It represents the whole cycle of crime and punishment.

It is both a Dante-esque circle of hell and the deadly routine of prison life. The ballad form, as he adapts it, encases paradox and story in a tight, encircling ring. Perhaps he found another in the hypocrisy of the prison system itself, destroying the souls and bodies of those it would reform. Wilde loved paradox, and he found some essential symbol of it in the man who murdered his wife. So we schoolgirls felt a great bond with Oscar Wilde, trying to ‘rear the changeling Hope in the cave of black Despair’, and we passed by Reading Gaol at the beginning and end of every term as we went to the railway station.Ĭarol Rumens chose this as her poem of the week to write about in the Guardian in March 2009: It resonates for me because I was at boarding school in Reading which, in those days, meant incarceration for 13 weeks at a time with only three days allowed out for lunch – there was no such thing as half term. This is a long (and bleak) poem, which you can read in full here. He did not wring his hands, as doĪnd drank the morning air.

New York: Vintage Books.And at every wandering cloud that trailed The epitaph on Wilde’s tomb was excerpted from the poem:Įllmann, Richard (1988). Leading up to the release of the poem, Wilde understood that he was no longer attempting to impress the upper classes of society, and instead wished for it to be published in Reynolds Magazine, where he claimed that then it would be “read by his peers” who were now among “the criminal classes.” The poem, which was published by Leonard Smithers on 13 February 1898 under the name “C.3.3.”, which stood for cell block C, landing 3, cell 3, sold enough to give him some income until he died just over two years later. During his imprisonment, a man named Charles Thomas Woolridge was hung for the murder of his wife, a scene which Wilde describes throughout the poem. Wilde was imprisoned here from 23 November 1895 until after being moved three other times following his conviction of gross indecency on. The poem documented the ghastly conditions of his experience in prison at Reading Gaol, located in Reading, Berkshire, England, which was the popular name of a former prison, known officially as HM Prison Reading. Wilde wrote what ended up being his final published poem during his lifetime, titled “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, while in exile in Berneval-Le-Grand, France, after his expulsion from prominent British society.

The ballad of reading jail