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“Is it really Wratislaw?” John Betjeman (1906-1984) asked in “On Seeing an Old Poet in the Café Royal” (61). It was not Wratislaw, apparently; it was Arthur Symons (1865-1945). But the confusion is appropriate: Theodore Wratislaw remains an elusive figure, drifting in and out of the 1890s as though it were not altogether clear whether he was a fictional character – he was indeed a source of inspiration for the title character of Max Beerbohm’s short story “Enoch Soames” (1916) – or a historical personage.
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 (1788-1853), 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, where his great-grandfather had been a
Master. In 1888 he left school to take up a position in his father’s office 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 (1837-1909), he wondered whether he
might become a poet. To this end, in 1892 two self-financed collections –
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
At the close of 1893, his collection of poetry,
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
In 1895 Wratislaw’s verse play,
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,
© 2017, D.J. Sheppard
D.J. Sheppard is Senior Academic Mentor and teacher of philosophy at Oakham School,
Rutland. He is the author of