The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Adey spent the first weeks of Oscar's imprisonment with Bosie and Robbie Ross in Rouen, in the Hotel de la Poste where a small group of English Uranian exiles had gathered. Like Bosie, Adey was convinced that there had been a conspiracy to send Oscar to prison. From Rouen, he drafted a resume of his theories about Oscar's conviction to an unnamed French journalist, offering `the following suggestion':

  It has long been reported that a person - indeed several persons - but one in particular, in very high authority has been implicated in uni-sexual practices which are in England illegal.

  Short of spelling out Rosebery's name, Adey could hardly make it any plainer that he was talking about the Prime Minister. `I am certain,' he continued:

  that the Treasury were faced by a body of private persons, some of whose names I know, headed by the infamous Lord Queensberry, to obtain a conviction by some means or other against Mr Wilde. These individuals, I believe, blackmailed the Treasury, holding over the Treasury the threat that, if Wilde were not convicted, damning evidence would be produced against important and exalted persons.

  `I trust you may see your way to point out clearly and to insist,' Adey wrote to the journalist, `that whether Mr Wilde was addicted to uni-sexual vice or not, he was convicted on insufficient and tainted evidence for political purposes.'

  Adey decided not to send this letter, but kept it, marking it `letter never sent'. Unlike Bosie, Adey was reasonably discreet and thought that more could be achieved by quiet and persistent lobbying. There was another reason why he may have decided not to send the letter. If he had sought to expose and embarrass a corrupt and conspiratorial Liberal government, he was too late. As Adey was writing his letter, Rosebery's fragile Liberal government imploded and a snap general election was called. Rosebery was voted out of office. If the conspiracy theorists were correct and Oscar's conviction was the consequence of a conspiracy to save Rosebery and keep the Liberal government in power, it had ironically only managed to prolong its life by less than a month.

  Bosie, meanwhile, had launched a vigorous campaign, both public and private, to try and ease Oscar's burden, to seek his release and to bring about social and legal emancipation for vexed and persecuted Uranians. After Henry Labouchere had publicly called for Bosie to be given the `opportunity to meditate' on his crimes `in the seclusion of Pentonville Prison', Bosie initiated an angry and impassioned private correspondence with Labby on the subject of Uranian love, writing to him on 9 June:

  These tastes are perfectly natural congenital tendencies in certain people (a very large minority) and ... the law has no right to interfere with these people provided they do not harm other people; that is to say, when there is neither seduction of minors or brutalization and where there is no public outrage on morals.

  Bosie ended his letter with a defiantly Uranian clarion call. `I confess I have not many hopes of the present age,' he wrote, `but ultimate liberation from conventional slavery and tyranny is as inevitable as death.'

  Three weeks later, Bosie took up the Uranian cudgels again in a letter to the Review of Reviews:

  Why on earth in the name of liberty and common sense a man cannot be allowed to love a boy, rather than a woman when his nature and his instinct tell him to do so, and when he has before him the example of such a number of noble and gifted men who have had similar tastes (such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Michael Angelo, Frederick the Great, and a host of others), is another question and one to which I should like to hear a satisfactory answer.

  At the same time he addressed a lengthy petition to Queen Victoria, appealing for her to exercise her power of pardon for Oscar, `the poet and dramatist who now lies in prison, unjustly convicted by the force of prejudice'. Perhaps wisely, Bosie did not suggest to the Queen that senior members of Her Majesty's government had conspired to send Oscar to prison, merely confining himself to a ritual denunciation of his father. Oscar had, he said, fallen victim `to the spite and unscrupulous cunning of another man, the Marquis of Queensberry, whose son I have the misfortune to be'.

  Bosie wrote to his brother Percy urging him to use the family's political contacts to help Oscar. `As soon as this conservative government comes in something must be done,' he told Percy:

  Please don't give up trying, for my sake. These things can always be managed somehow, only it wants obstinacy. All these relations of ours could do anything.

  He also asked Percy to see what could be done in the way of bribery and corruption. `Do old chap see if you can't do something about bribing the warders at Pentonville. I hear that much can be done, in the way of getting food in et cet: sent in. I have bad moments sometimes when I can neither eat nor sleep for thinking of him.' Percy presumably obliged. A few weeks later, the new Tory Home Secretary, Sir Matthew Ridley, wrote to Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, Chairman of the Prison Commission, and the man in charge of the nation's prisons, to say that his predecessor had been told `that there were suspicions that the Officers of Pentonville Prison were being tampered with by O. Wilde's friends'. Ridley went on to say that Oscar was `for this reason removed to Wandsworth'.

  Oscar had been moved to Wandsworth on 4 July. His premature removal there also foiled an audacious plot by a group calling themselves `The Few American Friends' based in New York. In September, the Governor of Pentonville, Mr J.B. Manning, received an extraordinary letter written in pencil from the `Friends', offering him `one hundred thousand pounds in English gold' if he would `set the poet free' - and `half that sum for the liberation of Taylor'. The `Friends' said they were concerned about preserving Oscar's literary ability:

  Should Wilde serve his sentence in prison he will get so tainted with the abominations of prison-life so as not to be able to shake it off, and his poetic power will be lost and he will be irretrievably ruined. We think he should be set at liberty.

  Whether this was their only motive is unlikely. The `Friends' were much more likely to be wealthy American Uranians who were prepared to pay almost any price to free a man they regarded as a prophet. `All you have to do,' they told Manning, `is to pay some people in the prison to look the other way':

  Use the personal column of the `New York Herald'. Wipe this communication out, only preserving the piece of paper on which it is written for purposes of identification when we make a full settlement with you. Spare no expense. We will pay all and more than you can use over the amount in full herein stated. Act Promptly, if not forget that you have received this, so the matter will go no further.

  Oscar was to spend five months in Wandsworth where, if anything, his condition seemed to worsen. The chaplain at Wandsworth, W.D. Morrison, was an ardent campaigner for prison reform, and took a special interest in Oscar. Morrison wrote that Oscar was in `an excited flurried condition', when he first arrived at Wandsworth, `and seemed as if he wished to face his punishment without flinching'. But, after a few weeks there, `it was easy for the experienced eye to see that this man would break down long before his sentence came to an end'. Morrison preached patience. `I could be patient, for patience is a virtue,' Oscar retorted. `It is not patience, it is apathy you want here and apathy is a vice.'

  It was not long before Morrison had some disturbing intelligence to report. On 11 September he wrote privately to Haldane to inform him that Oscar was masturbating compulsively in his cell:

  He is now quite crushed and broken. This is unfortunate as a prisoner who breaks down in one direction generally breaks down in several, and I fear that from what I hear and see that perverse sexual practices are again getting the mastery over him. This is a common occurrence among prisoners of his class and is of course favoured by constant cellular isolation. The odour of his cell is now so bad that the officer in charge of him has to use carbolic in it every other day.

  In Pentonville, Oscar had been dosed with bromide of potassium, which was given to prisoners to suppress their libido. But the drug had been discontinued after a few days because it was thought to be contributing to Oscar's depression. Without bromide of potassium, Oscar's libi
do would have been as high as ever, and it would, perhaps, have been surprising had he not sought relief from sexual tension through masturbation.

  Masturbation was not a trivial issue for the authorities. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was regarded as not only a pernicious and debilitating vice, but increasingly as both a symptom and a cause of insanity. David Skae, the eminent Scottish doctor and President of the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane, was the first to categorise `masturbatory insanity' as a separate and distinct mental illness in 1863. Masturbation in prison was regarded as a form of insanity, and the 1895 report from the Departmental Committee on Prisons recorded several cases of prisoners given over to masturbation in Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs:

  Male aged 48. - Found in an enclosed yard. No insane record. Health good on admission. No morbid symptom for two months. On second-class labour. Then symptoms of excitability showed themselves, was self-abuse; soon became acutely maniacal and was removed to asylum.

  Male aged 25. - Felony. No insane record. Sound on admission, and so continued for 14 months. Then became strange in manner and was placed under observation. In a few weeks was certified insane. His disease was connected with self-abuse. His diet was liberal throughout, and he was working in association when the symptoms occurred.

  Female aged 20. - Rogue and vagabond. No insane record. Of vicious tendencies and antecedents. Showed moral perversity of a kind that for some time obscured the mental symptoms. These last became however sufficiently aggravated to warrant certificate of insanity.

  In each case, masturbation led to a diagnosis of insanity and removal to either a local madhouse or to a prison for the criminally insane - most probably Broadmoor. Oscar's situation was serious. If he was masturbating compulsively, then the prison authorities would have a strong case for declaring him insane and sending him too to Broadmoor.

  This outcome would be a disaster for Oscar, but also a terrible embarrassment for the prison service and the government, as Morrison pointed out to Haldane:

  The practical question is what should be done? If he were to go off his head under cellular discipline it is almost certain to arouse a good deal of indignation in the public mind and the authorities will no doubt be blamed for allowing such a thing to happen. This contingency should if possible be avoided.

  Haldane thought the matter sufficiently serious to inform the Home Secretary, Sir Matthew Ridley, who treated the allegations very seriously, summoning Morrison to the Home Office. Morrison told the Home Secretary that he was convinced that Oscar was masturbating compulsively. After seeing Morrison, Ridley took the extraordinary step of summoning the warder in charge of Oscar's cell to the Home Office to personally cross-question him about Oscar's supposed masturbation. Ridley also instructed the Medical Inspector of Prisons, Dr Gover, to look into the matter. Gover visited Wandsworth on 20 September and examined Oscar in the presence of the prison doctor, Dr Quinton. He reported that there was `not the slightest evidence that Wilde is yielding to perverse sexual practices - self-abuse is not common among prisoners of his class, as Mr Morrison alleges'. On 7 October Ridley wrote to Haldane:

  I have seen Mr Morrison, who adheres to his statements in spite of the medical evidence, which is supported also by that of the Prison Doctor, Dr Quinton, who enjoys a very high reputation for professional acumen. The warder in charge of Oscar Wilde's cell tells me that he had noticed a curious smell, and that he had mentioned it in conversation with the Chaplain. You will see that Dr Gover accounts for this smell by the use of Jeyes purifying fluid.

  Ridley's letter smacks of a cover-up. Jeyes purifying fluid was a disinfectant made from coal tar, and it would be hard for Dr Gover to confuse the distinctly balsamic, antiseptic tang of coal tar, with the sickly sweet smell of commingled sweat and semen in a confined space. Besides which, Morrison had no reason to lie. He had sought Haldane's help in the matter knowing that Oscar was at very real risk of being declared insane if it was proved that he was masturbating compulsively.

  Nine months later, in a petition to the Home Secretary requesting that his sentence be commuted, Oscar as good as admitted to compulsive masturbation when he described how the system of almost constant solitary confinement made him `the sure prey of morbid passions, and obscene fancies, and thoughts that defile, desecrate and destroy'. And in his epic poem of prison life, `The Ballad of Reading Gaol', Oscar obliquely acknowledged the powerful impulse to masturbate in prison:

  Masturbation may have been the only release for Oscar in the grave new world where he found himself, the only form of pleasure available to him in the living hell of Wandsworth. Not only that. It might have been the only tangible way to affirm his love for Bosie and his identity as a Uranian. `I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life, crushed by anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain,' Oscar recalled in De Profundis:

  Every day I said to myself, `I must keep love in my heart today, else how shall I live through the day?'

  Was Oscar's compulsive masturbation an outpouring of lust, a brute and defiant expression of the seed of life in a place where the fetid breath of living Death was omnipresent? Or was it an attempt to recreate and remember the Arcadian erotic landscape of life before the fall, to rekindle what now seemed the far distant echoes of his love for Bosie? Or a strange amalgam of both?

  Oscar's mental and physical health continued to deteriorate inexorably. When Oscar left Wandsworth briefly to attend his bankruptcy hearing in early October, his old friend, the solicitor Arthur Clifton, was present and managed to have a short conversation with him:

  I was very much shocked at Oscar's appearance, though scarcely surprised ... his hair was rather long and he looked dreadfully thin ... he was very much upset and cried a great deal: he seemed quite broken-hearted and kept on describing his punishment as savage.

  A week later, on Sunday 13 October, Oscar collapsed during a service in the prison chapel. He had woken that morning and had been unable to stand. Dr Quinton was called, contented himself with telling Oscar that he would be punished for malingering if he refused to get up. Oscar forced himself to get up, falling over and bruising himself while he was dressing, and managed to walk shakily to the chapel. `I could hardly stand up,' he told Frank Harris later. `Everything kept disappearing and coming back faintly; and suddenly I must have fallen.'

  Oscar woke up in the prison infirmary with a pain in his ear where he had bumped himself as he had fallen. He was suffering from severe dysentery. `I saw him at the Infirmary at Wandsworth on Monday,' Robert Sherard told More Adey. `He is a perfect wreck and says he will be dead before long.' Lily Wilde, Oscar's sister-in-law, also visited him in the infirmary. `I sat with Oscar yesterday for % of an hour,' she wrote to More Adey:

  He is suffering from dysentery brought on I should say by great bodily weakness. He is hungry but cannot eat the food and at present is only allowed a little beef tea. Mentally he is very unhappy and indeed what else could he be. He is very altered in every way more I cannot tell you. He seemed gratified when I told him how you had kindly come up to give me news of him. The whole interview has made me more than sad.

  Robbie Ross saw Oscar at the next bankruptcy hearing and managed to speak to him for a few minutes. Oscar's `mind is considerably impaired', a shocked Robbie told Oscar Browning:

  Physically he was much worse than anyone had led me to believe. Indeed I really should not have known him at all. This I know is an ordinary figure of speech, but it exactly describes what I experienced. His clothes hung about him in loose folds and his hands are like those of a skeleton. The contour of his face is completely changed ... He is still in the infirmary but told me he wanted to leave as he hoped to die very soon. Indeed he only spoke calmly about death. Every other subject caused him to break down.

  Oscar's dysentery could be treated with drugs, plenty of rest and a nutritious diet. But his mental state, in particular his obsession with the subject of death and dying, was giving rise to con
siderable alarm. Haldane again took up the cudgels on Oscar's behalf and alerted the Home Secretary to his mental condition. Sir Matthew Ridley instructed two of the country's leading experts on criminal lunacy, Dr David Nicholson, Superintendent of Broadmoor, and Dr Richard Bryan, also of Broadmoor, to assess Oscar's mental state, paying particular attention to whether or not there was any `moral derangement', a coded reference to compulsive masturbation. They saw Oscar on 22 October and wrote their report a week later. The report has survived and makes fascinating reading:

  His history before imprisonment shows that he had the birth and education of a gentleman, and that his intellectual capacity was of a high order, as evidenced by the success which his novels, plays, and other writings met with. He busied himself in seeing to the rehearsal and proper stage rendering of his own plays, he possessed a great fund both of general information and of worldly knowledge. He also posed as the `apostle' of art and culture, more especially as was seen in an aestheticism which was the outcome of an almost childish vanity.

  On the other hand, with all his ability and while he gloried in being, as he was, in some sort, a social pet and pattern, he lived a life of the grossest selfindulgence, and practised the most disgusting and odious criminal offences with others of his own sex and that too not with one or two individuals of a better station in life, but apparently with the most casual acquaintances of comparatively low social position. He exhibited these depraved tastes and led this double life for years before his arrest and trial.

  What seemed to shock Nicholson and Bryan most was that Oscar had enjoyed casual sex with working-class boys. `During our interview with him,' their report continued, Oscar:

  entered freely into the circumstances of his past history, more especially as they had relation to his present position which he appeared to feel acutely, and upon which he dilated with great fervour and some amount of emotional depression, occasionally accompanied by tears. This display of feeling was no doubt referable, as he himself gave us to understand, to remorseful and bitter thoughts of the blasting of his future by the abominable follies of the past, and we do not regard this as being either unnatural or as indicating moral derangement.