AFTER THE SENTENCING, Wilde was taken in a windowless Black Maria from the Old Bailey back to Holloway. On his arrival, he was left in no doubt as to his changed status: he was now a convicted felon and was permitted none of the privileges he had enjoyed while awaiting trial.
Wilde surrendered all his personal property, then stripped naked for a detailed medical inspection, after which the prison doctor pronounced him fit enough to perform hard labour. Next, he bathed in grimy water, and had his hair cut short. Then he put on his convict costume – a cap and an ill-fitting grey suit with arrows printed all over it. Finally, the long litany of prison regulations was barked out to him: ‘Prisoners shall preserve silence by day and by night . . . They shall not be idle, nor feign sickness to evade their work.’1 There were so many rules that the recitation could take up to forty-five minutes; afterwards Wilde was led off to his cell.
About two weeks later, Wilde made the short journey down the Caledonian Road from Holloway to Pentonville, a prison for convicted felons. His cell there was around thirteen feet long, seven feet wide and nine feet high. Its walls were whitewashed and spotlessly clean, as was its shiny asphalt floor. A copy of the prison regulations was pinned to the wall, and a bible, a prayer-book and hymn-book stood on a small shelf. A plank of wood placed across two trestles would serve Wilde as a bed.
At Pentonville Wilde was introduced to the gruelling and monotonous daily routine of the Victorian prisoner. He was woken up in the morning at 5.30 by the tolling of the prison bell, which gave out a shrill and strident peal.2 On hearing it, Wilde rose, washed himself quickly with freezing water, then cleaned his cell and its contents. Everything had to be spick and span for inspection by the warders. After their rigorous examination, Wilde was allowed out to empty his slops from the bucket he used, during the night, as a lavatory.3 Having breakfasted on thin cocoa and stale bread at 7.30, he left his cell for around forty-five minutes’ exercise with the other prisoners. They paced around the ‘slippery asphalt yard’ in single file and in silence. Being exceptionally tall, Wilde’s long strides brought him quickly to the heels of the convict ahead of him; whenever this happened a warder would separate them immediately to prevent any communication.4
At around 9.30, the prisoners were marched off to chapel where wooden panels had been placed between the individual pews to prevent the prisoners seeing each other. The inmates had to endure the chaplain’s long and often virulent sermons, in which their ‘dishonesty, over-indulgence’ and ‘wickedness’ were castigated. The author of ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ found these tirades exasperating. Wilde longed to ‘rise in my place and . . . tell the poor, disinherited wretches around me that . . . they are society’s victims, and that society has nothing to offer them but starvation in the streets, or starvation and cruelty in prison’.5
Wilde’s dinner at noon, eaten in his cell, typically consisted of bacon and beans or suet pudding. He was also given weak tea there at around 5.30. During the day, he performed at least six hours’ hard labour, mostly in his cell. He ‘picked oakum’, which involved separating the fibres in a tarry rope, or turned the ‘crank’ handle to pump water or grind corn. The gas jets that lit his cell were turned off at eight, when the prisoner had to retire to his hard plank bed.
The regime under which Wilde would struggle to survive had been instituted by the Prison Act of 1865. The Act established the ‘Separate System’ throughout England, which was designed to isolate inmates from the outside world and from each other. Conversation between convicts was strictly forbidden at all times; even eye contact was severely punished. Inmates were locked in their solitary cells for up to sixteen hours a day. Advocates of the system claimed that it would ‘deprive the prisoner of the contaminating influence’ of their fellows.6 They also argued that in ‘the solitude of the cell, alone with a wounded conscience’ and his bible, the inmate would inevitably turn to God.7 Isolation was a potent means of control: it encouraged prisoners to focus exclusively inwards, rendering them docile and weak, and destroying their will to resist authority.
Wilde abhorred the puritanical character of the system, with its emphasis on solitary bible reading and its insistence that the prisoner learn to respect the seven deadly Victorian ‘virtues’ of industry, thrift, obedience, abstemiousness, duty, piety and chastity. He also loathed the scientific rationality that informed the regime. With meticulous precision, space and time were ordered and controlled in the prison. Each cell, landing and wing was identical in dimension; every action of every day was measured to the second, and each day replicated its predecessor. The Separate System was, in Wilde’s vivid phrase, ‘humanity’s machine’.
The diet was so inadequate that Wilde lost a considerable amount of weight – perhaps as much as twenty pounds in his first month. One newspaper reported that the prisoner was so ill that the governor contemplated transferring him to the infirmary.8 Alarmed by these reports, Wilde’s well-connected aristocratic friend Lady Brooke persuaded Richard Haldane, a Liberal MP of her acquaint ance, to visit the prison. Haldane, a kind-hearted and cultivated man, was a member of a Home Office committee investi gating the prison system, and had right of access to jails throughout England. The MP visited Wilde on 12 June 1895. At first, the prisoner refused to speak to him. Haldane managed to draw Wilde out, however, by putting a friendly hand on his shoulder, and by broaching the subject of his future literary plans. He urged Wilde to compose a great work based on his terrible experiences and, with that end in mind, promised to procure for him books and writing materials. These were the first sympathetic words Wilde had heard since his sentencing, and he burst into tears.
Haldane’s proposal constituted an extraordinary relaxation of the prison rules. For the first three months of his sentence, a Victorian convict was only allowed to read the Bible, and the prayer-book and hymn-book that remained permanently in his cell. Additional works of pious literature could be supplied at the chaplain’s discretion.9 Wilde was given a copy of John Bunyan’s famous seventeenth-century Protestant allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, but derived from it neither pleasure nor consolation.10 When the first three months of a prisoner’s sentence were up, he was permitted to borrow one book a week from the prison library.
When Haldane asked Wilde which titles he wanted, he nominated ‘Flaubert’s works’. Haldane explained that, as Flaubert had been charged with indecency over his novel Madame Bovary, it was unlikely that the request would be acceded to. Wilde laughed at this comment, which he doubtless regarded as typical of the stupidity of the prison authorities.11 Their literary chat, and the promise of books, raised his spirits and, with Haldane’s help, he enthusiastically drew up a list of requests. This included Pater’s Renaissance, and a number of volumes by Cardinal Newman. (The full list is reproduced in Appendix II a., See p. 319).
Haldane purchased all of the selected volumes, perhaps with the financial help of Lady Brooke, and sent them to Pentonville.12 Although Wilde had yet to serve three months of his sentence, the books were issued to him at the rate of one title per week. The governor meanwhile informed the Commission that ‘several books’ had been sent to the prison by Wilde’s friends.13 As convicts were forbidden to receive anything from the outside world,14 these volumes were immediately returned to their donors. One of the benefactors was anonymous so the gift could not be sent back: instead the book would be handed to the prisoner on the day of his release.
It is a pity Wilde was not allowed to see the volume (which has not been identified) or the touching note that accompanied it. ‘Please give Mr Wilde the book,’ it read. ‘I have never ever seen him but it must indeed be a hard heart utterly unacquainted with God’s love that does not bleed for such a shipwrecked life . . . I feel this book which I send, may be helpful. Faithfully yours, an Irishwoman.’15