[Circa 11 March 1895]1
My dear Friend,
A thousand thanks. For a week I go away with Bosie: then return to fight with panthers.2
Oscar
Kind regards to dear Ernest.
[? 5 April 1895]3
Dear Constance,
Allow no one to enter my bedroom or sittingroom – except servants – today. See no one but your friends. Ever yours
Oscar
[5 April 1895]4
Holborn Viaduct Hotel
It would have been impossible for me to have proved my case without putting Lord Alfred Douglas in the witness-box against his father.
Lord Alfred Douglas was extremely anxious to go into the box, but I would not let him do so.
Rather than put him in so painful a position I determined to retire from the case, and to bear on my own shoulders whatever ignominy and shame might result from my prosecuting Lord Queensberry.5
Oscar Wilde
[5 April 1895]
[Cadogan Hotel]
My dear Bosie,
I will be at Bow Street Police Station tonight – no bail possible I am told. Will you ask Percy, and George Alexander, and Waller,6 at the Haymarket, to attend to give bail.7
Would you also wire Humphreys to appear at Bow Street for me. Wire to 41 Norfolk Square, W.
Also, come to see me. Ever yours
Oscar
9 April 1895
HM Prison, Holloway
Dear Sphinx and Ernest,
I write to you from prison, where your kind words have reached me and given me comfort, though they have made me cry, in my loneliness. Not that I am really alone. A slim thing, gold-haired like an angel, stands always at my side. His presence overshadows me. He moves in the gloom like a white flower.
With what a crash this fell! Why did the Sibyl say fair things?8 I thought but to defend him from his father: I thought of nothing else, and now—
I can’t write more. How good and kind and sweet you and Ernest are to me.
Oscar
15 April 1895
HM Prison, Holloway
My dear kind good sweet friend,
What can I say to you? How can I thank you? I cannot express anything adequately. I am dazed with horror. Life has at last become to me as real as a dream.
What more hideous things may crawl out to cry against me I don’t know. I hardly care, I think, for sometimes there is sunlight in my cell, and every day someone whose name is Love comes to see me, and weeps so much through prison-bars that it is I who have to comfort him.10
With my deepest affection, my most sincere gratitude, ever yours
Oscar
16 April 1895
HM Prison, Holloway
My dear Robert,
You good, daring reckless friend! I was delighted to get your letter, with all its wonderful news. For myself, I am ill – apathetic. Slowly life creeps out of me. Nothing but Alfred Douglas’s daily visits quicken me into life, and even him I only see under humiliating and tragic conditions.
Don’t fight more than six duels a week! I suppose Sarah11 is hopeless; but your chivalrous friendship – your fine, chivalrous friendship – is worth more than all the money in the world. Ever yours
Oscar
23 April 1895
HM Prison, Holloway
My dear Sphinx,
I have just had a charming note from you, and a charming note from Ernest. How good you both are to me!
Willie has been writing me the most monstrous letters. I have had to beg him to stop.
Today Bosie comes early to see me. My counsel seem to wish the case to be tried at once. I don’t, nor does Bosie. Bail, or no bail, I think we had better wait.
[Later] I have seen counsel, and Bosie. I don’t know what to do. My life seems to have gone from me. I feel caught in a terrible net. I don’t know where to turn. I care less when I think that he is thinking of me. I think of nothing else. Ever yours
Oscar
Monday Evening [29 April 1895]12
HM Prison, Holloway
My dearest boy,
This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonour be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently. Since the hope, nay rather the certainty, of meeting you again in some world is the goal and the encouragement of my present life, ah! I must continue to live in this world because of that.
Dear —13 came to see me today. I gave him several messages for you. He told me one thing that reassured me: that my mother should never want for anything. I have always provided for her subsistence, and the thought that she might have to suffer privations was making me unhappy. As for you (graceful boy with a Christ-like heart), as for you, I beg you, as soon as you have done all that you can, leave for Italy and regain your calm, and write those lovely poems which you do with such a strange grace. Do not expose yourself to England for any reason whatsoever. If one day, at Corfu or in some enchanted isle, there were a little house where we could live together, oh! life would be sweeter than it has ever been. Your love has broad wings and is strong, your love comes to me through my prison bars and comforts me, your love is the light of all my hours. Those who know not what love is will write, I know, if fate is against us, that I have had a bad influence upon your life. If they do that, you shall write, you shall say in your turn, that it is not so. Our love was always beautiful and noble, and if I have been the butt of a terrible tragedy, it is because the nature of that love has not been understood. In your letter this morning you say something which gives me courage. I must remember it. You write that it is my duty to you and to myself to live in spite of everything. I think that is true. I shall try and I shall do it. I want you to keep Mr Humphreys informed of your movements so that when he comes he can tell me what you are doing. I believe solicitors are allowed to see the prisoners fairly often. Thus I could communicate with you.
I am so happy that you have gone away! I know what that must have cost you. It would have been agony for me to think that you were in England when your name was mentioned in court. I hope you have copies of all my books. All mine have been sold. I stretch out my hands towards you. Oh! may I live to touch your hair and your hands. I think that your love will watch over my life. If I should die, I want you to live a gentle peaceful existence somewhere, with flowers, pictures, books, and lots of work. Try to let me hear from you soon. I am writing you this letter in the midst of great suffering; this long day in court has exhausted me. Dearest boy, sweetest of all young men, most loved and most loveable. Oh! wait for me! wait for me! I am now, as ever since the day we met, yours devoutly and with an immortal love
Oscar
3 May 1895
HM Prison, Holloway
Dear and wonderful Sphinx,
If I do not get bail today will you send me some books?14 I would like some Stevensons – The Master of Ballantrae and Kidnapped. Now that he15 is away I have no one who brings me books, so I come to you, for you and Ernest are so good to me that I am glad to think that I never can repay you. Life is not long enough to allow of it. Always, always, I shall be in your debt.
Your letter cheered me very much. I do hope to see you soon. I have had no letter as yet today from Fleur-de-Lys. I wait with strange hunger for it.
My warmest thanks to Ernest. Always yours in gratitude and affection
Oscar
[4 or 5 May 1895]
[HM Prison, Holloway]
My dear Sphinx,
Ernest’s Shakespeare has arrived safe, and I hear your books are below. I hope I shall be allowed to have them, as Sunday is such a long day here.
I had two letters from Jonquil16 today – to make up – and I saw Frank Harris. He was very pleasant and I think will be able to help in the way of the press. I have just written to Calais to say how sweet you and Ernest are to me. I believe I come out on Tuesday next. I must see you, of course. Ever with great affection yours
Oscar
6 May 1895
HM Prison, Holloway
My dear Sphinx,
I have not had a line today from Fleur-de-Lys. I suppose he is at Rouen. I am so wretched when I don’t hear from him, and today I am bored, and sick to the death of imprisonment.
I am reading your books, but I want to be out, and with people I love. The days seem endless.
Your kindness and Ernest’s make things better for me. I go on trespassing on it more and more. Oh! I hope all will come well, and that I can go back to Art and Life. Here I sicken in inanition. Ever with great affection yours
Oscar
Letter from Bosie, at Rouen, just arrived. Please wire my thanks to him. He has cured me of sorrow today.
[? Early May 1895]
[? 146 Oakley Street]17
My dear Sweet Kind Friend,
I have no words to thank you for all you do for me, but for you and Ernest Bosie and I have deepest love.
I hope to be in better spirits tonight. Your sweetness last night was wonderful. Your flowers are like him – your sending them like yourself. Dear, dear Friend, tonight I see you at 7.45. Ah! you are good and gentle and wonderful. Always devotedly yours
Oscar
[May 1895]18
[? 2 Courtfield Gardens]19
As for you, you have given me the beauty of life in the past, and in the future if there is any future. That is why I shall be eternally grateful to you for having always inspired me with adoration and love. Those days of pleasure were our dawn. Now, in anguish and pain, in grief and humiliation, I feel that my love for you, your love for me, are the two signs of my life, the divine sentiments which make all bitterness bearable. Never has anyone in my life been dearer than you, never has any love been greater, more sacred, more beautiful …20
Dear boy, among pleasures or in prison, you and the thought of you were everything to me. Oh! keep me always in your heart; you are never absent from mine. I think of you much more than of myself, and if, sometimes, the thought of horrible and infamous suffering comes to torture me, the simple thought of you is enough to strengthen me and heal my wounds. Let destiny, Nemesis, or the unjust gods alone receive the blame for everything that has happened.
Every great love has its tragedy, and now ours has too, but to have known and loved you with such profound devotion, to have had you for a part of my life, the only part I now consider beautiful, is enough for me. My passion is at a loss for words, but you can understand me, you alone. Our souls were made for one another, and by knowing yours through love, mine has transcended many evils, understood perfection, and entered into the divine essence of things.
Pain, if it comes, cannot last for ever; surely one day you and I will meet again, and though my face be a mask of grief and my body worn out by solitude, you and you alone will recognise the soul which is more beautiful for having met yours, the soul of the artist who found his ideal in you, of the lover of beauty to whom you appeared as a being flawless and perfect. Now I think of you as a golden-haired boy with Christ’s own heart in you. I know now how much greater love is than everything else. You have taught me the divine secret of the world.
[NB: this letter is incomplete]
[20 May 1895]21
[? 2 Courtfield Gardens]
My child,
Today it was asked to have the verdicts rendered separately. Taylor is probably being judged at this moment, so that I have been able to come back here. My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter waters sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wiser to separate. Ah! moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I .shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me. I am determined not to revolt but to accept every outrage through devotion to love, to let my body be dishonoured so long as my soul may always keep the image of you. From your silken hair to your delicate feet you are perfection to me. Pleasure hides love from us but pain reveals it in its essence. O dearest of created things, if someone wounded by silence and solitude comes to you, dishonoured, a laughing-stock to men, oh! you can close his wounds by touching them and restore his soul which unhappiness had for a moment smothered. Nothing will be difficult for you then, and remember, it is that hope which makes me live, and that hope alone. What wisdom is to the philosopher, what God is to his saint, you are to me. To keep you in my soul, such is the goal of this pain which men call life. O my love, you whom I cherish above all things, white narcissus in an unmown field, think of the burden which falls to you, a burden which love alone can make light. But be not saddened by that, rather be happy to have filled with an immortal love the soul of a man who now weeps in hell, and yet carries heaven in his heart. I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom, my life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool springs are your eyes; the imprint of your little feet makes valleys of shade for me, the odour of your hair is like myrrh, and wherever you go you exhale the perfumes of the cassia tree.
Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other.
I decided that it was nobler and more beautiful to stay. We could not have been together. I did not want to be called a coward or a deserter. A false name, a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me, to whom you have been revealed on that high hill where beautiful things are transfigured.
O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loves, my soul clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the worlds of pain and pleasure you are my ideal of admiration and joy.
Oscar
10 March 1896
[HM Prison, Reading]22
My dear Robbie,
I want you to have a letter written at once to Mr Hargrove, the solicitor, stating that as my wife has promised to settle one third on me in the case of her predeceasing me I do not wish any opposition to be made to her purchasing my life-interest.23 I feel that I have brought such unhappiness on her and such ruin on my children that I have no right to go against her wishes in anything. She was gentle and good to me here, when she came to see me.24 I have full trust in her. Please have this done at once, and thank my friends for their kindness. I feel I am acting rightly in leaving this to my wife.
Please write to Stuart Merrill in Paris, or Robert Sherard, to say how gratified I was at the performance of my play: and have my thanks conveyed to Lugné-Poë; it is something that at a time of disgrace and shame I should be still regarded as an artist. I wish I could feel more pleasure: but I seem dead to all emotions except those of anguish and despair. However, please let Lugné-Poë know that I am sensible of the honour he has done me. He is a poet himself. I fear you will find it difficult to read this, but as I am not allowed writing materials I seem to have forgotten how to write: you must excuse me.
Thank More for exerting himself for books: unluckily I suffer from headaches when I read my Greek and Roman poets, so they have not been of much use, but his kindness was great in getting them sent.25 Ask him to express also my gratitude to the lady who lives at Wimbledon.26 Write to me please in answer to this, and tell me about literature – what new books etc.: also about Jones’s play and Forbes-Robertson’s management:27 about any new tendency in the stage of Paris or London. Also, try and see what Lemaître, Bauër, and Sarcey 28 said of Salomé and give me a little résumé: please write to Henri Bauër and say I am touched at his writing nicely.29 Robert knows him. It was sweet of you to come and see me:30 you must come again next time. Here I have the horror of death with the still greater horror of living: and in silence and misery [some lines cut out by prison officials] but I won’t talk more of this. I always remember you with deep affection. Ever your friend
O.W.
I wish Ernest would get from Oakley Street my portmanteau, fur coat, clothes, and the books of my own writing I gave my dear mother. Ask Ernest in whose name the burial-ground of my mother was taken.31 Goodbye.
Saturday, [30 May 1896]32
[HM Prison, Reading]
Dear Robbie,
I could not collect my thoughts yesterday, as I did not expect you till today. When you are good enough to come and see me will you always fix the day? Anything sudden upsets me.
You said that Douglas was going to dedicate a volume of poems to me. Will you write at once to him and say he must not do anything of the kind. I could not accept or allow such a dedication. The proposal is revolting and grotesque.33 Also, he has unfortunately in his possession a number of letters of mine. I wish him to at once hand all these without exception over to you; I will ask you to seal them up. In case I die here you will destroy them. In case I survive I will destroy them myself. They must not be in existence. The thought that they are in his hands is horrible to me, and though my unfortunate children will never of course bear my name, still they know whose sons they are and I must try and shield them from the possibility of any further revolting disclosure or scandal.
Also, Douglas has some things I gave him: books and jewellery. I wish these to be also handed over to you – for me. Some of the jewellery I know has passed out of his possession under circumstances unnecessary to detail, but he has still some, such as the gold cigarette-case, pearl chain and enamelled locket I gave him last Christmas. I wish to be certain that he has in his possession nothing that I ever gave him. All these are to be sealed up and left with you. The idea that he is wearing or in possession of anything I gave him is peculiarly repugnant to me. I cannot of course get rid of the revolting memories of the two years I was unlucky enough to have him with me, or of the mode by which he thrust me into the abyss of ruin and disgrace to gratify his hatred of his father and other ignoble passions. But I will not have him in possession of my letters or gifts. Even if I get out of this loathsome place I know that there is nothing before me but a life of a pariah – of disgrace and penury and contempt – but at least I will have nothing to do with him nor allow him to come near me.
So will you write at once to him and get these things: until I know they are in your possession I will be more miserable than usual. It is I know an ungracious thing to ask you to do, and he will perhaps write to you in terms of coarse abuse, as he did to Sherard when he was prevented publishing more of my letters, but I earnestly beg of you not to mind. As soon as you have received them please write to me, and make part of your letter just like your other, with all its interesting news of literature and the stage. Let me know why Irving leaves Lyceum etc.,34 what he is playing: what at each theatre: who did Stevenson criticise severely in his letters:35 anything that will for an hour take my thoughts away from the one revolting subject of my imprisonment.
In writing to Douglas you had better quote my letter fully and frankly, so that he should have no loophole of escape. Indeed he cannot possibly refuse. He has ruined my life – that should content him.36
I am deeply touched by the Lady of Wimbledon’s kindness. You are very good to come and see me. Kind regards to More, whom I would so like to see.
O.W.
Has anything come of Carlos Blacker and Newcastle?37 The trial. The Sphinx has some letters of D’s to me: they should be returned to him at once, or destroyed.
O.W.
2 July 1896
HM Prison, Reading
To the Right Honourable Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department.
The Petition of the above-named prisoner humbly sheweth that he does not desire to attempt to palliate in any way the terrible offences of which he was rightly found guilty, but to point out that such offences are forms of sexual madness and are recognised as such not merely by modern pathological science but by much modern legislation, notably in France, Austria, and Italy, where the laws affecting these misdemeanours have been repealed, on the ground that they are diseases to be cured by a physician, rather than crimes to be punished by a judge. In the works of eminent men of science such as Lombroso and Nordau,39 to take merely two instances out of many, this is specially insisted on with reference to the intimate connection between madness and the literary and artistic temperament, Professor Nordau in his book on ‘Degenerescence’ published in 1894 having devoted an entire chapter to the petitioner as a specially typical example of this fatal law.
The petitioner is now keenly conscious of the fact that while the three years preceding his arrest were from the intellectual point of view the most brilliant years of his life (four plays from his pen having been produced on the stage with immense success, and played not merely in England, America, and Australia, but in almost every European capital, and many books that excited much interest at home and abroad having been published), still that during the entire time he was suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania, which made him forget his wife and children, his high social position in London and Paris, his European distinction as an artist, the honour of his name and family, his very humanity itself, and left him the helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and of a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and then drove him to his hideous ruin.
It is under the ceaseless apprehension lest this insanity, that displayed itself in monstrous sexual perversion before, may now extend to the entire nature and intellect, that the petitioner writes this appeal which he earnestly entreats may be at once considered. Horrible as all actual madness is, the terror of madness is no less appalling, and no less ruinous to the soul.
For more than thirteen dreadful months now, the petitioner has been subject to the fearful system of solitary cellular confinement: without human intercourse of any kind; without writing materials whose use might help to distract the mind: without suitable or sufficient books, so essential to any literary man, so vital for the preservation of mental balance: condemned to absolute silence: cut off from all knowledge of the external world and the movements of life: leading an existence composed of bitter degradations and terrible hardships, hideous in its recurring monotony of dreary task and sickening privation: the despair and misery of this lonely and wretched life having been intensified beyond words by the death of his mother, Lady Wilde, to whom he was deeply attached, as well as by the contemplation of the ruin he has brought on his young wife and his two children.
By special permission the petitioner is allowed two books a week to read: but the prison library is extremely small and poor: it hardly contains a score of books suitable for an educated man: the books kindly added at the prisoner’s request he has read and re-read till they have become almost meaningless to him: he is practically left without anything to read: 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: and horrible 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.
It is but natural that living in this silence, this solitude, this isolation from all human and humane influences, this tomb for those who are not yet dead, the petitioner should, day and night in every waking hour, be tortured by the fear of absolute and entire insanity. He is conscious that his mind, shut out artificially from all rational and intellectual interests, does nothing, and can do nothing, but brood on those forms of sexual perversity, those loathsome modes of erotomania, that have brought him from high place and noble distinction to the convict’s cell and the common gaol. It is inevitable that it should do so. The mind is forced to think, and when it is deprived of the conditions necessary for healthy intellectual activity, such as books, writing materials, companionship, contact with the living world, and the like, it becomes, in the case of those who are suffering from sensual monomanias, the sure prey of morbid passions, and obscene fancies, and thoughts that defile, desecrate and destroy. Crimes may be forgotten or forgiven, but vices live on: they make their dwelling house in him who by horrible mischance or fate has become their victim: they are embedded in his flesh: they spread over him like a leprosy: they feed on him like a strange disease: at the end they become an essential part of the man: no remorse however poignant can drive them out: no tears however bitter can wash them away: and prison life, by its horrible isolation from all that could save a wretched soul, hands the victim over, like one bound hand and foot, to be possessed and polluted by the thoughts he most loathes and so cannot escape from.
For more than a year the petitioner’s mind has borne this. It can bear it no longer. He is quite conscious of the approach of an insanity that will not be confined to one portion of the nature merely, but will extend over all alike, and his desire, his prayer is that his sentence may be remitted now, so that he may be taken abroad by his friends and may put himself under medical care so that the sexual insanity from which he suffers may be cured. He knows only too well that his career as a dramatist and writer is ended, and his name blotted from the scroll of English Literature never to be replaced: that his children cannot bear that name again, and that an obscure life in some remote country is in store for him: he knows that, bankruptcy having come upon him, poverty of a most bitter kind awaits him, and that all the joy and beauty of existence is taken from him for ever: but at least in all his hopelessness he still clings to the hope that he will not have to pass directly from the common gaol to the common lunatic asylum.
Dreadful as are the results of the prison system – a system so terrible that it hardens their hearts whose hearts it does not break, and brutalises those who have to carry it out no less than those who have to submit to it – yet at least amongst its aims is not the desire to wreck the human reason. Though it may not seek to make men better, yet it does not desire to drive them mad, and so, earnestly does the petitioner beg that he may be allowed to go forth while he has still some sanity left: while words have still a meaning, and books a message: while there is still some possibility that, by medical science and humane treatment, balance may be restored to a shaken mind and health given back to a nature that once knew purity: while there is still time to rid the temperament of a revolting madness and to make the soul, even for a brief space, clean.
Most earnestly indeed does the petitioner beg the Home Secretary to take, if he so desires it, the opinion of any recognised medical authorities on what would be the inevitable result of solitary confinement in silence and isolation on one already suffering from sexual monomania of a terrible character.
The petitioner would also point out that while his bodily health is better in many respects here than it was at Wandsworth, where he was for two months in the hospital for absolute physical and mental collapse caused by hunger and insomnia, he has, since he has been in prison, almost entirely lost the hearing of his right ear through an abscess that has caused a perforation of the drum. The medical officer here has stated that he is unable to offer any assistance, and that the hearing must go entirely. The petitioner, however, feels sure that under the care of a specialist abroad his hearing might be preserved to him. He was assured by Sir William Dalby,40 the great aurist, that with proper care there was no reason at all why he should lose his hearing. But though the abscess has been running now for the entire time of his imprisonment, and the hearing getting worse every week, nothing has been done in the way even of an attempted cure. The ear has been syringed on three occasions with plain water for the purpose of examination, that is all. The petitioner is naturally apprehensive lest, as often happens, the other ear may be attacked in a similar way, and to the misery of a shattered and debilitated mind be added the horrors of complete deafness.
His eyesight, of which like most men of letters he had always been obliged to take great care, has also suffered very much from the enforced living in a whitewashed cell with a flaring gas-jet at night: he is conscious of great weakness and pain in the nerves of the eyes, and objects even at a short distance become blurred. The bright daylight, when taking exercise in the prison-yard, often causes pain and distress to the optic nerve, and during the past four months the consciousness of failing eyesight has been a source of terrible anxiety, and should his imprisonment be continued, blindness and deafness may in all human probability be added to the certainty of increasing insanity and the wreck of the reason.
There are other apprehensions of danger that the limitation of space does not allow the petitioner to enter on: his chief danger is that of madness, his chief terror that of madness, and his prayer that his long imprisonment may be considered with its attendant ruin a sufficient punishment, that the imprisonment may be ended now, and not uselessly or vindictively prolonged till insanity has claimed soul as well as body as its prey, and brought it to the same degradation and the same shame.
Oscar Wilde 41
4 July 1896
HM Prison, Reading
To the Right Honourable Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department.
The Petition of the above-named prisoner humbly sheweth that the petitioner has been informed by the Governor of the Prison that Mr More Adey is anxious to see him on behalf of Mrs Oscar Wilde with reference to coming to some agreement with regard to the guardianship, education, and future of their children, and also with regard to financial arrangements connected with their marriage-settlements, which in consequence of the petitioner’s bankruptcy require serious consideration.
The petitioner is naturally anxious to meet his wife’s wishes, whatever they may be, in every possible way. But while perfectly ready to see Mr Adey on her behalf would earnestly beg that the interview be in the Solicitors’ Room and for the space of one hour, and not in the cage for half-an-hour and in presence of a warder.43
It would be impossible to discuss delicate and private matters from behind a cage and with a warder present. Mr Adey has no doubt written instructions of some kind from Mrs Wilde, who is now in Germany, which the petitioner should see or be made acquainted with. The petitioner has full confidence in Mr Adey and would gladly avail himself of his advice. In a matter so important as the guardianship and education of his children an hour is but barely sufficient time even for scant consideration. There are also difficult financial matters that require settlement. The petitioner has also to settle the question of his having access to his children, and other still more domestic questions. Hurried interviews from behind a cage in a warder’s presence are necessarily of a painful and distressing character: the petitioner is anxious that he should be able to have this important business interview, so vital for his wife and children, under conditions that allow of judgment, reflection, and, if possible, wise and rational decision.
Oscar Wilde
Wednesday [26 August 1896]44
[HM Prison, Reading]
My dear Robert,
The Governor has told me that you have written to ask to see me. It is most kind and affectionate of you, but an order has already been sent to More Adey and Arthur Clifton (whom I have not seen yet) and, as you know, I am only allowed two visitors. I did not think there would have been any chance of your being in town. I hope you are well and writing a great deal. I often think of you and of our uninterrupted friendship, of twelve years’ standing, and while I bitterly regret the sorrow that I have brought on you and others of my friends, I remember with pride and gratitude your chivalry and courage on my behalf. Should the end of my terrible punishment ever come, you are one of the few people I would like to see, and be with from time to time.
Please remember me very kindly to George Ives.45 I was greatly touched at hearing of his desire to come and see me. In the terrible solitude and silence in which one lives a message or a memory means a great deal. I hope he is hard at work writing books. I am very glad you know him. He is such a good fellow and so clever.
Should you have anything special to communicate to me – something separate from the sympathy and affection you have, I know, for me – More Adey, who is to write to me in the course of the next fortnight, will communicate it in his letter. He has to write to me on business.
I was so disappointed at not seeing you that I have been allowed as a favour to write this letter to you. Pray remember me to any of my friends who may ask after me, and believe me, dear Robert, sincerely yours
Oscar
23 September 1896
Robbie is still at the sea, with his brother and mother, who has taken a house there for him. She sends you kind messages saying she often thinks of you and prays for your welfare. Robbie is going on well, the doctors say, but he suffers a great deal from dyspepsia which affects his spirits very much. You know how much he thinks of and feels for you. He looks very ill still. He had his hair cut very short while he was at his worst and, owing to his continued weakness, it has not yet grown again and is very thin. This makes him look different. He has had a photograph taken which I hope to have an opportunity of showing you before long. He amuses himself by reading Dickens and has become quite enthusiastic over Barnaby Rudge and Our Mutual Friend etc. They just serve to amuse him without tiring his head.
Miss Schuster says ‘Could not Mr Wilde now write down some of the lovely tales he used to tell me? Remind him of one about a nursing-sister who killed the man whom she was nursing. And there was one about the two souls on the banks of the Nile. Were there time I could mention others, but I think the mere reminder of some of his tales may set his mind in that direction and stir the impulse to write. He told me also a beautiful play (just two years ago) that he has not written, about a husband, a wife and her lover, with a plot rather in the style of Frou-frou.’47
Perhaps you could jot down the plots of some of those splendid stories you told us from time to time; Robbie knows more than I do, but I remember the Moving Sphere story, and the one about the Problem and the Lunatic.48 To make a little résumé from memory of what you have already invented might put you in the vein for fresh invention.
Poor Miss Schuster has to leave her beautiful house. She cannot manage to keep it on now that her mother is dead. She is expecting Lady Brooke [the Ranee of Sarawak]49 to stay with her in October. Lady Brooke has been with your wife during the last nine months. I will try to see her, or if that is impossible, will learn from Miss Schuster all about your children, and will then try to obtain permission to visit you to tell you all about them. I should ask for permission towards the middle or end of October.
Acting on advice I have just written to the Home Secretary, undertaking, if you are released before May, to accompany you abroad at once, and promising that you will remain there until after the end of May. I hope I did right.
I have also written to your wife saying you are better, as I gave her a very bad account of you after I saw you in July. I think it would be well if you obtained leave to write to her; if you were inclined to consent to her appointing a guardian of whom you approved for your children in case of her death it would be well to tell her so, but I think a letter to her in any case would be a good thing.
If you should hear of anything that I have done on your behalf without your knowledge of which you do not approve, I trust you will repudiate it in as strong terms as you please. If you should have changed your mind about the clothes, let me know when you write, otherwise I will order you a travelling suit from your tailors Doré. I think on the whole my suggestion was the better one, but it really does not matter if you prefer my getting them at Doré’s. I shall not go abroad until I am quite certain I cannot be of any use to you here. I hope you do not think I have any feeling against Sherard. I am on perfectly friendly terms with all your friends and get on particularly well with Sherard. I merely object to his frightful indiscretion, which is a positive mania with him and, contrary to his affectionate intentions, does you harm.
[NB: this fragment of a longer letter survives only in draft form]
Friday [25 September 1896]
[HM Prison, Reading]
My dear More,
I was greatly delighted to get your letter. I was afraid that Bobbie 50 might have been ill, and that that was the cause of the delay. It was a real pleasure to hear from him at such length, and to see his old wit and pleasant satire running through his budget: I do hope he will be quite well soon. Please thank his mother for her kind messages. I am very glad she has been spared to watch over Bobbie in his illness.
I thank you very much for writing to the Home Secretary.51 I do hope it will have some effect. But pity seems to beat in vain at the doors of officialism; and power, no less than punishment, kills what else were good and gentle in a man: the man without knowing it loses his natural kindliness, or grows afraid of its exercise. Still, I hope something may be done. I admit that I look forward with horror to the prospect of another winter in prison: there is something terrible in it: one has to get up long before daybreak and in the dark-cold cell begin one’s work by the flaring gas-jet; through the small barred window only gloom seems to find an entrance: and days often go over without one’s being once even in the open air: days on which one stifles: days that are endless in their dull monotony of apathy or despair. If I could be released before the winter comes, it would be everything. On November 19th I will have had eighteen months of this black loathsome life: perhaps then something may be done. I know you will do your best: I have no words for my sense of your great wonderful kindness to me.
With regard to my children, I feel that for their own sake as well as for mine they should not be bred up to look on me with either hatred or contempt: a guardian amongst my wife’s relations would be for this reason impossible. Of course I would like Arthur Clifton if he would undertake the charge. And so, would you ask Arthur to be my solicitor now: Humphreys is of course of no use: though paid an enormous fee through Leverson he never once came to see me about my Bankruptcy: so I was allowed to become insolvent when there was no reason.52 If Arthur will be my solicitor he can on application to the Home Secretary come and see me in the Solicitors’ Room here for one hour without the presence of a warder, and with him I could discuss the whole affair, and then write to my wife on the whole subject. I would feel quite safe if Arthur was my children’s guardian. And as a solicitor his advice would be of great service. If he could come within the next fortnight it would be a great thing.53
I was greatly touched by the extract from the letter of the Lady of Wimbledon. That she should keep a gracious memory of me, and have trust or hope for me in the future, lightens for me many dreadful hours of degradation or despair. I have tried to remember and write down the Florentine Tragedy:54 but only bits of it remain with me, and I find that I cannot invent: the silence, the utter solitude, the isolation from all humane and humanising influences, kill one’s brain-power: the brain loses its life: becomes fettered to monotony of suffering. But I take notes of books I read, and copy lines and phrases in poets: the mere handling of pen and ink helps me: the horror of prison is the horror of complete brutalisation: that is the abyss always in front of one, branding itself on one’s face daily, and the faces of those one sees. I cling to my notebook: it helps me: before I had it my brain was going in very evil circles.
I am so glad you are friends with Robert Sherard: I have no doubt he is very indiscreet, but he is very true, and saved my letters from being published. I know there was nothing in them but expressions of foolish, misplaced, ill-requited, affection for one of crude and callous nature, of coarse greed, and common appetites, but that is why their publication would have been so shameful. The gibbet on which I swing in history now is high enough. There is no need that he of all men should for his own vanity make it more hideous.
I am so glad Pierre Louÿs has made a great name for himself.55 He was most cultivated, refined, and gentle. Three years ago he told me I would have to choose between his friendship and my fatal connection with A.D. I need hardly say I chose at once the meaner nature and the baser mind. In what a mire of madness I walked! …56 From your silence I see he still refuses to return my presents and letters … It is horrible he should still have the power to wound me and find some curious joy in doing so … I won’t write about him any more today. He is too evil, and there is a storm outside …
Poor Aubrey:57 I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy …
As for my clothes, my fur coat is all I need really; the rest I can get abroad. Don’t bother yourself. I hope Arthur will come and bring me good news of you and Robbie. Ever yours
Oscar
10 November 1896
HM Prison, Reading
To the Right Honourable Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department.
The Petition of the above-named prisoner humbly sheweth that in the month of June last the petitioner, having been at that time a prisoner for more than a year, addressed to the Secretary of State a petition praying for his release on the grounds chiefly of mental health.
That the petitioner has received no answer to his petition, and would earnestly beg that it be taken into consideration, as on the 19th inst. the petitioner will have completed eighteen months of solitary confinement, a sentence of terrible severity in any case, and, in the case of the petitioner, rendered all the more difficult to bear, as it has been inflicted for offences which are in other countries of Europe more rightly recognised as tragic forms of madness coming chiefly on those who over-tax their brain, in art or science.
Some alleviations have been granted to the petitioner since the date of his former petition: his ear, that was in danger of total deafness, is now attended to daily: spectacles have been provided for the protection of his eyes: he is allowed a manuscript-book to write in, and out of a list of books, selected by himself and approved of by the Prison Commissioners, a few have been added to the Prison Library: but these alleviations, for which the petitioner 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.
Of all modes of insanity – and the petitioner is fully conscious now, too conscious it may be, that his whole life, for the two years preceding his ruin, was the prey of absolute madness – the insanity of perverted sensual instinct is the one most dominant in its action on the brain. It taints the intellectual as well as the emotional energies. It clings like a malaria to soul and body alike. And while one may bear up against the monotonous hardships and relentless discipline of an English prison: endure with apathy the unceasing shame and the daily degradation: and grow callous even to that hideous grotesqueness of life that robs sorrow of all its dignity, and takes from pain its power of purification; still, the complete isolation from everything that is humane and humanising plunges one deeper and deeper into the very mire of madness, and the horrible silence, to which one is, as it were, eternally condemned, concentrates the mind on all that one longs to loathe, and creates those insane moods from which one desires to be free, creates them and makes them permanent.
Under these circumstances the petitioner prays for his release on the expiration of his term of eighteen months’ confinement, or at any rate before Christmas comes. Some friends have promised to take him abroad at once, and to see that he has the treatment and care that he requires. There is of course before him no public life: nor any life in literature any more: nor joy or happiness of life at all. He has lost wife, children, fame, honour, position, wealth: poverty is all that he can look forward to: obscurity all that he can hope for: yet he feels that, if released now, somewhere, unknown, untormented, at peace, he might be able to recreate the life of a student of letters, and find in literature an anodyne from pain, first, and afterwards a mode by which sanity and balance and wholesomeness might be restored to the soul. But the solitary confinement, that breaks one’s heart, shatters one’s intellect too: and prison is but an ill physician: and the modern modes of punishment create what they should cure, and, when they have on their side Time with its long length of dreary days, they desecrate and destroy whatever good, or desire even of good, there may be in a man.
To be at length, after these eighteen months of lonely sorrow and despair, set free, for whatever brief space of time health of mind or body may allow, is the earnest prayer of the petitioner.
Oscar Wilde
[November 1896]
[HM Prison, Reading]
[…] France by Lina Munte. Could nothing be done, in improving the company and getting fees? I would be quite ready to give for the time the complete acting rights of Salomé to Lugné-Poë. I think Robert Sherard might help with advice. Or Stuart Merrill.
(6) I brought out Salomé at my own expense with the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant. So it is mine. I have had no accounts from them of any kind. I wonder would not a new edition be advisable as it is being played? This might be arranged for, and some fees or money got. Sherard or Merrill will do it I am sure.
(7) To these purely business matters perhaps More Adey will kindly reply. His letter dealing purely with business I will be allowed to receive. It will not, I mean, interfere with your literary letter, with regard to which the Governor has just now read me your kind message.
For myself, dear Robbie, I have little to say that can please you. The refusal to commute my sentence has been like a blow from a leaden sword. I am dazed with a dull sense of pain. I had fed on hope, and now Anguish, grown hungry, feeds her fill on me as though she had been starved of her proper appetite. There are, however, kinder elements in this evil prison air than there were before: sympathies have been shown to me, and I no longer feel entirely isolated from humane influences, which was before a source of terror and trouble to me. And I read Dante, and make excerpts and notes for the pleasure of using a pen and ink. And it seems as if I were better in many ways. And I am going to take up the study of German: indeed this seems to be the proper place for such a study. There is a thorn, however – as bitter as that of St Paul, though different – that I must pluck out of my flesh in this letter.60 It is caused by a message you wrote on a piece of paper for me to see. I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with other terrible thoughts that gnaw me …61 Thought, to those that sit alone and silent and in bonds, being no ‘winged living thing’, as Plato feigned it,62 but a thing dead, breeding what is horrible, like a slime that shows monsters to the moon.
I mean, of course, what you said about the sympathies of others being estranged from me, or in danger of being so, by the deep bitterness of the feelings I expressed about Alfred Douglas: and I believe that my letter was lent and shown to others with the part about him cut out by a pair of scissors.63 Now I don’t like my letters shown about as curiosities: it is most distasteful to me: I write to you freely as to one of the dearest friends I have, or have ever had: and, with a few exceptions, the sympathy of others touches me, as far as its loss goes, very little. No man of my position can fall into the mire of life without getting a great deal of pity from his inferiors; and I know that when plays last too long, spectators tire. My tragedy has lasted far too long: its climax is over: its end is mean; and I am quite conscious of the fact that when the end does come I shall return an unwelcome visitant to a world that does not want me; a revenant, as the French say, as one whose face is grey with long imprisonment and crooked with pain. Horrible as are the dead when they rise from their tombs, the living who come out from tombs are more horrible still.
Of all this I am only too conscious. When one has been for eighteen terrible months in a prison cell, one sees things and people as they really are. The sight turns one to stone. Do not think that I would blame him for my vices. He had as little to do with them as I had with his. Nature was in this matter a stepmother to each of us. I blame him for not appreciating the man he ruined. An illiterate millionaire would really have suited him better. As long as my table was red with wine and roses, what did he care? My genius, my life as an artist, my work, and the quiet I needed for it, were nothing to him when matched with his unrestrained and coarse appetites for common profligate life: his greed for money: his incessant and violent scenes: his unimaginative selfishness. Time after time I tried, during those two wasted weary years, to escape, but he always brought me back, by threats of harm to himself chiefly. Then when his father saw in me a method of annoying his son, and the son saw in me the chance of ruining his father, and I was placed between two people greedy for unsavoury notoriety, reckless of everything but their own horrible hatred of each other, each urging me on, the one by public cards and threats, the other by private, or indeed half-public scenes, threats in letters, taunts, sneers … I admit I lost my head. I let him do what he wanted. I was bewildered, incapable of judgment. I made the one fatal step. And now … I sit here on a bench in a prison cell. In all tragedies there is a grotesque element. He is the grotesque element in mine. Do not think I do not blame myself. I curse myself night and day for my folly in allowing him to dominate my life. If there was an echo in these walls it would cry ‘Fool’ for ever. I am utterly ashamed of my friendship with him. For by their friendships men can be judged. It is a test of every man. And I feel more poignant abasement of shame for my friendship with Alfred Douglas … fifty thousand times more … than I do, say, for my connection with Charley Parker 64 of which you may read a full account in my trial. The former is to me a daily source of mental humiliation. Of the latter I never think. It troubles me not. It is of no importance … Indeed my entire tragedy sometimes seems to me grotesque and nothing else. For as a result of my having suffered myself to be thrust into the trap Queensberry had laid for me – the trap he openly betted in the Orleans Club he would lure me into – as a result of that, the father ranks in history with the good parents of moral tales: the son with the Infant Samuel: and I, in the lowest mire of Malebolge,65 sit between Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade.66 In certain places no one, except those actually insane, is allowed to laugh: and, indeed, even in their case it is against the regulations for conduct: otherwise I think I would laugh at that … For the rest, do not let Alfred Douglas suppose that I am crediting him with unworthy motives. He really had no motives in his life at all. Motives are intellectual things. He had passions merely. And such passions are False Gods that will have victims at all costs, and in the present case have had one wreathed with bay. He himself cannot but choose to feel some remorse. That he should really realise what he has done would be a burden too heavy for him to bear. But he must sometimes think of it. So in your letter tell me how he lives, what his occupations are, his mode of life.
And so now I have in my letter plucked the thorn out. That little scrawled line of yours rankled terribly. I now think merely of you getting quite well again, and writing at last the wonderful story of the little restaurant with the strange dish of meat served to the silent clients.67 Pray remember me, with my thanks, to your dear mother, and also to Aleck. The gilded Sphinx is I suppose wonderful as ever. And send from me all that in my thoughts and feelings is good, and whatever of remembrance and reverence she will accept, to the Lady of Wimbledon, whose soul is a sanctuary for those who are wounded, and a house of refuge for those in pain. Do not show this letter to others, nor discuss what I have written, in your answer. Tell me about that world of shadows I loved so much. And about his life and soul tell me also. I am curious of the thing that stung me: and in my pain there is pity.
Oscar
Wednesday Evening, 16 December [1896]
[HM Prison, Reading]
My dear More,
I have received a letter from Mr Hargrove informing me that the Official Receiver has determined to sell half of my interest to my friends, and that under these circumstances, unless your offer is at once withdrawn, my wife’s offer 68 contained in the letters handed to Arthur Clifton will be withdrawn too.
I feel that I had better trust myself entirely to your judgment, and I am now of opinion that your course was a wise one. I know you and others have carefully considered the whole case, and my wife’s proposal that in case of my surviving her I was to have £150 a year was, I think, a cruel and heartless one, and as inconsiderate of the children’s interest as of my existence.
What Hargrove’s next move will be I do not know. If my wife leaves me absolutely without a penny I can only trust that for a year at any rate I will be looked after, and I may be able to write again. Business matters, such as the present, of course upset me, and make me weak in mind and body, with the hysteria of shattered nerves, sleeplessness, and the anguish in which I walk; but Art is different. There one makes one’s own world. It is with shadows that one weeps and laughs. A mirror will give back to one one’s own sorrow. But Art is not a mirror, but a crystal. It creates its own shapes and forms.
(2) It would be a great thing for me to see you (or Arthur Clifton) some time next month, and at intervals, on my affairs. I hope permission will be granted.69 I suggested, on the last occasion, Arthur, as through his being a solicitor I felt it gave some chance of the interview being private. You remember how abortive and painful and useless was my interview with you, with the Prison Officer seated between us to note the subject and character of our conversation; I could not discuss anything with you to any purpose, and finally cut short the interview. I was unable to go through with it. I would sooner see you, as you are more thoroughly acquainted with all the various difficulties in my way. Were the matter in the hands of the Governor I would have no fear of the result. But the matter is entirely one for the Commissioners. In case they prove obdurate, would your solicitor, Mr Holman, act for me, if Mr Hargrove tries to force legal proceedings? Nothing would induce me to see Humphreys. His advice would, I think, be worthless. This, for your consideration. His fees to be managed through Leverson.
(3) With regard to the books, there has been a little misunderstanding. The list was sent to you that you should add whatever new books you could think of, such as Stevenson’s memoirs etc.:70 books published since my imprisonment. To save time and trouble, it was considered more politic to have no further delay. So my list will have to suffice. And, indeed, will be a very great boon to me – of incalculable service – even Ollendorff71 priceless: I find that to study a language one had forgotten is a good mental tonic: the mere mechanical side having its value. Of the kindness of my good friend Arthur72 Humphreys, the publisher, I cannot trust myself to write. It is a very dear remembrance on his part of a pleasant literary friendship. Give him my warmest thanks. When I read Walter Pater I shall have two friends to think of. The books, however, remain behind. They are sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. But they may soothe and heal other troubled minds and breaking hearts. Those not on Humphreys’s really lavish list, pray provide. Perhaps in February a few new books may be got. But these are, now, more than most welcome. I wait them eagerly.73
(4) I feel that my wife does not realise my mental state, or the suffering, both mental and physical, she is inflicting on me. I wish she could be brought to see that she should let me alone now for the next five months. When I reflect that the only two people who have, since my imprisonment, tried to distress me by terrible letters are my wife and Lord Queensberry, I feel fixed on some shrill pinnacle of horror. Lady Brooke has influence with my wife. Could she be asked from me to suggest to my wife not to trouble me or distress me any more till my release? We were great friends once.
(5) As my affairs are apparently being wound up I am anxious that the French translator of my novel should be considered.74 I was under the impression that the French copyright was mine. It seems that, subject to a ten per cent royalty, it is Ward & Lock’s. Of course, their having it is absurd. But I am entitled to ten per cent on every copy sold, which of course should go to the translator. Would you see Kernahan, the author, who is one of Ward & Lock’s readers, and a friend of mine. The nominal sum of £10 was paid for the French rights to Humphreys: but it is monstrous that Ward & Lock should be making money before the translator is paid. The French are so nice to me, I am horrified at the position of the translator. I propose to refund the £10, through Leverson, and then to have the translator considered. His honorarium should be not less than £50. If I, through Leverson, have half of this paid, would Ward & Lock pay the rest? Also what of my ten per cent?
(6) The French rights of all my plays are mine. The mischief of Lady Windermere’s Fan has been done.75 I suppose there is no use bothering.
(7) A matter of great seriousness was alluded to by Arthur Clifton, and written about by Robbie, to me: but in both cases with such delicacy that it is still quite unintelligible to me. I refer to my feelings with regard to Alfred Douglas. I have not mentioned the subject to anyone but Robbie: I am horrified to think that newspapers should busy themselves with it: I don’t know what they say, or who writes the things. Eighteen months ago I asked Robert Sherard to stop the publication of any more of my letters: since then, I have said nothing to him on the matter. If he writes on me, pray beg him from me never to mention in conjunction with mine that ill-omened and most unfortunate name, so fatal to me and to my house. Also, I would like you to see all my letters to Robbie. I find that I accused him of a mutilation, done here under the old régime, without my knowledge. I am very sorry. I have been unjust to Robbie. In this life we lead, we become ungracious. Tell him all this.
(8) In case of my copyrights being sold I hope the Receiver will let me know what terms are offered. There are some I consider of value still: Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere, The Importance of Being Earnest, have still money-making chances. I fear it is only by putting all my troubles on to your shoulders that I can show you my gratitude to you and my trust in you. In such a strange plight Fate places one. Ever yours
Oscar
31 December 1896
HM Prison, Reading
Gentlemen,
I hereby authorise you to act as my solicitors in reference to my family affairs, both with regard to my life interest in my wife’s estate, and also to the guardianship of my children, and I request you to inform Messrs Hargrove & Son, 16 Victoria Street, Westminster Abbey, SW, that I desire that any communication which they may have to make to me should be made to me through you.
I believe I am correct in stating that the general outlines of the matter at issue have been communicated, by or through Mr More Adey, to you, but I am anxious, for your guidance and satisfaction, as well as for my own, that my own wishes and views should be clearly conveyed to you under my own hand.
I feel that it is quite right that the guardianship of the children should be vested in my wife, and that she should have the right to appoint guardians for them in case of her decease. In the latter case I think I should be allowed access to them ‘at reasonable intervals on occasions approved of by the guardians’. In the former case I would be ready to leave the matter to my wife, and to engage not to make any attempt to see the children against her wishes, or to communicate with them in any way except through her. I agree readily to their bearing another name than mine: the name, in fact, she has chosen which is an old family name on her side.76 I would not myself wish to reside in the same town with them. I propose to live, if I live anywhere, in Brussels. I have written all this to my wife, and I have also conveyed it to Mr Hargrove.
With regard to money affairs, the offer made to me by my wife of £150 a year is, of course, extremely small. I certainly hoped that £200 would have been fixed on. I understand that my wife alleges as one of the reasons for £150 being selected that she wishes to pay off a debt of £500 due from me to her brother Mr Otho Lloyd, at the rate of £50 a year. I think, with Mr Adey, that I should have the £200 if that debt should be paid off by me. However, I do not wish to haggle over the terms, though of course I think them small. The income under our marriage settlement is about £1000 a year, and on the death of Mrs Wilde’s mother some addition will accrue.
With regard to my life interest I sincerely hope that half at least will be purchased for me. My wife does not realise that in case of my surviving her and living to any advanced age it would really be bad for my children to have an unfortunate father living in penury, and perhaps forced to make application for assistance to them. Such a state of things would be in every way undesirable and unseemly. In the case of my surviving my wife I wish to be placed above any necessity of troubling my children for my support. I was in hopes that at least half the interest would by this time have been secured, but I have been misled by Mr Hargrove’s letter, which I enclose. As regards the other half, if it also could be got for me it would enable me to resettle it at once on the children as a proof of the affection I have for them and the genuineness of the position I am taking up with regard to their future welfare.
I should mention that my wife came to see me at Wands-worth prison and wrote to me a very touching and affectionate letter then (October year last).77 She also on the death of my mother, Lady Wilde, came to break the news to me here in person78 and displayed great tenderness and affection, but it is now nearly a year since I have seen her, and the long absence, combined with influences hostile to me personally surrounding her, has made her take up a certain stand with regard to my life interest and my income during her life. She is quite aware of the deep affection existing between me and my sons, and in her last letter (November 21) expresses her hope that ‘when they are older they may be proud to acknowledge me as their father’ and that I may win back the intellectual position I have lost; with other gracious wishes. Mr Hargrove in one of his letters stated that the proposed £150 a year would be forfeited on my breaking any of the conditions attached to it. This is, I admit, a painful and humiliating position for me to look forward to. I think my solemn agreement should be sufficient. The happiness of my children is my sole object and desire.
Would you kindly ask Mr More Adey to use all his efforts to see me here himself. I have much to talk to him about. Also tell him that I quite understand that the books were a present from my friend Mr Humphreys the publisher. Also that Mr Alexander holds no French rights at all in Lady Windermere’s Fan (one of my comedies) but that I am glad he should act for me.
I hope you will allow me to express in conclusion my thanks to you for undertaking this delicate and difficult matter for me. It relieves me of a great deal of the mental anxiety and distress incident on my condition, and intensified by Mr Hargrove’s violent and harsh letters. I remain yours faithfully
Oscar Wilde
18 February 1897
[HM Prison, Reading]
My dear More,
The Governor has kindly allowed me to see your letter, and to answer it at once.
(1) With what pleasure I have read it I need not say. On Saturday the 27th I hope to see you with Robbie and Ernest Leverson. The interview, by special permission, is to be of an hour’s duration and in a private room. A warder will be present, but this need not incommode us. The visiting order is for three. We shall then surely be able to discuss all business matters. Business with you, seriousness with Ernest, nonsense with Robbie.
(2) I enclose the authorisation for Lugné-Poë. Pray thank him from me for his kindness. To be represented by so distinguished a poet charms me.
(3) With regard to what I will call the ‘deposit-fund’, that is a sum of money left for my disposal, not for the paying of my debts, but for my own help, and support, and the help of those I love, like my mother, there will, I feel sure, be, after what has been expended on my dear mother, a certain sum left, perhaps not small. Out of this I propose to pay in instalments at first my debts of honour, after I have seen that enough is forthcoming to give me at least eighteen months of free life to collect myself. To Charles Wyndham,79 to take merely one instance out of alas! too many, I owe £300 for literary work never done: my trial of course prevented it. I must pay him half, if possible. But I want to do it myself when I go out of prison. Also with regard to Miss Napier, the money was advanced to my wife (£50) and I will pay it myself when I go out. I forget if Mrs Napier80 lent my wife anything. The debt of £50 to my old friend please have paid at once from me through Ernest Leverson. I am sure Ernest will see that I must begin by paying half to people and then gradually all. Of this when we meet. It is only a week off. I may say that I would like to wait and see what my wife proposes to do before I come forward as having kind and generous friends. She has no right to take technical advantage of our marriage-settlement to leave me without anything.
(4) I told you I was going to write to Alfred Douglas. I am still at work at the letter.81 It is the most important letter of my life, as it will deal ultimately with my future mental attitude towards life, with the way in which I desire to meet the world again, with the development of my character: with what I have lost, what I have learned, and what I hope to arrive at. At last I see a real goal towards which my soul can go simply, naturally, and rightly. Before I see you and Robbie I must finish the letter, that you may understand what I have become, or rather desire to become in nature and aim. My whole life depends on it. I will send the letter to Robbie, who must read it carefully and copy it out carefully every word, for me. Then you, having read it and seen that it is copied rightly, will send it for me to A. D. I don’t know his address. I hope to have it finished by Tuesday.
To dear Frank Harris my kindest regards and thanks. To you always my best of thanks and gratitude
Oscar Wilde
8 March 1897
HM Prison, Reading
My dear More,
I am very much obliged to you for your letter, which the Governor has kindly allowed me to have and to answer. My business is I know unpleasant, but then it was not for pleasure that you took its burden on you, so I will write quite frankly to you.
Your news has distressed me a good deal. The claims of my own trustees and my brother-in-law would of course be easily withdrawn, and I thought I could, if the Queensberry debt was paid, as it should have been, by the Queensberry family, have made an effort at any rate to pay off my own personal creditors, who are really very few in number. I see, however, that this cannot be. I will now have to think of how to retain or buy my interest in my books and plays. I do not think they will be valued high. As £150 has been already been paid to Humphreys who did nothing to help me (beyond of course forcing me to put in two appearances at the Bankruptcy Court where one would have been sufficient and engaging their own relative Mr Grain82 to appear as counsel where no counsel was required) I am reluctant to even write to them. I am very anxious however to know how I can be kept informed of the state of things, so that if my copyrights are to be sold I may have a chance of bidding for them. I am also anxious about my claim to the place in Ireland: it is now in utter rack and ruin, but I am reluctant to see it pass to a stranger: could Mr Holman, already in touch with the Receiver, let you know if anything happens? In the case of my brother’s death, without male issue, the Irish property should fetch something: £4000 or £5000 at least.
As regards the Queensberry family, I of course feel very strongly about their allowing me to be made bankrupt by their father for the costs of the trial, and for such an absolutely contemptible sum; less than half, as I told you, of what in three wasted summer months I spent on Bosie at Goring – less than one half! Their idea that it would be a sort of ‘score’ off their father not to pay him his paltry claim showed how utterly blind they were to my feelings. As for Queensberry, I suppose nobody ever had such intense pleasure of a low order at such a low cost as he had. It was in the cheapest of markets that he bought his triumph. Indeed it was the only occasion in his life that he found his pleasures economical. To send a man like myself to prison for £900, and then to take him out and make him an insolvent for £700 more, was a piece of good fortune he never looked for. As regards my own debts, they were hardly anything. Their letting their father triumph a second time over me, rather than pay so petty, so abject a sum as £700, cut me very deeply. And people who live in the world of action don’t understand that there is another world in which they who are not free live: a world in which nothing happens but emotions, and in which consequently emotions have a power, a proportion, a permanence that is beyond the possibility of description.
I was told, on Percy’s behalf, that he had laid aside the sum of £600 for me, as the equivalent of his father’s costs, to be used I suppose in buying back for me the property the Bankruptcy Receiver had seized, and possibly in other ways. I conveyed to him my thanks. I consider Percy a very good-hearted fellow, kind and considerate. I would very much like to see him again some time. He should of course have paid the costs, and left me then if necessary to settle my other debts. But he, I have no doubt, acted under advice. If he had realised matters a little more he would have seen that he merely doubled his father’s delight and exultation by not interfering to prevent my insolvency. It was the only thing Queensberry was afraid of. He need not have been …83 With regard to the whole question the Queensberry family must remember that through them I am in prison, through them a bankrupt, and that they can hardly allow people whom they ruined so completely to go to the workhouse.
I was touched and helped immeasurably by your telling me that some friends of mine have arranged that for eighteen months I am to have enough to live on: that gives me breathing space. But of course I cannot trespass for a lifetime on those on whom I have no more claim than any other of the poor and wretched and homeless people of whom God’s world is so full. I couldn’t do it. And I may live longer than eighteen months. A heart may be broken and yet fulfil its natural functions. The soul may sit in the shadow of death, and yet the body walk in the ways of life, and breathe and eat and know the sun and rain. I have no organic disease of any kind. I am troubled with insomnia, but I get my four or five hours of sleep every night. Supposing I live on? I should not be at all surprised if I did. I come of a long-lived race. The Queensberry family had better consider the point, the Douglases we will call them, as the other name is loathsome. There are debts of dishonour in a family as well as debts of honour. If the Douglas estates have to be burdened with a prospective claim of some paltry life-interest, let them be so burdened. A family cannot ruin a man like me, and look on the whole thing merely as a subject for sentiment or reminiscence over the walnuts and the wine. People, as somebody in one of Ibsen’s plays says, don’t do these things.84 It is dreadful that it should fall on me to remind them. They should consult their family solicitor, and let him communicate the result to my solicitor. That is all that is necessary.
You say in your letter that Bosie is so anxious to make ‘some little return’ to me for all I ‘spent on him’. Unfortunately, I spent on him my life, my genius, my position, my name in history; for these no little, or big return is possible. But as regards the mere wretched pounds, shillings, and pence side of my ruin – the workhouse aspect – he must seriously consider the whole point. It is his duty to do so. His duty to himself as much, far more indeed, than to me. When people play a tragedy they should play it in the ‘grand style’. All smallness, pettiness, meagreness of mood or gesture is out of place. If the Douglases don’t recognise this, let me be informed. But I don’t doubt that they will. It is a perfectly obvious matter. And as for me, my life will of course necessarily be one of great retirement, simplicity and economy of living, and many modes of self-denial, imposed and accepted. But a certain small permanence is requisite even for the practice of the virtues of thrift and economy. Bosie must consider the matter. I will be much obliged if you will copy out all that I have written, from the bottom of page one,85 and send it off to him. It will relieve my own letter to him of a very unpleasing duty, one that a little thought on his part would have spared me.
As regards my children, I sincerely hope I may be recognised by the Court as having some little, I won’t say right, but claim to be allowed to see Cyril from time to time: it would be to me a sorrow beyond words if I were not. I do hope the Court will see in me something more than a man with a tragic vice in his life. There is so much more in me, and I always was a good father to both my children. I love them dearly and was dearly loved by them, and Cyril was my friend. And it would be better for them not to be forced to think of me as an outcast, but to know me as a man who has suffered. Pray let everything be done on my behalf that is possible. A little recognition by the Court would help me so much. And it is a terrible responsibility for the Law to say to a father that he is unfit to see his own children: the consciousness of it often makes me unhappy all day long.
As regards my life-interest, should Mr Hargrove make any proposal about it, it of course will be communicated to me by you at once. It will require grave consideration. The advances cannot come from me, can they? Should my own solicitor come to see me, pray let it be the last week in this month. I am quite distressed at the idea of his only charging £1.1s and expenses. I think he should have at least £3.3s. Let the money be got from Leverson, and whatever Mr Stoker 86 is owed be paid to him from the same fund in Leverson’s hands.
I fear you see traces of bitterness in my business letters. Yes, that is so. It is very terrible. In the prison in which my body is I am shown much kindness, but in the prison in which my soul is I can show myself none. I hope that neither in your heart nor in Robbie’s, nor in the heart of any that have been good to me, will bitterness of any kind ever find a place. It makes one suffer very deeply. Your affectionate friend
Oscar Wilde
I quite see that I must accept, gratefully indeed, my discharge as a bankrupt, when I get it, and then set to work to try and pay off some of the debts. I suppose it won’t be done till I go out of prison? I would like things held over, on account of the sale of copyrights etc. At present I receive no communication at all from the Receiver. That is, I suppose, right.
For the list of books, so many thanks. I am going to ask for a Bible in French: la Sainte Bible.87