Oscar Wilde in Prison

Abstract

I had also, towards the end of the ‘nineties,’ served on the Committee appointed by the Home Office to investigate the organization of our prisons. As an aid to the discharge of my duties on this Committee I had a warrant which enabled me to go to any prison, at any hour, and call on the Governor to produce any prisoner. During the time of our work Oscar Wilde had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment under circumstances which are well remembered. I used to meet him in the days of his social success, and, although I had not known him well, was haunted by the idea of what this highly sensitive man was probably suffering under ordinary prison treatment.¹ I went to Holloway Gao1, ² where I knew he was, and asked the Governor to let me see him. The Chaplain was called in, and he said that he was glad I had come, for with Wilde he had wholly failed to make any way. I then saw Wilde himself, alone in a cell. At first he refused to speak. I put my hand on his prison-dress-clad shoulder and said that I used to know him and that I had come to say something about himself. He had not fully used his great literary gift, and the reason was that he had lived a life of pleasure and had not made any great subject his own. Now misfortune might prove a blessing for his career, for he had got a great subject.

An Autobiography (London: Hodder & Stoughton; Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1929) pp. 177–9. Editor’s title.