Every prisoner shall attend prayer and public worship, except in the case of illness, or other reasonable cause, to be allowed by the Governor or visiting justice.
Every prisoner guilty of drunkenness, blasphemy, swearing, or any improper expression, or any abuse or disorderly conduct, shall be punished at the discretion of the Governor.
Every prisoner shall make his or her own bed, and be washed before nine o’clock every morning, on pain of forfeiting one day’s allowance of provisions.
No tobacco to be used in the prison.
All prisoners who shall not be at work shall be required to walk round the yards, or be locked up in solitary cells.
The chambers and cells shall be swept out and thoroughly cleaned by the prisoners every morning before they are left.
No wine, ale, beer, porter, or spirituous liquors of any kind, shall be admitted for any convicted prisoner under any pretence whatever, unless ordered by the surgeon in his journal.
Every prisoner shall, at locking up time, present himself in the yard, and also at the door of the cell, to the turnkey.
Silence must be observed on all occasions by day and night.
Every prisoner guilty of any of the following offences will subject himself to punishment:
Talking, shouting, cursing, swearing, singing, whistling, attempting to communicate by signs, by writing, or in any other way.
Unnecessarily looking around or about at any time.
Having in possession or attempting to receive money, tobacco, knives.
Looking out, or attempting to look out, at window or door of a cell.
Not folding a bed in the proper manner; being in bed after 6 a.m. or before 8 in the evening.
Stealing any property of the prison or of a prisoner; trying to take anything left from another prisoner’s meal.
Spitting on, or disfiguring the prison walls and floors.
Irreverent behaviour in chapel either before, during, or after service.
Striking, or in any way assaulting or threatening another prisoner or officer.
Attempting to escape, or assisting others to do so.
Not folding up clothing in a proper manner.
Not washing feet twice a week, prior to using the water to clean the cell.
Not ready to leave cell when unlocked by officer for exercise, chapel.
Prisoners wishing to see the Governor, Chaplain or Surgeon must apply to the officer when paraded for exercise in the morning, who is bound to attend to such applications.
Regulations for the Administration of Corporal Punishment
All acts of corporal punishments will be carried out in the presence of the governor or warden and of the prison surgeon or chief medical officer.
Standard approved instruments must be used for the administration of all punishments, either birch rod or cat-o’-nine-tails.
Each birch rod or cat-o’-nine-tails must be used for one punishment only and must be destroyed after use.
Only use a cat-o’-nine-tails that bears the seal of the Prison Commission.
For males over 10 and up to 16 years of age, use scale B. For males over 16, use scale C.
B C
Weight not exceeding 9 oz 12 oz
Length from end of handle to tip of spray 40 inches 48 inches
Length of handle 15 inches 22 inches
Circumference of spray at centre 6 inches 7 inches
Circumference of handle at top of binding 3½ inches 5 inches
Circumference of handle 6 inches from end 3¼ inches 3 inches
(The Prison Act of 1898 reduced the use of corporal punishment to two types of offences only: gross personal violence to an officer of the prison; and acts of mutiny. In 1906, Colonel Isaacson, by then governor of Manchester Prison, wrote: ‘In every large prison there is always a small fraction of the population imbued with brutality, to whom dietary punishment is absolutely useless. For these, when they resort to personal violence on an officer, I can see no alternative but the birch rod or cat.’
Birching as a judicial penalty, in both its juvenile and adult versions, was abolished in 1948, although retained until 1962 as a punishment for violent breaches of prison discipline.)
Executions – the length of the drop
The length of the drop may usually be calculated by dividing 1,000 foot-pounds by the weight of the culprit and his clothing in pounds, which will give the length of the drop in feet, but no drop should exceed 8 feet 6 inches. Thus a person weighing 150 pounds in his clothing will ordinarily require a drop of 1,000 divided by 150 = 6⅔ feet, i.e. 6 feet 8 inches.
When for any special reason, such as a diseased condition of the neck of the culprit, the Governor and Medical Officer think that there should be a departure from the standard procedure, they may inform the executioner and advise him as to the length of the drop which should be given in that particular case.
Letter from Prisoner C.3.3. to the Home Secretary, November 1896
HM Prison, Reading
Prisoner C.3.3. – Oscar Wilde
10 November 1896
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 in Europe more rightly recognised as tragic forms of madness coming chiefly on those who overtax 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 is 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 the 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, set free, for whatever brief space of time health of mind or body may allow, is the earnest prayer of the petitioner.
Oscar Wilde
Letter from Oscar Wilde to the Daily Chronicle, May 1897
On 27 May 1897, from Dieppe, Oscar Wilde wrote a long letter to the Daily Chronicle about the conditions at Reading Gaol. He wrote specifically about the case of Warder Martin, ‘dismissed by the Prison Commissioners for having given some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child’, and about the beating of Prisoner A.2.11., Prince, who ‘had had twenty-four lashes in the cookhouse on Saturday afternoon’: ‘This man is undoubtedly becoming insane’. Wilde praised Governor Nelson – ‘a man of gentle and humane character, greatly liked and respected by all the prisoners’ – but concluded: ‘the system is of course beyond his reach so far as altering its rules is concerned. I have no doubt that he sees daily much of what he knows to be unjust, stupid and cruel. But his hands are tied.’
Warder Martin had been dismissed for ‘gross insubordination’. Following the publication of Wilde’s letter in the Daily Chronicle, the Prison Commission looked again at Martin’s case and at the other points raised by Wilde. On 15 June 1897, the Commission concluded that the decision regarding Martin had been the correct one: ‘He was an unsatisfactory officer and it is not easy to attribute the conduct which led to his dismissal to an excusable motive. Supposing he was a specially tender-hearted man and honestly believed the boy was suffering from hunger, he should have reported this to the governor. To permit warders – even from humane motives – to distinguish one prisoner from another by kindly acts would obviously lead to very serious scandals, and Martin had previously been suspected of trafficking with prisoners.’
R. B. Haldane was a member of the Prison Commission and of the parliamentary committee (chaired by Herbert Gladstone) that had been considering the whole matter of prison reform since 1894. Wilde’s letter to the Daily Chronicle played its part in the debate – and in the reforms that followed. The Prisons Act 1898 modified the ‘separate system’, allowing prisoners to communicate with one another, abolished hard labour, and introduced the concept of remission for good behaviour.
Acknowledgements
Readers of my series of Oscar Wilde murder mysteries frequently ask me the same question: ‘How much of this is true?’ My answer is, ‘All of it. Or almost all. Certainly, much more than you would think.’ For example, Colonel Isaacson, Major Nelson, Dr Maurice, the Reverend M. T. Friend, even Professor Bent Ball and the prisoner Prince: notwithstanding their unlikely names, these are all real people with fascinating individual stories.
I hope that my account of life in Reading Gaol in the 1890s is accurate. It is based on Wilde’s own account, of course, and of accounts by others who knew the prison at the time. I am especially indebted to Anthony Stokes, for many years a senior prison officer at HM Prison, Reading, and author of Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol (2007), who took me on an extended tour of the prison and allowed me to spend some time in Wilde’s cell. (Since 1992 Reading has been a Remand Centre and Young Offender Institution, holding males aged eighteen to twenty-one. Wilde’s cell is, of course, no larger than it was in the 1890s, though the prisoner’s bed is marginally more comfortable and he has a television to watch. Thanks to that television, the young prisoner I met on my visit to cell C.3.3. knew quite well who I was, even though he had not heard of Oscar Wilde.)
I am also indebted to Isobel Morrow, Independent Monitoring Board, HM Prison, Reading, and to Pauline Bryant, who was Governing Governor at Reading at the time of my visit. My special thanks, too, go to my friend Roger Lewis, who introduced me to the work of Sir Charles Bent Ball, and to Andrea Lloyd, Curator, Printed Literary Sources 1801–1914 at the British Library, who showed me the original manuscript of De Profundis, the letter Wilde wrote from Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas – tear stains and all.
For their continuing encouragement and support I thank Roger Johnson and Jean Upton of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and Michael Seeney and Donald Mead of the Oscar Wilde Society. As ever, I am especially grateful to Merlin Holland, the only grandson of Oscar Wilde and Constance, for his friendship and indulgence. He has been good enough to correct inaccuracies in these books when he has spotted them and generous enough to encourage me in my endeavours. Given that he is certainly the most distinguished Wildean scholar of them all, and the fact that I am making a fiction of his grandparents’ extraordinary lives, this is indeed a kindness.
For her sustaining enthusiasm and detailed input, my principal debt, of course, is to my British publisher, Kate Parkin at John Murray, who has guided me from the outset. I am also much indebted to Caroline Westmore at John Murray and to Nick de Somogyi, my perspicacious proofreader, as well as to my publishers in other countries, notably Lauren Spiegel at Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, in New York, and Emmanuelle Heurtebize at 10/18 in Paris. As with each book in this series, I owe considerably more than fifteen per cent to my literary agent, the incomparable Ed Victor, and to his team.
This is the sixth book in this series to date. Readers new to the series regularly ask: which one should I start with? The answer is: truly, it does not matter. Each mystery stands alone. Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders is set in 1889 and begins with the first encounter between Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, but it does not need to be read first. Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile is set in the early 1880s, at the time of Oscar’s celebrated lecture tour of the United States and, later, when, for a while, he lived and worked in Paris. Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders begins right back in 1877 when Oscar, as a student visiting Rome, had an audience with Pope Pius IX. Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers begins in the spring of 1890 and features Wilde’s association with the Prince of Wales and Bram Stoker. Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death is an adventure that takes place in 1892, at the time of Wilde’s great success with the play Lady Windermere’s Fan. Please read next whichever of the stories comes most easily to hand.
The third question I am most frequently asked is this: ‘Which biography of Oscar Wilde do you recommend?’ Of course I recommend Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann (1987), but, magisterial as it is, the book is riddled with inaccuracies and must be read in conjunction with Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde by Horst Schroeder (2002). I also recommend, and without reservation, The Wilde Album by Merlin Holland (1997) and Oscar Wilde and His World by Vyvyan Holland (1966). The two books that, for me, take the reader closest to ‘the real Oscar Wilde’ are The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (2000) and Son of Oscar Wilde by Vyvan Holland (1954). For the most complete portrait of Constance Wilde I wholeheartedly recommend Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle (2011), and for a wonderfully evocative picture of Dieppe at the time of Wilde’s sojourn there I recommend 60 Miles from England: The English at Dieppe 1814–1914 by Simona Pakenham (1967).
Biographical Notes
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, on 16 October 1854. He was the second son of Sir William Wilde, an eminent Irish surgeon, and Jane Francesca Wilde, née Elgee, a poet, author and translator, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Speranza’. Oscar Wilde was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Magdalen College, Oxfo
rd, where he achieved a double first and, for his poem Ravenna, won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. On leaving Oxford, he settled in London and embarked on a career as a professional writer, critic and journalist. His play Vera was published in 1880 and his Poems appeared in 1881.
In 1881, Richard D’Oyly Carte presented the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience, satirising Oscar and his fellow ‘aesthetes’. Its success, and Wilde’s celebrity, led D’Oyly Carte to invite the young author, aged twenty-eight, to undertake an extensive lecture tour of North America at the beginning of 1882. In 1883, Wilde spent several months in Paris, working on his play The Duchess of Padua, and meeting, among others, Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine, Emile Zola and Robert Sherard. On 29 May 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of a noted Irish QC, and set up home at 16 Tite Street, Chelsea. Their sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born in 1885 and 1887.
Wilde’s story Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime appeared in 1887, followed, in 1888, by The Happy Prince and Other Tales and, in 1889 and 1890, more controversially, by The Portrait of Mr W. H. and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The first of his successful social comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan, was produced in London in 1892, followed by A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
In 1891 Oscar Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, the third son of the then Marquess of Queensberry. In 1895 Queensberry left a card for Wilde at the Albermarle Club accusing him of ‘posing Somdomite’ (sic) and provoking Wilde to sue Queensberry for criminal libel. The failure of the libel action led to Wilde’s own prosecution on charges of gross indecency. On 25 May 1895 he was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Released from gaol on 19 May 1897, Wilde travelled immediately to France and spent the rest of his life on the Continent. His poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published in 1898, and his confessional letter De Profundis was published posthumously, in 1905. Constance Wilde died in Genoa on 7 April 1898, following an operation on her spine. Oscar Wilde died in Paris on 30 November 1900. He was buried at Bagneux Cemetery. In 1909 his remains were moved to the French national cemetery of Père Lachaise.
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