Frank Miles

George Francis Miles (1852-1891) was a handsome London artist who specialised in pastel portraits of society ladies. He was the son of the rector of Bingham in Nottinghamshire, and 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 a friend and house-mate (and many believe a lover) of Oscar Wilde whom he met in 1876. Miles introduced Wilde to Lily Langtry, and to his friend and patron Lord Ronald Gower, who later became the model for the worldly Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde's novel he Picture of Dorian Gray.

In 1887 Miles was committed to an 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