AT TWO O’CLOCK on the rainy afternoon of 21 November 1895, Wilde stood on the centre platform at Clapham Junction station awaiting his train for Reading ‘in convict dress and hand cuffed, for the world to look at’. The worthy burghers of London going to, and coming from, the City, saw the prisoner and laughed. ‘That was,’ Wilde recalled, ‘before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed, they laughed still more.’ One of their number spat in Wilde’s face. He had to endure their abuse until his train arrived at 2.30. ‘For a year after that was done to me,’ he wrote, ‘I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.’1
After alighting at Reading station Wilde completed the short trip to the prison which, like Holloway, Pentonville and Wandsworth, had the neo-Gothic appearance of a medieval castle. After the customary medical inspection, Wilde was taken up two shiny iron staircases and along a narrow walkway to cell C.3.3. – the third cell on the third floor of Block C. It was no bigger than his previous dwellings, but it had two large south-facing windows which let in a fair amount of light. This would be his home for the next eighteen months.
The report on Wilde’s condition at Wandsworth recommended a ‘variation of employment’ such as ‘bookbinding’ or ‘garden work’. Instead of hard labour, Wilde would now ‘be employed with the school master in sorting, repairing and distributing books’; he was also given three hours of garden work a day.2
As ‘schoolmaster’s orderly’ Wilde’s main task was to issue and collect library books. This afforded him a rare and welcome opportunity of talking with his fellow convicts, and about a subject dear to his heart. Once a week Wilde brought the prison library’s catalogue round to each inmate’s cell. He must have given the prisoners excellent advice about which books to choose, striking up, in the process, many friendships which would endure beyond his release. After the convicts had chosen their titles, Wilde went back to the library, where he took the selected books down from the shelves and put them on a trolley. He then made his rounds of the cells to deliver the books. When issuing each prisoner with a volume, he wrote its catalogue number on a blue library card that was kept in the convict’s cell. After a week, the prisoner could exchange the book for another title, provided that it was returned undamaged. Another of Wilde’s duties was to cover the library books with brown paper and rebind them. He told one of his first visitors at Reading how much he enjoyed this chore. If he could not read all the volumes he wanted, he could at least ‘hold books in his hand’.3
The visitor in question was Constance. Though seriously ill and utterly broken psychologically, she had travelled, in February 1896, to see Wilde, all the way from Genoa in Italy, where she now lived with Cyril and Vyvyan. She made the trip to break to Wilde the terrible news that his mother had died as she could not bear the idea of him hearing the report from the lips of a stranger.
Wilde was overwhelmed with anguish and remorse. He believed that his mother had died ‘broken-hearted because the son of whose genius and art she had been so proud . . . had been condemned to the treadmill for two years’.4 His distress was undiminished by the fact that the tidings did not surprise him. Wilde claimed that, on the eve of Constance’s visit, Speranza’s spirit had appeared in his cell dressed in her outdoor cloak. He had asked her to take it off and sit down, but she shook her head sadly and vanished.5
It was a fittingly theatrical and bookish denouement to the relation ship between mother and son, pregnant as it was with so many literary associations. Speranza’s spirit played the role of the banshee – the phantom woman of Irish folklore whose appearance portends the death of a family member. She was also performing the part of Odysseus’ mother, who features in Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus descends into Hades, the underworld of the Greeks, and there, among the shadows of the dead, he encounters the ghost of his mother. They engage in conversation, at the conclusion of which Odysseus tries to embrace his mother, but, phantom-like, she eludes his grasp. Curiously, the episode had made a great impression on Wilde at Oxford, where he recounted the ‘wonderful’ and ‘affecting’ scene in an essay.6
Speranza’s wraith seems, too, to have been mimicking Everallin, the mother of Oscar in Macpherson’s Ossianic poems. In one episode, Everallin’s ghost appears to Oscar’s father Ossian, ‘in all the light of her beauty; her blue eyes rolling in tears’. She exhorts him to ‘Rise, and save my son; save Oscar prince of men’, who is in mortal danger. It is possible that Speranza recited this marvellous scene to Wilde as a boy, and he may have recalled it now as he lay in jail. Certainly he interpreted her ghostly visitation as an attempt to warn him of some imminent danger. Speranza’s spirit reappeared to him on many occasions later in his life and always, he believed, to that end.7
On her deathbed Speranza had asked if her ‘dear Oscar’ might be permitted to visit her, but she must have known that he would not be allowed. Now that she was dead, Wilde was not even granted permission to attend her funeral.8 A month after it took place he asked a friend to retrieve, from Oakley Street, all of ‘the books of my own writing I gave my dear mother’.9
The Wandsworth medical report had proposed that Wilde continue to enjoy special reading privileges. He was to have access to his little collection of personal classics, which had been transferred from Wandsworth to Reading. On their arrival, their Wandsworth shelf-marks were replaced with new ones, and the words ‘Reading Prison’ were written on the half-title pages.10 As an additional concession, Wilde was now permitted to read two volumes rather than one per week.
In February 1896, seven titles were added to his store. These were: Dante’s Divina commedia, accompanied by an Italian grammar and dictionary to help Wilde with the poem’s medieval Italian; two massive folio volumes containing the entire surviving corpus of Greek and Latin poetry and drama; the equally weighty Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon, and Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary. More Adey, the translator of Henrik Ibsen and another of Wilde’s ‘chivalrous’ and supportive friends,11 procured the volumes and dispatched them to Reading. He was one of several people who sent the prisoner books during his confinement; others included the Sphinx and Robbie Ross.
The seven volumes were most welcome to Wilde. The works of classical literature proved to be of little use, however, as reading them brought on terrible migraines.12 Along with the headaches, Wilde complained that his attention span, which had been ground down by ill health and depression, was often no longer equal to the effort of reading such literature.13 He bemoaned, too, the fact that Reading’s governor – the despotic drunkard H. B. Isaacson – deliberately obstructed his reading. He ‘loves to punish’, Wilde told a friend, ‘and he punishes by taking my books away from me’.14
Fortunately for the prisoner, Isaacson’s days at Reading were numbered. He was replaced in July 1896 by Major James Nelson, whom Wilde would later describe as the most ‘Christ-like’ man he ever met.15 Around the time of Nelson’s arrival, Wilde composed a harrowing petition to the Home Secretary in which he expressed the fear that he was slowly becoming insane. In interviews with friends too, he seemed haunted by the spectre of madness: he asked Robbie Ross if he thought ‘his brain seemed all right?’ and predicted that his confinement would slowly ‘deprive him of his mind’.16 In his petition to the Home Secretary, Wilde attributes his dire mental condition to ‘the fearful system of cellular confinement’, and to the absence of ‘writing materials whose use might help to distract the mind’. He also laments the lack of ‘suitable or sufficient books’ that are ‘so essential to any literary man’ and ‘so vital for the preservation of mental balance’.
Wilde then makes an impassioned plea for wider access to literature. ‘By special permission,’ he writes, in the third person, in accordance with prison protocol, ‘the petitioner is allowed two books a week to read: but the prison library is extremely small: it hardly contains a score of books suitable for an educated man.’ As for those books that had been ordered specifically for him, ‘he has read and reread them till they have become almost meaningless’. Consequently, ‘the world of ideas, as the actual world, is closed to him: he is deprived of everything that could soothe, distract, or heal a wounded and shaken mind.’ Wilde concludes with the most pathetic paean he ever penned to books: ‘Horrible,’ he says, ‘as all the physical privations of modern prison life are, they are as nothing compared to the entire privation of literature to one to whom Literature was once the first thing of life, the mode by which perfection could be realised, by which, and by which alone, the intellect could feel itself alive.’17
The Prison Commission responded by instructing the new governor to provide Wilde with ‘foolscap paper, ink and pen, for use in his leisure moments in his cell’ (in the event, he was given a notebook). It told Nelson to ascertain whether Wilde had indeed read all the books available to him; if that was the case, then he could ask the prisoner to request further titles. In addition, the Commission instructed the governor to ‘use his discretion’ with regard to the number of books Wilde was issued per week.18 In his reply Nelson said that while Wilde had not actually read ‘all the books in the prison library’, he had perused all those titles ‘he considered worth reading’. He also enclosed a list of books for which the prisoner ‘would be extremely grateful’.19
This list contains over twenty titles, written out in Wilde’s neatest hand. Some of his requests, such as a novel by the French Decadent author Huysmans, have been crossed out by Nelson, perhaps because of their controversial nature. Ernest Renan’s heterodox Life of Jesus and his Apostles were allowed to remain, but only if they were purchased in original French-language editions, presumably to ensure that none of the other prisoners could read them. Some of Nelson’s excisions may be due to the fact that he was limited to a budget of £10, the annual amount allocated to prison book purchases. It is, however, highly likely that Wilde’s friends paid for at least some of the books. (The full list of titles appears in Appendix II b., pp. 319–20).
When the new books began to arrive Nelson took one of them round to cell C.3.3. Entering the room, he cheerfully announced, ‘the Home Secretary says you are to have books.’ Holding out the volume he had brought with him, he said, ‘here is one you may like, I have just been reading it myself.’ Wilde was so overwhelmed by the governor’s kindness that he broke down and wept. ‘Those,’ he told him, ‘are the first kind words that have been spoken to me since I have been in [Reading] gaol.’20
This was just one of the many ways in which Nelson ‘used his discretion’ when applying the regulations in Wilde’s case. The prisoner was allowed to retain up to perhaps a score of volumes permanently in his cell, which assumed the appearance of a small library.21 He was also granted the extraordinary privilege of keeping his gas jet lights on all night so that he might read for as long as he wished.22
Yet despite these blessings, Wilde’s suicidal depression is still palpable in the piteous appeal for an early release he wrote to the Home Secretary on 10 November 1896. He thanked the Prison Commission for having added his book requests to the prison library, but said that even ‘these alleviations, for which the prisoner is naturally very grateful, count for but little in relieving the terrible mental stress and anguish that the silence and solitude of prison-life intensify daily’.23
Wilde’s plea for an early discharge was not granted, but he was permitted to order more books, provided they were paid for by his friends. The Commission’s decision was probably prompted by Nelson, who informed them that Wilde had ‘read and re-read all the books’ that ‘were specially supplied for him’.24 Once again, Wilde drew up a list of titles, which More Adey then purchased and dispatched to Reading. (The catalogue is reproduced in Appendix II c., p. 320.)
One final consignment of books was sent to Wilde before his release. He appears to have broached the idea of compiling a further list of requests during an interview with Adey in January 1897.25A little while later Adey wrote out the catalogue, which he submitted for Haldane’s approval at the end of the month. This was duly granted, along with Major Nelson’s consent, once again with the proviso that Wilde’s friends supply the books.26 Wilde probably made numerous revisions to Adey’s list, because it had to be sent a second time to the Home Office and to Nelson for their authorisation. (The amended list can be seen in Appendix II d., pp. 320–1.) The only item Nelson objected to was an issue of the periodical the Nineteenth Century that contained an article on the prison system ‘with which,’ he said, ‘it is not desirable the prisoner should be acquainted’.27