Prisons

On 25 May 1895 Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour for ‘gross indecency’. He was processed at Newgate Prison before being moved on to Pentonville Prison, where he began to experience the ‘hard labour’ he’d been sentenced to, namely many hours of walking a treadmill or separating the fibres in scraps of old navy ropes. A few months later he was moved to Wandsworth Prison where the regime was so harsh that in November he collapsed, banging his ear on the way down, which led to later infections and ailments. After spending two months in the infirmary, he was transferred to his final prison, Reading Gaol.

Freedom

Two years after his conviction, on 19 May 1897, Wilde was taken by train from Reading Gaol to Pentonville preparatory for his release. The next day he was actually set free and sailed the same evening for Dieppe, France. He never returned to England. He was to live on for three miserable, poverty-stricken years in Paris before dying of meningitis on 30 November 1900, aged 46.

A few months after his release, Wilde began writing ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ while staying with his former lover and loyal friend, Robert Ross near Dieppe on the Normandy coast. It was assembled from aspects of his experience of imprisonment but came to focus on one particular character and event, the hanging of one Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a former trooper in the Royal Horse Guards.

Charles Thomas Wooldridge

On 7 July 1896 i.e. a year into Wilde’s imprisonment, Wooldridge was hanged at Reading Gaol. He had been convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen, earlier that year at Clewer, near Windsor. He was 30 years old. Wooldridge’s case and punishment provide the focus of Wilde’s poem. In Wilde’s hands Wooldridge is transformed from a prisoner into a symbol round which descriptions of prison life, the misery and harshness of incarceration, and the awe and horror at the prospect of judicial murder all crystallise.

The ballad form

Wilde added and added to the poem until eventually it consisted of 109 stanzas. Wilde’s pre-incarceration poems had been written in the style of late-Victorian Romanticism, with lush metaphors and sophisticated literary allusions to Greek mythology etc. By stark contrast, the Ballad is, as the name suggests, written in the simpler ballad form, long associated with folk, peasant and working class culture, and stripped of fancy literary references.

One of the reasons for choosing this form is that Wilde intended it, along with its message of prison reform and moral injustice, to reach as wide an audience as possible. He wrote to a friend suggesting that it be published in Reynolds’ Magazine, ‘because it circulates widely among the criminal classes – to which I now belong. For once I will be read by my peers – a new experience for me.’

The simplest ballads usually consist of four-line stanzas. Probably the most famous ballad in the English language is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published precisely 100 years before Wilde’s ballad, in 1798. The most famous stanza goes:

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

In the technical language of poetry a ‘iamb’ is a metrical foot made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (ti-tum). In the Ballad Wilde uses the traditional structure of iambic tetrameters (four metrical feet per line) alternating with iambic trimeters (three metrical feet per line) so the effect is:

ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum (4 beats)
ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum (3 beats)

So it’s the identical rhythm to the stanza I just quoted from the Rime. Where Wilde is a little unusual is that the 109 stanzas of his Ballad have six lines rather than four.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

The longer, 6-line form has at least two results. One is that each stanza has 50% longer to develop its thought or idea. This gives individual verses, and the poem as a whole, more weight (maybe).

The second consequence is that he could make the rhyme scheme more complicated. The rhyme scheme in the Coleridge is almost as simple as could be, ABAB i.e. where, shrink, where, drink.

Wilde’s rhyme scheme is that bit more complicated, at ABCBDB: first come three freestanding words – loves, heard, look; then a word rhyming with the end of line B (heard); then a freestanding word D (kiss), before another B word (sword). You can see how the D word doesn’t rhyme with anything else. The effect is to break up the seesaw monotony of ABAB with a wild card. It is regular enough to feel song-like but irregular enough not to be boring.

One last point: Wilde also mixes it up by quite regularly including internal rhymes within the same line, as in lines 1 and 5 here:

So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.

Sing-song isn’t quite the right word but this excess of rhymes, and especially the internal rhymes in one line, emphasise the ‘popular’ ballad vibe which in turn give the whole thing a kind of thumping obviousness; or maybe a kind of inevitability. Instead of the subtle floating of modernist verse it has a kind of thumping, marching quality, a doom-laden inevitability.

One last point: again, unlike the one-off lines and perceptions of more sophisticated poetry, the ballad revels in repetition. The multitude of rhymes are a sort of repetition on a small scale while certain words and phrases, descriptions (of the condemned man’s plight, of the grave) and indeed entire stanzas (namely the ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’ stanza), are repeated throughout the poem. This quality of wholesale repetition – repetition at the micro and the macro level – also contributes to the oppressive, doom-laden feeling.

Six sections

The ballad is arranged in six parts.

Part 1 (16 stanzas)

Part 1 paints the background: in the prison exercise yard the prisoners are walking in silent circles, looking up at the little patch of blue the prisoners call the sky, when the narrator notices a man with a cricket cap on his head who is looking up at the clouds with a particularly ‘wistful’ expression. One of Wilde’s neighbours whispers that the man is ‘going to swing’ i.e. be hanged. Why? For murdering his wife in her bed. This introduces the central premise of the poem, the rather sweeping generalisation that:

each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

And these generalisations move onto the idea that, although most men kill the thing they love, most are never caught or punished or condemned to hang, whereas this man, Wooldridge has been caught, convicted and sentence. Which allows the poem to move onto a vivid series of scenes describing what it’s like to be a man condemned to death, how:

• he is watched by wardens day and night to make sure he doesn’t kill himself and deprive the system of its justice
• on the fatal morning he wakes at dawn to see his cell filled by the chaplain, sheriff and governor
• he hurries to put on his convict uniform while a doctor checks his pulse
• he feels the hangman tie the leather nooses (three, apparently) round his throat
• he walks past his own coffin
• he listens to the Burial Office being read
• he looks up into the miserable skylight overhead in his last moments

Part 2 (13 stanzas)

Back in the exercise yard the narrator comments on how the man he now knows is condemned to death, oddly, strikingly, doesn’t give way to despair but drinks the air with simple pleasure. The narrator describes the black fate of the tree whose trunk is turned into a gallows. Then reflects how his own life has crossed with the condemned man’s like two ships passing in a storm, how they are both outcasts.

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.

Part 3 (37 stanzas)

The narrator (again) describes life for the condemned man, the behaviour of the governor, doctor and chaplain who ‘leaves a little tract’. And life for the prisoners with vivid details of the ‘hard labour’ Wilde was condemned to:

We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill…

But the description is background all the more to foreground the specific horror of Wooldridge’s fate. This description leads up to the prisoners returning from work past an open grave and knowing who it had been dug for.

And Wilde marvels that, while the condemned man slept like a baby, it was the others, his comrades, who were kept awake at night in terror at his fate. He claims the wardens were amazed to find, on their rounds, men praying (for the condemned man or for themselves) in the depths of the night. This seems doubtful a bit doubtful although we accept it as poetic licence and as part of the ballad form’s traditional spooky, supernatural vibe. It also happens to provide a handy example of how effective the poem is when it sticks close to actual description:

The warders with their shoes of felt
Crept by each padlocked door,
And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,
Grey figures on the floor,
And wondered why men knelt to pray
Who never prayed before.

But just as quickly loses it, that closeness of observation I admire, when Wilde gives way to melodrama:

All through the night we knelt and prayed,
Mad mourners of a corse!
The troubled plumes of midnight were
The plumes upon a hearse:
And bitter wine upon a sponge
Was the savour of Remorse.

I don’t think the prisoners are actually ‘mad’, what does ‘the troubled plumes of midnight’ mean?, the hearse is conventional melodrama because, of course, there is no hearse for this dead man; the bitter wine on the sponge is of course a reference to Christ being offered the same during his crucifixion; and the capitalisation of Remorse takes us back to the heavy-handedness of medievalising allegory.

This histrionic tone continues into some stanzas which go way over the top. Wilde has the prison invaded by ‘crooked shapes of Terror’, by ‘phantoms’, a ‘ghostly rout’, who proceed to dance a grisly masque’ and even sing a phantom song whose lyrics are quoted. This has lifted off from the real to become a visionary fantasia which reminded me not only of the most hallucinatory parts of Coleridge’s poem but also the visionary processions you find in Shelley’s poetry. The ghostly rout’s song goes:

‘Oho!‘ they cried, ‘the world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with Sin
In the Secret House of Shame.‘

(Does this refer to Wilde himself? We know that between his trials his boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas persuaded him to go abroad to, of all places, Monte Carlo, where he lost large sums gambling (a vice which never appealed to Wilde). Is he comparing the way Douglas rolled the dice but escaped conviction partly because he was a gentleman, whereas he, Wilde, was convicted because he indulged a bigger game, ‘playing with Sin’? Does ‘the Secret House of Shame’ refer to the entire lifestyle of gay orgies and rent boys which he indulged in and created in the years leading up to his arrest?)

The visionary dance scene ends as a more realistic dawn arrives. The prisoners are woken at 6am to clean their cells and by 7 are standing to. The narrator describes the horrible hopelessness the men felt at the absolute inflexibility of human justice which, for once, justifies the capital letter:

For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride…

And at 8am prompt a great wail goes up from the cells because every one of the prisoners knew that was the hour when Wooldridge was hanged. Again I’d contrast overdoing it (the madman on a drum):

We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man’s heart beat thick and quick,
Like a madman on a drum!

With description which is more realistic and therefore more impactful:

With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair…

OK, I don’t like the archaic phraseology (‘smote’) or the schoolboy angst (‘despair’) but I can well imagine a kind of collective groan did go up all round the prison at the hour of Wooldridge’s execution, and that is a haunting image.

Part 4 (23 stanzas)

No chapel service is held on the day they hang a man; the chaplain feels too sick. The prisoners were finally released from their cells at noon to take exercise in the yard. And so the men traipse round and round in the usual silent circles in their shabby prison outfits with the ‘crooked arrows’ on them. The wardens mind them in the usual way but the prisoners note the traces of lime on their boots and the newly filled-in grave by the prison walls. And Wilde is haunted by the image of the freshly dead man’s corpse wrapped in a shroud of quicklime designed to eat into his body like acid.

And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day…

The authorities don’t sow anything on a hanged man’s plot of earth for fear the product will be tainted, but Wilde suggests the opposite: that God’s earth is kindlier than men know, that beautiful roses would blossom out of the curse man’s soil.

Wilde bitterly criticises the shabby underhand way Wooldridge was killed, a passage all the more effective for the relatively restrained diction, no capitalised allegories, no Despair etc, just the facts:

They hanged him as a beast is hanged:
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.

They stripped him of his canvas clothes,
And gave him to the flies:
They mocked the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes:

The chaplain didn’t kneel to pray at the grave and yet Wilde insists it was precisely for sinners that Christ died, that God’s Son died for all men.

Part 5 (17 stanzas)

Only now does Wilde get round to telling us what it is like to be in prison. Having told us about this one condemned man, part 5 now widens the perspective out to consider prison and prisoners in the wider perspective of society and contains Wilde’s bitter criticism of the prison system: all it does is breed more vice and crime.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison-air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there…

Although he spoils this stanza, as so much else, with what I regard as heavy-handed use of capitalised allegorical abstract nouns:

Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.

‘Despair’ is a word I associate with immature poems by fifth formers in the school magazine. It’s such a lazy word, so easy to throw around in any situation, it lacks specificity and precision. It’s also so over-used simply because it is such a handy rhyme word – air, there, care, loads of rhyme words can set it up, it’s too easy, too available. In many ways Wilde’s diction, here and in all his poems, is an object lesson in how not to write a poem.

It was only around now that I realised there’s a recurring pattern in Wilde’s stanzas. Remember my comments on the 6-line stanza, how the extra 2 lines allow the thought to be extended? Well, I realised there’s a tendency for the first four lines to be good, sticking close to description of actual sights or events, but for Wilde to repeatedly spoil the effect by using those final two lines for over-the-top, allegorising histrionics. So:

At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill.

Or:

The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.

To paraphrase George Orwell in Animal Farm, four lines good, six lines bad.

And yet, despite his style, the horror of prison life comes over well enough, the enforced silence and the loneliness. The first of these stanzas is a bit rank but the second one really conveys it:

With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.

And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.

But precise and upsetting, or over-the-top and Gothic, all these descriptions are designed to lead the poem up to its heart which is a vision of Christian redemption. For it is the very intensity of their suffering which, in Wilde’s view, leads men’s hearts to break but not into hopeless despair – instead, in the optimistic climax of the poem, this breaking allows Christ’s love to enter in and redeem them. I’ll quote the three relevant stanzas in full to give a sense of the flow of the argument:

And thus we rust Life’s iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God’s eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.

And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper’s house
With the scent of costliest nard.

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

This immediately reminds you of the passages in De Profundis where Wilde repeats that the only way to stay sane in prison was through acceptance – accepting his fate, accepting his destiny, accepting that it couldn’t have happened any other way, accepting every step that led to the miserable depths of wretchedness, and then accepting his condition in its entirety. Repining and objecting – if only I’d done this and if only I hadn’t done that – can only drive you mad with regret. The wretchedness of the conditions cause many a man’s heart to break but this is good. Only by breaking hardened hearts can the sweetness of God’s forgiveness be experienced.

Wilde is giving a straightforwardly, unironically Christian message of salvation. Jesus Christ moved among sinners, moneylenders and prostitutes, not among the upstanding rule-abiding members of the community, precisely because it is the sinners who need saving (and who, incidentally, in their own way, often embodied the true Christian virtues of charity and forgiveness, as demonstrated in his fairy stories). And so it’s in this spirit of Christian redemption that the poem rises to its pious climax:

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.

It’s a moving climax within the rhythm of this very rhythmic poem but also because of what we know about Wilde’s biography: it is moving that the lifelong cynic, dandy and provocateur has been so broken down, so stripped of poses and smart one-liners, that his Christian conversion appears utterly genuine.

Part 6 (3 stanzas)

Having reached the climax of this Christian vision the poem tastefully, tactfully, ends with three short stanzas which recap and summarise the entire work with the laconic simplicity of the true ballad:

In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.

To be honest, Wilde could have ended there and done his job. I think he weakens the effect by going on and making the final stanza a repetition of the idea which dominated the opening, the notion that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, repeating word for word the related verse in Part 1.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

It has a purely rhetorical, incantatory effectiveness but I don’t like it as an ending because I just don’t believe it.

Sales

The finished poem was published by Leonard Smithers on 13 February 1898 with the author’s name given as C.3.3. This number was how Wilde was referred to in prison, standing for cell block C, landing 3, cell 3. The aim was to avoid having Wilde’s name – by then notorious – appear on the poem’s front cover.

The poem was a surprising success, with Smithers reprinting it in February, a signed edition and a fourth mass edition in March, a fifth edition later the same month and a sixth edition in May. The seventh edition, in June 1899, finally revealed the author’s identity, putting the name Oscar Wilde in square brackets below the C.3.3.

The Ballad brought Wilde a small income for the rest of his life but it wasn’t enough to live on. The Ballad was the last thing he wrote.

Thoughts

You can see the effort that’s gone into the poem. You can appreciate the careful structuring of the material which delays a description of prison life till part 5 so that all the horror and negativity of prison life doesn’t sit hopeless and heavy but leads directly into the message of Christian redemption at what I take to be the climax of the poem. It is well and cleverly done. But still, in my view, it is marred by all kinds of faults.

Melodrama

The leading one is the sometimes ridiculous melodrama, the Victorian Gothic exaggeration. Coleridge’s poem is intended to be a high Gothic melodrama and works partly because it brings a sort of realistic description to an over-wrought subject. Wilde’s poem is not as good because it brings a consistent tone of overwrought melodrama to a subject which, arguably, would have been better treated with understatement. Thus in the opening stanzas one of the other prisoners tells him Wooldridge is going to swing and rather than accept the news as one more horrible thing about prison life, Wilde goes bananas:

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel…

Similarly, describing Wooldridge’s manner he writes:

He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair…

This kind of melodrama is too simplistic; it’s a child’s version of psychology. The Cave of Despair reminds me of the widespread allegorisation in the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser’s huge allegorical epic,  the Faerie Queene.

I take the point that the ballad, as a form, is often melodramatic and involves elements of the supernatural (loads of gruesome murders and midnight ghosts). But Wilde’s penchant for capitalised abstract nouns (Justie, Despair) felt to me like a giving-in to late-Romantic clichés and that these clichés do what all clichés do, which is close off the possibility of genuine observation, of subtle psychology and insight, in favour of cheap special effects.

Late-Romantic diction

Secondly, Wilde’s style brings together all the faults of late-Romanticism, its archaic vocabulary and lush tone, without a hint of the new, stripped-down modernism which was going to appear in English poetry in just ten years’ time. It is the last gasp of a dying tradition. So (in my opinion) the first four lines of this stanza are good(ish):

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky…

But are marred by the ‘poeticism’ of silver in the final couplet:

…And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

Wilde is more successful when he avoids big words like Despair and poeticisms about silver and ivory, and instead describes the observable facts, as he does in this grim stanza about what a hanging actually looks like:

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!

OK the exclamation mark is childish but the image of the feet of the hanged man ‘dancing’ in a spastic frenzy for a few last seconds is vivid, realistic and horrible.

The central premise

I just couldn’t relate to the central theme or premise, the phrase Wilde repeats again and again and chooses to end the entire poem with – the notion that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

I think the emotional impact he intended depends on the reader buying into this sentiment but I didn’t really understand it – I don’t think it makes sense. Most men very much do not kill the thing they love. Surely most men love the thing they love, don’t they? The following simply isn’t true:

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Wilde 1) tries to give the phrase the ominous weight of impending Greek tragedy, to make it some central plank of human nature, 2) then places it as the central refrain of the whole poem, 3) assigning it the final concluding position in the entire work.

And yet, reading it in the summer daylight, it seemed non-sense, the opposite of the truth; it evaporated in my hands and so, insofar as the poem relies on it, the Ballad, as an overall argument or proposition, for me, fails.

Christian redemption

What did work for me (this time round) was the sequence about the human heart breaking in order to allow Christ’s love in to save. On this particular morning, on this particular reading, I found this very moving.

The power of details

But if I don’t buy into the ‘all men kill’ premise, many of the incidental details do stick and haunt the imagination: the little patch of blue overhead, the cricket cap Wooldridge wears, the wailing that goes up from all the inmates at the hour of the hanging, and the corpse’s swollen purple throat. Despite all its flaws of diction and logic, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ remains a powerful work and indictment.

Femicide

It’s possible to read the entire poem, along with modern introductions to it, references in the letters, articles about it, and never once be reminded of the central fact that Wooldridge isn’t the innocent victim of a barbaric system, but that Wooldridge murdered his wife.

Do you remember the name of his wife (which I mentioned at the start)? No, most people don’t. She was Laura Ellen. Their fractious relationship led him to beat her up and Army rules led to them living apart. Suspecting her of having an affair he travelled to her lodgings in Clewer, they had an argument indoors which spilled out into the street where he cut her throat with a cut-throat razor and she bled to death.

You don’t have to be a feminist to find the way that Wilde lionises Wooldridge and makes him the central figure in his longest and most famous poem somewhat distasteful. It’s not hard to see the entire production as another example of the assault and abuse of a woman, and then her brutal murder, being elided and glossed over so that men can feel sorry for themselves.

The real victim here is Laura. Wooldridge, like Wilde, got his just deserts under the existing law of the time. Both of them would be imprisoned now, in 2024 (Wilde for procuring sex with under-age boys). Just like Wilde, Wooldridge was totally guilty of the offences he was charged with. But in Wilde’s concern for moral or poetic or spiritual exoneration, the real victim of the story is elided, occluded, forgotten, turned into the vague pretext for the refrain ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’.

You don’t have to be a feminist to find this a typical example of a male writer writing from a male perspective for male readers, distorting the truth, inverting the system of values (it was the woman who was the victim, not Wooldridge), making the wife-beating murderer into the central symbolic figure of the long poem, and over-writing, occluding, burying the real victim.

There’s a handy Wikipedia article about Wooldridge, which gives a lot more background to his case (and corrects Wilde’s erroneous belief that Wooldridge murdered Laura in their bed). But as if to prove the point, there’s no Wikipedia article for Laura. She only ‘exists’ in the discourse in her relation to the man who abused and murdered her. You don’t have to be a feminist to think this is typical.

• Charles Thomas Wooldridge Wikipedia article

Related links

• The Ballad of Reading Gaol online
• Oscar Wilde online

Related reviews

• Wandsworth Prison Museum
• Oscar Wilde reviews