REFORMED PRISONER OR PRISON REFORM?: AN ACCOUNT OF OSCAR WILDE’S CARCERAL WRITINGS (1895-1900)

Mohsen Gholami,Majid Yazdani

doi:10.21533/epiphany.v13i1.317

Mohsen Gholami, Majid Yazdani

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.21533/epiphany.v13i1.317

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Abstract

The present paper aims at sifting through Oscar Wilde’s carceral/post-carceral writings: De Profundis (1905), The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and The Daily Chronicle’s letters (1897-8) in order to pinpoint how Oscar Wilde’s literary voice, during incarceration, transformed from that of an aesthete, or a witty writer into an uncompromising prison reform activist, remaining actively engaged in mounting a propaganda tool against the desperate plight and hardship of the late nineteenth-century penal system, and accordingly, calling for the necessity of implementing major penal reformations as a retaliatory measure. The overriding question concerning this paper, therefore, will center on ‘How prison reformed Oscar Wilde’, and ‘How Oscar Wilde reformed prison’ from every conceivable angle to explore the fact that Oscar Wilde is worthy of consideration in the way in which he was affected in prison and solitary confinement and how he summoned strength to cope with the deprivations of prison life as well as implementing his recommendations to help reform prison, which were incorporated in the 1898 Prison Act.

Highlights

On May 25th, 1895, Oscar Wilde ( Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde) was prosecuted and assailed for the abominable crime of buggery and “gross indecency”[1] (Smith, 1976, p. 165-173), as a consequence of the ‘judicial conflict’ (Hernen, 2013, p. 221) between him and Lord Alfred Douglas’s2 father, the Marquess of Queensbury
Oscar Wilde was handed down a determinate two-year sentence of hard labour, – ‘a term that the Gladstone Committee (Cross, 1971, p. 3) judged to be more than a man could endure and that the 1898 Prison Act[3] would abolish (Bailey, 1997, p. 289)
Sent to Newgate Prison in London for processing, thereupon followed by a brief stay in Pentonville Prison (May 25–July 4, 1895; May 18– 19, 1897), where the ‘hard labour’ (Fig. 1) to which he had been sentenced consisted of many hours of ‘walking a treadmill’[4] (Fig. 2), and ‘picking oakum’[5] (Fig. 3), and where prisoners were permitted solely to wade through the Bible, hymns and The Pilgrim’s Progress

Summary

Introduction

On May 25th, 1895, Oscar Wilde ( Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde) was prosecuted and assailed for the abominable crime of buggery and “gross indecency”[1] (Smith, 1976, p. 165-173), as a consequence of the ‘judicial conflict’ (Hernen, 2013, p. 221) between him and Lord Alfred Douglas’s2 father, the Marquess of Queensbury.

Results

Conclusion