Wilde About Valerie

Did the real-life romance between brewery heir Henry Meux and former chorus girl Lady Valerie Meux help inspire the central love story in The Picture of Dorian Gray? Writer and historian Devon Cox has suggested the possibility — and once you look closely, the idea becomes surprisingly persuasive.

This image has been created by AI using a photograph of Oscar Wilde, taken by Napoleon Sarony in 1882, and Arrangement in Black, No. 5 (Portrait of Lady Meux), James McNeill Whistler, 1881, Honolulu Academy of Arts in Hawaii.

After marrying Constance Lloyd in 1884, Oscar Wilde leased 16 (now 34) Tite Street in Chelsea, directly opposite the studio of American artist James McNeill Whistler. Wilde and Whistler had been friends since 1879, and their artistic rivalry was legendary.

It was in this house, specifically in the ground-floor library overlooking the street, that Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. As Cox notes, Wilde had an “unimpeded view of the famous, and most infamous, faces of the age as they came and went.”

One of those faces may well have been Valerie Meux, who in 1886 was sitting for a Whistler portrait. Her zebra carriage, her Egyptian antiquities, her scandalous marriage — Valerie was impossible to ignore.

In Wilde’s novel, artist Basil Hallward becomes captivated by the beautiful young Dorian Gray, who sits for his portrait. Dorian falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a young actress performing in a shabby theatre in London’s slums. When Sibyl abandons acting out of love for him, Dorian cruelly rejects her. She dies by suicide, and Dorian’s life spirals into corruption and decadence.

Henry Meux, heir to a vast brewery fortune, met Valerie Langdon when she was earning her living on the stage — not as a celebrated actress, but likely as a chorus girl. Their relationship scandalised Victorian society. Henry did not abandon Valerie; he married her. Yet his life, too, could be said to descend into a kind of misery: estrangement from his family, social ostracism, and the strange, extravagant world Valerie built around them.

There are similarities:

• Dorian is wealthy, beautiful, and motherless. Henry was wealthy, handsome, and effectively abandoned by his mother.

• Sibyl is a stage performer from London’s underbelly. Valerie was a chorus girl from London’s low theatres.

• Dorian meets Sibyl in a theatre. Henry meets Valerie in a theatre.

• Dorian rejects Sibyl, and tragedy follows. Henry does not reject Valerie — but scandal follows.

And there are differences, of course. Sibyl is innocent; Valerie was formidable. Dorian is monstrous; Henry was conventional. But Wilde rarely lifted real people whole. He absorbed atmospheres, reputations, gossip, and archetypes — and transformed them.

So, did Wilde borrow their story?

We cannot prove it. But Wilde was living opposite Whistler. Valerie was sitting for Whistler. Wilde was writing Dorian Gray at that exact moment. And Valerie Meux’s life was precisely the kind of melodrama Wilde adored.

As Devon Cox writes: “…it is unlikely that he would not have been at least vaguely familiar with Lady Meux and her sensational story.”

In the end, the Henry–Valerie romance may not be the source of Dorian and Sibyl, but it is almost certainly part of the atmosphere from which Wilde’s only novel emerged.

Source:

Cox, Devon. The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde and Sargent in Tite Street, Aurum (The Quarto Group), London, 2022.