Queer Places:
Rugby School, Lawrence Sheriff St, Rugby CV22 5EH
York Lodge, 48 Ashley Rd, Walton-on-Thames KT12 1HS, UK
Theodore William Graf Wratislaw (April 21, 1871 - September, 1933) was a British poet and civil servant. He was a source of inspiration for the title character of Max Beerbohm’s short story “Enoch Soames” (1916) – or a historical personage. Wratislaw was published in the Strand Magazine and The Yellow Book along with such as Henry James, Arnold Bennett, Wilde and other fin de siècle contributors. To a Sicilian Boy (1893) is cited as example in Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850-1900, by Brian Reade.
Theodore William Graf Wratislaw was born at Rugby, Warwickshire, on 21 April 1871. “Graf” is the German title of Count to which his grandfather, William Ferdinand Wratislaw, laid claim, though it is uncertain whether he was justified in doing so. Theodore was the first born of a fourth generation of Wratislaws in Rugby. By this time, they had become one of the pre-eminent families in the town on account of the solicitors practice first established by William Ferdinand in the early nineteenth century and developed by Theodore’s father. The latter also perpetuated the family’s commitment to Liberal politics and evangelical Christianity.
Wratislaw was educated at Rugby School from 1885–1888, where his great-grandfather had been a Master. In 1888 he left school to take up a position in his father’s office in 1893 with a view to qualifying as a solicitor himself. At odds with his inheritance, however, Wratislaw harboured literary ambitions: first and foremost under the influence of Algernon Swinburne, he wondered whether he might become a poet. To this end, in 1892 two self-financed collections – Love’s Memorial and Some Verses – were published locally with George Over in editions of 35 copies each. During this period, the poet was encouraged by Norman Gale, also resident at Rugby, with whom he would acrimoniously break in due course. According to George Ives, it is also the time when Wratislaw hovered at the edge of the group of homosexual Oxford undergraduates – part of what came to be known as the Uranian poets – that variously published in The Spirit Lamp (1892-93) and The Chameleon (1894).
Wratislaw moved to London in 1893, ostensibly with the purpose of passing his final law examinations before returning to the family firm, but most likely in the hope of establishing himself as a metropolitan homme de lettres. In the latter aim he enjoyed the patronage of Charles Kains Jackson, with whom he had most likely come into contact via the Oxford Uranians. As editor of The Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1880-1902) from 1888 to 1894, Kains Jackson published some of Wratislaw’s poems, including the homoerotic “To a Sicilian Boy” (August 1893). He also provided an outlet for Wratislaw’s literary journalism, publishing a series of his forthright articles on fellow poets, as well as two pieces on Aubrey Beardsley. The earlier of these, published in September 1893, was the first to discuss Beardsley’s work in relation to decadence. In time Wratislaw became acquainted with Beardsley and a number of other notable figures, amongst them Max Beerbohm, Lord Alfred Douglas, Ernest Dowson, and Arthur Symons. Other contacts and sources of patronage were Kains Jackson’s associate Gleeson White, who published Wratislaw’s article “The Photographic Salon at the Dudley Gallery” in The Studio (1893-1964), and the Rev. Stewart Headlam, who published a number of his poems in The Church Reformer (1882-95). In September 1893, Wratislaw also spent a weekend as Oscar Wilde’s guest at Goring-on-Thames.
In 1892 he published at his own expense two volumes of poems – Love's Memorial and Some Verses. In 1893 he published Caprices, which included poems dedicated to Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, in an edition of 120 copies.[2] Caprices appeared with an art-nouveau cover designed by Gleeson White. Like Wratislaw’s Love’s Memorial, this collection had been rejected by John Lane, thanks to a negative reader’s report by Richard Le Gallienne, before being published by Gay & Bird. Wratislaw originally intended to include “To A Sicilian Boy” in the volume, though at the last minute he thought better of it. The book received an excellent notice in Kains Jackson’s The Artist, written by his friend, Charles Hiatt, but for the most part the critical tide ran contrariwise.
Having passed his final law examinations in November 1893, Wratislaw returned to Rugby, yet by the following autumn he was back in the capital and for the first and last time appeared in The Yellow Book. “To Salomé at St James’s” was published in Volume 3, October 1894, alongside the work of a number of other young decadents. Once again, the reviews were hardly generous. In the Pall Mall Gazette , “all, or nearly all” of the contributors were charged with “infantile blasphemy,” but Wratislaw was singled out for a special dose of opprobrium (“Brazen”).
In 1895 Wratislaw’s verse play, The Pity of Love, appeared through Swann Sonnenschein. Thanks in no small part to the advocacy of George H. Ellwanger, to whom he had been introduced by Gleeson White, Wratislaw also published a couple of poems in The Chap-Book (1894-98), an American little magazine published by Stone and Kimball in Massachusetts. Still he found it impossible to live by his pen alone. In August 1895 he entered the Civil Service, specifically the Estates Duty Office at Somerset House, London. After 1895 he worked as a solicitor at Somerset House, describing life there (in a letter of 1914) as "penal servitude".[1] In due course, he found favour with Leonard Smithers, who published some of his works in The Savoy (1896), including his only published piece of fiction. In May 1896 Smithers also published Wratislaw’s final and most substantial poetic statement, Orchids. It proved a high-water mark: henceforth Wratislaw ceased to publish as a poet, save for “Tintagel,” which appeared in Literature (1897-1902), the predecessor to the Times Literary Supplement, in April 1899. That said, he did publish Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Study in Greening’s short-lived series “English Writers of Today.” During his lifetime this was the literary work for which Wratislaw was best known.
Orchids was published in 1896, also in a limited edition. In 1927 he moved to York Lodge, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey (commemorated now by a blue plaque - the house has been sympathetically restored by the current owner).
Wratislaw married three times. His first wife, Sarah Esther Caroline Harris (b. 1875), was a Jewish Londoner who as a child had emigrated to Cape Town, returning to Britain via Milan as a trained opera singer by 1897. They married in 1899, but Sara died of tuberculosis in 1901, aged 26. In April 1908 he married Theodora Russell (née Bankes) (b. 1875), but they divorced in 1912. In July 1914, Wratislaw was declared a bankrupt, but his luck turned at the end of this year when he met Ada Ross (b. 1878), a prosperous London couturier. They married in May 1915. The marriage endured, insulating Wratislaw from a further humiliation: disinheritance by his father, with whom he seems to have shared a turbulent relationship throughout his adult life.
Owing to the ill health that had dogged him for a decade or more, Wratislaw retired from the Estates Duty Office in 1930. He began but did not complete a memoir of the ’nineties, Salad Days, including the recollections of his weekend with Wilde that were published in 1979 ( Oscar Wilde ). Just before his death in September 1933, Wratislaw re-visited Goring and had his account only at the proof stage; however a 1979 edition with foreword by Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, edited by G Krishnamurti and entitled Oscar Wilde - a memoir, has been published. Other works include The Pity of Love a tragedy based on the love story of Sophia Dorothea, the wife of King George I, and Philip von Konigsmark; also Algernon Charles Swinburne: a study (1900) which was his best known work in his lifetime. Wratislaw's translations of Two Ballades by Francois Villon was published in 1933, with only 60 copies being printed and intended for his friends and sent out to them by his widow, Ada, after his death. Earlier on, he had written to a friend that he was writing a resume of his uncle's (Reverend A H Wratislaw- headmaster of Felsted 1850-55) translation into English from the Slavonic of their ancestor's - Baron Vratislav von Mitrovitz - account of his life as a galley slave of the Turks, when he was aged only 15–18 years in the 16th century. Count Marc Wratislaw von Mitrovitz, as an attache of the Austrian Embassy in Paris attended the marriage of Marie Antoinette to the future Louis XVI, then came to settle in England in 1770, becoming French master at Rugby School.
Following Wratislaw’s death in September 1933, John Gawsworth edited Ada’s memoriam to her husband, Selected Poems of Theodore Wratislaw . In an obituary notice, his long-time friend, Susan Watt, remembered “one of the eager lads of the nineties, a member of that ‘tuneful choir in full song’” (Sheppard, 215).
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