Then came the summing-up. Mr Justice Wills was too prosaic to accept the affectation of Wilde’s letters to Douglas as anything but indecent, and he spoke of them in unpleasant terms as Mr Justice Charles had not. As he went on he became more vehement, as if the heinousness of the offense was being borne in upon him the more he talked of it. ‘It is the worst case I have ever tried,’ he declared. He agreed that the fecal stains on the Savoy sheets might have been due to diarrhea, but did not encourage this supposition. He impressed upon the jury the importance of maintaining the highest moral tone. The jury retired at half past three, and returned at twenty-five minutes to six with a question about some minor evidence. Lockwood, conscious that the rejection of Shelley’s testimony meant that only the testimony of accomplices was left, said to Clarke, ‘You’ll dine your man in Paris tomorrow.’ But Clarke said, ‘No, no, no.’33 The jury retired again but returned a few minutes later to find the defendant guilty on all counts except that relating to Edward Shelley. Clarke asked the judge not to pass sentence until the next session, so as to consider a legal technicality. But the Solicitor General opposed the motion, and the judge rejected it. He then turned to the prisoners:
Oscar Wilde and Alfred Taylor, the crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon one’s self to prevent one’s self from describing, in language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise to the breast of every man of honour who has heard the details of these two terrible trials. That the jury have arrived at a correct verdict in this case I cannot persuade myself to entertain the shadow of a doubt; and I hope, at all events, that those who sometimes imagine that a judge is halfhearted in the cause of decency and morality because he takes care no prejudice shall enter into the case, may see that that is consistent at least with the common sense of indignation at the horrible charges brought home to both of you.
It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried. That you, Taylor, kept a kind of male brothel it is impossible to doubt. And that you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is equally impossible to doubt.
I shall, under such circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgement it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of the Court is that each of you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years.
A cry of ‘Shame’ was heard in the court. Wilde blanched and his discomposed face worked with pain. ‘My God, my God!’ he said. He struggled to speak, and may have managed to say (though witnesses differ), ‘And I? May I say nothing, my lord?’ But the judge merely waved his hand to the warders, who took hold of Wilde just as he swayed and seemed about to fall to the ground. Taylor followed him, indifferent, as if conscious of having no place in the drama. But he had shielded Wilde, as Wilde had shielded Douglas. (After serving his sentence Taylor emigrated to America and oblivion.c) Outside, Yeats said, the harlots danced on the pavement.35 They were delighted to have this rival removed. Lord Queensberry too was triumphant, and that night he and Charles Brookfield and Charles Hawtrey held a victory dinner in celebration.d
* By coincidence, it was just at this time that Countess Russell was suing her husband for divorce on the grounds of his homosexuality, supposedly with the advice of Sir Edward Clarke, so that the two cases appeared to reinforce each other. (She lost her suit, however.)
† Among them, Robert Clibborn was sentenced on 11 March 1898 to seven years for blackmailing, and William Allen in September 1897 to eighteen months for receiving stolen property.
‡ Before the trial ended, John Gray left the country and went to Berlin, where he was soon joined by Raffalovich. That sometime friend of Wilde published in the autumn of 1895 a forty-seven-page pamphlet entitled L’Affaire Oscar Wilde. It was a way of exculpating himself. Gray had a barrister named Francis Mathews attend the trial and hold a watching brief for him, but, as it happened, his name was not mentioned.
§ In a copy of The Land of Heart’s Desire which he gave to John Quinn in 1904 he wrote of Wilde, ‘He was an unfinished sketch of a great man, and showed great courage and manhood amid the collapse of his fortunes.’23
‖ He was beginning to speak out more boldly. He wrote to Henry Labouchere at Truth, on 12 June, to defend his departure before the first trial:
I stayed for three weeks after Mr Wilde’s arrest, and visited him every day, and I did everything my mind could devise to help him, and I left on the day before his trial at his most urgent request, and at the equally urgent request of his legal advisers, who assured me that my presence in the country could only do him harm, and that if I were called as a witness I should infallibly destroy what small chance he had of acquittal. Mr Wilde’s own counsel absolutely declined to call me as a witness, feeling the harm I might do him in cross-examination, so that had I been called as a witness at all, it would have only been under a subpoena from the prosecution. Now, sir, you must give the devil his due, and granting, for the sake of argument, that I am an exceptional young scoundrel, you have no right to call me a coward.
Truth commented that Douglas did have the courage of his opinions, ‘but, these opinions being what they are, it is to be regretted that he is not afforded an opportunity to meditate on them in the seclusion of Pentonville.’ Unfazed, Douglas answered privately (as he had told the French journalist) that he knew forty or fifty men in the best society, hundreds of undergraduates at Oxford, not to mention ‘a slight sprinkling of dons,’ who were homosexual. Lots of boys around Piccadilly lived on prostitution. He was sending a pamphlet by Krafft-Ebing, which he was now having translated, asking for the repeal of an Austrian law against homosexuals.28 Finally, on 28 June, Douglas wrote from the Hôtel de la Poste, Rouen, to W. T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews. This time he dealt directly with homosexuality, pointed out that the laws were very different in France, that lesbianism was tolerated in England, that dealing with male prostitutes was no worse than dealing with female ones, and that his father practiced fornication and adultery, advocated free love, and maltreated both his first and second wives. Stead refused to publish this, and so did Labouchere. (This letter was produced against Douglas in his libel suit against Ransome, 18–23 April 1913.)
a Not of the Wills family from which Wilde derived one of his names.
b The French press understandably mixed up Lord Alfred Douglas with Lord Douglas of Hawick, and the former indignantly fired off a telegram from Rouen to Le Figaro demanding an apology, and wishing that it had indeed been he who had struck Queensberry. He wrote the same day, 22 May, to Le Temps complaining of the mixup, and asserting that the newspaper had mistakenly referred also to Lady Queensberry as ‘the divorced wife’ of the Marquess, when it was the Marquess who was the divorced husband.
c In the 1930s, Douglas, staying at a Chicago hotel, rang the bell for the floor waiter. It was answered by Alfred Taylor.34
d Queensberry was said in a letter to the Star to have evinced sympathy for Wilde. The Marquess wrote to the editor to take it back:
Sir,—I must take exception to the word ‘sympathy’ that is placed in my mouth. I never used it. In my time I have helped to cut up and destroy sharks. I had no sympathy for them, but may have felt sorry, and wished to put them out of pain as far as possible.
What I did say was that as Mr Wilde now seemed to be on his beam ends and utterly done I did feel sorry for his awful position, and that supposing he was convicted of the loathsome charges brought against him that were I the authority that had to mete out to him his punishment, I would treat him with all possible consideration as a sexual pervert of an utterly diseased mind, and not as a sane criminal. If this is sympathy Mr Wilde has it from me to this extent.
Yours, &c.
QUEENSBERRY
24 April [1895]
CHAPTER XIX
Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Spring Days in Prison
The press lived up to Wilde’s expectations by almost universally praising the verdict of the jury. His old acquaintance Clement Scott wrote in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Open the windows! Let in the fresh air.’ The News of the World on 26 May rejoiced that ‘The aesthetic cult, in the nasty form, is over.’ The St James’s Gazette editorialized on 27 May that ‘a dash of wholesome bigotry’ was better than overtoleration. Only the Daily Chronicle and Reynolds’s News offered any sympathy to the greatest dramatist of the age. Reynolds’s, in a leader of 20 May, refused ‘to gloat over the ruin of the unhappy man,’ and pointed out that he had corrupted none of the young men. It complained of Lockwood’s attitude, and of Queensberry’s attendance at the trial, and suggested that the male strumpets who had given evidence should not go unpunished. As for Wilde’s friends, few felt for him. Burne-Jones hoped that Wilde would shoot himself and was disappointed when he did not; but in a few months he relented and expressed sympathy. Yet Hall Caine said to Coulson Kernahan, ‘It is the most awful tragedy in the whole history of literature.’1
What of Wilde? Reynolds’s News on 9 June described what happened to him after the jury’s verdict. He and Taylor were taken from court to Newgate prison, where the warrants authorizing their detention for two years were prepared. They were then brought in a prison van to Holloway. Here his belongings were taken from Wilde, and he was stripped to his shirt. An officer noted down a minute description of his appearance, distinctive marks, color of his eyes, hair, complexion, any scars. Some minutes later he was made to take a bath, on emerging from which he found a full suit of prison clothes ready for him, from the underlinen to the loose shoes and ‘hideous’ Scottish cap. The clothes were of the usual drab color, with broad arrows printed all over them. As a concession to his importance, and because of his unusual height, the clothes were new, but no less appalling for that. The rules were read to him, and he was marched to his cell. Shortly afterwards he received his first prison meal, an allowance of thin porridge (skilly) and a small brown loaf.
During the week of 9 June, Wilde was moved to Pentonville, the prison for convicted prisoners, as Holloway was for unconvicted ones. Here he had a close medical examination. If declared fit, he was to take his first month’s exercise on the treadmill—six hours daily, making an ascent of 6000 feet, twenty minutes on and five minutes rest. During this month, also, he would sleep on a plank bed, a bare board raised a few inches above the floor, supplied with sheets, two rugs, a coverlet, but no mattress. His diet was to be: cocoa and bread for breakfast at half past seven; dinner at noon (one day bacon and beans, another soup, another cold Australian meat, and another brown-flour suet pudding, with the last three repeated twice a week, potatoes with every dinner); and tea at half past five. After the first month he would be put to some industrial employment, such as post bag-making, tailoring, or picking oakum. He would exercise in the open air daily for an hour, walking with the rest of his ward in Indian file, no talking being allowed. Until three months of his sentence were over he could not communicate with the outside; at that time he might write and receive one letter, and be visited for twenty minutes by three friends, but separated from them by wire blinds, and in the presence of a warder. The visit could be repeated every three months. He could get off the plank bed only when a certain number of marks had been awarded for work done. Every morning at nine and twice on Sundays, he had to attend chapel. He could be visited by the chaplain as often as he liked, and also daily by the governor or deputy governor. A government inspector would visit him once a month to hear any complaints.
Reynolds’s News noted that Wilde’s health had been seriously affected since his confinement, and that he would probably be transferred to the infirmary. ‘Already Wilde has grown much thinner, and since his conviction he has preserved, it is said, a settled melancholy and reticence. He has had great difficulty in getting sleep, and from time to time he loudly bemoans the bitterness of his fate.’ There was no refuge in oblivion, only pain.
Douglas Rampant
behind my prison’s blinded bars I do possess what none can take away.…
Wilde’s fictitious heroes generally manage to break the law without having serious brushes with the police. Lord Arthur Savile escapes punishment altogether, while Dorian Gray is obliged to punish himself. The only one of Wilde’s protagonists who goes to jail is Guido Ferranti in The Duchess of Padua. Guido nobly assumes the guilt for having assassinated the Duke, although he knows that the Duchess has done the deed. Wilde had some feeling that he had allowed himself (in spite of his strictures on self-sacrifice) to be punished in place of Lord Alfred Douglas, and certainly he had taken the blame for several of Douglas’s erotic encounters. There is also a resemblance to Guido Ferranti in Wilde’s behavior after being taken into custody. A passive resignation is all either would display. When the enamored Duchess visits the imprisoned Guido, in disguise, and begs him to escape, he replies, ‘Be sure I shall not stir.’ Wilde showed the same resistance. He could not have failed to recall how one of his favorite heroes, Julien Sorel, also refuses to stir when he is imprisoned and his former mistress Mme de Renal begs him to escape.
Where both Guido and Julien differ from Wilde is that their beloveds too die for love. Douglas, flouting fictional decorum, lived on for fifty years. During the two years that Wilde was imprisoned, Douglas was a character searching for his tragic role and not finding it. There can be no doubt that he was greatly distressed. His mother and friends worried about him. He felt the need to make some public gesture in Wilde’s behalf: it would have to be on the Continent, since he was warned by his mother’s solicitor that his return to England during the next two years was inadvisable. He conceived of the term of his exile as comparable to Wilde’s prison sentence. His father offered, if he would give up Wilde forever, to give him money to go to the South Sea Islands, where ‘you will find plenty of beautiful girls.’2 Douglas’s answer was to petition the Queen for clemency for Wilde on 25 June 1895; the Secretary of State said he was unable to advise Her Majesty to comply with this prayer.
At the same time, Douglas still had a private life. His mother had gone through a complicated series of maneuvers to provide him with companionship. Lionel Johnson did not accept her offer to pay expenses if he would join Bosie. Ross’s family having forbade him to stay with Douglas, More Adey consented to go with him, at Lady Queensberry’s request.3 Other appointed companions were to follow. Douglas quickly resumed his former way of life with his accustomed recklessness. In Le Havre in late July, he rented a small yacht and hired a cabin boy. This boy brought another boy, and some adults joined them. There were reports of naked bathing and implications of other doings, so that the Journal du Havre published at the end of the month an editorial attack upon the young English lord who was corrupting the city’s youth. Douglas responded with injured innocence in a letter to the editor:
For me who have suffered so much already, it would not matter a bit that a little provincial newspaper should accuse me of all imaginable crimes, but it is different for my little cabin boy, an innocent creature, and the good people who are his friends, whom you dismiss so carelessly.
Let us establish, sir, that I have rented a little yacht and that I have also employed a cabin boy and that I have made, with this cabin boy and a friend of his and several Havre fishermen who are accustomed to go with foreigners, several trips to the sea; is that any reason to insult and defame not merely me, but these other good people, your fellow countrymen?
For me it is already too clear that the world has the right to insult and attack me because I am the friend of Oscar Wilde.
There is my crime, not that I was his friend, but that I shall be until death (and even afterwards if God permit). Well, sir, it is not part of my policy to moralize, to leave a friend in the lurch, to deny him e
ven if that friend is in prison or in hell.
I may be wrong, but I still prefer to consult my own conscience rather than that of the Journal du Havre.
This was his farewell salute to Le Havre, for a day or two later he went off to Sorrento and Capri. Wilde is said to have commented, ‘Le prince du caprice est parti pour Capri.’4
It was Douglas’s secret plan to write something more extended about the Wilde case. An Englishman, Dalhousie Young, came to see him in Le Havre, with an essay he had written in defense of Wilde. Douglas was also encouraged by a series of articles in the French press. On 3 June, Henry Bauer had a leading article in L’Echo de Paris meditating on the barbarity of the sentence, the hypocrisy of London society, the brutishness of Queensberry, and the outrageousness of English law and judges. On 18 June 1895, Octave Mirbeau had a favorable piece in Le Journal (Paris). Paul Adam, in La Revue blanche of 15 May 1895, argued that Greek love was less harmful than adultery. The most telling article was that of Hugues Rebell, a young poet and novelist, in the Mercure de France for August. This eloquent ‘Défense d’Oscar Wilde’ denounced the conduct of the trial and rebuked the hypocritical and prudish court for its effrontery in mistreating a writer who was giving substance and character to English literature. Rebell called for Pentonville to take its place beside the Bastille: ‘With what joy should I see Pentonville in flames! And not only in Wilde’s behalf, but in behalf of all of us pagan artists and writers who are by rights honorary prisoners.’ Douglas, on reading this at the beginning of August, urged More Adey to buy several copies for distribution. He also wrote to the Secretary of State on 30 July 1895 asking if it was true that journalists were allowed to observe Wilde in prison. In Sorrento he decided to write his own article and submit it to the same review. He said nothing about it in his letters, in case his friends should try to dissuade him.
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