WHEN THE ACTOR Rupert Everett said this week that Oscar Wilde had lived life “from the dress circle to the drains”, it was of course a metaphor.
But it’s a now little-remembered fact that Wilde’s career in England also involved drainage work of the more literal kind. And that, in effect, long before he became famous as an aesthete and a dandy, he spent two months of his life doing what many of his fellow Irishmen have had to do, before and since: working as a navvy. No, he was not a member of McAlpine’s fusiliers. Nor was it out of any economic need that in 1874, at the age of 19, he joined a road-building gang near Oxford. This was an altogether more high-minded project, an extension of his studies in that famous town of spires. His fellow workers included Arnold Toynbee, who would later become a famous economic historian, credited with popularising the term “industrial revolution”. But their gang foreman, and the man behind the whole idea, was the great art critic and Oxford professor, John Ruskin.
As well as being a critic and academic, Ruskin was also a social reformer who had by then become obsessed with the idea of improving the lot of his fellow man. His philanthropic experiments included opening a no-frills teashop in London, aimed at supplying the beverage to poor customers at the cheapest price possible, and a voluntary street-cleaning service that he hoped would shame the authorities into doing something about the city’s ubiquitous squalor.
Neither was entirely successful. But in the case of the Oxford road project, Ruskin foresaw the twin advantages of improving both local infrastructure and the minds of his students, unused as many of them were to manual work. Years later, Wilde – who at the time of the project was newly arrived from Dublin – recalled how the idea was broached: “One summer afternoon . . . we were coming down the street – a troop of young men, some of them like myself only nineteen, going to river or tennis-court or cricket-field – when Ruskin . . . in cap and gown met us.
“He seemed troubled and prayed us to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on cricket ground or river, without any result at all except that if one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score, a cane-handled bat.
“He thought, he said, that we should be working at something that would do good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all labour there was something noble . . . We were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he wished.” Ruskin’s plan, it emerged, was to connect two nearby villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, which at that time were separated by a swamp, forcing locals to take a detour of many miles. So he devised a plan to dig a road through the swamp, and not content with mere utilitarianism, also aimed to prettify the road with banks of flowers on either side. To which end, in the winter of 1874, he and his unlikely group of diggers went to work.
By his own account, Wilde became expert at pushing a laden wheel-barrow over planks, although in other accounts, his tendency to deliver occasional reflections on the nature of beauty impeded the road’s progress. In any case, the work continued into the winter, causing controversy among the college authorities and amusement among the students’ contemporaries, who came to mock from the banks.
Sad to say, the mockers were in time proved right. Like many academic meanderings, the road never did reach a conclusion. First, the end of term interrupted digging. In the meantime, Ruskin had to go to Venice. And returning to find themselves leaderless, the gang soon fell apart, with the road still mid-swamp.
I’m told that even today, it’s not that easy to get from North to South Hinksey, although the Oxford ring road now links the two for motorists (presumably without the banks of flowers). Still, it was the thought that counted. And, at least locally, the arts students’ heroic attempts at civil engineering are not forgotten. Indeed, only a few weeks ago, the Ruskin and Wilde Societies joined the Friends of North Hinksey at the site for a talk on the theme of “Ruskin, Wilde, and the Doctrine of Work”.
It’s a sad irony that Wilde’s brilliant career in England would end, as it began, with hard labour, this time of a kind that destroyed him. But in between, he claimed – a little fancifully – that the unfinished road had pointed the way to his life of art for art’s sake. In a lecture delivered early in his career, already sounding triumphant, he said: “I felt that if there was enough spirit amongst the young men to go out to such work as road-making for the sake of a noble ideal of life, I could from them create an artistic movement that might change, as it has changed, the face of England.”