Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (36 page)

     
E
aten by teeth of flam
e
,

I
n a burning winding-sheet he lie
s
,

     
A
nd his grave has got no nam
e
.

A
nd there, till Christ call forth the dea
d
,

     
I
n silence let him li
e
:

N
o need to waste the foolish tea
r
,

     
O
r heave the windy sig
h
:

T
he man had killed the thing he love
d
,

     
A
nd so he had to di
e
.

A
nd all men kill the thing they lov
e
,

     
B
y all let this be hear
d
,

S
ome do it with a bitter loo
k
,

     
S
ome with a flattering wor
d
,

T
he coward does it with a kis
s
,

     
T
he brave man with a swor
d
!

Knowing my friend’s fondness for playing with words, I made a note of the thirty-six letters he had underscored and rearranged them to form a sentence that reads: ‘Sebastian Atitis-Snake done the dread deed.’

Within weeks of completing
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
, Oscar was reunited with Lord Alfred Douglas – the young man whose presence in his life had brought about his downfall. At the end of August, from his favourite table at the Café Suisse, Oscar, now forty-two, wrote to Lord Alfred, now twenty-six: ‘Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.’

At the end of September, Constance wrote to her husband from Genoa: ‘I
forbid
you to see Lord Alfred Douglas. I forbid you to return to your filthy, insane life.’ But Oscar found he could not obey his wife’s command – and so lost her and his children and the small allowance of £3 a week that she had been paying to him. ‘Nemesis has caught me in her net,’ he wrote, ‘to struggle is foolish. Why is it that one runs to one’s ruin? Why has destruction such a fascination? Why, when one stands on a pinnacle, must one throw oneself down? No one knows, but things are so.’

In the spring of 1898, Constance, who had damaged her back in a fall, had an operation on her spine. The operation failed and she died on 7 April, aged thirty-nine. Oscar was distraught. ‘If only we had met once, and kissed each other,’ he wrote. ‘It is too late. How awful life is.’ The following year, he went to Genoa to visit her grave: ‘It is very pretty – a marble cross with dark ivy-leaves inlaid in a good pattern . . . I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected – with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.’

Constance’s death brought Oscar £150 a year from her estate, unconditionally. He continued to see Lord Alfred Douglas, but it was not as it had once been between them. After
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
he did no serious work: he travelled, he drank, he borrowed money from friends, he took each day as it came. He could not – or would not – concentrate to write, but when he and I met, over absinthe and cigarettes, he told me stories of his adventures which I wrote down – promising him faithfully that they would not be published during his lifetime. I asked him if he wanted the story of Atitis-Snake to be published at all.

‘Yes,’ he insisted. ‘Most definitely.’

‘But you murdered a man, Oscar,’ I reminded him.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I used to play golf – rather well. There is so much more to Oscar Wilde than the public appreciates. In time, they must be allowed to know it all.’

‘Why did you kill him?’ I asked. ‘Was it part of your desire for experience? Because you wanted “to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world”?’

No,’ he answered emphatically. ‘For once in my life, I did the decent thing. If Atitis-Snake had lived,’ he said, ‘the boy, Tom, would never have been safe.’

Gradually, my friend’s health deteriorated. In particular, his ear worsened. Three and a half years after his release from prison, he died in Paris, of cerebral meningitis, on 30 November 1900. He was just forty-six years of age.

Oscar was given a pauper’s burial in a leased grave at Bagneux, a suburb seven miles to the south of central Paris. Nine years later his remains were removed to the French national cemetery at Père Lachaise, where they now rest beneath a fine monument created by the young sculptor Jacob Epstein.

Impressive as is Epstein’s monumental winged sphinx in Oscar’s memory, for me it does not rival the tomb built for Sir Richard Burton in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen’s church in Mortlake, a village seven miles to the south of central London. The Burton tomb, thirteen feet in height, is an exact representation of a desert tent, its sandstone walls sculpted to depict the cloth of the tent rippling in the desert breeze. Oscar in Paris and Constance in Genoa are buried five hundred miles apart. At Mortlake, in their tent-like mausoleum, Richard and Isabel Burton are buried side by side – despite the best efforts of Private A. A. Luck, late of the Bombay Grenadiers.

In 1906, I published
The Life of Oscar Wilde
and included in the biography a chapter specially written by Warder Thomas Martin. When I had completed the book and delivered my manuscript to the publishers, I was sorting through the materials that I had used while writing it and came across a slip of paper that, at first, meant nothing to me. All that was on the paper was an address in Whitechapel – written clearly, but not in Oscar’s hand. I asked Warder Martin if the handwriting or the address meant anything to him. He recalled at once that the handwriting was that of Dr Maurice, the surgeon at Reading Gaol, and the address was that of the mother of Prisoner E.1.1. – the boy, Tom Lewis.

I remembered then that it was Oscar who had given me the piece of paper and had asked me, one day, when convenient, to visit the address to find out, if I could, what had become of the boy. I did so – in October 1906. I found the address without difficulty and there, in a tidy terraced house off the Whitechapel Road, I found the boy’s mother – living alone. She was a small, bird-like lady in her mid-fifties, with white hair, pink cheeks and a friendly disposition. She appeared happy to meet me and proud to talk about her son, who, she assured me, had not been in trouble of any kind since coming out of prison eight years before. She saw her boy very little nowadays, but he sent her money every week and she was grateful for that. He ran a restaurant, she told me, near King’s Cross railway station, which enjoyed what she called ‘a very high-class sort of clientele’. She had never been to visit it herself – her son discouraged her: ‘Home is home and business is business,’ he said – but she knew the address and she gave it to me. I went there that same afternoon. The restaurant turned out to be a café, with, above it, on the first floor, what was undoubtedly a male brothel. I think that Oscar would have been amused. When he had asked me to enquire after the boy he had said to me, ‘Remember, Tom Lewis is his name. As names go, it is not very promising. Do not expect too much of him. If only he had been called Oscar Wilde, think what a life he might have led!’

RHS

September 1939

Reading Gaol in the 1890s

Her Majesty’s Prison Reading was built in 1844 and designed by the great Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott, who went on to build London’s Albert Memorial and the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station. The design for Reading Gaol was based on the 1842 ‘New Model Prison’ at Pentonville, which in its turn was based on the design of the 1829 Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The design was to allow for the implementation of the favoured penal regime of the time, the ‘separate system’, whereby the inmates were kept in solitary confinement and prevented from seeing or speaking to one another. The aim of the system was to allow the prisoners within the ‘penitentiary’ the opportunity for quiet reflection and the true repentance of sins. As a county gaol, Reading also served as the site for executions: the first in 1845, in front of a crowd of 10,000; the last in 1913.

The full history of Reading Gaol is told in
Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol
(Waterside Press, 2007) by Anthony Stokes, for many years a senior prison officer at Reading Gaol.

Rules for Prisoners in the 1890s

1. The bell shall ring at the opening and locking up of the rooms and cells, which shall be, from Lady Day to Michaelmas Day, at six o’clock in the morning and eight o’clock in the evening; and in the winter months at day-light in the morning and eight in the evening; and at all times the prisoners shall be locked up in their day rooms before dusk in the evening.
   
2. No person shall be allowed admission into the prison during the hours of prayer, the time for public worship, or before unlocking or after locking up hours; and no person (except a barrister or solicitor), unless in the presence of the prison Governor or some person appointed by him, shall remain within the prison after hours or locking up, except in the case of sickness of a prisoner, or some other cause assigned to the satisfaction of the Governor.
   
3. Every prisoner shall attend prayer and public worship, except in the case of illness, or other reasonable cause, to be allowed by the Governor or visiting justice.
   
4. Every prisoner guilty of drunkenness, blasphemy, swearing, or any improper expression, or any abuse or disorderly conduct, shall be punished at the discretion of the Governor.
   
5. Every prisoner shall make his or her own bed, and be washed before nine o’clock every morning, on pain of forfeiting one day’s allowance of provisions.
   
6. No tobacco to be used in the prison.
   
7. All prisoners who shall not be at work shall be required to walk round the yards, or be locked up in solitary cells.
   
8. The chambers and cells shall be swept out and thoroughly cleaned by the prisoners every morning before they are left.
   
9. No wine, ale, beer, porter, or spirituous liquors of any kind, shall be admitted for any convicted prisoner under any pretence whatever, unless ordered by the surgeon in his journal.
   
10. Every prisoner shall, at locking up time, present himself in the yard, and also at the door of the cell, to the turnkey.
    
11. Silence must be observed on all occasions by day and night.
    
12. Every prisoner guilty of any of the following offences will subject himself to punishment:
    

• Talking, shouting, cursing, swearing, singing, whistling, attempting to communicate by signs, by writing, or in any other way.
  
• Unnecessarily looking around or about at any time.
  
• Having in possession or attempting to receive money, tobacco, knives.
  
• Looking out, or attempting to look out, at window or door of a cell.
  
• Not folding a bed in the proper manner; being in bed after 6 a.m. or before 8 in the evening.
  
• Stealing any property of the prison or of a prisoner; trying to take anything left from another prisoner’s meal.
  
• Spitting on, or disfiguring the prison walls and floors.
  
• Irreverent behaviour in chapel either before, during, or after service.
  
• Striking, or in any way assaulting or threatening another prisoner or officer.
  
• Attempting to escape, or assisting others to do so.
  
• Not folding up clothing in a proper manner.
  
• Not washing feet twice a week, prior to using the water to clean the cell.
  
• Not ready to leave cell when unlocked by officer for exercise, chapel.