Do you think the most important people from literature and history were fully respectable, dull people? Then you were fooled.
Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman were tangled in a love-triangle. Lord Byron is responsible for Twilight and his...
Welcome to Room 3, which adds to the story told in Room 2 - here, we will get to know the dramatic love-rectangle surrounding Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker that was already mentioned in the last chapter.
Oscar and Abraham "Bram" Stoker met in their school days at Trinity College in Dublin. Bram was president of the Philosophical Society of the university and invited Oscar to join it - they become loose friends. Bram later strongly identifies with Wilde. Why? Oh, we will talk about that.
But the whole drama starts in 1876. Oscar is twenty-two and still in his phase when he kisses men but loudly yells "No homo!" after it. While having a painter-boyfriend, he still flirts with young ladies and becomes quite a womanizer- until, in the summer, he meets "an exquisitely pretty girl. She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money". Enchanting, isn't it?
The lady in question, Florence Balcombe, is a famed beauty that will later become an actress - Oscar is absolutely smitten. Because he is a drama queen, Oscar of course exaggerates a little, but Florence was really quite beautiful:
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
(pleaseexcuse the bad quality, those are the 1880's)
The two court by exchanging gifts and letters for over two years and must seriously have considered marrying each other. But in 1878, when Oscar is finally at a point to get himself together and mentions to propose, Florence is like "Well whoops, sorry, I am already engaged."
To whom you ask?
To Bram Stoker. Yeah, the guy who would go on writing Dracula (we will talk about that) stole Oscar Wilde's girlfriend.
Oscar, of course, was gay, but that doesn't mean that he couldn't be a dramatic little bitch about the whole thing. After hearing of the marriage, he is very much upset and asks Florence to return a golden cross he gave her, saying that it bore "the memory of two sweet years - the sweetest of all the years of my youth". Could he be any more dramatic?
Yes, he could.
Three years later, after Florence debutes on the London Stage, he anonymously sends her a flower crown. In a letter concerning it, he says "she thinks I never loved her, thinks I forget. My God, how could I!"
Knowing about the sad fate of Oscar's wife Constance, it was of course better for Florence to choose Bram, but please, why the fuck would you give up a man like Oscar?
For comparison, Bram Stoker looked like this:
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
