Martin Fido (1939–2019)

In the quiet Suffolk village of Peasenhall, on the morning after a dark and stormy night in 1902, the body of twenty-year-old Rose Harsent was found in the kitchen of the house where she worked as a servant, with her throat cut and with signs of a fire having been started to attempt to conceal the evidence. She was six months pregnant, and suspicion rapidly fell on William Gardiner, one of the leading lights of her Primitive Methodist chapel. He had been accused by other villagers of having an affair with Rose a year earlier, but an internal enquiry in the chapel had cleared them.

There was some evidence supporting the theory that Gardiner was the murderer, and he was brought to trial, but there were gaps in the evidence and the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict either in the first trial or the subsequent retrial, something very unusual in English legal history, and the prosecution was abandoned without Gardiner having been found either guilty or innocent.

The case aroused a lot of publicity: the general view in the village seems to be (still, apparently) that Gardiner was guilty, but elsewhere newspapers and the public were mostly on his side. And of course amateur investigators have been amusing themselves with finding alternative suspects ever since. Fido and Skinner take a relatively sober line: whilst acknowledging the strength of the case against Gardiner, they consider that there wasn't enough evidence presented at the time to prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. There are some facts, in particular the anonymous note found in Rose's possession arranging a midnight meeting, that can't easily be linked to Gardiner, and suggest to the authors that the most likely explanation is that Rose had another lover who was not identified at the time and is of course untraceable now, and that this man killed her in the course of an argument. But it's all speculation, really.

The most interesting thing about the book was really reading it whilst actually staying in Peasenhall, and getting a feel for the way village life went on there around 1900.… (mais)

This inexpensive coffee-table book contains a brief life of Oscar Wilde and well-chosen illustrations. The author of the text, Martin Fido, taxes Wilde with being a minor writer, although he grants that the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and his poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” are masterpieces. The plays—notably “The Importance of Being Earnest”—were the best contribution to the British stage since the Restoration comedies and taught Wilde’s fellow Irish Protestant, Shaw, a thing or two about witty dialogue. And the book-length, spleen-filled epistle to his “Bosie,” Sir Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, gets a high rating as well.
Wilde’s fame rests more, however, on his downfall. As Fido casts it, Wilde became the victim of his own hubris in having Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, arrested and put on trial for libel. That vigorous but eccentric exemplar of British manhood, remembered today for codifying the rules of boxing, had accused Wilde of being a “sondomite” and blamed him for corrupting his son, Alfred (although it was far too late for that by the time the two met).
The suit led to Wilde’s sentencing to two years’ hard labor in prison, from which he emerged a broken man. His wife changed her name and took their two sons to the continent to escape notoriety. As Fido tells it, the severe sentence led to a slackening of the hounding of homosexuals in Britain for a half-century. When it flared up again after World War Two (Alan Turing, for example), another wave of revulsion over the penalties set in, leading to decriminalization.
This then is the legacy of Oscar Wilde. His success during his lifetime was not primarily literary, but social. He was a brilliant dinner guest, sought after by aristocrats not because they thought of him as one of their own (as Wilde wished to believe) but as witty entertainment for their other guests. When lampooned in Punch and by Gilbert and Sullivan, he took it in good nature. Among his deepest friendships were leading actresses and beauties of the day, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, and Lily Langtry. Fido stresses Wilde’s qualities of generosity and sympathy.
All in all, this book is a good introduction to the life and times of a pop star from the last years of the Victorian era.… (mais)