Wilde in solitary

Colm Toibin, the Irish writer, visits the cell of Oscar Wilde:

Early in 1895, while facing charges of indecency and wondering if he should abscond to France, Oscar Wilde had no idea what a two-year prison sentence would mean for him. Wilde’s misfortune was to serve his sentence just before prison conditions were officially changed by the 1898 Prison Act.

In total isolation, first in Pentonville and Wandsworth, and then in Reading gaol, to which he was moved in November 1895, Wilde slept on a plank bed with no mattress. Allowed one hour’s exercise a day, he walked in single file in the yard with other prisoners but he was not allowed to communicate with them. He could not sleep, he was permanently hungry and he suffered from dysentery. For the first month, Wilde was tied to a treadmill six hours a day, making an ascent, as it were, of 6,000 feet each day, with five minutes’ rest after every 20 minutes. Towards the end of his sentence, the governor of the jail, Major Nelson, remarked to Wilde’s friend Robert Ross: “He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.” Wilde was later to praise Nelson, who had arrived at Reading in July 1896, as “the most Christlike man I ever met”. Nelson was more liberal than his predecessor and was ready to relax the rules.

In January 1897, when Wilde still had more than four months still to serve, he and Nelson came up with an ingenious idea. While nothing in the prison regulations allowed prisoners to write plays or novels or essays, inmates had permission to write letters. Under the previous regime, Wilde had written to solicitors and the Home Office, or in limited quantities to friends, but his letters were inspected and the writing materials removed as he finished. But the regulations did not specify how long a letter should be. And if a letter were not finished, then the prisoner, it was supposed, could be allowed take it with him when he left the prison.

Thus Wilde, alone in his cell, was given pen and ink every day. What he wrote was removed each evening and then, it seems, handed back to him in the morning, or parts were given back to him to revise. Since “De Profundis” was in the form of a long letter, it would be his property when he was free. It took him three months, with much revision.

Wilde addressed his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. On his release, he handed the manuscript to Ross, who had two typed copies made, one of which he sent to Douglas. In 1905 Ross published extracts from the text, and a fuller version in 1908. The complete version, however, was not published until 1949...

A link to an exhibition on Wilde's time at Reading- in the jail itself- with photos- is here.