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 It was out-of-date.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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How to Raise a Horror Writer

Bram Stoker was a sickly child and spent a lot of time in bed, while his loving Irish mother, Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley (hereafter referred to as "Mother Stoker") entertained him with stories. Many of her stories were oral histories, the kind that the Brothers Grimm sought out in Germany, the kind that appeared in Speranza's Ancient Legends many years later. Sometimes, Mother Stoker would tell little Stoker about the horrors of the potato famine, as he drifted off to sleep other times the stories came from her own family history.

One was about her great-great-great... grandfather. I haven't been able to find much evidence to support her ancestry, but the story of this particular grandfather is scary and fascinating.

First, I didn't know the word "lynch" had different etymology rooted in Ireland than it does in the States. The Irish etymology predates the American through the Stokers' grandfather, James Lynch Fitzstephen, also sometimes called James Fitzstephen Lynch.

Lynch was the infamous cold-hearted mayor/judge of Galway Ireland. The story goes that Lynch's son Walter was jealous of his father's Spanish houseguest, whom he believed was wooing his lady. In a fit of rage, he killed the Spaniard, but sobered up and confessed his crime. The people of Galway, for some reason, were on Walter's side and pleaded mercy on his behalf, but his ruthless father found him guilty and hung him out the window of their home. The house is gone, but the window is still there, marked with a plaque.

This memorial of the stern and unbending justice of the chief magistrate of this city, James Lynch Fitzstephen, elected mayor in A.D. 1493, who condemned and executed his own guilty son, Walter, on this spot.’ He was one son who was not spared.

As gruesome a story as this is, especially for telling a sick little boy, I did find a compelling argument for why the American etymology is more popular. Lynching is something that takes place outside of the law, whereas the mayor of Galway acted within the law. Earliest published use of the term dates back to 1811, well after Charles Lynch added his name to the list of terrible Lynches associated with the word, but, as if to accommodate differences of opinion on its etymology, the OED specifies that in its early use the word implied only "the infliction of punishment, such as whipping" etc.

I have to stop there because the history of the word is so awful that it makes me sick and I lose sleep. Other stories Mother Stoker used to tell were about deaths through the Potato Famine (1845-52). It's possible that she told these stories from her own memory. Punch comics sure had some things to say on the subject.

If Mother Stoker didn't make her son an author of horror stories with those tales, she also had Manus the Magnificent to talk about. Manus O'Donnell (d.1564) was an Irish clan leader and important member of the O'Donnell dynasty based in County Donegal. His father, Hugh, was crowned king of the O'Donnells during their clan's terrible feud with the O'Neills. Just reading his wikipedia entry is like watching the Game of Thrones.

Stoker fans everywhere look for traces of the Tales of Mother Stoker in Bram Stoker's Dracula. I can certainly see that when I think of Dracula talking about history after reading about Manus the Magnificent. The Mayor of Galway also posed a good model for a villain and might have made Stoker more sympathetic, when reading about Vlad the Impaler. But Stoker read about Vlad as an adult, so he must have loved listening to the terrible stories his mother told him as a boy.

***

A few days after I originally posted this, pieces of the stories that I imagine Mother Stoker telling her son start turning up in all of Bram Stoker's writing for me. Most shocking are the final words of Stoker's best known short story, "The Judge's House." My focus is overwhelmingly on the 1890s and Dracula, so as obvious as the connection is between the Mayor of Galway and "The Judge's House," I overlooked it until now. The story ends with the line:

There at the end of the rope of the great alarm bell hung the body of the student, and on the face of the Judge in the picture was a malignant smile.

Please, post a comment, if you find any other connections that I might have overlooked.

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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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