Frank Miles

George Francis Miles (1852-1891) was a handsome London artist who specialised in pastel portraits of society ladies. He was the grandson of Philip John Miles (1773-1845), an English merchant, politician and collector, who was elected MP for Bristol in 1820.

Today Frank Miles is best known for being an early lover of Oscar Wilde. Miles introduced Wilde to to Lily Langtry, and to his friend and patron Lord Ronald Gower (who became the model for the worldly Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde's novel Picture of Dorian Gray).

In 1887 Miles was commited to asylum near Bristol, and he died in 1891 of what was diagnosed as general paralysis of the insane (4 years), exhaustion and pneumonia'.

In the 20th century Miles achieved brief notority as being an unlikely suspect for Jack the Ripper) theorists. The thin line of argument was that he lived on Tite Street near Sir Melville MacNaghten; a cousin was an equerry to Prince Albert Victor (another unlikely suspect); and the brother of Montague Druitt, yet another suspect, was in the same regiment that Miles had been in.

References

Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper