Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (37 page)

Prisoners wishing to see the Governor, Chaplain or Surgeon must apply to the officer when paraded for exercise in the morning, who is bound to attend to such applications.

Regulations for the Administration of Corporal Punishment

All acts of corporal punishments will be carried out in the presence of the governor or warden and of the prison surgeon or chief medical officer.

Standard approved instruments must be used for the administration of all punishments, either birch rod or cat-o’-nine-tails.

Each birch rod or cat-o’-nine-tails must be used for one punishment only and must be destroyed after use.

Only use a cat-o’-nine-tails that bears the seal of the Prison Commission.

For males over 10 and up to 16 years of age, use scale B. For males over 16, use scale C.

(The Prison Act of 1898 reduced the use of corporal punishment to two types of offences only: gross personal violence to an officer of the prison; and acts of mutiny. In 1906, Colonel Isaacson, by then governor of Manchester Prison, wrote: ‘In every large prison there is always a small fraction of the population imbued with brutality, to whom dietary punishment is absolutely useless. For these, when they resort to personal violence on an officer, I can see no alternative but the birch rod or cat.’

Birching as a judicial penalty, in both its juvenile and adult versions, was abolished in 1948, although retained until 1962 as a punishment for violent breaches of prison discipline.)

Executions – the length of the drop

The length of the drop may usually be calculated by dividing 1,000 foot-pounds by the weight of the culprit and his clothing in pounds, which will give the length of the drop in feet, but no drop should exceed 8 feet 6 inches. Thus a person weighing 150 pounds in his clothing will ordinarily require a drop of 1,000 divided by 150 = 6⅔ feet, i.e. 6 feet 8 inches.

When for any special reason, such as a diseased condition of the neck of the culprit, the Governor and Medical Officer think that there should be a departure from the standard procedure, they may inform the executioner and advise him as to the length of the drop which should be given in that particular case.

Letter from Prisoner C.3.3. to the Home Secretary, November 1896

HM Prison, Reading

Prisoner C.3.3. – Oscar Wilde

10 November 1896

To the Right Honourable Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department.

The petition of the above-named prisoner humbly sheweth that in the month of June last the petitioner, having been at that time a prisoner for more than a year, addressed to the Secretary of State a petition praying for his release on the grounds chiefly of mental health.

That the petitioner has received no answer to his petition, and would earnestly beg that it be taken into consideration, as on the 19th inst. The petitioner will have completed eighteen months of solitary confinement, a sentence of terrible severity in any case, and, in the case of the petitioner, rendered all the more difficult to bear, as it has been inflicted for offences which are in other countries in Europe more rightly recognised as tragic forms of madness coming chiefly on those who overtax their brain, in art or science.

Some alleviations have been granted to the petitioner since the date of his former petition: his ear, that was in danger of total deafness, is now attended to daily: spectacles have been provided for the protection of his eyes: he is allowed a manuscript-book to write in, and out of a list of books, selected by himself and approved of by the Prison Commissioners, a few have been added to the Prison Library: but these alleviations, for which the petitioner is naturally very grateful, count for but little in relieving the terrible mental stress and anguish that the silence and solitude of prison-life intensify daily.

Of all modes of insanity – and the petitioner is fully conscious now, too conscious it may be, that his whole life, for the two years preceding his ruin, was the prey of absolute madness – the insanity of perverted sensual instinct is the one most dominant in its action on the brain. It taints the intellectual as well as the emotional energies. It clings like a malaria to soul and body alike. And while one may bear up against the monotonous hardships and relentless discipline of an English prison: endure with apathy the unceasing shame and the daily degradation: and grow callous even to that hideous grotesqueness of life that robs sorrow of all is dignity, and takes from pain its power of purification; still, the complete isolation from everything that is humane and humanising plunges one deeper and deeper into the very mire of madness, and the horrible silence, to which one is, as it were, eternally condemned, concentrates the mind on all that one longs to loathe, and creates those insane moods from which one desires to be free, creates them and makes them permanent.

Under the circumstances the petitioner prays for his release on the expiration of his term of eighteen months’ confinement, or at any rate before Christmas comes. Some friends have promised to take him abroad at once and to see that he has the treatment and care that he requires. There is of course before him no public life: nor any life in literature any more: nor joy or happiness of life at all. He has lost wife, children, fame, honour, position, wealth: poverty is all that he can look forward to: obscurity all that he can hope for: yet he feels that, if released now, somewhere, unknown, untormented, at peace he might be able to recreate the life of a student of letters, and find in literature an anodyne from pain, first, and afterwards a mode by which sanity and balance and wholesomeness might be restored to the soul. But the solitary confinement, that breaks one’s heart, shatters one’s intellect too: and prison is but an ill physician: and the modern modes of punishment create what they should cure, and, when they have on their side Time with its long length of dreary days, they desecrate and destroy whatever good, or desire even of good, there may be in a man.

To be at length, after these eighteen months of lonely sorrow, set free, for whatever brief space of time health of mind or body may allow, is the earnest prayer of the petitioner.

Oscar Wilde

Letter from Oscar Wilde to the
Daily Chronicle
, May 1897

On 27 May 1897, from Dieppe, Oscar Wilde wrote a long letter to the
Daily Chronicle
about the conditions at Reading Gaol. He wrote specifically about the case of Warder Martin, ‘dismissed by the Prison Commissioners for having given some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child’, and about the beating of Prisoner A.2.11., Prince, who ‘had had twenty-four lashes in the cookhouse on Saturday afternoon’: ‘This man is undoubtedly becoming insane’. Wilde praised Governor Nelson – ‘a man of gentle and humane character, greatly liked and respected by all the prisoners’ – but concluded: ‘the system is of course beyond his reach so far as altering its rules is concerned. I have no doubt that he sees daily much of what he knows to be unjust, stupid and cruel. But his hands are tied.’

Warder Martin had been dismissed for ‘gross insubordination’. Following the publication of Wilde’s letter in the
Daily Chronicle
, the Prison Commission looked again at Martin’s case and at the other points raised by Wilde. On 15 June 1897, the Commission concluded that the decision regarding Martin had been the correct one: ‘He was an unsatisfactory officer and it is not easy to attribute the conduct which led to his dismissal to an excusable motive. Supposing he was a specially tender-hearted man and honestly believed the boy was suffering from hunger, he should have reported this to the governor. To permit warders – even from humane motives – to distinguish one prisoner from another by kindly acts would obviously lead to very serious scandals, and Martin had previously been suspected of trafficking with prisoners.’

R. B. Haldane was a member of the Prison Commission and of the parliamentary committee (chaired by Herbert Gladstone) that had been considering the whole matter of prison reform since 1894. Wilde’s letter to the
Daily Chronicle
played its part in the debate – and in the reforms that followed. The Prisons Act 1898 modified the ‘separate system’, allowing prisoners to communicate with one another, abolished hard labour, and introduced the concept of remission for good behaviour.

Acknowledgements

Readers of my series of Oscar Wilde murder mysteries frequently ask me the same question: ‘How much of this is true?’ My answer is, ‘All of it. Or almost all. Certainly, much more than you would think.’ For example, Colonel Isaacson, Major Nelson, Dr Maurice, the Reverend M. T. Friend, even Professor Bent Ball and the prisoner Prince: notwithstanding their unlikely names, these are all real people with fascinating individual stories.

I hope that my account of life in Reading Gaol in the 1890s is accurate. It is based on Wilde’s own account, of course, and of accounts by others who knew the prison at the time. I am especially indebted to Anthony Stokes, for many years a senior prison officer at HM Prison, Reading, and author of
Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol
(2007), who took me on an extended tour of the prison and allowed me to spend some time in Wilde’s cell. (Since 1992 Reading has been a Remand Centre and Young Offender Institution, holding males aged eighteen to twenty-one. Wilde’s cell is, of course, no larger than it was in the 1890s, though the prisoner’s bed is marginally more comfortable and he has a television to watch. Thanks to that television, the young prisoner I met on my visit to cell C.3.3. knew quite well who I was, even though he had not heard of Oscar Wilde.)

I am also indebted to Isobel Morrow, Independent Monitoring Board, HM Prison, Reading, and to Pauline Bryant, who was Governing Governor at Reading at the time of my visit. My special thanks, too, go to my friend Roger Lewis, who introduced me to the work of Sir Charles Bent Ball, and to Andrea Lloyd, Curator, Printed Literary Sources 1801–1914 at the British Library, who showed me the original manuscript of
De Profundis
, the letter Wilde wrote from Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas – tear stains and all.

For their continuing encouragement and support I thank Roger Johnson and Jean Upton of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and Michael Seeney and Donald Mead of the Oscar Wilde Society. As ever, I am especially grateful to Merlin Holland, the only grandson of Oscar Wilde and Constance, for his friendship and indulgence. He has been good enough to correct inaccuracies in these books when he has spotted them and generous enough to encourage me in my endeavours. Given that he is certainly the most distinguished Wildean scholar of them all, and the fact that I am making a fiction of his grandparents’ extraordinary lives, this is indeed a kindness.