While serving a two-year sentence at a prison in Reading, England, the author, playwright, and poet Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) witnessed the hanging of a fellow prisoner who had been convicted of murder. The death of the man, whom Wilde had befriended, deeply troubled the writer and formed the basis for a poem that he wrote after his release, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898):

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky….

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was the last major work that Wilde completed before his own death in 1900, at age forty-six. More somber than many of Wilde’s earlier works, the poem was marked by the sadness and tragedy of the last years of Wilde’s life, starting with his arrest and conviction for homosexual acts in 1895 and his self-imposed exile in France for the last three years of his life. “Something was dead in each of us,” another passage read, “And what was dead was Hope.”

Wilde had begun his literary career as a student at Oxford, where he wrote poetry and became involved with the “aesthetic” movement. The aesthetics believed that art should exist for its own sake, rather than to convey a message or teach a moral lesson. Wilde, with his long hair, subversive wit, and flamboyant dress, became one of the spokesmen for the movement. Wilde published his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1891. He also wrote many plays, including The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

In the early 1890s, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), the son of a prominent aristocrat, the Marquess of Queensberry (1844–1900). The marquess was furious and accused Wilde of being a “somdomite [sic]”—a crime in nineteenth-century Britain. Wilde was soon arrested on the charge of “gross indecency,” convicted, and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. After his release, Wilde fled to France, where he lived under an assumed name. He died of cerebral meningitis in a Paris hotel three years later.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

  1. The Marquess of Queensberry is also known for sponsoring an athletic club in England that standardized the rules of boxing in the 1880s. The rules, still in effect for professional boxing, are widely known as the Marquess of Queensberry rules.
  2. Wilde’s 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was made into a Hollywood movie in 1945. A remake, starring Colin Firth (1960–), was released in the United Kingdom in 2009.
  3. The ban on male homosexual acts in England and Wales, under which Wilde was convicted, was repealed in 1967.

alt