Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  In his resolve he was heartened by some messages of support and sympathy. Yeats had called at Oakley Street after his departure with a sheaf of letters gathered from ‘Dublin literary men’.14 Frederick York Powell even relayed the unexpected news that Whistler was touched by his plight, and had ‘expressed himself very kindly and gently’ on the subject.15

  Wilde remained at Courtfield Gardens until Monday 20 May, the date on which he had to surrender to his bail at the Old Bailey. The case was to be heard before the sixty-six-year-old Justice Wills, a noted Alpinist, and also – by chance – a neighbour of the Wildes in Tite Street.16 Proceedings, however, were delayed when Sir Edward Clarke made a successful application for the cases of Wilde and Taylor to be tried separately. And then – to his dismay, and despite his protestations – the prosecution elected to take Taylor’s case first. It was another reverse: if Taylor were convicted, Wilde’s already slim chances would be further reduced.

  Taylor’s case was quickly heard. Beginning at noon on Monday 20 May, by the following afternoon the jury had declared him guilty of gross indecency with both Parker brothers. They were unable to decide on the question of whether Taylor had procured the Parkers for Wilde, but the judge felt it was sufficient to have come to a verdict on the principal charges. Sentencing was postponed until Wilde’s case had been heard.

  During the course of 21 May, Wilde was present at the Old Bailey, ready if his case were called. While in the building he was approached by the ex-police inspector Kearley and handed the Marquess of Queensberry’s formal demand for payment of his £677 3s 8d legal costs. Failure to pay within seven days would constitute a statutory ‘act of bankruptcy’.17 It was a new misery to contemplate, piled upon his own legal expenses, his outstanding trade debts, his borrowing from friends and relations, his advances from theatrical producers.

  Almost at the moment of this crisis, though, he received a communication from his friend Adela Schuster. She wished to place £1,000 at his disposal. In the note accompanying the gift she wrote, ‘I desire this money to be employed for your own personal use and that of your children as you may direct.’ Wilde chose to call the money a ‘trust’ or ‘deposit fund’. Rather than using it to repay immediate debts it would be used to provide for emergencies and necessities, depending upon the outcome of the case. He handed the sum over to Ernest Leverson to administer: £120 was converted immediately into banknotes, and handed to Wilde to distribute; £150 was used to pay Humphreys.18

  Wilde’s own trial commenced – before a new jury – on the morning after his encounter with Kearley. It continued for four days, during which he stayed again at his mother’s house in Oakley Street, being collected and returned each day by Headlam, sometimes together with Percy Douglas. Wilde now had to face only the eight counts of gross indecency: with Charles Parker, Alfred Wood, Edward Shelley and the unknown boys at the Savoy. But it was enough.

  The evidence and the arguments rehearsed at the previous trials and court hearings were gone over once again. But the appetite of the public – and even of the press – seems almost to have been sated. The reporting of the case began to slacken. Wilde, too, seemed a notably diminished and wearied figure. He was allowed to sit, even when giving evidence. He declared that he found it difficult to hear.19 ‘Most of the time he seemed in a daze, and now and then, when consciousness of his position returned to him, he swayed backwards and forwards as if overwrought with mental distress. The evidence that was being given made no impression on him.’ During much of the time he doodled on a piece of foolscap that lay on the ledge of the dock, gradually turning it black with ink.20

  The only people whose energy appeared undimmed were the two leading counsels and the Marquess of Queensberry. From the beginning of proceedings Queensberry had been a conspicuous presence in the crowded courtroom. He greeted the news of Taylor’s conviction with a crowing telegram to Percy’s wife, ending, ‘Wilde’s turn tomorrow’. And, when confronted by Percy that evening on Piccadilly, he succeeded in giving his son a black eye (the fist-fight was broken up and both men were arrested, and bound over the next day to keep the peace).21

  In the courtroom the ‘stubbornness’ with which the case was fought on both sides was considered ‘most remarkable’, and ‘the personal encounters’ between Lockwood and Clarke would – it was suggested – be long ‘remembered as the fiercest scenes of the kind which have ever been witnessed in court’.22 Clarke (as a former long-serving solicitor general) reminded Lockwood that he was a public ‘minister of justice’ and was ‘not here to try to get a verdict of guilty by any means’.23 He portrayed Wilde as the victim of a conspiracy of ‘all the blackmailers in London’, his name besmirched by men who, in ‘testifying on behalf of the Crown… have secured immunity for past rogueries and indecencies’.24

  Justice Wills was certainly sceptical about the admissibility of much of the evidence against Wilde. To Lockwood’s fury, he agreed with Clarke that Edward Shelley (the Crown’s one witness not tainted by allegations of blackmail) must be regarded as an accomplice, whose evidence could not be accepted without corroboration. As there was no such corroboration, he ordered that the count be removed from the consideration of the jury, and a formal verdict of ‘not guilty’ recorded. The ruling – at the end of the Thursday sitting – created a great buzz of excitement. That evening Lockwood fulminated against the judge around the clubs of London, calling Wills ‘an incompetent old fool’.25 Clarke secured another telling point, eliciting that Jane Cotter, the chambermaid at the Savoy who claimed to have seen a boy in Wilde’s bed, was severely short-sighted yet never wore ‘eye-glasses’ at work.26

  Although, in the public mind, there was (apparently) ‘not a shadow of doubt’ as to Wilde’s guilt, ‘somehow the feeling spread abroad that in view of all the circumstances’ there would almost ‘certainly be another disagreement’ of the jury, and perhaps even an acquittal.27 Wilde, perhaps, dared not hope so much.

  Coming away from court on the afternoon of Friday 24 May, he was accompanied back to Oakley Street in the carriage by Ernest Leverson. There were financial matters to discuss. Leverson gave assurances that, should Wilde be convicted, his mother would be provided for from Adela Schuster’s ‘trust fund’. Leverson also asked, though, whether he might repay himself – from the same source – the £250 still owing from his emergency loan of £500. And, it seems, that Wilde readily agreed.28

  That night Wilde took farewell of his friends. All would be over on the morrow. Lockwood would conclude his closing address, and the judge would make his charge to the jury. Wilde informed each of those gathered at Oakley Street of ‘a little gift, from the poor trinkets which remained to him’ – a souvenir in case he did not return home the next day. After his bouts of depression and apathy, he seemed to have achieved an impressive serenity. On retiring he kissed – with ‘stately courtliness’ – the hand of Willie’s wife. He had been touched by her kindness and sympathy.‡ He then spent a ‘long hour’ with his beloved mother.29 And, almost certainly, he wrote, yet again, to Bosie.

  ‘Every great love has its tragedy,’ Wilde declared, ‘and now ours has too, but to have known and loved you with such profound devotion, to have had you for a part of my life, the only part I now consider beautiful, is enough for me… Our souls were made for one another, and by knowing yours through love, mine has transcended many evils, understood perfection, and entered into the divine essence of things.’30

  In court the next morning, Lockwood continued his closing address. He seemed determined to make good any deficiencies in the evidence through the vehemence of his rhetoric. Wilde would later recall the strange sensation of sitting in the dock listening to this ‘appalling denunciation’ and being sickened by what he heard. And then it had suddenly occurred to him: ‘How splendid it would be if I was saying all this about myself?’ He saw then that ‘what is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.’ Now, unfortunately, it was being said by the solicitor general.31

  The summing up
of Justice Wills, though moderate, was – when compared to that of Justice Charles – markedly less disposed towards the defendant. He made no allusions to the prejudicial reporting of the newspapers. He was not inclined to accept an artistic interpretation of Wilde’s passionate letters to Lord Alfred Douglas. He suggested there was ‘some truth in the aphorism that a man must be judged by the company he keeps’ – adding, ‘Gentlemen, you have seen the Parkers, as you have seen Wood… Are these the kind of young men with whom you yourselves would care to sit down to dine?’

  The jury retired at half past three, and Wilde was taken down to the cells to wait upon their return. Despite Lockwood’s powerful performance, and Justice Wills’s closing remarks, there still existed in the courtroom a suspicion that there might again be a hung jury. If that were to occur, there was a strong possibility that the Crown would abandon the prosecution, and Wilde would be allowed to go free – doubtless in the hope that he would depart into self-imposed exile. As the minutes extended, and the first hour passed, this began to seem an ever more likely outcome. ‘You’ll dine your man in Paris, tomorrow,’ Lockwood is supposed to have remarked to Clarke. Wilde’s counsel, however, was less sanguine. The jury re-appeared shortly after half past five. But it was only to inquire about a piece of evidence, and – following the judge’s elucidation of the point – they retired again. A few minutes later they returned. It was clear they had reached a decision.

  Wilde was brought back into the dock. He stood, ashen-faced, to hear the verdicts. To the first count: Guilty. Wilde was seen to slump forward and clutch the rail. Guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. Only on the charge relating to Shelley was he found, formally, not guilty.

  Taylor was brought up into the dock to hear sentence pronounced. Justice Wills was scathing in his comments. He had not ‘the shadow of a doubt’ that the jury had come to the correct decision. ‘It is no use for me to address you,’ he informed the prisoners:

  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.

  He passed the severest sentence that the law allowed: two years’ imprisonment, with hard labour. ‘In my judgement,’ he added, ‘it is totally inadequate for such a case as this.’32

  The harshness of the sentence caused ‘considerable sensation’ in court. There were cries of ‘Oh! Oh!’ and ‘Shame!’. Taylor appeared to hear the sentence with calm indifference. But Wilde seemed stunned. He made a movement as if he wished to address the judge. He struggled to articulate a phrase (perhaps, ‘And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?’) The words, however, were lost. The warders hurried him out of sight.33

  * Lockwood’s personal feelings in the matter may well have been conflicted – or sharpened – by the fact, that, like Asquith, he had been on friendly terms with Wilde both socially and politically. He was a vice-president of the Eighty Club. Wilde even owned a sketch of Pigott (the Parnellite forger) done by Lockwood. As a further complication, Lockwood’s nephew (by marriage) was Maurice Schwabe, whose name – though kept out of the original libel trial – had been mentioned in subsequent proceedings as the man who had introduced Wilde to Taylor.

  † Adding to her misery was the thought that Constance (on the advice of Philip Burne-Jones) was planning to change her name and that of the children. It would, she suggested, ‘bring them much confusion’. She urged Constance to wait ‘until the trial is quite over’: ‘Neither’, she went on, ‘do I approve of the Navy [as a future career] for [nine-year-old] Vyvyan. I think it quite unfit as he is a born writer, made for literature alone.’

  ‡ Lily Wilde was then heavily pregnant. On 11 July 1895 she would give birth to a daughter, christened Dorothy Irene Wilde – to be known as Dolly.

  -PART IX-

  In Carcere

  E Vinculis

  1895–1897

  age 40–42

  ‘Oscar Wilde in Prison’, as imagined by U.S. magazine The Standard, 1895.

  1

  The Head of Medusa

  ‘Don’t ask me to speak of it please.’

  oscar wilde

  The nightmare then began in earnest. Wilde was now a prisoner of the Crown, and the full weight of the unreformed Victorian penal system crashed down up him. He lost, at a stroke, all choice in his own movements and actions. Taken briefly to a cell in Newgate, adjoining the Old Bailey, while the warrant was signed for his detention, he was then loaded into a closed police carriage (or ‘Black Maria’) – together with Alfred Taylor and two warders – and transferred across north London to Pentonville.1

  In the bare reception ward the details of his age, religion and education were taken down. He was subjected to a medical examination. His weight was recorded as 190lbs; he had lost more than half a stone during his time on remand in Holloway, and had not regained it over the course of his second trial. Although he had been sentenced to hard labour, the Pentonville medical officer deemed the out-of-shape forty-year-old prisoner quite unequal to its rigours. Wilde was passed fit only for ‘light labour’ – the sewing of mailbags and the picking of oakum.2 He was little aware of his good fortune.

  Next he was made to undress before the prison staff, and immerse himself in a tub of ‘filthy water’. He dried himself with a damp, brown rag and then donned the prison uniform: the drab coarse trousers, the loose jacket and vest, the blue worsted stockings, the heavy boots, and the grey-and-red Scotch cap, all printed over with the infamous ‘crow’s foot’ arrow. His hair was cropped. He received his first daily dose of bromide of potassium – or ‘prison medicine’, as the libido-quelling sedative was called. He was assigned a cell, and its number became his new ‘name’.3

  He heard the iron-clad door clang shut on his new home – a 13ft × 7ft box of bare whitewashed walls, dimly lit by a barred window of opaque glass. He felt the hardness of his narrow plank bed, and the thinness of the regulation blanket. He confronted his first dish of prison food (the sight and smell of it turned his stomach; he could not eat). Time slowed to a crawl.

  Pentonville, built in the 1840s, housed some thousand inmates, but Wilde felt entirely alone. The prison operated on the ‘separate system’, which aimed to keep inmates completely isolated from each other, confined to their cells for all but a couple of hours each day. Although they might be brought together in the exercise yard and the chapel, at such moments they were not allowed to converse, or even to look at each other. Only during the 1860s did prisoners cease having to wear hoods – or ‘peak’ caps – when out of their cells.4 Some prisoners might be allowed to work with others ‘in association’, but at such moments, too, silence had to be maintained. Punishments for talking to fellow inmates were harsh; they included loss of food, loss of work, loss of privileges, and even solitary confinement. The great concern of the authorities was to prevent the contamination of first-time offenders by hardened criminals, to stop prisons becoming ‘seminaries of sin’. Prison presented a wasteland of ‘endless silence’ punctuated only by the slam of metal-framed doors, the clank of chains, the echo of footsteps, the bark of orders and reprimands, and by obscure cries of pain, distress and despair. Wilde who had lived for conversation, for social intercourse, for intellectual stimulation, for beauty, for comfort, for good food and ease, had lost them all, absolutely and at a stroke. The horror of it overwhelmed him.

  Although the novelty of his first day had been appalling, more appalling still was the uniformity of every other day – and night. Wilde found himself oppressed by the ‘three permanent punishments authorized by law in English prisons: Hunger, Insomnia, Disease’. The diet was deliberately inadequate. And the pace of Wilde’s weight loss was soon increased by frequent bouts of diarrhoea. The condition was one of the miseries of prison life, made even worse
by the wholly inadequate sanitary arrangements. Prisoners, confined to their ill-ventilated cells from five in the afternoon until eight the following morning, had only one too-small pot for ‘the purposes of nature’. The stench was brutal.5

  Wilde’s mental condition declined along with his physical state. Regular doses of bromide were apt to produce feelings of mental prostration and melancholy among new prisoners,6 but it was the ‘endless silence’ and ‘eternal solitude’ of existence that oppressed him most.7 Alone in his cell for hours upon end his thoughts turned inward: regret gnawed at his soul; he was tortured incessantly with ‘self-reproaches’.8 His daily allocation of oakum picking was carried out alone in his cell. And though designated as ‘light labour’, the work of unplucking the twisted strands of old tarred rope was hard on both the fingers and the spirit.*

  And behind the tedium there lay always the dread of punishment. Wilde, who had always considered himself made for exceptions rather than rules, struggled to comprehend his new world of regulation, or to make sense of its inhumanity. When, in the exercise yard, the man walking in front him whispered how sorry he was for him and how he hoped he would ‘bear up’, Wilde – forgetting the edict against all conversation – stretched out his hands, and cried, ‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’ He was, of course, punished, for the response. Wilde was at a disadvantage: at 6 feet tall he was – as one warder recorded – ‘considerably taller than the majority’ and always a conspicuous figure in the exercise yard. Indeed he often served the officers as a ‘landmark’ as they counted the prisoners walking the ring. His ‘very long stride’, moreover, was always bringing him close on the heels of the man in front, prompting calls of ‘keep your distance’. He developed a dread of the daily cell inspection. Each of his small collection of containers and utensils had its set place, and if this was neglected in the smallest degree he was liable to be punished. ‘The punishment was so horrible,’ he recalled, ‘that I often started up in my sleep to feel if each thing was where the regulations would have it, and not an inch either to right or left.’9