When Holland first heard about the book, he had doubts about its authenticity. “It seemed too good to be true,” he recalls on the phone from his home in the Burgundy region of France. “There have been so many forgeries. I thought, What are the chances of an unknown Wilde manuscript coming up?” But one detail gave Holland cause to reconsider: that gold coat of arms on the red binding. Nearly a decade earlier, while researching at Duke University, he had come across a similarly bound edition of Wilde’s papers. The coat of arms—a shield flanked by two winged horses over the motto “Forward”—was that of the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Bosie and the man who effectively destroyed Wilde.
Enraged by his son’s relationship, the Marquess visited Wilde’s London club in 1895, leaving a message with the porter accusing Wilde of being a sodomite. Goaded on by Bosie, who loathed his father, Wilde brought a libel action against the Marquess. With two of his plays running on the West End, Wilde was at the peak of his success and probably felt indestructible, but the suit backfired on him. It was withdrawn, and the Crown then brought charges of gross indecency against the writer. He was convicted, and after serving two years’ hard labor, he exiled himself to Paris, where he died of cerebral meningitis in 1900.
The scandal, which convulsed Victorian society, naturally shook the Wilde family. Constance, Wilde’s wife, who remained largely loyal to him, settled with their sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, in Genoa, Italy, and changed their surname to Holland. Merlin, Vyvyan’s only child, coedited The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (2000) and authored several books on his grandfather’s work. Now, at 63, he’s writing a more personal book that he plans to title After Oscar: A Legacy of Scandal. “It’s a look,” he says, “at how the echoes of that disastrous court case in 1895 continued to influence the lives of his friends, his enemies and, most of all, his family.”
While Bosie outlived his lover by nearly a half century, his was hardly a happy life. The third son of the Marquess, he inherited some money but went bankrupt in 1913. In his later years he was supported by his nephew, Francis, who became the 11th Marquess of Queensberry. As Holland recalls, “Bosie made overtures to my father, but he did not respond.”
Following Bosie’s death in 1945, however, the enmity between the Hollands and the Queensberrys finally thawed. “My father got to know Francis, probably out of curiosity, and the two gentlemen became close,” Holland says. Francis also developed an interest in the families’ mingled history and acquired a collection of Wilde’s signed books and papers, many of which had been sold at a sheriff’s sale after Wilde went to jail.
