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THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY |
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ROBERT
HARBOROUGH SHERARD (1861-1943) |
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Kevin H.F. O'Brien |
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[Kevin
O’Brien was a professor at St.Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia from 1966 until
his retirement in 2000. His Oscar
Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts
was published by Personal Library, 1982.
An earlier version of this article appeared in G.A. Cevasco (ed.): Encyclopedia
of British Literature, Art & Culture
(Garland 1993). It has generously been
revised by Dr O’Brien especially for THE OSCHOLARS.] |
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Robert Sherard is known today mostly as a friend of Oscar
Wilde. He wrote the first biographies:
Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy
Friendship (1902), The Life of
Oscar Wilde (1906), and The Real
Oscar Wilde (1917), and was an especially close friend of his in 1883 in
Paris, and 1895 in London during and
after Wilde's three trials. Although
Wilde once described Sherard as ‘that bravest and most chivalrous of all
beings,’ Sherard lost this esteem, and his many appearances in the modern
biographies of Wilde by Hesketh Pearson, Montgomery Hyde, and Richard Ellmann
leave mainly the impression that he was either a madman or a besotted
fool. There was more to Sherard than
this. |
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Born in London on 3 December 1861, Sherard was the fourth
of six children of Rev. Bennet Sherard
Calcraft Kennedy, the illegitimate son of the sixth and last Earl of
Harborough, and Jane Stanley Wordsworth, granddaughter of the poet. While a young man still under the influence
of his much-travelled family, Sherard was educated in Italy, Germany and
Guernsey (where the Kennedys shared ‘Hauteville House’ with Victor Hugo in
the 1870s); he spent only part of a year at New College, Oxford. Sherard moved to Naples in 1881 after a
terrible fight with his father, who cut him off from the expected family
inheritance of Stapleford, the Harborough estate at Melton Mowbray. Sherard dropped the surname ‘Kennedy,’ and,
moving to Paris in 1882, took up his writing career. |
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In March 1883 he met Wilde, who had gone to Paris after
his North American lecture tour of 1882.
They became close friends.
Sherard's blond, athletic good looks and aristocratic connections were
attractive to Wilde. Sherard published
his first novel, A Bartered Honour (1883) and his only volume of
poetry, Whispers (1884), which he
dedicated to Wilde when their friendship was most intense; and Wilde wrote
some effusive love letters to the handsome but heterosexual Sherard, who
denied their implications in his Wilde biographies. Sherard never understood Wilde's
homosexuality, which infuriated Wilde and led to the breakup of their
friendship after Wilde's release from prison in 1897. |
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Sherard lived in France from 1883 to 1895; England from
1895 to 1900; and France again from 1901 to 1906. He supported himself mostly from
journalism. While in Paris (1883-1895),
Sherard contributed excellent interviews and vignettes of Parisian political,
social, and artistic life to two New York newspapers--the World, and Morning Journal--and
the London Pall Mall Gazette, Daily
Graphic and Westminster Gazette. Later
in the 1890s he wrote for magazines like The
Author, The Bookman, McClure's, and
Pearson's. Although Sherard claims
that at the height of his career he earned £1,000 a year, like Wilde, he
managed money badly and often was poor.
He supplemented his income writing for trade journals like The Caterer, his columns filled with
social history and Paris street life. |
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Although most of his income was earned from journalism, he
was a prolific writer of novels, biographies, social exposés, and
reminiscences of his life in France.
Sherard's thirty-three published books include fourteen novels, mostly
undistinguished mystery-thrillers; however, After the Fault (1906), based on the failure of his marriage
(1887-1906) to Marthe Lipska, is mature and powerful and affords an insight
into Sherard's old-fashioned spirit of noblesse
oblige and self-sacrifice. The
biographies, besides those on Wilde, are Emile
Zola (1893), Alphonse Daudet (1894), and Guy de Maupassant (1926).
Sherard was an avid seeker of friendships with authors, and in France
became quite friendly with Zola, Mallarmé, Pierre Louÿs, and especially
Alphonse Daudet. He specialised in
championing controversial authors, such as Zola and Wilde, and in living
dangerously, as he did when conducting social investigations in England,
Scotland, and Ireland from 1895 to 1901, which resulted in his books The White Slaves of England (l897), The Cry of the Poor (1901), The Closed Door (1902), and The
Child Slaves of Britain (1905).
Sherard went ‘undercover’ in pursuing his investigations, living with
the poor and sharing their hardships and way of life. Not merely a ‘muckraker,’ he was
passionate, loyal and sympathetic, and showed considerable pluck and
tenacity. Sherard displayed his
charity when a destitute and dying Ernest Dowson lived with him for six weeks
in Catford and died in his home in February 1900. |
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The social investigation books were written after Sherard
had moved from Paris to London in 1895; he gave up his career in Paris in
1895, he said, to be by Wilde's side during the three trials in April–May of
that year. Certainly, Sherard was a
loyal friend and busied himself trying to get Wilde to flee England after the
second trial, and afterwards faithfully visiting him in prison during his
two-year sentence. Sherard was in such
an emotional state at the turn in Wilde's fortunes that Alphonse Daudet,
visiting in London at the time and a good friend, became worried about
him. In order to divert his mind he
suggested that they collaborate on a book.
It eventually appeared in English, under Daudet's name, as My First Voyage: My First Lie (1901). |
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After the death of Wilde in 1900, Sherard lived in St.
Malo for a while and was so sick that he expected to die. That was when he wrote the emotional first
biography of Wilde, The Story of an Unhappy Friendship. However,
after his recovery he wrote his books of reminiscences of his career in
France, the most successful of which, Twenty
Years in Paris (1905), was selected
by the Times Book Club. |
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After his divorce from Marthe Lipska in 1906, he married
the wealthy American widow Irene Osgood in 1908. Violent, alcoholic and syphilitic, he was a
difficult man to live with. After his
second marriage ended in divorce in 1915, he struggled with poverty and
ill-health the rest of his life. The
slough in his career lasted until 1926 when he published The Life and Evil Fate of
Guy de Maupassant, a book that
led to his being honored by France in 1929 as a Chevalier of the Legion of
Honor. |
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In 1928 he married Alice Muriel Fiddian and lived in
Corsica, writing the vituperative Vindex pamphlets, for the purpose of ‘whipping
hyenas away from [Wilde's] grave,’ which were collected in Oscar Wilde Twice Defended (1934) and
Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar
Wilde (1937). The latter work
elicited a fearful personal rebuke from George Bernard Shaw in his
introduction to the revised edition of Harris's biography of Wilde
(1938). Sherard died in London on 30
January 1943, and left his widow £50. |
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Sherard spoke French, Italian, and German and was an
intelligent, emotional, idealistic man.
Many of his journalistic pieces, although overwritten and passionate,
were fine achievements in their day, and in his prime he was a much respected
journalist. However, he was a wild man
in his personal life, much given to the ‘mud honey’ of the gutter, as Frank
Harris termed it, and he caused much grief to his wives, his friends and
himself. |
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Bibliography |
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DuCann, C.G.L. ‘Oscar Wilde's Friend.’ The Freethinker 62 (21 February 1943):
75, 80. |
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O'Brien, K.H.F. ‘Robert
Sherard: Friend of Oscar Wilde.’
English Literature in Transition 28 (1985): 3-29. |
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------------------ ‘
Irene Osgood, John Richmond Limited and the Wilde Circle.’ Publishing History 22 (1987):73-93. |
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Tilby,
Michael. ‘Emile Zola and His First English Biographer.’ Laurels 59 (1988): 33-56. |
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