Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times by Morris B. Kaplan

Author:Morris B. Kaplan [Kaplan, Morris B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Social Science, Gay Studies, History, Europe, Great Britain
ISBN: 9780801465826
Google: K6EtGnZW6VAC
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2012-03-31T13:00:00+00:00

Why you have thrown yourself away upon one who is the converse of you in all things remains a mystery. Very sincerely I feel quite unworthy of you, and I think you must be a kind of St. Theresa, a reforming soul. Some day, like [George Eliot’s] Romola, you will find me out and you will hate me. Are you prepared for this?191

More positively, he informs her: “It astonishes me I can write to you so easily and in this strain. You are the only girl with whom in writing I have felt on equal terms.”192 However, he concludes on a darker note: “Do not, I ask you, start thinking too well of me, for I dread the disenchantment.”193 Nellie van de Weyer was not to be deterred. She married Regy and would remain with him until the end of his life, bearing and raising their four children. Brett’s biographer reports that she carried this letter with her until it literally fell to pieces in 1935, five years after Esher’s death.194

On hearing of Regy’s decision to marry, Cory offers advice, urging his pupil always to let his wife have the last word and to have a bank account of her own. He goes on at great length about the need not to interrupt or differ with her in public, despite his recognition that “it is very trying for a man who is cleverer than his wife to have to listen to her feeble and exaggerated aphorisms.” Since Cory has not met Nellie, these remarks probably reflect his own first year of marriage with Rosa. However, he tries to finish on a more upbeat note: “Marriage without mutual respect must be painful without respectful affection and reserved confidence. It must be oppressive but not intolerable. I dare say your Flamande will be reasonable and even-minded. . . . If you have anything like the sweet humility and tenderness in your wife that I have in mine you will be fortunate.”195 As the wedding date approaches, Cory responds more directly to Regy’s own doubts: “I am very glad to hear from you and sorry that you are going to be married so phlegmatically. Doody [Howard Sturgis] gave me a description of Nel—and was very hopeful about her—”196 Regy’s experience of marriage quickly proves more positive than these grim prognoses: “A month ago this day Nell and I were married! She says she is quite happy now, no longer doubtful.”197 Regy reads Eliot’s Romola aloud to his bride; they have already finished Silas Mamer and Daniel Deronda. They discuss in detail the heroine of the latter novel, to whom Regy attributes that “fearlessness of tongue” he previously admired in boys at school: “The proudest and noblest natures sometimes see their way to confess where those less sure of themselves would hesitate. Gwendolyn was too proud and had suffered too acutely to fear breaking the ordinary so-called rules (for they cannot accurately be called rules) of social intercourse between fashionably bred people.”198 To Curzon he writes: “It does not appear strange to me, this fact of being married, which is odd.

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