J. ROBERT MAGUIRE. Ceremonies of Bravery: Oscar Wilde, Carlos Blacker, and the Dreyfus Affair.

Abstract

This is a story of feuding and fighting, of honour besmirched, of public humiliation and puritanical outrage, with demands for justice also playing their part and sex, as usual, somewhere in the background. Carlos Blacker (1859–1928), handsome, charming, and as an Old Etonian sufficiently well placed, though always financially precarious, was a close friend of Oscar Wilde until they fell out over the Dreyfus scandal in 1898. Although there is no evidence of anything more—and Blacker was married to the same woman for more than 30 years—the friendship between the two men was of a memorable intensity. Writing to Blacker on his release from Reading Gaol in 1897, Wilde recalled in his theatrically romantic mode how they had ‘tired many a moon with talk, and drank many a sun to rest with wine and words’. They first met early in the 1880s and saw one another regularly for the rest of the decade. A good deal of J. Robert Maguire’s book is necessarily taken up with these pre-Dreyfus years. First of all, he recounts a scandal in which Blacker quarreled badly and publicly over money matters with his fellow Old Etonian, and former best friend, Henry Pelham Archibald Douglas Pelham-Clinton, seventh Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyme. Wilde tried to act as an intermediary and help with legal advice. There follows a lengthy description of the prolonged, tangled, and depressing negotiations between Wilde and Constance, his wife, over the provision of financial support after his downfall. Blacker along with other well-intentioned, but not always competent, friends, including Robert Ross, became immersed in this, and he seems to have retained the confidence of almost everyone, no small achievement.