Oscar Wilde 4: Doing rhyme: The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Secret Life of Books

In this episode - the last in our series on Oscar Wilde - we tell the story of the melodramatic, mediagenic, mad, melancholy end of Oscar Wilde's writing life and glittering career as the cleverest man in Britain, after his string of smash hit plays, culminating in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Almost as the curtain went up on his masterpiece he filed a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Alfred Douglass, Wilde's lover. It was the beginning of a series of legal, emotional and financial disasters for Oscar Wilde, and led to the last of his great works: The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

In previous episodes we looked at Wilde's break-out collection of fairy tales (the Happy Prince), a novel (Dorian Gray) and his greatest play. With The Ballad of Reading Gaol Wilde's career culminated, and ended, with a long poem. It tells the story of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, who murdered his girlfriend and was executed at Reading Gaol, where Wilde was also incarcerated, in July 1896. With "Reading Goal," Wilde's most distinctive literary device, the paradox, stops being a force of subversive delight, and becomes a grim, philosophical reflection on the impossibility of happiness.

The poem was published in 1898 under the name C33, which was Wilde’s prison name. It seemed to herald a new beginning for Wilde - the work of a reflective, penitent and compassionate artist - but it was actually his swan song. He was unable to write anything else before his death at the age of 46 in 1900.

Works referred to in this episode:

Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” (1898) De profundis (pub. 1905)

John Betjeman, The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel (1937)

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

Anon. Newgate Calendar, or The Malefactors' Bloody Register, (1774)

Susan Fletcher, Twelve Months in an English Prison, (1883)

Marcus Clark, For the Term of His Natural Life, (1872)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)

William Wordsworth, the “Lucy” poems (1798-1801)

Ballads by Keats, Byron and the Border poets (18C)

John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)

John Milton, De doctrina christiana (written 17C, pub 1825) and the Divorce Tracts (1643-45)

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1896)

Edward Carpenter, “Civilization, Its Cause and Cure” and other essays (1889)

D.H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (1828)

E.M. Forster Maurice, (written 1913-14, pub. 1972)

Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin, Freedom Magazine (founded 1886)

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