It was taken as proof of his sanity.Īgain and again, Wilde’s letters from prison return to this theme of silence and solitude. Ironically, his eloquence defeated his argument. He pleads that he is on the brink of madness. In a letter to the Home Secretary, begging for mitigation of his sentence, the poet and playwright refers to “this silence, this solitude, this isolation from all human and humane influences, this tomb for those who are not yet dead”. “Ultimately the bond of all companionship,” he once observed, “is conversation.” For Wilde, who was the greatest talker of his age, it must have been, if anything, worse. Solitary confinement, which it almost was, is now classed as such. When they emerged for one hour of chapel and one of exercise, they had to wear the Scotch cap.
Prisoners were kept in one-man cells for 22 hours a day. That led to what was called the Separate System. Accordingly it was decided that prison should be a frightful experience designed to deter people from crime, rather than an improving one to reform them. In the mid-19th century, after Britain stopped sending convicts to Australia, there were fears of a growing criminal class at home. The tradition is said to have been introduced, fittingly enough, by the poet Philip Sidney, when he was Queen Elizabeth’s Master of Ordnance. These were covered in broad arrow marks to indicate that he was now property of the crown. What better moment, then, to explore what Wilde went through during those two years?Īs well as the Scotch cap, his garb included a suit of prison clothes, which were newly cut for him owing to his unusual height. The prison, which closed in 2014, is the focus of a campaign to turn it into an arts centre, with the support of everyone from Banksy to Kenneth Branagh. Today marks the 125th anniversary of Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol. Now he found himself incarcerated during a time of astonishing brutality in the British penal system. “Even in prison, a man can be quite free,” he had written in an essay. The idea was to prevent prisoners from striking up friendships with one another. It was a leather cap with a long peak, which slanted downwards to cover the face. Among the prison clothes the writer received, after he was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for having sex with men, was something that was known as a Scotch cap. “Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,” Oscar Wilde once remarked.
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