Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

by Gyles Brandreth

  He left on the night train to London.

  The next day he spent visiting his mother and his brother in London.

  The day after he went to Reading for the weekend. He went to stay with his friend, George Palmer, the biscuit king.

  At 11 a.m. on the following Monday — 5 March 1883, the Monday morning of the first night of the new production of Hamlet at the Théâtre La Grange — Oscar Wilde entered the gates of Reading Gaol.

  18

  Reading Gaol

  Oscar visited Reading Gaol at the invitation of his friend, George Palmer, and in the company of Palmer and the prison chaplain, the Reverend Paul White. The Huntley & Palmer biscuit factory was located on land immediately adjacent to the gaol and George Palmer was a member of the prison’s Board of Visitors. According to Oscar, Palmer was ‘an Englishman with a hearty sense of humour and a fondness for Scottish country dancing, a businessman, a keen sportsman and a Quaker, yet the best of company despite these terrible afflictions’.

  Oscar knew George Palmer well, admired and trusted him. Oscar’s feelings towards the Reverend White were more equivocal. In his journal at the time, Oscar noted:

  White is patently a virtuous man which always arouses suspicion. There is something about him that is too good to be true. His spoken English is so perfect it makes me think it is not his mother tongue. I have a sense that I had met him before our recent acquaintance, but he denies it absolutely. When I press him on his past, he gives little away. He declines to talk about his life before he discovered Christ, explaining that then he walked in the valley of the shadow of death and has no desire to revisit it.

  What had prompted George Palmer to suggest this particular Monday morning excursion was the arrival at Reading Gaol of what he termed ‘a celebrity inmate’: the notorious Roderick Maclean. ‘What you are to aestheticism, Oscar, he is to assassination.’

  ‘Really?’ replied Oscar, not altogether flattered by the comparison. ‘The man’s a lunatic, is he not?’

  ‘So it seems. As you know, he sent one of his verses to Queen Victoria and when Her Majesty failed to show her appreciation he sought to avenge his wounded pride. He fired a gun at her at Windsor railway station. Charged with high treason, he was found “not guilty but insane”. The sovereign was not amused. The law is being changed. In future, such offenders will be deemed “guilty but insane”. He’s at Reading on his way to the Broadmoor asylum. I don’t know what state he’ll be in, but at least you can see him and add him to your collection of curiosities.’

  ‘I shall be intrigued to meet him, George. Thank you. I am fascinated by those who have made their mark upon the world — in whatever way. I am in awe of those determined to fulfil their destiny—whatever the cost.’

  Oscar was intrigued to visit Reading Gaol in any event. He wondered whether or not — and, if so, to what degree — the experience would disturb him. The year before he had made light of his visit to the penitentiary at Lincoln, Nebraska: he had since been surprised to find how frequently he revisited the place in his dreams, and how often those dreams turned to nightmares. More recently, he had read Charlotte Brontë’s account of her visit to Newgate Prison at the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and had found himself haunted by Miss Brontë’s description of holding the hand of a young woman who had murdered her own child and was soon to be hanged.

  In his journal Oscar noted the mixed emotions that the visit to Reading Gaol provoked in him:

  I was appalled, but fascinated too. Appalled by the ugliness of all that I saw; revolted by the squalor and the cruelty; the wretched food (filthy water, grey meat and black potatoes was all their lunch); the so-called ‘separate’ system by which the inmates are kept apart from one another, in complete silence, hooded and masked whenever they leave their cells; the dreary, debilitating drabness of their lives — nothing happens. There is no work, recreation or occupation, except for those sentenced to ‘hard labour’, whose lot is either to walk the treadmill, or break stones in the prison yard, or submit to ‘shot drill’. This last involves the prisoner lifting a twenty-five-pound cannon ball up to chest height, moving it three paces to the left or right, then putting it down. The task is repeated, hour after hour, at the supervising turnkey’s discretion.

  I was appalled by what I witnessed and fascinated by the way in which Palmer and White — both civilised men — did not appear to question the rightness of it all. I was surprised, also, to find that this ghastly place — this hell on earth — was a prison for women as well as men, and struck by the variety of ages, types and nationalities among the inmates: near-gentlemen and outright vagabonds, petty thieves and murderers, Arabs and Irishmen, debtors and drunkards, children and old lags close to death. ‘Are they treated differently, the young and the old?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the chaplain earnestly. We were standing in the prison’s central hall. He went to a large bare-board cupboard that was fixed against a wall nearby, beckoning me to follow. From his pocket, he produced a bundle of keys, selected one, unlocked and pulled opened the cupboard doors. Lined up and pinioned against the back of the cupboard, like rifles in a gun cabinet, were a dozen scourges. ‘These are our cat-o ‘-nine-tails, a necessary evil if discipline’s to be maintained. As you can see, some are larger, some are smaller. The smaller are the ones we use on males when they are between ten and sixteen years of age. The birch rod is fifteen inches long, rather than twenty-two. The length of the flail, from the end of the handle to the tip of the spray, is forty inches instead of forty-eight. The weight is nine ounces, not twelve.’ I marvelled at the cruel precision of these instruments.

  The tour of the prison took two hours. The promised encounter with the curiosity that was Roderick Maclean was brief. The wretched man was incarcerated on B1 landing, in one of the ‘dark cells’. The room was windowless and unlit. The turnkey who unbolted the door to admit the visitors handed the chaplain an oil lamp as they entered. By the yellow light of the lamp the prisoner was clearly visible. He cowered at the far end of his metal bed, encased in a straitjacket.

  ‘Is that necessary?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘He is insane,’ answered the chaplain. ‘He is a danger to himself as well as to others.’

  As Oscar and the Reverend White approached the man, Maclean flinched and shut his eyes against the light.

  ‘Do not be alarmed, sir,’ said Oscar.

  ‘This is Mr Oscar Wilde,’ said the chaplain.

  The prisoner twisted his head round and opened his eyes. He gazed intently into Oscar’s face. ‘The poet?’ he asked, in a hoarse whisper. His voice was so much more refined than Oscar had expected. ‘Oscar Wilde, the poet?’

  Oscar bowed towards the man.

  Maclean struggled in his straitjacket, straining towards the light. He leant forward and held his head up towards Oscar. There was a Scottish lilt to his accent. ‘You have come to see me?’ he whispered.

  ‘I have,’ said Oscar. ‘I read the poem that you dedicated to Her Majesty. It was reproduced in the newspapers. It is a fine poem, Mr Maclean. I would be proud to have written a poem of such feeling.’

  Maclean stared up at Oscar and tears tumbled from his eyes.

  Oscar bowed once more and backed away from the bed towards the cell door. ‘I must go now,’ he said quietly. ‘Good day, Mr Maclean. I am glad to have made your acquaintance. A fellow poet salutes you.

  Oscar paused on the landing outside the madman’s cell as, noisily, the turnkey locked the door. He said to George Palmer, ‘I am sorry that I was not able to shake his hand. Is the straitjacket strictly necessary?’

  ‘The doctor says so,’ answered the Reverend White. Oscar turned and looked into the chaplain’s warm brown eyes. They were not the eyes of a cruel man. ‘Is there nothing good in this dreadful place?’ he asked.

  ‘We are going to the chapel now,’ said the clergyman. ‘That is my domain.’ He smiled. ‘And God’s, of course. The chapel is a good place.’

  ‘We can only hope that the prisoners find s
ome measure of consolation here,’ said George Palmer, when they reached the chapel.

  ‘While reflecting on the error of their ways,’ added the chaplain, soberly. ‘The chapel is designed for that purpose.’

  The chapel was, in fact, designed like a small Greek amphitheatre, with row upon row of individual wooden stalls rising one above the other in tiers before a simple stone altar. The stalls, to Oscar, looked like upright open coffins, each one just large enough to accommodate a grown man. Once a prisoner had entered his allotted stall, all other prisoners were blocked from view: the only human being visible was the chaplain.

  The Reverend White stood on the steps of his altar, with George Palmer and Oscar on either side of him, surveying the scene. ‘And with him they crucify two thieves,’ murmured Oscar, ‘the one on his right hand, and the other on his left.’

  ‘Mark, chapter fifteen, verse twenty-seven,’ said the chaplain. ‘It is a favourite text of mine, as you may imagine.’

  ‘When you look out on your congregation,’ asked Oscar, ‘when you look into their eyes, Father, what do you see?’

  ‘I don’t look into their eyes,’ replied the clergyman. ‘I do not see their eyes. The men all wear caps like hoods to mask their faces. The women all wear thick veils.’

  ‘But that woman there,’ said Oscar. ‘She wears no veil.’

  Oscar’s head was turned towards the right. He was looking at the front row of the wooden stalls. Seated, motionless, in the end stall but one was an old woman in a black dress. Her white hair was pulled back and tied within a netted snood. She wore the shoulders of defeat and held in her lap hands knotted with age and pain. Her dark face (as brown as the oak stall in which she sat) was grotesquely bloated; whether by tears or drink or disease, Oscar could not tell.

  The chaplain started suddenly when he saw the wretched woman. ‘She’s not a prisoner,’ he said.

  ‘Is she a ghost?’ asked Oscar.

  The clergyman did not laugh. ‘She works here,’ he said dryly. ‘She cleans the chapel, when she’s minded.’

  The woman’s head had now turned in the direction of the three men standing before the altar, but it was at the chaplain that she stared. Her gaze was unflinching. Was it insolent and full of reproach? Or devoted and heavy with despair?

  The chaplain called out to the woman angrily, ‘Vai-te embora! Desaparece!’[1]

  She neither moved nor looked away.

  ‘What is her history?’ asked Oscar. ‘She is not English.’

  ‘Her history is unknown. She has been here for many years.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘We keep her on as an act of charity.’

  George Palmer was studying his half-hunter. ‘We’d best be on our way, gentlemen. We must pay our respects to the governor.

  They departed the chapel, leaving the old woman still seated in her stall, and walked briskly and in silence to the governor’s office. ‘We’ll not stay long,’ muttered Palmer.

  ‘You’ll stay long enough for a cup of sweet tea and a nip of brandy,’ said the governor, swinging open his door and taking each of his visitors’ right hands in both of his. He was loud, fat, squat, red-faced and relentlessly genial. Oscar never caught his name, but in his journal dubbed him ‘Colonel Pickwick’. He wore a military moustache and combined a military bearing with the twinkling bonhomie, good humour and good heart that most English readers of Dickens find irresistible but which Oscar’s Irish sensibility found somewhat irksome.

  ‘Mr Wilde, Mr Wilde, Mr Wilde,’ he repeated enthusiastically, not releasing Oscar from his grip as he dragged my friend across the room. ‘I hear that friend Maclean was not at his best for you this morning. I apologise. He had a turn. He had to be tethered. I know you’re fellow poets — you’d have enjoyed a chinwag. It wasn’t to be, alas. But nil desperandum, as you scholars say. We have a famous man for you to meet all the same!’

  The governor ungrasped Oscar and threw open a glass-fronted door that led from his office to an anteroom beyond. ‘Ha, ha!’ he cried, as the door swung back to reveal the upright figure of a tall, thin, pale-faced old man with a shock of wiry white hair and piercing blue eyes. ‘If Pa killed Ma, who’d kill Pa? Marwood!’

  Oscar recognised the well-worn joke and recognised the features of the elderly, upright man, also. He had seen portraits of William Marwood in the popular papers often enough. Mr Marwood smiled and revealed an ungainly row of yellow, jagged teeth. He stepped towards Oscar and pressed a visiting card into his hand. Oscar glanced down at it:

  WILLIAM MARWOOD PUBLIC EXECUTIONER,

  Horncastle, Lincolnshire

  Oscar and the executioner shook hands.

  ‘Marwood and I are old friends,’ boomed Colonel Pickwick. ‘He looked after my boots in the old days. He was a cobbler before he took up hanging.’ The governor lifted his feet one by one to show off his shiny boots. ‘He was a fine cobbler, but he had a higher calling. How old were you when you became public hangman, Will?’

  ‘Fifty-four,’ answered the executioner pleasantly. It was a thin voice and oddly high-pitched. ‘I’ve been doing it nine years now. Thinking about it all my life, of course.’

  ‘It’s the “thinking” what does it, Mr Wilde,’ said Colonel Pickwick, ‘you know that.’ The governor puffed out his chest, twitched his moustache and winked in William Marwood’s direction. ‘I don’t know how history will mark you down, Mr Wilde, but Marwood’s place is assured. He invented the “long drop”, you know. ‘He looked at his old friend with pride, reaching up to rest a hand on the executioner’s shoulder. ‘Thanks to Marwood’s ingenuity, the drop between the trapdoor and the point at which the rope tightens is as much as ten feet these days. It’s a cleaner, sweeter business altogether. It’s stopped all that twitching and jerking during the death throes. Horrible to witness at close quarters, as the padre will tell you.’

  There was a knock on the outer door. ‘Come!’ called Colonel Pickwick. A young turnkey entered the office carrying a large tray bearing cups and saucers, a pot of tea, a jug of milk, a bottle of cheap brandy and a large dish of ham sandwiches. ‘Excellent,’ growled the governor, rubbing his hands. ‘Gentlemen, tuck in,’ he instructed. He poured a generous dose of brandy into each of the teacups. ‘And drink up. It’s a cold day.’

  The five men stood in a circle around the governor’s desk. ‘This is a most unusual tea party,’ said Oscar, lifting a ham sandwich to his lips. ‘I’ll not forget it.’

  ‘Which of us is the Mad Hatter?’ asked Colonel Pickwick, with a wink and a hearty laugh. ‘I think Marwood has a slight look of the March Hare about him, don’t you, Mr Wilde?’

  The public hangman appeared to take the observation as a compliment and raised his cup of tea and brandy in the governor’s direction.

  ‘The padre can be the dormouse,’ continued Colonel Pickwick, warming to the theme, ‘but, damn and blast, we have no Alice!’

  ‘There’s a strange old lady that we met in the chapel,’ suggested Oscar.

  Colonel Pickwick spluttered good-humouredly: ‘Dear me, no. She’s too far gone even for Alice in Wonderland. She’s as mad as Maclean. We only tolerate her at the padre’s behest.’ He added a dash more brandy to Oscar’s cup and then raised his own. ‘A toast, gentlemen. To our new friend, Mr Wilde, and our old friend, Mr Marwood — each an artist, in his way. Your good health.’

  The five men raised their teacups to one another. In the glass door leading to the governor’s anteroom Oscar saw a reflection of the group and smiled at its improbability: a poet, a prison governor, a hangman, a priest and a biscuit manufacturer, all standing in a ring. In later years, he frequently reflected that he had never drunk a toast with so motley a crew.

  ‘There’s an extra toast for Marwood,’ announced the governor, reaching down to the table for the brandy bottle. ‘He’s retiring this year.’

  ‘My eye’s not what it was,’ said Mr Marwood, by way of explanation. ‘.And my hand’s not as steady.’ He held up a tremulous hand to prove the point.

>   Colonel Pickwick laughed. ‘He can afford to. He gets twenty pounds a year from the crown plus ten pounds a drop. He’s a rich man.’

  ‘Rich in memories, certainly,’ said Marwood seriously. ‘I’ve never done it for the money.’

  ‘How many have you hanged in your time, my friend?’ asked the governor.

  ‘One hundred and sixty-four men and eight women over nine years, but I’m not retiring until the summer. I’m expecting a busy spring.’

  ‘Well, here’s to it, William,’ said the governor, emptying the remains of the brandy bottle into the cups held out before him.

  Oscar was surprised to find how much he liked these men. Colonel Pickwick was too loud for comfort, but his openness and easy hospitality were endearing. Oscar was particularly taken with Marwood and his devotion to his craft. When Oscar told him that he was newly returned from France, Marwood began an interesting discourse on the benefits of the noose over the guillotine and a fascinating account of the ‘families’ of executioners in both countries. ‘When I retire,’ he told Oscar, ‘I plan to write a history of execution and I believe that the French chapters will be the most interesting. Heritage is everything to a Frenchman.’ He was an especial admirer of the six generations of the Sanson family. ‘The French Revolution was their heyday, of course. During the five hundred and three days of the Terror, the Sansons executed a total of two thousand, three hundred and eighteen men, women and children — and not a botched head among them. Did you know that, Mr Wilde?’