SOURCE: Youngs, Tim. “‘A Sonnet out of a Skilly’: Oscar Wilde's ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’” Critical Survey 11, no. 3 (1999): 40-7.

[In the following essay, Youngs analyzes Wilde's poignant poem about a prison execution to highlight the ways in which prison changed the poet and his writings, concluding that the sordid, bestial conditions of prison compelled Wilde to confront realism.]

One remarkable career may have been launched at an institution in Reading (John Lucas's, which this volume honours, at the University), but another reached an inglorious end at a different institution there: Oscar Wilde's in Reading Gaol. Perhaps the arrival of John, a lover of the national sport, is anticipated in Wilde's line: ‘A cricket cap was on his head’, but there the similarity probably ends.¹

After being convicted on 25 May 1895 for indecency and sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour, Wilde eventually arrived at Reading Gaol on 23 November 1895, having been transferred from Wandsworth. (He had previously been held at Newgate and then at Pentonville.) He was released on 18 May 1897. His long poem, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, was begun in July 1897, completed in October, and published in February 1898. It is dedicated to the memory of prisoner Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, and is structured around his crime and punishment. Wooldridge had been sentenced to death for the premeditated murder of his wife. Startlingly, Wilde promotes an identification of himself with the murderer.

Wilde's experience in jail changed him. How much has been debated. Regenia Gagnier has an idiosyncratic dig at ‘Wilde's critics, who typically find his prison experience a more decisive turning-point than he did’.² She rejects both poles of argument about ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’: W. E. Henley's that Wilde ‘is merely posing and Chesterton's that for possibly the first time he is sincere’. All critics since Henley (in 1898) ‘have seen Reading Gaol as radically disjoined from his earlier work’. Gagnier's line is that it is not. She maintains (with some justification) that ‘socialist tendencies’ were present in Wilde's earlier work and that Wilde was consistent, but that his socialism went almost unnoticed until his imprisonment gave it a dress his contemporaries could recognise. However, she goes too far when she claims that ‘writing Reading Gaol in Naples, living once again with Douglas, Wilde was neither changed nor redeemed’.³ She does indeed go too far: to the wrong country, in fact.⁴ Wilde wrote the poem in France when he was living away from Douglas. That aside, her denial of change seems strange. André Gide reported Wilde as saying that ‘Prison has completely changed me’.⁵ It is difficult to see how any critic can propose a more decisive change than that. Even if Gide has fabricated or misremembered Wilde's remark, there is plenty of other evidence, from Wilde's friends and from his own writing, that attests to a transformation.

Richard Ellmann, Wilde's best known biographer, quotes Wilde's sister-in-law, Lily, who visited him on 22 October 1895, as writing: ‘He is very altered in every way’. Wilde's wife, Constance, told Edward Burne-Jones that her husband ‘was changed beyond recognition’. Robert Ross, having seen Wilde for the first time since his arrest, remarked: ‘I really should not have known him at all’.⁶ Ross's visit was occasioned by the proceedings against Wilde for bankruptcy. The second and final stage of the bankruptcy hearing occurred on 12 November 1895. Wilde's friends having failed to raise the sum required to pay off his debts, ‘he was officially declared bankrupt and his affairs put in the hands of a receiver’.⁷

Wilde is reported to have declared: ‘I died in prison’. In a way this might be true. After a fall, he suffered from pains in his ear, which was later operated on in France. His death, on 30 November 1900, may have been caused, it is thought, or at least hastened, by complications arising from the operation. Additionally, and crucially, he feared greatly for his sanity while in jail. Writing to Ross on 1 April 1897, Wilde referred to ‘my mental development in prison, and the inevitable evolution of character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place’. (Letters, 240) In De Profundis, he announces ‘Sorrow … and all that it teaches one, is my new world’, and reminds us that ‘I used to live entirely for pleasure’.⁸ Since he believed ‘My life is like a work of art’, it is sensible to assume that his art must have been affected as his situation changed so profoundly. It was.

De Profundis, Wilde's extraordinary autobiographical letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover, was written in his last year in jail between January and March 1897. It is a critical document in his life and thought. In it he advises Douglas to ‘let the reading of this terrible letter … prove to you as important a crisis and turning-point of your life as the writing of it is to me’. Apart from De Profundis and the ‘Ballad’, and excepting his private correspondence, his letters to The Daily Chronicle in May 1897 and March 1898 are his only significant post-prison works. All are characterised by an explicit concern with the experience and effects of prison life. The frivolous side of his wit had been killed off.

Although Gagnier seems to find Wilde's prison experience a less decisive turning-point than he himself did, she does offer an important corrective to many commentaries on ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ when she writes that it ‘is about physical love’.⁹ Yet she does not offer any signs of that (male) bodily love. These, whether they are erected consciously or not, are present in the poem and they inform the narrator's sympathetic identification with the condemned man. When the poem was published, its first and early editions carried not Wilde's name but his cell number, ‘C. 3. 3.’,¹⁰ a tag that would strengthen the connection between both prisoners as well as creating the expectation of an autobiographical voice. And in a letter to Frank Harris, he wrote: ‘I … feel that the poem is too autobiographical’ (Letters, p.328).

The link between the narrator and the doomed trooper is established early in the poem. The first four stanzas move from observation of the man to an implicit comparison with him. The first stanza begins: ‘He did not wear’; the second: ‘He walked’; the third: ‘I never saw a man who looked / With such a wistful eye’; and the fourth: ‘I walked, with other souls in pain’. We have quickly gone from the narrator's looking at another to reflecting on his own parallel action (‘He walked’; ‘I walked’). In fact, the psychological identification is far closer even at this point than the poem openly discloses. In the fourth stanza the narrator wonders what crime the man has committed and learns from a whisper: ‘That fellow's got to swing.’ (l.24). A few months before he wrote the poem, Wilde had complained in a letter that ‘The gibbet on which I swing in history now is high enough’ (Letters, p.148). Wilde's envisaging himself as hanging in a figurative way that corresponds to Wooldrige's actual hanging should make us alert to the ways in which symbolism and actual description rub against each other in the poem. The narrator's identification with the murderer is made strongly in stanzas five and six, which bring the first section to a close. His soul is in pain. He knows what ‘hunted thought’ (l.31) oppresses the trooper: ‘The man had killed the thing he loved, / And so he had to die’ (ll.35-6). We infer from the shared knowledge a shared crime or sin.

In the third stanza of the second section of the poem it is difficult not to see an encoded expression of male love, together with its contemporary scandals of male prostitution:

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh …

(ll. 49-52)

These references to love bought and sold and to remorse and untroubled acceptance relate directly to Wilde's homosexual experiences. Throughout De Profundis, Wilde charged Douglas with having brought him to bankruptcy: ‘between the autumn of 1892 and the date of my imprisonment I spent with you and on you more than £5000 in actual money, irrespective of the bills I incurred’ (De Profundis, p.43). For Wilde, in jail, this is love bought at a terrible price. His prison and post-prison letters veer wildly between recrimination over this and a desire for reconciliation. The love he had bought from other, particularly younger, working-class men, was purchased at the cost (when revealed in court) of humiliation. The sentiments expressed in the stanza, therefore, help set up the corresponding ‘death of shame’ (l.55) that both ‘C.T.W.’ and the narrator experience. Shame is the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ in Douglas's poem, ‘Two Loves’, about which Wilde was cross-examined in court; and is the loveliest ‘Of all sweet passions’ in Douglas's poem ‘In Praise of Shame’.¹¹ The ‘wretched man’ who lies in ‘a pit of shame’ (ll.38-9) may ostensibly be Wooldridge; symbolically it is Wilde.

Probably less meant symbols of male love, but arguably symbols of it nonetheless, are found at various places in the ‘Ballad’. When the speaker of the poem tells us that the other prisoners wonder if they ‘Would end the self-same way’ (l.154), he concludes ‘For none can tell to what red Hell / His sightless soul may stray’ (ll.155-6). Later on he pronounces: ‘We were as men who through a fen / Of filthy darkness grope’ (ll.355-6). Whether intended as such or not, these images lend themselves to sexual interpretation.

Through the use of such symbols and images the poem quickly begins to work on a metaphorical level: it is not just about society's punishment of murder but about the ostracism of those who break social laws (and religious ordnance). In this respect a crucial stanza is that which ends Section II:

A prison wall was round us both,
          Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
          And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
          Had caught us in its snare.

(ll. 169-74)

The lines might apply equally to Wilde and Douglas, or to any gay men, as much as to the two prisoners. Pulling or widening the reference of the subject like this, as Wilde does, allows the poem to be read on a couple of levels throughout: there is the trooper's murderous crime and there is Wilde's.

On the eve of the execution the other prisoners cannot rest for crying: ‘there is no sleep when men must weep / Who never yet have wept’ (ll. 259-60). Imaginative sympathy is felt for the man whose life is about to end. An empathy that is quite out of keeping with Wilde's earlier, highly individualistic work, with its air of detached amusement, is built up. Self-pity is stirred and displaced by cognizance of another's doom. We have other evidence, outside the poem, of Wilde's new capacity for identification. In a letter to the governor of Reading Gaol, Major Nelson, Wilde wrote: ‘Of course I side with the prisoners: I was one, and I belong to their class now’ (Letters, p.282). One may take also his admission to Leonard Smithers that ‘I was not present at the Reading execution, nor do I know anything about it. I am describing a general scene with general types’ (Letters, p.315) as a further indication of a broader vision beyond the individual. Part of the difficulty in reading the poem is caused by a tension between the specific and the type; the self and the group. This should be no surprise since Wilde cannot but have felt his crafted individuality threatened by his prison uniform; that is, by his forced identity of ‘C. 3. 3.’, a prisoner and a homosexual.

Critics have on the whole been slow to recognise within the ‘Ballad’ allusions to physical male love. If for Douglas and Wilde it had been the love that dare not speak its name, many dare not hear it. At the moment of Wooldridge's hanging, there fall these lines:

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
          None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
          More deaths than one must die.

(ll. 391-6)

Regrets and sweats, the plural lives and deaths all connote Wilde's sexuality and its consequences. Ellmann writes, partly, though not only, of Wilde's homosexuality, that ‘Wilde prided himself on living a life not double but multiple’.¹² At the very instant of the execution Wilde moves the focus away from Wooldridge towards himself. The poet takes the condemned man's life—and death. But this is not a selfish appropriation. It may be another instance of that strategy by which Wilde represents himself as a figure so tragic he is Christlike, but it seeks to attain self-understanding through the other's fate. (In De Profundis he had asserted: ‘Christ realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation’.) Admittedly, Wilde does run the considerable risk of equating his crime with the trooper's, a comparison which may appear to make murder a less terrible thing than it is, as John Stokes, for one, has suggested: ‘Wilde suppresses the knowledge that the man's crime—murder—is of a radically different kind from his own alleged offences’. Stokes seems to take this as confirmation of what many critics have felt: ‘It is as if Wilde had lost his usually deft control over the transactions between actor and spectator and the multiple personality had become all but unmanageable’.¹³ Yet this is what makes the poem so engaging. Wilde thought so, too:

The poem suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic: some poetry, some propaganda. I feel it keenly, but as a whole I think the production interesting: that it is interesting from more points of view than one is artistically to be regretted.

(Letters, p.311)

Wilde is trying to forge new relationships and arrive at a new understanding. In the wonderfully powerful fifth canto he steps from a contemplation of his own condition to a criticism of what we might suppose to be our moral and social imprisonment of one another:

This too I know—and wise it were
          If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
          Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
          How men their brothers maim.

(ll. 547-52)

True, this doesn't match Blake's attack on the ‘mind-forg'd manacles’ in his magnificent poem ‘London’ but it does lead to a direct assault on the prison system: ‘It is only what is good in Man / That wastes and withers there’ (ll. 561-2); and the opening lines of the following stanza do sound more like Blake (or a more prosaic version of him): ‘For they starve the little frightened child / Till it weeps both night and day’ (ll. 565-6). (This referred to an actual incident in which a crying child was given a biscuit by a warder who was then sacked for the act. Wilde offered to pay the fine of this child and of two others, and secured their freedom. He protested against the warder's sacking in his letter to the Daily Chronicle of 27 May 1897.)

It is evident from his two letters written to the press after his release that Wilde saw—and felt—jail to be a bestial place:

condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all intercourse with the external world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalised below the level of any of the brute-creation, the wretched man who is confined in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane.¹⁴

In ‘The Decay of Lying’ Wilde had written of the restrictions of the ‘prison-house of realism’.¹⁵ His prison and post-prison writings show—even in their lack—the difficulty he now faced in avoiding realism. Suddenly, the ‘monstrous worship of facts’ seemed not so grotesque. What fascinates in the ‘Ballad’ is the tension between the realism and the romance.

A few days after beginning ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, Wilde wrote to Douglas (at the beginning of June 1897), imploring him to ‘write ballads’ (Letters, p.289):

The Ballad is the true origin of the romantic Drama, and the true predecessors of Shakespeare are not the tragic writers of the Greek or Latin stage … but the ballad-writers of the Border.

(Letters, p.288)

In choosing to tell of his sordid existence in a ‘foul and dark latrine’ (l.572) in the form he associates with the romantic drama, Wilde is still striving to demonstrate his witty individuality. (This is not to say he has not changed; it is only to detect a survival that gives some continuity to his writing in the face of such upheaval.) ‘Ballads are nobody's property’, writes Robert Graves,¹⁶ and the poem by ‘C. 3. 3.’ does, as Gagnier points out, emphasise the collective voice.¹⁷ At the same time, Wilde cannot write about the shame of his class without articulating his own shame. He cannot express their concerns without voicing his own and all the while contriving to make art. It is difficult to think of anyone else who could feel that ‘I had made a sonnet out of a skilly!’ (Letters, p.328).¹⁸

Notes

1. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, in Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, Edited with an Introduction by Isobel Murray (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 169, line 9. Further references will be given by line number in parentheses.

2. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987), 171.

3. Ibid., 231.

4. Rupert Hart-Davis, ed, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 286-288, 301, 305. Further references will be given parenthetically as ‘Letters’.

5. André Gide, Oscar Wilde, quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 508.

6. Ellman, 461-462, 468.

7. Ibid., 462.

8. Wilde, De Profundis, in The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, 104.

9. Gagnier, 172.

10. See for example Isobel Murray's note in Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, 220.

11. Both poems date from 1894 and are reproduced in Chris White, ed, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 1999), 54-6.

12. Ellman, 267.

13. John Stokes, Oscar Wilde (Harlow: Longman for the British Council, 1978), 46.

14. ‘Wilde's second post-prison letter to the Daily Chronicle’, Murray, 191. The letter was published on 24 March 1898.

15. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Intentions [1891] (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1925), 27.

16. Robert Graves, ed, English and Scottish Ballads (London: Heinemann, 1957), xxv.

17. Gagnier, 193.

18. ‘Skilly was a kind of thin gruel given to prisoners.’ Editor's note, Letters, 328, n.1.