WILDE’S CONDITION WORRIED Haldane. Less than a month after his visit the MP had the prisoner transferred from Pentonville prison to Wandsworth, in south London. He probably thought Wilde would benefit from the more salubrious environment outside the city; he also knew William Morrison, Wandsworth’s chaplain, and could closely monitor the prisoner’s condition through him.
Haldane asked Pentonville’s governor to send on to Wandsworth the ten books that had been purchased for Wilde. They arrived a month and a half after the prisoner’s transfer.1 While Wilde waited, no doubt with great impatience, for the delivery of his little library of books, he turned to the King James Bible. Like so many Victorian prisoners, he must have read it from cover to cover, perhaps more than once. Wilde had always been enchanted by the ‘beautifully artistic’ stories of the Old Testament, as well as by the personality of Jesus. Back in the 1860s, at the Protestant Portora school, he had learned many of its verses by heart. The ease and frequency with which Wilde quotes the King James version in some of his prison letters suggests that he once again committed much of it to memory. It is highly likely, however, that Wilde was also permitted, in his first days at Wandsworth, to peruse books from the prison library, which was overseen by Haldane’s friend, the chaplain.
The libraries of Victorian prisons were largely comprised of three types of books: educational volumes, religious books and popular fiction. In one of the prisons in which Wilde was confined these categories were represented fairly equally, with roughly three hundred volumes of each.2
The educational books were extremely rudimentary. Arnold’s Phonic Reader Primer and that publisher’s ‘Albion Readers’ were typical titles; both were aimed at the semi-literate working class who made up the vast majority of the prison population. There were also practical handbooks on various trades.3 Obviously, none of them was of the slightest interest to Wilde. The same is doubtless true of the pious titles on offer. Typical of these books was Joseph Kingsmill’s The Prisoner’s Manual of Prayer which includes the prayer: ‘Take me, O gracious God, under thy protection this night; I am a vile, unworthy sinner . . .’4
Popular literature was heavily censored by the chaplain. Novels that referred to sex, prisons or politics found no place on the prison library’s shelves.5 It is something of a surprise, then, that any title managed to pass the censor, but there was a wealth of ‘goody-goody’ Victorian novels to choose from. In these works virtuous characters are awarded happiness and evildoers come to a bad end which, as Earnest’s Miss Prism remarked, is ‘what fiction means’.
The prison authorities added a new terror to Wilde’s punishment by effectively force-feeding him the sentimental, didactic and realistic fiction he despised. Out of excruciating boredom, Wilde was compelled to read ‘everything’ that was on offer at the various prisons in which he was confined, ‘several times’ over.6 Some members of the prison hierarchy evidently believed that Wilde would benefit from a steady diet of ‘wholesome’ reading. During a conversation with one official, Wilde was asked which book he most coveted. When he named Flaubert’s luxuriant and sensual historical novel Salammbô, he was rebuked: ‘It is that sort of nonsense which has brought you here.’7
One ‘goody-goody’ novel available to Wilde was Sir Walter Besant’s three-volume work The Ivory Gate.8 The hero, Mr Edward Dering, is a city solicitor who, after a life dedicated to hard work and the accumulation of wealth, suddenly recognises the ‘visionary dreamer’ within himself and the infinite spiritual and social possi bilities available to humanity at large. After his awakening he preaches a gospel of altruism: if man, he says, ‘lays down his garb of selfishness and puts on the white robes of charity’, Utopia can be established on earth. The novel ends with a beatific vision in which the hero suddenly sees a ‘long procession of those who work and sing at their work and are happy, work they ever so hard, because they work for all and all for each.’9 This is, of course, precisely the sort of badly written moralistic fiction that Wilde excoriated, with such devastating eloquence, in his writings. Besant was indeed one of Wilde’s bêtes noires – a sort of novelistic equivalent of Harry Quilter, who exemplified for him all that was anti-intellectual, sentimental and inartistic about middle-class English fiction. He found Besant’s ‘universal benevolence’ positively nauseating and was equally appalled by the author’s didacticism, and his disdain for what he referred to as ‘mere style’ – a phrase that greatly amused Wilde. Worse still, Besant was an arch-realist, whose voluminous oeuvre constituted, in Wilde’s view, a tedious attempt to ‘exhaust the obvious’.
Novels like Besant’s espoused some of the guiding principles of the Separate System, such as diligence and duty. As works of realism, they also resembled the world of the prison in their cold objectivity. Both worlds, real and fictional, denied their inhabitants the freedom of interpretation or discussion, and neither offered them an outlet for their inner world of feelings, dreams and fantasies. Such parallels may explain why Wilde’s criticism of the prison system was often reminiscent of his strictures against the realistic novel: it was ‘stupid’, he complained, because it lacked ‘imagination’.
Prison libraries also contained thrillers and murder yarns such as Fergus Hume’s The Lone Inn. The immensely popular productions of this New Zealand crime writer were regarded as innocuous because they generally attributed crime to the personal ‘wickedness’ or psychological deficiency of the felon, rather than to social circumstances. Wilde probably found such popular ‘trash’ more congenial than Besant: at least the story had a clearly defined structure, and the author did not consciously set out to preach.
Not that Wilde had anything complimentary to say about the choices available to him. ‘The books,’ he remarked in a letter to the press written after his release, ‘that compose an ordinary prison library are perfectly useless. They consist chiefly of third-rate, badly-written, religious books, so-called, written apparently for children, and utterly unsuitable for children or for anyone else.’10 One of Wilde’s proposals for prison reform was that prisoners have free access to an adequate selection of good literature.
Like the titles on offer, the conditions in the prison were far from conducive to a pleasant, or rewarding, reading experience. The perpetual state of exhaustion, hunger, illness and depression ‘paralysed’, in the words of one inmate, ‘the reading faculties’.11 Victorian prison cells were, moreover, hardly designed for reading. The murky light that filtered through the tiny barred and begrimed windows and the meagre light emitted by the gas jets barely allowed the prisoner to make out the printed words.
Reading in these circumstances inevitably caused eyestrain and sight loss, and Wilde’s vision became impaired, particularly during the winter months of his incarceration, when he read by gaslight after sundown.12 He would stand up in his cell next to the artificial light, holding his book right up against the flame and peering closely at the pages, which he turned very slowly.13 This image of uncomfortable, unhurried and isolated reading contrasts sharply with all our previous pictures of Wilde the reader.
Relief from conventional literary prison fare arrived on 17 August in the form of the ten books that had been bought for Wilde by Haldane. At the end of that month, the Liberal MP also sent to Wandsworth’s library, through his own bookseller, some ‘volumes of Pater which Oscar Wilde was anxious to have’.14 The new additions to Wilde’s store were Greek Studies, in which Pater discusses various aspects of Greek literature and culture, Appreciations, his anthology of essays on English literature, and Imaginary Portraits, a collection of four historical stories.
Wilde’s copy of the latter has survived. On its inside cover there is a little table of rows and columns, in which the date ‘1–10–95’ is written.15 This was probably the day on which Wilde returned it to the library. In the margin on page 141, the date appears again, next to a tiny rip. It must have been written by the chaplain, or his assistant, the schoolmaster’s orderly, who inspected books for damage on their restitution to the library. Next to the volume’s half-title are two numbers, ‘541’ and ‘1189’, doubtless its library shelf-mark.
The book is in very poor condition. Its edges and corners are knocked; its cover and many of its pages heavily soiled with smudges and dust marks. These blemishes vividly conjure up the unwholesome circumstances in which the volume was read, and the filthiness of the hands that held the book after performing hard labour. The volume contains markings that are probably Wilde’s. Few other inmates are likely to have requested Pater, and no one else would have been allowed to mark the book. Of the stories in the volume, Wilde seems to have been particularly drawn to ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’, a fictional sketch of an early precursor of the German Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Wilde had described the tale, on first reading Imaginary Portraits a decade earlier, as an allegory of ‘the passion for the imaginative world of art’.16 Vertical lines mark passages referring to Bach and Goethe. Wilde’s curiosity was also excited by some musings on the Enlightenment’s conception of the imagination and by a number of abstruse paragraphs on metaphysics.17
These markings suggest that Wilde’s enquiring intellect was still very much alive. He evidently retained the requisite mental power to engage the book in a readerly dialogue; he was also robust enough to query some of its claims. On page 104 there is a question mark next to Pater’s dubious statement that the lives of Dutch artists were generally ‘exemplary in matters of domestic relationship.’
Yet Wilde’s markings also convey despair. Page 111 contains what must be the most poignant example of all Wildean marginalia – a single exclamation mark next to the word ‘silence’. Did he draw attention to the word because it was charged with terror for him? Under the Separate System the prison was pervaded by a deafening silence; ‘condemned’ to that silence, ‘the wretched man,’ Wilde commented, ‘confined in an English prison, can hardly escape becoming insane.’18
Wilde drew comfort from the books Haldane sent him. When Robert Sherard visited him at the end of August, reading was the only subject he could discuss with equanimity; all other topics caused him to break down. Similarly, in October, when he was granted special permission to see his solicitor friend Arthur Clifton, Wilde mentioned the pleasure his copies of Pater and Newman afforded him.
Both visitors were horrified by Wilde’s appearance and by his account of life inside. During his talk with Clifton, Wilde spoke of the ‘savage’ treatment meted out to him.19 Wilde ‘cried a great deal’, Clifton recalled, and said repeatedly that ‘he did not think he would be able to last the punishment out’.20
Wilde was displaying signs of partial deafness – a consequence of a fall in chapel, which permanently damaged his ear. Because of that fall, and chronic diarrhoea, Wilde was allowed to spend some time in the infirmary. He did not enjoy much respite there, however, as the doctors treated him cruelly. Wilde’s condition became so serious that the Home Secretary sent two medical experts to examine him for mental and physical illness. Wilde’s health evidently concerned them as they strongly recommended that he be transferred from London to the country, where he might profit from the fresher air, and Reading Gaol was eventually settled upon. Once again, Wilde’s guardian angel, Haldane, was probably at work behind the scenes.21