Chapter Text
Rumours of a scandalous secret memoir by Lord Henry Warren began to surface not long after his death in 1912. His sister, Lady Gwendolen Fairfield, claimed in a 1913 letter to her close friend, the Duchess of Monmouth[1], that her brother:
until the day he died was engaged in a most secret work, of which he scarcely admitted even to me and certainly not to our brother [Charles, fourth Duke of Torbay]! He was never without his writing-slope[2] those last few years, you know, and I used to tease him saying I’d never in my life seen him with a pen in his hand and nor had even his classmates at Oxford and Eton but he never seemed to like my saying so. I only glimpsed once the papers he concealed in the box of the writing-slope, and after he died it was nowhere to be found! And no one would answer for it, not even [his nephew, second son of Duke Charles] Andrew, who of course was thick as thieves with the old reprobate (the only one of the family who was in the end, I daresay). Andrew keeps his own counsel and while I suspect he will never give Harry away, I am sure he knows what became of the writing-slope and its contents.[3]
We know now that Lady Gwendolen was correct and that Lord Andrew Warren was entrusted with his uncle’s secret memoir, and notes amongst Lord Andrew’s own personal papers suggest that he was sworn to conceal these matters until all parties mentioned in the memoir—which is to say, everyone of Lord Henry’s own generation—had passed away. Following Andrew Warren’s tragic death at Passchendaele in 1917, however, the memoir was forgotten. His widow Lilias, six months pregnant with their only child and suddenly in deep in debt, was forced to sell many of her husband’s effects, including Lord Henry Warren’s writing-slope.
The writing-slope, though of fine Italian manufacture, was in poor condition by this time, which may explain why it languished for many years in the back of a London antique-shop. It might have stayed there forever but for the efforts of Ms Cecily Warren, great-granddaughter of Andrew. Ms Warren’s interest in her family history led her to trace the sale of her great-grandfather’s possessions, efforts which in due course led her to the store where her thrice-great uncle’s lost papers awaited rediscovery.
That this discovery has created a controversy is, perhaps, one of the great understatements of the decade. Ms Warren has been accused of perpetrating a fraud, a charge she continues to vehemently deny, and against which we, the Editors of this volume, also stand, in light of the enormous efforts that have been devoted to the authentication of the papers.
Scholars have long assumed that Lord Henry Warren was the prototype of Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Henry Wotton” in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and that he may have known more about the mysterious disappearance of his friend, painter Basil Holland (the known antecedent of Wilde’s “Basil Hallward”), than he ever admitted in his life. Warren’s writings confirm that the former is almost certainly true, but that he was as troubled and mystified by the latter as anyone in his day.
The most fascinating aspect of Warren’s memoir is the considerable extent to which it correlates with Wilde’s novel, which has been one of the reasons for the charges of fraud. However, extenuating evidence suggests that versions of many of the novel’s key events were related to Wilde by witnesses—for example, by Basil Holland via written correspondence in at least two known cases[4]—and it appears that he appropriated several views and epigrams that Warren was known to have stated in general conversation. Naturally, a considerable amount of poetic license was certainly taken with regard to events that he could not have possibly seen himself, and we need not discuss the obvious implausibility of the novel’s more fantastical elements. We must also bear in mind that Warren was writing his memoir two decades after The Picture of Dorian Gray was published; the book was by then both famous and notorious, and it appears to have amused Warren to make frequent reference to it. Nevertheless, the general outline of Wilde’s story does seem to have been provided by events in the lives of Warren and Holland.
There are those who accuse Lord Henry Warren of being a cut-rate English Decadent and a chronic name-dropper, charges often levelled against him in his own day. It is more charitable, perhaps, to see in him an intelligent mind that never found its true vocation, and which instead was frittered away on drawing-room epigrams and the theatre of high society. His memoir also provides a view into the private life of a man who in our modern terms we would describe as bisexual and homoromantic, but who would no doubt have dismissed such labels as lacking in both poetry and imagination.
There are also tantalising hints regarding the true identity of the young man who was the subject of a known and now lost work by Basil Holland, which was seen by many visitors to his studio and which provided the inspiration for Wilde’s novel. Some speculate that this man was John Gray, poet and later priest; others, in apparent defiance of chronology, have assigned Dorian Gray’s origins to Lord Alfred Douglas, notwithstanding that Wilde and Douglas did not meet until two years after the first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott’s. The “Dorian” named in Warren’s memoirs corresponds to neither of these men, but as Warren chose—for reasons best known to himself—to use Wilde’s name for the beautiful young man of Holland’s lost portrait, the mystery remains.
—The Editors
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NOTE: What follows are excerpts. The complete text is available in a single volume from Oxford University Press.
We have kept Warren’s rather disingenuously obscured references to years. Where appropriate, additional informational notes have been included as footnotes in the text.
—The Editors
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[1] The Duchess was one of the few women who stood by Lady Gwendolen in her notorious disgrace in 1886, possibly due to the Duchess’s own personal—albeit much quieter—scandals.
[2] A portable cabinet with a fold-out writing surface, a space for papers, and holders for ink and pens (see Figure 1.1).
[3] Letter from Lady Gwendolen Fairfield to Sarah, Duchess of Monmouth, June 14, 1913.
[4] See also The Collected Letters of Basil Holland, Oxford University Press, 2010.