Monday: Oscar

I read this last week.  Although I knew that Oscar Wilde had had two sons, I had never known anything about what had happened to them.  After Oscar lost his libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry and it became clear that he was going to be arrested, his sons, Cecil and Vyvyan, were taken out of their school and despatched to the continent with their governess.  Their mother joined them some time later and they spent the next years wandering around Europe, living in hotels,  going to a variety of schools and hoping that no-one would discover their 'infamous' connection.

Constance, their mother, died a few years into their exile and the boys were forbidden from having any contact with their father.  Indeed, Vyvyan was told that he was dead.  When Oscar was released from prison, he tried to find them but his wife's family prevented him from knowing where they were.  He died without ever having seen them again.

This is far from an early misery memoir since, unlike the self-indulgence of modern misery memoirs, it is a dignified and very matter of fact little book.  What does come through is what a good father Oscar had been, breaking with Victorian tradition and romping around the nursery with his boys.

Of course, now you have to wonder what the big deal would have been.  

I will confess that I didn't intend this blip for today but, for the first time since I started blipping, I forgot my camera when I went to work.  Horrors!