Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on his “Pit of Shame”)

“In Reading gaol by Reading town

There is a pit of shame,

And in it lies a wretched man

Eaten by teeth of flame,

In burning winding-sheet he lies,

And his grave has got no name.”—Oscar Wilde, from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898)

The last, tragic act in the life of Oscar Wilde—the dandy who, who like fellow Anglo-Irishman George Bernard Shaw, conquered the late Victorian theater scene through his wit and paradoxes—began in earnest when he was sentenced on this date in 1895 to two years of hard labor for “gross indecency”—his society’s shuddering term for homosexuality.

The playwright—whose fortunes took a perilous nosedive following the triumphant premiere of his greatest comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, a mere three months ago—was taken to Reading Gaol (now known as HM Prison Reading, and re-designated for young offenders), a penal institution only 30 miles from London, but light years removed in sensibility from the high society whose social code he had satirized onstage and flouted off.

In a prior post, I noted that Wilde started on his path of self-destruction when he received a ferocious calling card from the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his young male lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Instead of ignoring or even laughing off the misspelled insult (Queensberry called him a “Sondomite”), and/or fleeing for the Continent, as many wise friends counseled, Wilde heeded the advice of the peevish Douglas and sued Queensberry for criminal libel.

Within three months, Wilde’s entire world had turned upside down. Queensberry’s attorney, Edward Carson, got his client off with a parade of witnesses testifying to the playwright’s patronage of “rent boys,” or young male prostitutes.

Now the legal prey rather than the pursuer, Wilde found that he had run afoul of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which outlawed homosexual acts.

The two trials broke his reputation, but hard labor broke his body and spirit.

Two major writings emerged from his confinement. De Profundis (literally, “from the depths”), a letter addressed to Douglas, featured a title that could just as easily been used in place of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

The Ballad appeared in February 1898, nine months after Wilde’s release from prison, under the pseudonym “C.C.3”—his prison number. In a real sense, it suggested his attempt at a new identity.

Gone was the dandy who mocked everything, including, famously, his own-self-importance, at his first trial. (Questioned whether he adored any man younger than himself, he responded: “I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.”)

In his place was a more sorrowful persona, one now intimately familiar with absolute despair (“The world had thrust us from its heart,/And God from out His care.”).

Penniless, guilty over the early death of his long-suffering wife, his health broken, Wilde died in 1900, only three years after his prison term ended. His deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism—a faith he had explored as a college student—was signaled in Ballad, however, as he considered the only means out of his shame and despair:

“How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?”