Did Jerome take part in the Oscar Wilde persecution?

[_niece]

Dear colleagues,

Vague rumours have reached me that Jerome Jerome participated in some unpleasant way in the scandalous Oscar Wilde affair - either by publishing a letter or a newspaper article, or even by giving some information to police. Has anybody heard anything about that?

[jesthepres]

The only established connection between Jerome and the Wilde affair was Jerome's adverse comments in his magazine To-Day on 29 December 1894 on a new publication, The Chameleon, which appeared in the same month. It contained contributions from Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. One aim of The Chameleon was to win acquiescence at Oxford for homosexuality. Jerome drew attention to 'the undesirable nature of some of the contents' and apparently (though I haven't seen the printed evidence) recommended police action. Whatever, The Chameleon lasted only one issue. As far as I know Jerome had no further connection with Wilde or the subsequent trial.
Jeremy Nicholas

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot.

This is the valuable contribution I recieved from LiveJournal community darkvictoria:

http://community.livejournal.com/darkvictoria/388660.html#comments

See the curious details about Tom Stoppard and also the kind of immorality Chameleon contained. The case was actually mentioned by Wilde in De profundis, but without any word of Jerome.

Arthenice

[_niece]

Sorry, that was _niece - I forgot to log in in my excitement.

[Jeremy Nicholas]

I have now found most of the text of Jerome's editorial in To-Day lambasting The Chameleon, and have written a fuller account of the whole episode to be published in the next edition of 'Idle Thoughts' (available to members only, but I shall post my piece on the Forum after it has been distributed; no date for that as yet!).

[_niece]

That would be great! Could you also post Jerome's article itself - or at least send it to me on daria_lieven@yahoo.co.uk?

[Jeremy Nicholas]

All the relevant text of Jerome's editorial that I have found is quoted in full in my piece, so you'll have both just as soon as the Hon. Sec of the Society has had time to produce the next issue of 'Idle Thoughts'. (Imminent, he tells me!)

[_niece]

Very good. Was he very virtuous and indignant (I mean Jerome, not your secretary)? It would be sad to witness his Three-men-in-a-boat manner changing to a commonplace cant.

[jesthepres]

Back in February (!) I promised to post my contribution to the Society's next edition of Idle Thoughts which sets out the extent of Jerome's involvement with the Oscar Wilde affair. IT 28 has now been sent to all members.  Here it is:
JKJ AND OSCAR
Jeremy Nicholas

      As the previous issue of Idle Thoughts (No.27) related, Jerome condemned in his own publication, To-day, the contents of a new magazine, The Chameleon, which, in the words of Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann, was ‘an attempt to win acquiescence at Oxford for homosexuality’.
   In his play The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard further added to speculation surrounding Jerome’s connection with Wilde’s disgrace. But what had Jerome written exactly? What had he said or done that might have had any bearing whatever on the matter?
   The definitive answer has arrived in the shape of a new biography of Wilde by Neil McKenna. The Secret life of Oscar Wilde (Arrow Books, paperback, £8.99, pub.2004) is a brilliantly-written and –researched piece of work, ‘whisky to Ellmann’s water’ as one reviewer described, which goes into some prurient detail over Wilde’s sex life.
   In the first (and, as it transpired, only) edition of The Chameleon there appeared the unsigned story ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ (rather than ‘The Prince and the Acolyte’ as Idle Thoughts No.27 had it). It was written by an undergraduate, Jack Bloxam, one of the founders of the magazine and who later, incidentally, followed his fictional hero’s footsteps into the priesthood. It concerned the sexual relationship between a man and a boy. Shockingly, the boy was portrayed not as a seducer but as a willing partner. Further, the story made it quite clear that the love between the man and the boy was ‘divinely ordained’. Not the sort of thing to appeal to genteel Victorian sensibilities.
   It was first thought that Wilde was the author (McKenna makes it perfectly clear that Wilde had an obsession with rent boys and engaged in a long series of relationships with several of them), though he himself thought the story ‘too direct…There is no nuance…still it has interesting qualities, and is at moments poisonous: which is something’.
   Here is Jerome’s reaction, in part, thundered in an editorial in To-day on 29 December 1894. He thought that The Chameleon was ‘certainly a case for the police’ and that ‘the publication appears to be nothing more nor less than an advocacy for indulgence in the cravings of an unnatural disease’. The Chameleon was bound to absolutely corrupt and ruin any boys and young men attracted to members of their own sex. ‘That young men are here and there cursed with these unnatural cravings, no one acquainted with our public school life can deny. It is for such to wrestle with the devil within them; and many a long and agonised struggle is fought, unseen and unknown, within the heart of a young man. A publication of this kind, falling into his hands before victory is complete, would, unless the poor fellow were of an exceptionally strong nature, utterly ruin him for all eternity.’ Jerome described The Chameleon as ‘is an insult to the animal creation…an outrage to literature…unbridled licence… garbage and offal’.
   It was not long before The Chameleon found its way into the hands of the Marquis of Queensberry. There is absolutely nothing to link Jerome with this particular event beyond what he had written in The Chameleon, and nothing, as Stoppard suggests in his play, to connect Jerome to Wilde’s arrest, trial or imprisonment in Reading Gaol. We must remember that Queensberry was already a self-confessed hater of ‘snob queers’ and ‘Jew nancy boys’ having discovered that his elder son, Viscount Drumlanrig, had been the secret lover of Lord Roseberry (Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister). Drumlanrig committed suicide in 1894. One can imagine Queensberry’s state of mind so soon after losing a son, and already knowing not only that his younger son, Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’), was associated with Oscar Wilde but that both of them were connected with the publication of The Chameleon.
   This sorry tale does not, on the face of it, cast Jerome in the best of lights. But his views would not have been substantially differed from those of the average member of the public at that time, one with very different attitudes to our own more tolerant and enlightened age. His strictly-observed Bible-based religious upbringing too would have made it impossible for him to countenance the idea of homosexuality. Its practice would have horrified him.
   Nevertheless, the pompous moraliser we read in the To-day editorial could hardly be more different from the genial riverside companion describing Harris’s attempts to make scrambled eggs. Jerome makes but one reference to Wilde in My Life and Times, a chilly dismissal and one that tactfully obscures his unfettered condemnation of thirty-two years earlier: ‘’The Florence [restaurant in Rupert Street]…was a cosy little place where one lunched for 1/3d and dined for 2/-. One frequently saw Oscar Wilde there. He and friends would come in late and take the table in the further corner. Rumours were already going about, and his company did not tend to dispel them. One pretended not to see him.’

[_niece]

Thank you very much indeed. It is a most interesting and clarifying article. I am sorry for Jerome – it was exactly a kind of senseless cant that I feared to find. His passionate description of a secret battle going in the heart of a young man points (at least for our spoilt imagination) to latent homosexuality on the author’s part. If, indeed, we take up a curiously all-male staff of Three man in a boat, and the significant absence in the novel of any kind of romantic plot or sub-plot...

[jesthepres]

Steady on, _niece! I think you are venturing on to very soggy territory indeed if you deduce from Jerome's reaction that he must be a latent homosexual and that, by implication, Three Men in a Boat is evidence of a gay menage a trois (sorry, can't reproduce the correct French accents!).
Why can't three men share a boating trip without being homosexual?!
No, as I emphasise in the article, Jerome was being no more violent in his reaction to the Uranian nature of The Chameleon than any other man of his time whose strict moral code looked on homosexuality as an unnatural perversion. Remember too his zealous Christian background. Today such illiberal, ignorant (in my view) opinions have thankfully been consigned to the dustbin - except, of course, among the extreme wings of various religions. Read Neil McKenna's biography of Wilde and you will learn with what disgust Victorian society looked upon homosexuals. You cannot deduce ipso facto that all such Victorians were closet gays!

[_niece]

Of course I understand he was not a homosexual - nor would any sane person consider Three man in a boat, that epitome of Arcadian innocence, in that absurd light! I only wanted to imply how extremely vulnerable can the vehement preacher be, if his own moral torch were only turned in his direction. As a clever man once said, for the puritan all things are impure.

[sean wiles]

NUFF SAID.....

[Frank]

Well, maybe just one more detail...  Jerome was more directly concerned with the PUBLICATION of The Chameleon than with its content.  At the beginning of his editorial comment, after expressing a desire for more information about it, he writes:

"As far as I can judge, it can be purchased by anyone who likes to pay the subscription.  If I am wrong - if it is a private publication, intended only to circulate among a limited and known clientele - there is an end to the matter.  A hundred gentlemen or so have as much right to circulate indecency among themselves, by means of the printing press, as they have to tell each other dirty stories in the club smoking room.  Each to his taste.  But if 'The Chameleon' is issued broadcast, and any immature youth, or foolish New Young Woman, can obtain it, then it is certainly a case for the police."

In his editorial for 5 January 1895, he reports "I am informed that 'The Chameleon' has been withdrawn from circulation, and that no further issue will appear, or that at all events it will be circulated in strict privacy..."[/u]

[Arbiter]

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