The Sexual Orientation of Men in the 1890s

Victorian sexuality can be approached from so many directions, including (but not limited to) body image, sexual orientation, masturbation, prostitution, sex education, disease, religion, marriage, and pornography. All of these aspects overlap and influence each other, creating tremendous diversity in attitudes toward sex at any given point in history. Each of these factors provide the context in which sexual identities are created. This post is the second in a series of posts that seek to explore that context from the 1890s with an emphasis on male sexuality.

Sexual Orientation

"Sexual orientation" is the preferred term used when referring to an individual's physical and/or emotional attraction to the same and/or opposite gender. "Gay," "lesbian," "bisexual" and "straight" are all examples of sexual orientations. A person's sexual orientation is distinct from a person's gender identity and expression. - The Human Rights Campaign

For the purposes of this post, I will be looking at the sexual orientations of self-identified men in the 1890s, especially writers. There will be little discussion of trans-men because I have little information on the lives of trans people in London in the 1890s, though they certainly existed, and likely wrote many wonderful things. I encourage all of my readers to discuss 1890s trans authors' sexual orientations in the comments of this post.

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas

1890s London was an extremely heterosexist place to live and be. It was also the most interesting and scary time of the century, in terms of discussing sexual orientation. Male homosexuality, as it exists today, was, in many ways, invented at this time. Of course, the history of male homosexuality dates way back before the 1890s, but at least two major events happened in 1890s London that would shape male homosexual culture for the next hundred years. Oscar Wilde's infamous trials occurred in 1895, and Havelock Ellis's translated Sexual Inversion (1897) became the first English medical textbook on homosexuality. 

Robert Ross at age 24

When I say that male homosexuality was invented, I mean that without differentiating labels of sexual orientation, we are all just sexual human beings. Men certainly didn't need the label of 'homosexuality' to be openly attracted to other men. Robbie Ross was relatively open about his sexuality before the 1890s, he was discriminated against and bullied at school, and embraced by his family. It was the ways that heterosexist society understood male homosexual attraction that were changing.

Heterosexist society is only capable of understanding homosexuality from within the context of heterosexuality. It normalizes heterosexuality, but at the beginning of the decade even heterosexuality was a problem. 

The Elder's Happy Home (1881).

'The sexual problem' and 'varietism' were a couple of the terms used in alternative journals to discuss what was most commonly being referred to as 'the marriage question.' Of course, marriage to a woman was the ideal goal of male sexuality in the 1800s. The marriage question's main focus was divorce, though it was expanded to include polyamory, and the complications involved in legalizing extramarital relationships to legitimize the children born of these relationships. Essentially, it struggled with the problem of men who were sexually attracted to people other than the woman they married.

W. Somerset Maugham's first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897) tackles the marriage question by outlining many of the ways in which working-class Londoners struggled with the institution of marriage, and the ways in which marriage regulated heterosexual sex. At one point, Liza's lover even considers bigamy.

Hall Caine and Family (1890s).

Living as man and wife outside of marriage was more common than most people think in the Victorian Era. (George Elliott) Mary Ann Evans' partner, philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes was already married when he met Evans, but had an open marriage, and was unable to get a divorce, so he lived with Evans, as if they were man and wife. Hall Caine's wife, Mary Chandler was only 13 when they met, and too young to get married. They lived together, had children, and people assumed they were married, although they couldn't and didn't get married until she was almost of age.

Evolutionary theory provided fascinating new ways to think about those problems. The Darwinian Revolution was changing the way that people thought about life, the universe, and everything. As soon as it was published, it began to permeate fiction. By the 1890s, young writers had inherited a body of work to build off of that had created scenes and plots that adopted natural selection as part of human mating rituals. 

Darwinian courtship narratives featured, as Bert Bender put it, 'aggressive, eager, and possessive males and coy females; males participating in the "law of battle"; or scenes of music and dance that dramatized Darwin's theories on sexual attraction and biological beauty." Darwinian courtship narrative were also applied to real life.

Scientists used theories of evolution to naturalize perceived differences between men and women, especially in terms of courtship and sexual attraction. The dance floor became a metaphorical jungle for men and women's animalistic instincts. In my post on dancing, I discuss the scenes of music and dance that provided middle- and upper-class men one of the rarer opportunities to meet single women their mothers would approve of because those women occupied entirely different spheres of London life than their male counterparts. Most discussions on the separate spheres of Victorian life emphasize the restrictions that this highly gendered society imposed on women, but many Victorian men hardly ever got the chance to meet a woman they weren't related to. When they did, their were guides to help them through it, like Flirting Made Easy (1882).

From Flirting Made Easy (1882).

Although Flirting Made Easy is called a guide for girls, the text is clearly directed toward men, and echoed Darwinian courtship narratives found in fiction. Mrs. Humphry, Manners for Men (1897) describes the ideal man as the product of evolution, defined through his abilities to deal with all of the elements presented to him in the masculine spheres of society.

It was once said by a clever man that no one could be a gentleman all round who had not knocked about the world and associated with all sorts and conditions of men, high and low, rich and poor, good and bad. Experiences like these are like the processes for refining gold. The man who emerges unharmed from the fire of poverty and its associations, and who retains his independent manliness in relations with those high-place, must have within him a fibre of strength that is the true essence of manliness.

In this, we also have the idea of men knocking about with men becoming more manly men, which seems to reinforce the righteousness of a separate spheres ideology, in the midst of which a man could go to certain theatres, streets, hotel lobbies, and hire a 'rent boy.' Rent boys were young male prostitutes.

In the 1880s, 'the social purity movement' sought to contain the many manifestations of male lust, including prostitution.  In 1885, they pushed through legislation that would ruin Wilde's life ten years later.  The main intention of the legislation wasn't on regulating homosexuality (most of the movements supporters likely had little idea that such relationships existed). The legislation's main intent was to protect young girls from indecent assaults. Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 revised the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen (so until 1885, there was nothing legally wrong with Caine's relationship with Chandler).  The law was also amended to make any indecent assault punishable by making 'gross indecencies,' regardless of age, punishable as a misdemeanor.  Consequently, the vague wording was interpreted more broadly to apply to consensual same-sex acts between adults, which is what Wilde was sent to prison for in 1895.

I keep saying that most people in this heterosexist society didn't know anything about homosexuality, so that it was as if homosexuality didn't exist. Clearly, men who were interested in such encounters found them, and a dialogue was beginning to emerge. Richard von Krafft-Ebing first introduced the word 'homosexual' to the language through his English translation of Psychopathia Sexualis in 1892. A more popular word among homosexual men, at the time, was 'Uranian,' which emerged in poetry that referred to a third sex, which placed a female psyche in a male body.

The widespread belief that homosexual men are more feminine emerged during this time, and was reinforced through Ellis and Wilde.

Before Wilde was identified as a homosexual, the traits that we've grown to associate with homosexual culture were regarded as part of the culture of refined gentlemen, living an artistic life. Wilde was flamboyant, he cared about his hair, his clothes, his wife's clothes, he edited a woman's magazine, he wrote for the theatre... Ladies loved Oscar Wilde so much that he hired a guy with hair like his to travel with him on his American tour, so that he might be able to fulfill his many female fans' requests for locks of hair without having to cut any of his own. He was a masculine sex symbol at the beginning of the 1890s - not in spite of his aestheticism, but because of it.

At the end of the decade, the characteristics that made Wilde so masculine and sexy to women were associated with what Ellis called 'sexual inversion.' In his book, Ellis provided what is considered my many to be the first objective assessment of the sexual relations of homosexual men, including men with boys. Ellis didn't characterize homosexuality in terms of morality, or as a disease. It did, however, create a link between homosexuality and child abuse that has been difficult to reverse. There was no evidence then, or now, to suggest that homosexual men were, or are, more likely to abuse children than heterosexual men.

Child abuse was approached much differently in the 1880s and 90s than it is today, as illustrated through the beginning of Caine's relationship with Chandler (who eventually became his wife). Chandler's father ran a restaurant, and was called on to deliver a sandwich to Caine. After delivering the sandwich, Chandler's father (rightly or wrongly) believed that something sexually inappropriate had occurred between Caine and 13 year-old Chandler. Because he now viewed his daughter as sexually impure, he insisted that she was to be Caine's responsibility from that day forward.

Other cases in the UK and throughout the colonies, provide examples where parents sought monetary compensation in addition to an arrangement where the pedophile had access to their child victim. It was cases like this that the 1885 law sought to prevent. Pedophilia is not considered a sexual orientation today, but rather a paraphilia, or 'a condition characterized by abnormal sexual desires, typically involving extreme or dangerous activities.' It wasn't considered a sexual orientation in the 1890s either, if only, because people were still trying to figure out what sexual orientation was.

Three Yale men in drag; New Haven, CT (1880).
This photo likely had nothing to do with
sexual orientation, just some young men
dressing up as women for a photo.

Because 1890s London was such an extremely gendered and heterosexist society, anything outside of reproductive sex within a marriage was considered a vice, and needed to be repressed. Of course, the people within that society were still people with all kinds of sexual urges, as is clear through the lives of the writers presented here, like Oscar Wilde, Robbie Ross, Hall Caine, and Bram Stoker.

By today's standards, Oscar Wilde would most likely identify as bisexual because he did love women, including his wife, Violet Hunt, and Florence Balacombe (the future Mrs Stoker). He also loved Lord Afred Douglas, and Robbie Ross.

Robbie Ross was a homosexual before there was a word for it, and is perhaps one of the first gay activists. During the First World War, he even mentored a group of primarily homosexual poets and artists, which included Siegfired Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Hall Caine was also probably bisexual. He had many children with his young wife, but he also had many extramarital love affairs with men.

Although it's popular to insist that Bram Stoker was also into men, I would argue that he was probably a very typical heterosexual gentleman. There's no evidence that he ever cheated on his wife. He had romantic friendships with men, like Walt Whitman, which could rightly be considered an infatuation. However, he spent the majority of his married life away from his wife, which gave him ample opportunity to act on any extramarital urges he might have had, and didn't. I think that those romantic friendships were simply characteristic of a time when men weren't afraid of being considered homosexual because no one really knew what homosexuality was.

Of course, I am transposing contemporary ideas of homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality onto historical figures, which is a pretty anachronistic thing to do. In 1890s heterosexist society, if sexual orientation had anything to do with a man's identity, he most likely viewed it in a Jekyll and Hyde way, meaning he would Hyde any parts of himself that didn't fit with the heterosexist expectations of respectable life. He may still engage in those activities, but he would be very careful about letting anyone know about it.

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Where did your favourite 1890s writer go to school?

What did it take to be a successful writer in 1890s London? Did Education have anything to do with it? While managing the Lyceum, Bram Stoker used to receive manuscripts from aspiring playwrights of all walks of life. Though Stoker seemed skeptical about some of the aspiring writers he came across, a study into the educational backgrounds of some of 1890s London's most successful writers demonstrates that they did indeed come from all walks of life.

Of course, access to education was influenced by gender and social class. Women's education was topical in the 1890s, and formed the basis of some of these writers' works.

J.M. Barrie was educated in his native Scotland before moving to London, and becoming a writer. Barrie started school at the Glasgow Academy at age 8. At 10, he continued at the Forfar Academy, before moving on to the Dumfries Academy at age 14. He had a lifelong love of reading, and devoured Penny Dreadfuls as a kid. Barrie knew he wanted to be a writer, even though his family wanted him to go into the church. Determined to study literature, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he eventually earned his M.A. in Literature in 1882.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, like most Victorian women, was privately educated. It helped that she married a publisher.

Hall Caine grew up in the Isle of Man, but attended the Hope Street British Schools until age 14.  After school, he articled with John Murray, as an architect and surveyor. During this time, he still loved reading, and spent a lot of time at Liverpool's Free Library, leading him to insist that he was mainly self-taught.

Marie Corelli was the love child of the Scottish poet and songwriter Dr. Charles Mackay, and his servant Elizabeth Mills. Consequently, she was educated by a series of governesses, who, according to biographer Annette Fredrico, "fled from her intellectual exhibitionism and her intimidating sense of her own brilliance." Without a governess to look after her, Corelli was sent to a convent, most likely in Paris, where, according to Fredrico, "she concocted private theatricals about love and murder." Corelli left the convent at age 15. She published her first novel 16 years later, after a career as a musician.

Arthur Conan Doyle came from a broken home. His family actually had to split up because of his father's alcoholism, and lived in squalid tenement flats. With the financial support of his uncles, Doyle went to a Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school at age 9, then Stonyhurst College, until he was 16. Next, he spent a year at Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria (also a Jesuit school). He left that place agnostic, and went to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where writing became a hobby for him. He finished school at 28 with an advanced medical degree, and tried to be a doctor, until he got really good at his hobby, and the world became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes.

Richard Bernard Heldmann a.k.a. Richard Marsh used his pseudonym to practically assume a new identity, which included a claim to having graduated from Eton and Oxford. These claims have recently been proven false. Marsh adopted the new name, and life, to recover from the scandal of serving eighteen months’ hard labour, during April 1884, for forging cheques in Britain and France in 1883. He started using the name "Marsh" upon release from jail. Stories by ‘Richard Marsh’ begin to appear in literary journals in 1888, followed by two novels in 1893. Marsh wrote prolifically during the 1890s, and the early years of the 20th century. However, we're still not sure where he really went to school.

Ellen Buckingham Mathews a.k.a. Helen Mathers attended a boarding school in Chantry, near Frome in Somerset, which made it into her first novel,"Comin' thro' the Rye." In that book, she explores her experiences at school. "Mr Russell" in the novel was Rev Fussell in real life, who was the Lord of the manor and founder of the school. In the novel she calls the village Charteris.

W. Somerset Maugham studied medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth, London. He was still studying there in the 1890s (I mostly include him in this site because he is one of my husband's favourites). During this time, Maugham felt he got the education he needed for writing from the streets, by hanging out with the "low" sorts of people that he didn't otherwise get a chance to be around. He saw them on the streets, and in the hospital: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief ..." As a medical student, he wrote at night, and published Liza of Lambeth in 1897, which was a big success.

Sometimes, more is made of Bram Stoker's education before he went to school than during. An unknown illness kept him in bed, listening to his mom's horror stories, until he inexplicably recovered and went school at age 7. Of being a sickly kid, Stoker wrote, "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years." His private school was run by Rev. William Woods. Stoker's early illness left him with no further major health issues; he even excelled as an athlete at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated with honours as a B.A. in Mathematics. Stoker actively participated in the College Historical Society, 'the Hist', and became president of the University Philosophical Society, writing his first paper on "Sensationalism in Fiction and Society".

One might say education was a habit in the home of Mary Augusta Ward a.k.a. Mrs. Humphry Ward.  She was born into a prominent intellectual family of writers and educationalists in Tasmania, Australia. Ward was the daughter of a literature professor, the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, and she was Aldous Huxley's aunt. She attended boarding schools, including Shifnal in Shropshire from ages 11-15. Her schooldays inspired one of her novels, Marcella (1894). When she wasn't at school, she was at home with her family at Oxford University. She eventually married a writer and Oxford educator, and continued to live at Oxford, at 17 Bradmore Road, where she is commemorated by a blue plaque.

Oscar Wilde was educated at home until age 9, focussing on languages with a French bonne and a German governess. Then he was off to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He developed a prominent role for himself in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. By the time he was finished school, Wilde was basically the poster boy for aestheticism.

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The Unlikely Archivist

Much of what we know about writers in London in the 1890s comes from an unlikely source, with a complicated and controversial past. Perhaps, the wife of a writer as the source doesn't seem so unlikely, but that she was such a devoted archivist, considering her background, does come as a bit of a surprise.

I'm talking about Mrs. Mary Alice Caine née Chandler.

When this beautiful woman was thirteen years-old, her step-father did something he could be arrested for today and my stomach turns just thinking about it. When Mary Chandler was only 13 years-old and working at her step-father's restaurant/coffee shop with her sister, the Manx writer, Hall Caine was staying nearby with bachelor friend and frequented the restaurant. One day, he asked that their meal be delivered to them and Chandler's step-father sent her and her sister to make the delivery. Afterwards, he implied that something indecent happened during the delivery and demanded that the two single men make "honest women" of his step-daughters. He didn't really care if the men married the girls, he just wasn't willing to look after his step-daughters anymore.

Caine refused to marry Chandler. Evidence suggests he was embarrassed by her age. Chandler's step-father turned her out of the house, presuming Caine would take her in. He did.

Caine had a sister Chandler's age, who attended a boarding school called Sevenoaks. Caine swore his sister, Lily, to secrecy and sent Chandler to live with her there. Secrecy mattered because he was embarrassed by Chandler's age and didn't want his devoutly religious parents to find out he had been having sex with her.

Chandler attended Sevenoaks for just six months before she became pregnant with Caine's first child. Caine delayed for a month in registering the birth, then perjured himself by describing Chandler as "Mary Alice Caine, formerly Chandler." They didn't legally marry until 1886 in Edinburgh, where Caine could avoid bad publicity. Even then, he lied, giving her age as 23, when she was 17 to his 33.

In spite of all that, they seem to have had many children and a happy marriage. Caine grew successful writer in the 1890s. They became fabulously wealthy and bought a big house, where he and Chandler enjoyed posing for photos on the terrace and she became obsessed with scrapbooking.

Scrapbooking was a popular Victorian pastime. Chandler kept scrapbooks about everything that happened in Caine's career. She had piles and piles of scrapbooks and was known within their influential circle as a meticulous record keeper, so much so that later in their lives when people, like Bram Stoker, were writing memoirs and histories of their friends' lives, they would come to her to borrow her scrapbooks.

Beginning in the 15th century, commonplace books became popular in England as a way to compile recipes, quotes, correspondence and more. Friendship albums became popular in the 16th century. These albums were the first scrapbooks. In 1775, James Granger published a history of England with several blank pages at the end of the book. The pages were designed to allow the book's owner to personalize the book with his own memorabilia.

I think there must have been a lot of Victorian women, like Chandler, who are responsible for documenting the history of the period. As an archivist (in one of my former lives), I even got to work on one such scrapbook, that served as a record of a trip to Boston that two young Victorian women went on. It was filled with letters, pages of their diaries, postcards that they wrote, but forgot to send, and photos, of course.

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Vampires or Bust

With more writers opting to self-publish every year, I thought it might be encouraging to know that one of the greatest published his best work at great personal risk.

When publishing Dracula, in 1897, Bram Stoker borrowed a "substantial amount" of money from his good friend, Hall Caine. The novel wasn't much of a success, during the author's lifetime, but it helped his widow to live comfortably. It also left a lasting impression on literature and film.

To me, this serves as a reminder that, if you feel compelled to create art, you should create art and don't waste any time worrying about whether it was worth it.

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A Bunch of Hairy Men

Hall Caine's photo in yesterday's post got me thinking about some of the late-Victorian writers' funny faces. Hall's face especially strikes me because, while I think he looks funny with his buggy eyes and dramatic beard, in the 1890s, ladies actually found him handsome!

Facial hair was popular among men in the 1890s. Although we look back on it with jocularity, it's making a bit of a resurgence in recent years (Movember, hockey beards, etc). Even the Edwardians found outrageous styles of facial hair ridiculous. 

Hall Caine (above) and Joseph Conrad (below) wore beards and mustaches, like Kaiser Wilhelm.

Bram Stoker (above) wore his in a fashion comically referred to as "dangle swaggles" (see picture at bottom).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and Ambrose Bierce (all are below) wore matching pointy mustaches that most agreed would make men look more distinguished, a look nowadays people think they can pull off with a pair of non-prescription eyeglasses.

As a young man in the 1890s, H.G. Wells (below) wore something like a walrus, but so did Rudyard Kipling (also below), leading one to speculate that this could have been some hip young thing.

To be fair, there were lots of ridiculous ways for a woman to style her hair that none of these guys would really get away with, but there were many other hairy styles available to men as well.

Though he himself was once a hairy beast, Charles Dickens said it best, when he said:

I am no friend to gentlemen who wilfully affect external oddity, while they are within all dull and commonplace.

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Laudanum

From absinthe to laudanum, substance abuse was prevalent during the latter part of the Victorian era. It doesn't seem like you could be a writer in the 1890s, without dying of substance abuse or knowing someone who had. This story bookends the decade, as a reminiscence of an author, who died in 1889, from a book published in 1908.

The book: My Story, Hall Caine's autobiography. Caine (photo on left 1895) was a Manx writer, very popular in the 1890s and 1900s. During the 1890s, he was surely bumping shoulders with my favorite writers. I'm not so fond of his writing as I am of his life and interactions with others of the period.

The passage I've selected is about Wilkie Collins. I just love how in his narrative, Caine portrays himself as using Collins's first and last name every time he addresses him, though they seem to have been great friends. Collins was a prolific writer and published 30 novels, more than 60 short stories, 14 plays, and more than 100 nonfiction essays.

In this passage, Caine is astonished at Collins's use of laudanum. Laudanum was a wildly popular drug during the Victorian era. It was an opium-based painkiller prescribed for everything from headaches to tuberculosis.

Hall writes:

One day, towards the beginning of 1888, I called upon him in great excitement about a difference I had just had with a friend with whom I was trying to collaborate. I wished him to adjudicate in the dispute, and he cordially undertook to do so. 

"State the difficulty," he said ; and I stated it with much fulness. He stopped me again and again — repeated, questioned, and commented. Two hours went by like ten minutes. We were sitting in Wilkie's workshop, With proofs of his current work everywhere about us. The point was a knotty one, and a serious issue seemed involved in it. Wilkie was much worried.  

"My brain is not very clear," he said once or twice, taking a turn across the room. Presently, and as if by a sudden impulse, he opened a cabinet, and took out a wine-glass and what seemed to be a bottle of medicine. " I'm going to show you one of the secrets of my prison- house," he said with a smile, and then he poured from the bottle a full wine-glass of a liquid resembling port wine. "Do you see that?" he asked. " It's laudanum." And straightway he drank it off.  

“Good heavens, Wilkie Collins!" I said, "how long have you taken that drug ? "  

"Twenty years," he answered.  

"More than once a day ? " 

"Oh yes, much more. Don't be alarmed. Remember that De Quincey used to drink laudanum out of a jug." Then he told me a story, too long to repeat, of how a man-servant of his had killed himself by taking less than half of one of his doses.  

"Why do you take it ? " I asked.  

"To stimulate the brain and steady the nerves."  

"And you think it does that?"  

"Undoubtedly," and laughing a little at my consternation, he turned back to the difficult subject I had come to discuss. " I'll see it clearer now. Let us begin again," he said.  

"Wait," I said. "You say, my dear Wilkie, that the habit of taking laudanum stimulates your brain and steadies your nerves. Has it the same effect on other people ?"  

"It had on Bulwer Lytton," answered Collins. "He told me so himself."  

"Well, then, Wilkie Collins," I said, "you know how much I suffer from nervous exhaustion. Do you advise me to use this drug?"  

He paused, changed colour slightly, and then said quietly, "No."  

The last time I saw Collins he was in great spirits and full of the "Reminiscences" that he intended to write. He talked of all his old friends with animation, the friends of his youth, "all gone, the old familiar faces"; and there was less than usual of the dull undertone of sadness that had so often before conveyed the idea of a man who felt that he had strutted too long on his little stage. He enjoyed his wine and some old brandy that came after it and a couple of delicious little cigars of a new brand which he loudly recommended. The more serious questions of literature and morality were all banished, and yarn followed yarn. 

I can only remember a single sad note in his conversation, and it was ominous. He was talking of Dickens, and I think he said he had been engaged to visit at Gad's Hill on the very day that Dickens died.  

A few days later, Wilkie Collins wrote inviting me to lunch, but naming no particular day. I was to go what day I liked, only remembering to send a telegram two or three hours in advance. So one Sunday morning I wrote a letter telling him that I meant to visit him the following day, and asking him for a telegram to say if the time would do. Instead of Wilkie's telegram there came a message from his affectionate adopted daughter, saying that on the previous morning he had been struck down with paralysis.

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