the Abbey, Yeats made an enemy out of Horniman. She invested a significant portion of her inheritance into the project, but he left her out of the circle of power (maybe because it was an Irish theatre project, and she hated the Irish). Consequently, Yeats wasn't the only young artist in her life. According to Murphy, Horniman's money gave her a sense of superiority over the young people she pursued, as they became increasingly dependent on her.

James Agate, a theatre critic, once said that her high-minded theatrical ventures had "an air of gloomy strenuousness" about them, but they are what won her honour and acclaim. She is one of the very few people to have both joined an occult society, and still have been awarded the Companion of Honour, which she earned in 1933.

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The Weird Magic of 1890s Writers: Enochian Magic

Practitioners of Enochian magic attempt to evoke the will of spirits or angels. As i wrote this post, I couldn't get the Black Crowes out of my head and almost called this post "Bram Stoker talks to Angels."

The word “Enochian” refers to the language practitioners use, a language recorded by Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley in the sixteenth century. The Enochian language was delivered to Dee and Kelley, much the way Joseph Smith wrote wrote the Book of Mormon, through angels. Understanding this language would uncover the secrets of the apocryphal Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish religious work, traditionally ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. It is not part of the Jewish biblical canon, apart from Beta Israel. However, it is regarded as canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, but not by any other Christian group.

Still practiced today, Enochian magic is primarily the result of the work of two men: Dee and Kelley.

Dee was a kind of spooky wise man, consulted by Queen Elizabeth I of Welsh. He liked math, astronomy, astrology, the occult, and making ships sail off in the right directions to go subjugate people. He religiously devoted his life to studying alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophy. Of course, he had a long milky-white beard! He made Christianity magical, dreamed of uniting the world in one religion, and, like Samuel Pepys, kept a fabulous diary. He believed that numbers are the root of all knowledge. He also believed he could talk to spirits.

Kelley and Dee were friends, until sometime after Kelley insisted that God wanted them to share Dee’s wife. Kelley was a long-bearded crystal ball style wizard, I mean... medium. They must have looked like Gandalf and Radagast, which makes the whole thing with Dee’s wife, Jane, just weird.

Kelley did most of the talking to angels through his crystal ball, while Dee wrote it all down. The Writers in London in the 1890s would be glad he did. Enochian occultists assume the exploits of Dee and Kelley are more or less completely true. Though many believe they were also influenced by other magical texts.

Dee and Kelley preferred the term Angelic over Enochian and there’s no evidence they ever used it for magic because the angels didn’t really want them to. Their records are records of the system rather than a log of their workings of the system.

Their work had a big influence on Rosicrucianism, but otherwise went unnoticed until the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn formed in the 1890s. The rediscovery of Enochian magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers in the 1880s led to Mathers working the material into a system of ceremonial “Magick” for the Order.

Constance Wilde, Bram Stoker, Maud Gonne, W.B. Yeats, and the many others, who joined the Order, used Enochian Magick to talk to Dee and Kelley’s angels, and could purportedly travel as auras into the spirit realm. The calls or keys that evoke the spirits are in the Enochian language that Dee and Kelley recorded, and can be used to enter visionary states, called Aethyrs.


The Aethyrs (numbered from 30-1, by our number-loving wizard friend, Dee) form a map of the universe.

The magic is practiced in a temple, which requires some specific decorating. What’s magic with good paraphernalia? Decorate your Enochian Temple with a table that has a hexagram engraved on top and a surrounding border of Enochian letters. You will also need seven planetary talismans, and five versions of the Seal of God’s Truth, made from beeswax and placed under the table with the hexagram on it. Some kind of crystal ball is also helpful, as is a magician’s ring, with the god-name Pele on it. Finally, there’s a black and red rod that you will want to use.

I’m just going to spend the rest of my afternoon imagining Bram Stoker and Constance Wilde setting up an Enochian Temple to talk to angels.

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Maud Gonne as the New Speranza

On 19 January 1892, W.B. Yeats published an article in the United Irishman, in which he compared the activist work of his beloved Maud Gonne to that of Oscar Wilde’s mother, Speranza. In her autobiography, Gonne promotes the idea that Yeats’ poem, “The Rose of the World” (written the same month) was about her, in which he links her to Helen of Troy and Diedre.

In his article, Yeats called Gonne “the new ‘Speranza’ who should do all with the voice all, or more than all, the old ‘Speranza’ did with her pen.” Clearly, he hoped to heap high praise upon his beloved friend, but it strikes me that of all the figures I’ve named so far, Speranza is the one we remember least. Yeats didn’t call Speranza old exclusively because of her age, but because that was the general view of her poetry in 1892 London. It was out-of-date.

Maybe, it’s because his poetry seems almost as old to me as hers does, but I’m beginning to see similarities in style between Yeats and Speranza. Take “The Rose of the World,” for example:

Who dreamed beauty passes like a dream?

And Speranza’s “Thekla. A Swedish Saga. The Temptation”:

Shivered, shattered, fades it waning
From the maiden like a dream.

Ok. Ok, dreams are common tropes.

So what of the validity of calling Gonne “the new Speranza?” Speranza wrote for the Young Ireland Movement in the 1840s. Her anti-British writings called for armed resistance and contributed to the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, which influenced generations of Irish nationalists. Gonne was in love with a right-wing French politician, Lucien Millevoye, and wanted to help him free Ireland and regain Alsace-Loraine for France. When Yeats met her, she was working to release Irish political prisoners from jail. But, when she returned to France, when Yeats was writing “The Rose of the World” for her and calling her the new Speranza, she had returned to Paris to work with Millevoye.

In the years that followed, she would have two children with Millevoye and join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Gonne’s young Ireland consisted of children’s parties.

To be fair, Gonne was always honest with Yeats about her feelings, but the new Speranza? This she was not.

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Dancing Through Literature in the 1890s

I’ve spent the past week struggling to write a scene in which my characters are dancing at a ball in 1890. Invariably, it comes off sounding like the script of a corny romantic comedy from the 1950s, which conveys none of the feelings I want to get across.

Next, it occurred to me that writers don’t often put dance scenes into literature. Dance is, in many respects, a visual art that best suited to film. That’s why it sounded like I was writing a script, surely! But movies didn’t have dance scenes or plots in the 1890s, so I dug deeper to find out more about how my writers (the characters in my novel) felt about dancing in the 1890s.

What I found surprised me.

First, the verb ‘to dance’ is most commonly used in English fin-de-sciélé literature in descriptive passages to describe things, not people: the leaves dance on the trees, the flames dance on a log, and so on.

Second, when men write about people dancing, during this period, they write about the indigenous peoples of North America more often than they write about the kind of ball room dancing that I was looking for.

With yells of triumph the Indians came flocking down from their caves and danced a frenzied dance of victory round the dead bodies, in mad joy that two more of the most dangerous of all their enemies had been slain. - The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

In his only novel, Oscar Wilde includes a scene about dancing, but it’s not in a ball room and it is used to make the woman dancing look less appealing.

The scene was the hall of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his pilgrim's dress had entered with Mercutio and his other friends. The band, such as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began. Through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily dressed actors, Sibyl Vane moved like a creature from a finer world. Her body swayed, while she danced, as a plant sways in the water. The curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.

Yet she was curiously listless. She showed no sign of joy when her eyes rested on Romeo. The few words she had to speak--

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss--

 with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly artificial manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. It was wrong in colour. It took away all the life from the verse. It made the passion unreal.

Basically, Wilde is using dance to give us an example of bad acting. Sure, Sybil Vane is beautiful, but, now that she is in love with Dorian Gray, she can’t act.

As I scanned the literature of the 1890s, I found love and bad acting to be recurring themes in literary scenes of ballroom dancing. In Violet Hunt’s The Maiden’s Progress, while Moderna is getting ready for a ball, Peggy says: “I wonder who you'll dance with? Perhaps you'll meet your Fate?” And Verona adds, pensively: “The ‘Unknown God.’ Father says every young girl raises altars to the ‘Unknown God.’ I wonder.” When Moderna returns from the ball, they both say at once: “Was it nice? Who did you dance with? Are you engaged? Did you get many compliments?” When Moderna gets rid of those meddlers, she writes in her diary:

My first ball. It is 4 A.M. Minching and Peggy and Verona have just left me. I must try and recall the events of the evening. I had a white dress trimmed with lilies of the valley rather pretty. Cecilia Riddell had daisies. Aunt Riddell had diamonds. What waste ! I danced twenty-one times twice with the son of the house. I danced three times with a Mr. Donkin. I can't remember whether it was twice or three times with Mr. Deverel. I danced the Lancers with Edward; and I went in to supper once with Mr. Vere and once with Edward. That is all I can remember. I was decidedly nervous at first. I don't think people thought me pretty there were such lots of awfully pretty girls there. They seemed to know everybody so well, and they all looked older than I. I look too dreadfully young. Cissy Riddell looked a perfect infant in her rational Liberty frock, that's one consolation. Mrs. Mortimer was kind. She said, "Who did your hair, child?" and gave it three pats that quite altered it.

So, that’s one example of how a woman might feel about dancing in the 1890s. What about her love interest? Why does he go to balls?

I suppose in the vague hope of meeting some day with a real woman, and talking to her. It is one of the very few social opportunities one has of doing so. A dinner party is complicated with eating how can two immortal souls communicate with each other through a medium of 'steaming soup, or the fumes of the roast, or at a musicale where one is constantly " hushed," until one's blood boils? But at a dance, social convention has decreed that one should have a woman to oneself for a quarter of an hour at least. I singled you out at once, and hoped that you would let me speak to you I was introduced, wasn't I?

Much as it continues to be today, dancing in the 1890s, was a mating ritual. Hunt writes hilariously in A Hard Woman that: "I don't think married women have any business to dance at all. [...] Dances aren't intended for them." But married women do go to dances. And, at a time when women really couldn’t just say what they thought or ask for what they wanted, dancing at a ball could be an effective weapon, as in Lady Windermere’s Fan.

I feel that every woman here sneers at me as she dances by with my husband. What have I done to deserve this?

But, I found that dancing didn’t just happen at balls or in North America when the indigenous people were attacking. In Paris, Marie Corelli describes the can-can, like it is going to destroy society!

...while I tried to urge my muddled intelligence into a clearer comprehension of all that was going on, the crowd suddenly parted asunder with laughter and shouts of applause, and standing back in closely pressed ranks made an open space in their centre for the approach of two women discreetly masked, — one arranged in very short black gauze skirts, the other in blood-red. Attitudinizing for a moment in that theatrical pose which all dancers assume before commencing the revolutions, they uttered a peculiar shout, half savage, half mirthful, — a noisy burst of music answered them, — and then, with an indescribable slide forward and an impudent bracing of the arms akimbo, they started the "can-can,” — which though immodest, vile, vulgar, and licentious, has perhaps more power to inflame the passions of a Paris mob than the chanting of the 'Marseillaise.' It can be danced in various ways, this curious fandango of threatening gesture and amorous invitation,— and if the dancers be a couple of heavy Paris laundresses or perilously it will probably be rendered so ridiculously as to be harmless. But, danced by women with lithe, strong, sinuous limbs — with arms that twist like the bodies of snakes, — with bosoms that seem to heave with suppressed rage and ferocity, — with eyes that flash hell-fire through the black eye-holes of a conspirator-like mask, — and with utter, reckless, audacious disregard of all pretense at modesty, — its effect is terrible, enraging!— inciting to deeds of rapine, pillage, and slaughter! And why ? Why, in Heaven's name, should a mere dance make men mad? Why ? — Mild questioner, whoever you are, I cannot answer you! Why are men made as they are? — will you tell me that? Why does an English Earl marry a music-hall singer ? He has seen her in tights, — he has heard her roar forth vulgar ditties to the lowest classes of the public, — and yet he has been known to marry her, and make her ^^ ray lady " — and a peeress of the realm ! Explain to me this incongruity, — and I will explain to you then why it is that the sight of the " can-can " danced in all its frankness, turns Parisian men for the time being into screeching, stamping maniacs, whom to see, to hear, to realize the existence of, is to feel that with all our ^ culture,' we are removed only half a step away from absolute barbarism!

All of this makes me think that I should save the dancing for more dramatic moments in my story, if I include any at all. Even W.B. Yeats identified the love of a dancer as brief.

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100 Random Things about Oscar Wilde

In honour of this being my 100th post, I’m sharing 100 things you probably didn’t know about Oscar Wilde. If you knew any of this stuff keep track of how many points you get. Your score should be out of 100. Leave your result as a comment. If you have more Wildean wits about you than I did when I started this list, I’ll have your email address and can contact you in the future, if I have any questions! (Just kidding, sort of.)

1. “The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.” At different points in his life, Wilde comes across as pessimistic and optimistic. His writing style, his critique of his contemporaries, and his ability to laugh at the world around him combine to indicate that he was a realist.

2. One of his greatest gifts was the ability to smile at his own misfortune.

3. Wilde was raised Anglican and Catholic. In college, he became infatuated with the Catholic Church, but did not become a convert until the end of his life. I found an interesting Catholic interpretation of his life on CatholicEducation.org

4. “I never change, except in my affections.” Wilde only dreamt of being able to live this way. His writing sympathized with a common longing for eternal youth and the ability to always remain the same. In practice, once you had Wilde's affection, you always had his sympathy. He had many life-long friendships.

5. Wilde lacked musical talent and never appreciated music, even during his Aesthetic period.

6. Wilde once claimed to never travel anywhere without his copy of Studies in the History of the Renaissance by Walter Pater.

7. Wilde visited Egypt, as a child, and was always fascinated by sphinxes.

8. Although the New York Tribune claimed Wilde’s teeth were “superlatively white,” he was embarrassed by his teeth, often spoke with his hand in front of his mouth to cover them, and eventually got dentures.

9. Wilde disliked idle conversation. “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

10. Wilde was a tremendously sensitive man, quite capable of indulging in self-pity, but usually only when he had genuine reasons to feel bad for himself. Moreover, he was just as affected by the hardships of others.

11. Wilde was clearly outgoing, but enjoyed privacy and was most productive as a writer when he was alone. Wilde got restless quickly, but always seemed to find himself quite entertaining.

12. Wilde’s ability to speed read and remember long passages has been attributed to an eidetic memory.

13. Wilde’s brother was a newspaper writer, so he often pokes fun at them.

14. Wilde was a very superstitious child, whose mother told him stories about macabre beasts. In the children’s books he wrote, as a father, his antagonists were generally friendly.

15. Wilde met Pope Piux IX, as an undergraduate in 1877.

16. Wilde became famous for his personality. After meeting Wilde at the Royal Court Theatre, Helena Modjeska once said, “What has he done, this young man, that one meets him everywhere? Oh yes he talks well, but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act - he does nothing but talk. I do not understand.”

17. In an unguarded moment, Wilde once told the 15 year-old daughter of a friend that if she were a boy, he would adore her. Her name was Aimée Lowther.

18. Wilde travelled extensively throughout Africa, Europe, and the United States.

19. Sex tourism was the most likely reason for Wilde's travel to Africa in adulthood.

20. Wilde's plays got mixed reviews from London theatre critics. One of his worst most vocal critics was his own brother.

21. Wilde feared nothing more than he feared God. The thought of eternal punishment was the one thing that prevented him from committing suicide, during his darkest moments, he told Vincent O’Sullivan.

22. The last gift Wilde gave to his two sons was a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

23. Biographer, Neil McKenna says that Wilde wasn’t good at making a first impression and quotes Bosie, in The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde:

There is no charm in his elephantine body, tightly stuffed into his clothes - no charm in his great face and head of unselect Bohemian cast - save the urbanity he can adopt or the intelligence with which he can vitalise his ponderousness.

24. On holiday, Wilde enjoyed days spent paddling about in a “Canadian canoe.”

25. Wilde wasn’t good at horseback riding.

26. Wilde loved dirty French novels. His love of them almost ruined a British publication.

27. Some say Wilde is the most quotable author of all time, but he once drew a blank when someone asked him what his motto was.

28. Wilde kept a vase of flowers on his writing desk to neutralize the smell of his ashtray.

29. The only time Wilde wasn’t self-conscious about his appearance was when he was playing with his children.

30. Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, which is now the home of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College.

31. When Wilde published the Happy Prince and Other Tales in May 1888, the Anthaeum compared him to Hans Christian Anderson, which was a far cry from the reputation he had carefully crafted for himself.

32. If you met him and he liked you, Wilde would probably give you a cigarette case.

33. Growing up, Wilde had three pet names: “Ossie” with his family, “Grey Crow” at school, and “Hosky” at Oxford.

34. Wilde had a hard time saying no when asked for money.

35. Wilde’s favourite drinks were brandy and absinthe.

36. The Wildes had servants to cook and clean, but usually ate meals on credit at the hotel.

37. Wilde had five siblings: William 'Willie' Charles Kingsbury Wilde; Isola Francesca Emily Wilde, who died as a child and broke Wilde’s heart; his half-sisters - Emily and Mary Wilde; and his half-brother, Henry Wilson.

38. Early biographers look at the above childhood photo of Wilde dressed in frills and suggest that his mother wanted him to be a girl, thus arousing Wilde’s interest in men, but this was not true in anyway. In mid-nineteenth century Ireland, boys were traditionally dressed as girls to protect them from the dred due, a kind of blood-thirsty fairy, who abducted little boys, but ignored little girls. Wilde’s mother adored old Irish myths and legends, almost as much as she adored her little boys.

39. Wilde had as many female friends as he did male friends and, in fact, was an important contact for female writers in the 1880s.

40. For Christmas 1877, Wilde gave his girlfriend, Florence Balcombe, a small gold cross.

41. The executor for the estate of Oscar Wilde was a Canadian, Robert Ross.

42. Ross is also responsible for bring Wilde back into popularity with his 1908 edition of Wilde’s collected works.

43. Ross worked tirelessly to protect Wilde’s work, after Wilde was gone. This included fighting the rampant black market trade in erotica that was published falsely under Wilde’s name.

44. Wilde often claimed to be two years younger than he was and even lied about his age on his marriage certificate.

45. Wilde never enjoyed competitive sports, but he liked athletes.

46. Wilde tested out his clever maxims in conversations before putting them in his writing.

47. Wilde frequently suffered from writer’s block.

48. Wilde enjoyed sentimental friendships more than romances.

49. After he finished school, Wilde made money lecturing on aesthetics.

50. Wilde’s American tour was funded by Gilbert and Sullivan.

51. One of Wilde’s first impressions of America was that American men “seem to get a hold on life much ealier than we do.”

52. The hardest decision Wilde ever made was probably the decision not to flee to Paris before his trials were over. Even the judge expected him to do it. His family talked him out of it, specifically his mother and brother.

53. Wilde began writing the Sphinx in 1874 and spent many years working on it. He finally published it in 1894.

54. In the beginning, Wilde was uncertain how to go about publishing his poetry, so he wrote to the PM and asked for help, assuming, correctly, that an Oxford boy would not be ignored. “I am little more than a boy,” Wilde wrote and Gladstone wrote back, suggesting his send his poetry to the Spectator. Wilde followed this advice and was met with success!

55. Wilde’s father was a polymath.

56. Wilde spent money as fast as he got it.

57. Before and after they were married, Wilde borrowed money from his wife’s brother.

58. Wilde’s wife, Constance was a writer in her own right and had her own income.

59. In the 1880s, Wilde and Constance held seances at their house on Tite Street.

60. Their home on Tite Street was called “House Beautiful.”

61. After Wilde’s release from prison, when he had moved to Paris, his wife wrote to him that, if she ever saw him again, she would forgive anything.

62. In the Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde based the character, Algernon, on his brother, during a time when they were trying to get along better.

63. Wilde hated his brother, Willie, but often gave him money.

64. While he was in jail, Wilde’s brother pawned or sold most of his favourite things, including his famous fur coat.

65. His parents probably met through a book review. His mother wrote one for his father’s book, The Beauties of Boyne and Blackwater.

66. Wilde wrote reviews for books by lesser known authors. These were published in the Gazette.

67. Wilde’s favourite occupation was reading his own sonnets.

68. They say that people often criticize the character traits that they see as most problematic in themselves. Wilde despised “Vanity, self-esteem, [and] conceit,” but admired the “Power of attracting friends.”

69. Wilde enjoyed writing letters to the editor.

70. Wilde’s favourite actor was Henry Irving.

71. “Ivory” was one of Wilde’s favourite words.

72. “Quite charming” was one of his favourite phrases.

73. Bathing was Wilde’s favourite ritual.

74. If you made it this far, you probably know that Wilde’s favourite colour was green, but might not know that he hated mauve and magenta.

75.. In the Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde bases the character of Basil on his real-life artist friend and rival, James Whistler.

76. Max Beerbohm characterized Wilde with this list of words:

Luxury - gold-tipped matches - hair curled - Assyrian-wax statue - huge rings - fat white hands - not soignée - feather bed - pointed fingers - ample scarf - Louis Quinze cane - vast Malmaison - cat-like tread - heavy shoulders - enormous dowager - or schoolboy - way of laughing with hand over mouth - stroking chin - looking up sideways - jollity overdone - But real vitality…Effeminate, but vitality of twenty men, magnetism - authority. Deeper than repute or wit, Hypnotic.

77. Wilde probably had sex with Walt Whitman once, but preferred beardless men.

78. Wilde was bisexual.

79. With men, Wilde was a top.

80. Not only did Wilde love women, he liked women too. He enjoyed them socially and found them both attractive and intelligent.

81. Wilde adopted the name Sebastion Melmoth, after prison. Sebation was a martyr. Melmoth is from Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a novel by his great-uncle that bears some similarities to the Picture of Dorian Gray.

82. Wilde often ate seafood for breakfast, but that was a common upper-class Victorian habit. Victorians were weird.

83. Wilde was 6’3” and got his height from his mother, who was approximately six feet tall.

84. A lot of people considered him fat. Laura Troubridge wrote in her diary in 1883: “Went to a tea party at Cressie's to meet the great Oscar Wilde. He is grown enormously fat with a huge face and tight curls all over his head - not at all the aesthetic he used to look.” And Adrian Hope wrote in 1887: “O.W. was at the Lyric Club, fat and greasy as ever and looking particularly revolting in huge white kid gloves.”

85. Later in life, Wilde considered his aestheticism to have been something of a phase.

86. He spoke the way he wrote. William Butler Yeats couldn’t believe it: “My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labor and yet all spontaneous.”

87. When the Savoy Hotel introduced hot and cold running water, Wilde wasn’t pleased. He was happier having someone bring him his water.

88. Wilde called white wine yellow because his friend Robert Sherard once pointed out to him that white wine really isn’t white at all.

89. Wilde was once infatuated with the actress Lillie Langtry, but denied buying a lily daily and walking it over to her home as a gift.

90. Much like the contemporary sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, Wilde thought that jealousy in a marriage was “closely bound up with our conceptions of property” and “an extraordinary source of crime in modern life.”

91. In 1880, Wilde proposed to Charlotte Montefiore. When she refused, he wrote: “Charlotte, I am so sorry about your decision. With your money and my brain we could have gone far.”

92. Wilde slept with a female prostitute in Paris in 1883. His friend, Robert Sherard wrote about it. Afterwards, Wilde remarked: “What animals we are, Robert!”

93. Wilde almost certainly never had syphilis.

94. Wilde’s first kiss was from a boy he went to school with at Portura. They were saying good-bye at a railway station. He was sixteen years-old.

95. Wilde lied about his early school years in an interview with a journal called Biograph, when he was 26 years old. Nobody is sure why. Portura was a good school.

96. Wilde first described his future wife in a letter to Waldo Story as “quite young, very grave and mystical, with wonderful eyes, and dark brown coils of hair.... We are, of course, desperately in love.” Proof that at least one British postman was able to find Waldo!

97. Though Wilde didn’t see his wife again, after he left prison, they never got divorced.

98. Fatherhood inspired much of Wilde’s work. He took the job as editor of Woman’s World because he had a family to support. He wrote children’s stories because he had children to tell them to. Wilde loved being a father.

99. Wilde wrote in ink and edited in pencil.

100. There’s no evidence that Oscar Wilde ever said: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

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Being Irish in Victorian London

As a Canadian moving to Ohio, I've noticed there are an awful lot of Canadians in our neighbourhood, which, for me, begs the question: are there more Canadians in this place than there are in other parts of this American city or are we just seeking out our fellow expats in order to form some sense of community? As I research writers in London in the 1890s, primarily Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde who both came from Dublin and stayed in contact during their time in London, I wonder whether they experienced something like what my husband and I have experienced in Ohio.

 

A lot of famous writers were friends in 1890s London, just as they are today. Small communities in big cities are forged on the basis of common bonds, like cultural heritage (being Irish or Canadian), career (through professional associations and the work place), through religion (parish communities and Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), through common interests (Rational Dress), and through just about anything else you can think of that brings people together. Now I'm asking whether writers from Dublin formed their own circle in London in the 1890s, while I explore Victorian Irish communities other Dubliners may have been a part of.

I found a list of Irish Nests in Victorian London, but Stoker and Wilde lived in Chelsea, which had, in the 1890s, become a bit of a nest for affluent artistic types. Stoker lived in a lovely townhouse overlooking the park in Chelsea Way, while Wilde was living in his famous house on Tite Street and they attended each others' parties. Their wives were likely friends as well.

Yet, when I search for Irish communities in Victorian London, I keep coming up with racial slurs and statistics about poverty in Victorian London. English racism toward the Irish was pretty bad in Victorian times, but many Irish people in London avoided this kind of discrimination because of their wealth. Rather than meeting at a watering hole in one of London's Irish nests, I think my Irish writers would have met with W.B. Yeats and friends in the Irish Literary Society.

Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society in 1892, though it seems to have waited until 1893 to hold its inaugural meeting. At this meeting, Stopford Brooke gave a talk on "The Need for Getting Irish Literature into the English Tounge."

Like Oscar Wilde's mother, Brooke was an elder member of the group and wrote histories, as well as poetry. Speranza, Wilde's mom, stopped participating in the Society in the mid-1890s because her health was failing, which leads me to suspect that membership involved some kind of active participation and they must have been holding regular meetings.

Outside of the Irish Literary Society, I'm left only with the Irish nests throughout London. In fact, by the time the writers that I'm interested in were moving to London, Irish immigration to the city was on the decline. These writers were also exceptional among their group because of their wealth. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a survey of beggars on the streets of London found they were mostly Irish.

The oldest and most populated Irish community was in St Giles in the Fields and Seven Dials in the 1700s. By the nineteenth century, Irish Londoners lived all over the City. By this time, Irish communities had developed in Whitechapel and Saffron Hill, Poplar and Southwark, and perhaps most notoriously, in the Calmel Buildings off Orchard Street in Marylebone. By the 1890s, Irish communities were all over London and my favourite writers could afford to live anywhere they liked... well, most of them could.

None of the writers in my blog lived as poorly as most Irish Londoners did. Due to London's high cost of living, multiple Irish families often shared single-room dwellings. "In one house in Saffron Hill investigated by Thomas Beames in 1849, 88 men, women and children, were found living in a single five room house." Combine overcrowding with medieval plumbing and lack of laundry or bathing facilities and things didn't just get smelly; they also became unsafe, producing shocking mortality rates!

Through his education, Oscar Wilde dropped his Irish accent. He was primarily Anglican, though he flirted with converting to Catholicism. His brother, on the other hand, had the same education, retained his Irish accent and people thought it was charming. Hall Caine and Henry Irving spoke affectionately of Willie Wilde's Irish voice and Willie referred to himself as "an Irish gentleman." However, in Oscar Wilde's circle, Willie Wilde was mocked and Oscar was mocked for having such a brother (mostly due to Willie's drinking), but I wonder how much of it had to do with hanging on to his Irishness.

London was still, in the 1890s, an unkind place to the Irish. It's much easier being Canadian in the U.S.A.

Until my readers correct me, which one day I dearly hope you will, I'm concluding that, like my husband and I, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker simply sought out people they had things in common with and that sometimes one of those things was their heritage. Speranza lived in Ireland longer than her sons and her writing career was entrenched in her national heritage. It makes sense that Yeats's Irish Literary Society was something important for her to participate in, whereas Stoker and Wilde might have had nothing to do with it, but were glad their wives were Irish.

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Degeneration, Decadence & Drink

First published as Entartung (1892), Max Nordau’s major work was published in English as Degeneration in 1895. In Degeneration, Nordau transfers Bénédict Augustin Morel’s notion of degeneracy to the arts circles of his time, suggesting that authors and artists are as degenerate as criminals, prostitutes and lunatics.

Some of what we call fin-de-siècle decadence, Nordau called degeneration. This decadence was also on trial in 1895, along with anything else that had to do with Oscar Wilde. Decadence and degeneration are two of the major themes that I'm most interested in the artists and writers of the 1890s. It permeated every aspect of the aesthetic life from fashion to diet to decorating and consumption. Nordau observed this in Degeneration, which, historian, Steven E. Ascheim describes as:

...a veritable diatribe of cultural criticism that characterized virtually every modernist fin-de-siecle current as a symptom of exhaustion and inability to adjust to the realities of the modern industrial age.

I can't imagine fully tackling all of Nordau's views on the aesthetic movement in a single blog post. Nor am I interested in fleshing out the coincidental timing of the release of Nordau's work in London with regards to Wilde's trials, though I find it interesting enough to note and wish to further add that Nordau actually mentions Wilde in his work, asserting that Wilde considered himself above morality. Here, however, I intend to just lightly touch on some of Nordau's ideas, as well as what Wilde, Bram Stoker and H.G. Wells had to say, about why writers drank.

The full-text of Degeneration is available here and I'll begin with a quote from it. Nordau writes:

WE have recognised the effect of diseases in these fin-de-siecle literary and artistic tendencies and fashions, as well as in the susceptibility of the public with regard to them, and we have succeeded in maintaining that these diseases are degeneracy and hysteria. We have now to inquire how these maladies of the day have originated, and why they appear with such extraordinary frequency at the present time. Morel, the great investigator of degeneracy, traces this chiefly to poisoning. A race which is regularly addicted, even without excess, to narcotics and stimulants in any form such as fermented alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, hashish, arsenic which partakes of tainted foods (bread made with bad corn, which absorbs organic poisons (marsh fever, syphilis, tubercu-losis, goitre), begets degenerate descendants who, if they remain exposed to the same influences, rapidly descend to the lowest degrees of degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarfishness, etc. That the poisoning of civilized peoples continues and increases at a very rapid rate is widely attested by statistics.

When I read that, I can't help but feel there is something very modern about it. If we didn't feed our children gluten or non-organic dairy, if we didn't smoke or drink, we wouldn't have problems with ADHD and depression. Of course, I think there's some (just a little bit of) wisdom in Nordau's words. I don't want to eat arsenic tainted food and drugs are bad for you, but I hesitate. Are drinking and drugs a symptom or the problem?

Nordau says:

The drinker (and apparently the smoker also) begets enfeebled children, hereditarily fatigued or degenerated, and these drink and smoke in their turn, because they are fatigued.

Fatigued, respiratory conditions and fetal alcohol syndrome, I say potato and Nordau says patatto. But then, I love Victorian words for alcoholism and alcoholics. Nordau throws in a little misogyny for good measure.

The erotomaniac 'degenerate' stands in the same position to the woman as a dipsomaniac to intoxicating drinks. Magnan has given an appalling picture of the struggles waged in the mind of a dipsomaniac by the passionate eagerness for the bottle, and the loathing and horror of it.

Now, I've been mocking Nordau, but the essence of what he says in that last quote is ahead of its time - that is until later when he equates "dipsomania" or "madness for drink" with all of the other madnesses of his time, including: "aichmophobia" the fear of pointed objects; "arithmomania" the madness for numbers; and "oniomania" a madness for buying (I really like that last one). Though the Victorians had their crazies and their teatotallers, they didn't really understand alcoholism or addiction as a disease. In the quote above, Nordau recognizes the struggle of addiction, as if he sat in on one of today's AA meetings. Only a few doctors in the 1890s, mostly working with Dr. Norman Shanks Kerr (1834-1899) thought of abstinence from alcohol as a cure for "dipsomania."

Kerr was recognized in London as an avid support of the Temperance Movement and was a strict teatotaller. His was the radical idea that the only permanent cure for sever alcohol withdrawal (delirium tremens) was to stop drinking permanently. Oh course, he still treated the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal with opium, but who's perfect?

Wilde preferred opium to alcohol, but understood that:

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.

Nordau felt that:

Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime.

Nordau, somewhat rightly, believed that Wilde achieved more through his personality than through any effort or work. Nordau recognized Wilde as the representative of the Aesthetic Movement in England. Meanwhile, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes:

Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.

W.B. Yeats said:

The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober.

H.G. Wells advised against taking alcohol regularly and compared it to polite conversation:

Speech, no doubt, is a valuable gift, but at the same time it is a gift that may be abused. What is regarded as polite conversation is, I hold, such an abuse. Alcohol, opium, tea, are all very excellent things in their way; but imagine continuous alcohol, an incessant opium, or to receive, ocean-like, a perennially flowing river of tea! That is my objection to this conversation: its continuousness.

In my research, I got onto this topic in response to the question: why do writers drink (there's a new book about it and here's a review). But Wells gives me no reason to assume that writers drink with more enthusiasm than anyone else. Bram Stoker's first book, The Primrose Path, is a moralistic romance novel about a protagonist who succumbs to alcoholism and eventually lets it ruin his life. Stoker was known to have practiced moderation in all things. Perhaps, the question I better ask might be: why would writers drink.

When I talk to other writers, artists and even academics, the guilty truth we share is that it feels like we are living the dream. Wells reinforces that notion In a Modern Utopia (1905):

The conditions of physical happiness will be better understood in Utopia, it will be worth while to be well there, and the intelligent citizen will watch himself closely. Half and more of the drunkenness of earth is an attempt to lighten dull days and hopelessly sordid and disagreeable lives, and in Utopia they do not suffer these things. Assuredly Utopia will be temperate, not only drinking, but eating with the soundest discretion

And yet, inside that passage there is a certain hedonism. Is it hedonistic to have all of what you want?

Good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic! The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful. What more can you want?

In that passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray, we have hedonism in the form of drinking, smoking and the pursuit of sex. We have the idea that getting what you want should make you happy. Does having everything you want and not being happy make you feel guilty? Do people drink because they are unhappy?

I digress for fear of running into a long meditation on happiness and self-medication. Self-medicating is, I think, what Nordau felt the degenerate thought he or she was doing by drinking. He just found artists more despicable for finding it beautiful.

To that effect he says:

When Raffaelli paints shockingly degraded absinthe-drinkers in the low drinking dens of the purlieus of Paris, we clearly feel his profound pity at the sight of these fallen human beings, and this emotion we ex-perience as a morally beautiful one. In like manner we have not a momentary doubt of the morality of the artist's emotions whenwe behold Callot's pictures of the horrors of war, or the bleeding, purulent saints of Zurbaran, or the monsters of Breughel van der Holle, or when we read the murder scene in Dostojevsky's Raskolnikow. These emotions are beautiful. Sympathy with them gives us a feeling of pleasure. Against this feeling the displeasure caused by the repulsiveness of the work cannot prevail. When, however, the work betrays the indifference of the author to the evil or ugliness he depicts, nay, his predilection for it, then the abhorrence provoked by the work isintensified by all the disgust which the author's aberration of instinct inspires in us, and the aggregate impression is one of keenest displeasure. Those who share the emotions of the author, and hence are with him attracted and pleasurably excited by what is repugnant, diseased and evil, are the degenerate.

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The Most Valuable Poem in the World?

This week a poem that Oscar Wilde wrote in college sold for almost €80,000. Aside from the bitter irony that, in the latter part of the 1890s, Wilde was so desperately poor that he sometimes could not afford to eat dinner at all and relied on free meals, I think it's excellent that his poetry is so valuable at this point in the history of homosexuality. I'm not sure, however, that the poem itself has anything to do with homosexuality, but it does present an early version of a theme that would reoccur in Wilde's writing on love.

The poem was called, "Heart's Yearnings" and was written in 1873.

Heart's Yearnings

Surely to me the world is all too drear,

To shape my sorrow to a tuneful strain,

It is enough for wearied ears to hear

The Passion-Music of a fevered brain,

Or low complainings of a heart's pain.

My saddened soul is out of tune with time,

Nor have I care to set the crooked straight,

Or win green laurels for some pleasant rhyme,

Only with tired eyes I sit and wait

The opening of the Future's Mystic Gate.

I am so tired of all the busy throng

That chirp and chatter in the noisy street,

That I would sit alone and sing no song

But listen for the coming of Love's feet.

Love is a pleasant messenger to greet.

O Love come close before the hateful day,

And tarry not until the night is dead,

O Love come quickly, for although one pray,

What has God ever given in thy stead

But dust and ashes for the head?

The message of this poem is simple; he hopes to fall in love before he dies. The idea of waiting for Love has always appeared in art. Yet, the line I like best is: "My saddened soul is out of tune with time." Wilde often felt out of tune with time, in love, art, and other matters. Here, I think that line means that he's sad about love before love has given him the chance to be sad about it. It makes me think of a line in a song by Bjork: "I miss you, though I haven't met you yet."

Still, the price this poem sold for works out to €220 per word and more than three times the price that a poem by Yeats sold for at the same auction, making it the most valuable poem in the world - not long after the U.K. legalized same-sex marriage. The context of this sale gives an entirely different resonance to the idea that Wilde's "saddened soul [was] out of tune with time," whether he was writing about homosexuality at the time or not.

Because I am a person interested in all of the minute details of these writers' lives, my remaining question about the poem is whether or not this was before he met Florence Balcombe. I've been searching for the dates of their relationship, but can't seem to pin it down. Let me know, if you know and I will update this post, when I have that information.

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For Love and Ireland

W.B. Yeats joined the Irish nationalist cause as much for his love of Maud Gonne, a beautiful young Irish feminist, as he did for his politics. Though Gonne liked and admired Yeats, this was a story of unrequited love.

The pair met on 30 January 1890. Biographies on Yeats call Gonne "an actress whose great beauty would haunt (Yeats) for the rest of his life." Her passionate work for the nationalist cause in Ireland and her reckless destructiveness in pursuit of her political goals plagued Yeats. Thought he tried to support those goals in his own way.

Yeats focused on drama, trying to spark a revival of Irish literature and culture. Gonne liked this, but regularly refused to marry him (between 1890 and 1901) and they remained close friends through many estrangements, including her marriage to Major John MacBride. In his poetry, Yeats compared her to Helen of Troy, whose capriciousness led to the destruction of a civilization.

In her autobiography, Gonne wrote a great deal about Yeats, including the following:

While we were still at dinner Willie Yeats arrived to see me and we all went into the drawing-room for coffee. Kathleen (Gonne) and I sat together on a big sofa amid piles of soft cushions. I was still in my dark clothes with the black veil I always wore when travelling instead of a hat, we must have made a strange contrast. I saw Willie Yeats looking critically at me and he told Kathleen he liked her dress and that she was looking younger than ever. I was on that occassion Kathleen remarked that it was hard work being beautiful, which Willie turned into his poem Adam's Curse.

Gonne actually includes the poem in its entirety here, but I trust that you can look it up, if you haven't read it.

Next day when he called to take me out to pay my customary visit to Lia Fail, he said:

"You don't take care of yourself as Kathleen does, so she looks younger than you; your face is worn and thin; but you will always be more beautiful, more beautiful than anyone I have known. You can't help that. Oh Maud, why don't you marry me and give up this tragic struggle and live a peaceful life? I could make such a beautiful life for you among artists and writers who would understand you."

"Willie, are you not tired of asking that question? How often have I told you to thank the gods that I will not marry you. You would not be happy with me."

"I am not happy without you."

"Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. I will tell you one thing, our friendship had meant a great deal to me; it has helped me often when I needed help, needed it perhaps more than you or anyone ever knew, for I never talk or even think of these things."

Like Gonne, I believe that some loves are meant to inspire and carry a person through hard times. Indeed, we should be grateful for every love we've ever had in our lives, no matter how happy or unhappy they make us.

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Not that Shakespeare!

There's no denying the men's club aspect to the culture of writers in London, during the 1890s. Even the Bohemian arts movement excluded women in London in ways that women were included in France. This, however, doesn't mean that women didn't participate! One example is Olivia Shakespear.

In the 1890s, Shakespear was a novelist and she didn't just sit at home writing novels under a pseudonym. Shakespear used her real name on all of her publications. She got out of the house, was active in London's writerly circles, most notably with William Butler Yeats.

Shakespear and Yeats met on 16 April 1894, at the launch party for the Yellow Book. Shakespear captivated Yeats instantly. Of the occasion, he wrote in his memoirs:

At a literary dinner where there were fifty or sixty guests I noticed opposite me, between celebrated novelists, a woman of great beauty. Her face had a perfectly Greek regularity, though her skin was a little darker than a Greek's would have been and her hair was very dark. She was exquisitely dressed with what seemed to me very old lace over her breast, and had the same sensitive look of distinction I had admired in Eva Gore-Booth. She was, it seemed, about my own age, but suggested to me an incomparable distinction.

After that night, the two became great friends, who would share literary ideas and notions. Though they were both married, in time, they also became lovers. This romance, of course was always overshadowed by Yeats' obsession with Maud Gonne, who he met in 1889 and pursued for decades. Consequently, Shakespear's affair with Yeats was probably overwhelming intellectual. They made many friends through this affair as well. Shakespear introduced Yeats to Ezra Pound in May 1909.

Shakespear shouldn't have been having an affair anyway. Shakespear was Olivia's married name. Her maiden name was Tucker. There doesn't appear to be any relation to the bard.

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Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Interest in alternative spirituality and the occult peaked before the Second World War, but mysticism was already becoming popular in the late-Victorian period, after the Darwinian Revolution.

In the 1890s, Bram Stoker was involved in an occult-like spiritualist organization, called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This mystic order was shrouded in secrecy. Indeed, the order threatened to ruin people's lives, if they revealed its secrets to outsiders. However, its hermetics were based on things people  thought of before, like Freemasonry, the religion of ancient Egypt, alchemy, and tarot cards.

Other members of the Order included W.B. Yeats, Algernon Blackwood, and Oscar Wilde's wife: Constance. A new biography, Constance: the Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde, goes into great detail of Constance's experiences with the Order and how being among the first to join elevated members' positions. Digging Hermetics in the 1890s got you in on the ground floor, so-to-speak, because the movement was young and still under the direction of it's founder William Wynn Westcott.

In October 1887, Westcott wrote to Anna Sprengel, whose name and address he received through the decoding of the Cipher Manuscripts. Westcott claimed to receive a wise reply which conferred honorary grades of Adeptus Exemptus on Westcott, and his fellow Freemasons Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and William Robert Woodman and chartered a Golden Dawn temple consisting of the five grades outlined in the manuscripts. Anna Sprengel died four years after helping to found the order.

Anna Sprengel, countess of Landsfeldt, love-child of Ludwig I of Bavaria and Lola Montez, may never have existed at all, as there is no proof of her existence and it now seems she was invented by Westcott to confer legitimacy on the Golden Dawn (although I'm not sure how the support of imaginary people confers legitimacy on anything). In 1901 Mathers, leader of the Golden Dawn, briefly supported the claim of Swami Laura Horos, who had long campaigned for recognition as that countess, to have written Westcott as Anna Sprengel.

Regardless, I think it could have been the order and organization within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that provided orderliness to previously unruly creatures, specifically Bram Stoker's vampires. Anna Sprengel was supposedly a countess and Bram's vampires were led by a count. I don't know of any other interpretations of vampires that require devotion and worship, like Renfield has for Dracula:

"I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am your slave, and you will reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped you long and afar off. Now that you are near, I await your commands, and you will not pass me by, will you, dear Master, in your distribution of good things?"

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