He wrote not as art now, but as desperately serious matter. Wilde’s old skill at paradox and phrase making was not there now merely to amuse his audience or mock his betters, but rather to kill his own pain and grief and attempt to communicate passionately and fiercely with his lover. (Wilde, for example, compares himself to Christ.) But there is also a beautiful, calm eloquence, and a sense of urgency, of things being said because there might not be time or opportunity to say them in the future. “De Profundis”, it should be said, is neither fair minded nor consistent it is, at times, bloated in its comparisons and its rhetoric.

The complete version, however, was not published until 1949.īy the time he wrote “De Profundis”, Wilde’s love for Douglas had turned into a sort of bitterness, and the tone of his long letter manages to capture that bitterness as well as the extraordinary attachment he felt for Douglas. In 1905 Ross published extracts from the text, and a fuller version in 1908. On his release, he handed the manuscript to Ross, who had two typed copies made, one of which he sent to Douglas. Wilde addressed his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. Nelson was more liberal than his predecessor and was ready to relax the rules. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.” Wilde was later to praise Nelson, who had arrived at Reading in July 1896, as “the most Christlike man I ever met”. Towards the end of his sentence, the governor of the jail, Major Nelson, remarked to Wilde’s friend Robert Ross: “He looks well. For the first month, Wilde was tied to a treadmill six hours a day, making an ascent, as it were, of 6,000 feet each day, with five minutes’ rest after every 20 minutes. He could not sleep, he was permanently hungry and he suffered from dysentery. Allowed one hour’s exercise a day, he walked in single file in the yard with other prisoners but he was not allowed to communicate with them. In total isolation, first in Pentonville and Wandsworth, and then in Reading gaol, to which he was moved in November 1895, Wilde slept on a plank bed with no mattress.

Wilde’s misfortune was to serve his sentence just before prison conditions were officially changed by the 1898 Prison Act. E arly in 1895, while facing charges of indecency and wondering if he should abscond to France, Oscar Wilde had no idea what a two-year prison sentence would mean for him.

De profundis oscar