My apologies in advance for being morbid, but that recent warning on the hazards of gypsy skirts has reminded me of the sad fate that befell Emily and Mary Wilde. Half-sisters to Oscar, they seem never to have known their famous younger brother, nor he them, because they were born out of wedlock. For the sins of the parents, they were exiled from Dublin and raised by Sir William Wilde's brother, the Rev Ralph, in north Monaghan.
We don't know much about their short lives, and even their deaths were partly veiled. But in 1871, the year Oscar graduated from Portora College in neighbouring Fermanagh, the sisters attended a local Halloween ball given by a Mr Reid. When most guests had left, the host took Emily for a last dance, sweeping her past the open hearth, where her crinoline dress brushed the embers and caught fire. Mary ran to help, but in the struggle to beat out the flames, her dress caught too. Farce turned quickly to tragedy. Mr Reid wrapped one of the sisters in his coat and carried her outside to douse her in the snow, while the other ran around screaming until she collapsed. Both had been fatally burned.
Details of the accident were recorded in the report of William Charles Waddell, whose work as a coroner was the source material for a strange but wonderful book,
Melancholy Madness by Michelle McGoff-McCann, published in 2003. According to the latter, the Wilde sisters spent their last days at Reid's house. Mary, who was 22 and the younger by two years, died first. Her inquest was scheduled for November 10th at Carrickmacross, but this was downgraded to an "inquiry" after a letter from Sir William Wilde voiced concern that a full inquest would worsen Emily's condition.
Of course the need for secrecy about Mary's death extended well beyond Emily, who lingered until November 21st. The sisters' surnames were disguised in Waddell's casebook as "Wylie", and the Northern Standard's report was almost as discreet. Even so, the cover-up was not watertight. McGoff-McMahon's book includes a letter written 50 years later by John Butler Yeats to his son W.B., with the story as told to him by a "Mrs Hime" who had been at the ball.
The letter notes that the sisters' mother, owner of "a small black-oak shop in Dublin", travelled north to be with them at the end. Then: "After all was over, even to the funeral, Sir Wm [ went to Monaghan] and old Mrs Hime told me that his groans could be heard by people outside his house. There is a tragedy, all the more intense because it had to be buried in silence." Yeats goes on to surmise that Wilde Snr's "vivacity and stream of talk" were outlets for repressed emotion: "like the bubbles that appear on the surface when the water begins to boil". Had Oscar known, "he would not have been so scornful of his poor father".
The Wilde sisters were buried in St Molua's graveyard, Drumsnat, where a headstone reads: "They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in death they were not divided." As I was saying, my apologies for being so morbid. But the moral is: if you're wearing flouncy dresses, for God's sake, stay away from the fire.
Melancholy Madness takes its title from one of the 861 inquests and inquiries in Waddell's casebook, covering the 20 years to 1876 (his earlier and later casebooks are missing). And despite the narrow theme - death - and even narrower geographic location - north Monaghan - the book is a social history of a place that could have been anywhere in Ireland.
This said, it also provides a manual for crime novelists and other writers planning unfortunate ends for their characters. For every natural death - or "visitation of God" as Waddell recorded it - there was an unnatural one. It may not have been a divine visitation that did for the unfortunate James McGaghey in 1857, but God was definitely a suspect, because cause of death was "head-trauma; crushed by the church bell". Then there was the even more unfortunate Thomas Corbitt who, running home for his dinner in 1856, hurdled a gate he had hurdled many times, only to become impaled - in a way you don't want to think about - on a stick that was trapped there. The human imagination is no match for the horrors real life sometimes dreams up.
To end on a (slightly) lighter note, the book's preface was written by Patrick McCabe, the highly imaginative author of one of the best opening sentences in Irish literature: "When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent." Fans of The Butcher Boy and Frank Pig Says Hello will recall that Francie Brady's mother was sent to "the garage" to get fixed. With similarly grim humour, The Garage is now the name of a theatre - set in the grounds of the town's old psychiatric hospital - which tonight hosts the Drumlin Players' tribute to Samuel Beckett, Celebrating Sam. If you're in the area, you might like to take in an evening that includes three of his reflections on mortality: Come & Go, A Piece of Monologue, and Krapp's Last Tape.