Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery

by Gyles Brandreth

  But in Reading Gaol, apart from my daily ‘chinwag’ with Private Luck – which lasted between three and eight minutes, never more – I had no sustained conversations of any kind during the spring and early summer of 1896. I spoke that one time with the boy prisoner, Tom, at Warder Braddle’s graveside. With Warder Stokes, now and then, when he came to my cell, I attempted inconsequential small talk, but the poor fellow was so guarded in his responses, so desperately watchful of all he said, that I quickly understood that my well-intended pleasantries were a burden to him. With the other turnkeys my exchanges were rarely more than monosyllabic.

  Late one afternoon in May, by the potting sheds, I saw a prisoner standing alone leaning against a wall, with his head thrown back and his jaw thrust upwards towards the setting sun. There were no warders in sight, so, hungry for a friend to speak to, I went over to him. I saw from the badge on his uniform that it was C.3.5. – the poisoner, Atitis-Snake. His cap was pushed back a little on his head, so for the first time I saw his mouth and chin. In his hand he held a lighted cigarette. ‘By all that’s wonderful,’ I cried, ‘where did you get that?’

  He turned his shrouded head towards the potting sheds and nodded. There, sitting on the step by an open door, also with a lighted cigarette in hand, was the boy, Tom. I laughed and set down my wheelbarrow. The pair of them, man and boy, convicts at Reading Gaol, looked for all the world like a farmer and his lad enjoying an evening smoke at the end of a hard day’s labour in the fields. ‘What must I do to beg a cigarette?’ I asked.

  As I spoke, in the distance I heard a woman’s voice calling, ‘E.1.1., where are you? Come here now.’ I looked along the pathway that led back to the main prison buildings. I could see no one. The voice, louder and more urgent than before, repeated its call – not angrily but as a clear command. The boy got lightly to his feet and ran off towards it.

  ‘It was the wardress,’ I said. I smiled. ‘Her face has an unexpected grace that her voice most surely lacks.’ I turned back to Sebastian Atitis-Snake, but he was gone.

  By the wall where he had been standing and on the step where the boy had sat, I foraged for the remains of their cigarettes, but there was nothing to be found.

  Not long after this, on a day when I had learnt from Warder Stokes that my neighbour the dwarf had once been a circus tumbler and assistant to the Great Voltare, the celebrated mesmerist, I attempted to speak to him as we trudged around the exercise yard, one after the other, five paces apart.

  ‘You worked in the circus, my friend,’ I whispered when we were at the farthest point from the watching turnkey. ‘Have you ever thought that we are like elephants pacing around the ring?’ I was excited to fill the air with sound.

  The dwarf made no reply, but I sensed from a slight motion of his head that he had heard me. ‘In America,’ I continued, ‘I met P. T. Barnum and he did me the honour of presenting me to the mighty Jumbo.’

  I spoke absurdly, but not simply for the sake of speaking. I spoke to make contact with a fellow soul in torment.

  ‘He won’t answer,’ hissed another voice in the ring. It was the prisoner who paced ahead of him, Atitis-Snake. ‘He won’t speak. He is silent as the grave. We are buried here. This is our grave. There is no escape for us – except death.’

  Before my incarceration, I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy.

  My mother, amid the troubles of her later life, used to quote to me Goethe’s famous lines:

  Who never ate his bread in sorrow,

  Who never spent the midnight hours

  Weeping and waiting for the morrow,

  – He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.

  I heard the lines from my mother’s lips – time and again – and absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember how I used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn. I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do little else.

  On the anniversary of my imprisonment – Monday, 25 May 1896 – the Reverend Friend, chaplain of Reading Gaol, came to call on me in my cell. Warder Stokes had forewarned me of the visit and I was resolved to receive the reverend gentleman courteously, and not as I had done previously, with rancour and ill-disguised hostility. He, too, it seemed, had come to call in a spirit of conciliation.

  ‘Good morning, my friend,’ he said, smiling as he entered my cell. ‘May I sit with you a while?’

  ‘By all means,’ I replied, getting to my feet and offering him my wooden chair to sit upon. ‘Warder Stokes told me that you might come to see me today. I am glad. I am grateful. I have not spoken at any length with another human being since the day in February when my wife came to tell me of my mother’s death. That was three months ago. It was the day that Warder Braddle died.’

  ‘I remember,’ said the Reverend Friend, settling into the chair and laying his prayer book carefully on the table before him. I noticed his fingernails, clean and neatly cut: a novelty at Reading Gaol. ‘You will sit also?’ he said, pursing his lips and waving a delicate hand towards my bed. I perched on the edge of it and looked steadily into his pale blue eyes. They told me nothing.

  ‘Did Warder Braddle’s death surprise you?’ I asked.

  ‘Your question does, my friend,’ he answered. ‘Why do you think of Warder Braddle?’

  ‘Because he died outside my door,’ I said, ‘and now I tend his grave.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the chaplain, half closing his eyes, as if to picture it. ‘In the Garden of Remembrance.’

  ‘Is it unconsecrated ground?’ I asked.

  The chaplain looked at me, surprised. ‘Yes, it is – but it was a Christian burial. Suicide is a mortal sin in the eyes of God and a punishable offence in the eyes of the Law, but the soul of the man who takes his own life is not necessarily doomed to damnation.’

  ‘You believe Warder Braddle took his own life?’ I asked.

  ‘It is possible,’ he answered quietly, running his fingers around the rim of his prayer book. ‘I saw him at the last, leaning over the balustrade. I know the governor is certain it was an accident – and I trust the governor’s judgement – but Braddle did not seem drunk to me.’

  ‘Did he have cause to kill himself?’

  The Reverend Friend looked directly at me and smiled. ‘We are all sinners, C.3.3.’

  ‘You were his priest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you also his confessor? Did you know the nature of his sins?’

  The chaplain pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. ‘I have not come here to speak ill of the dead. I have come to bring comfort to the living.’ He held out his hand, as if offering a benediction. ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  I smiled. ‘As today you are my confessor, I will tell you. I am in pain,’ I answered.

  The chaplain adopted a look of concern. ‘Is it your ear?’ he asked. ‘I know you’ve had trouble with your ear.’

  ‘My ear does bleed at night sometimes. My heart bleeds also. The pain is overwhelming.’

  The chaplain sighed. ‘Suffering is a mystery, is it not?’

  ‘A mystery and a revelation,’ I answered. ‘I have discovered lately that we can learn more from pain than we can from pleasure.’

  ‘I am moved to hear you say so,’ said the Reverend Friend, furrowing his brow. His face was featureless, his age difficult to determine. ‘Perhaps your year has not been wasted.’

  ‘When I was at Oxford,’ I said, holding the clergyman’s gaze, ‘I remember telling one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, a
nd that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul.’

  ‘And so, indeed, you went out, and so you lived,’ said the prison chaplain, nodding his head sagaciously. ‘I have read much about you, my friend. There has been much to read.’

  ‘My only mistake,’ I continued, ‘was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sunlit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ murmured the chaplain.

  ‘Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sackcloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall . . .’

  ‘All these were things of which you were afraid?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, and as I had determined to know nothing of them, in due course I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.’

  The chaplain sat back, folded his arms across his chest and considered me carefully. ‘Do you regret having lived for pleasure?’ he asked.

  ‘Not for a single moment,’ I cried, leaning towards him eagerly. ‘I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.’

  ‘But to have continued the same life would have been wrong—’

  ‘Yes,’ I interrupted, ‘because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. And now I find that the other half of the garden has its secrets for me also.’

  The Reverend Friend patted his prayer book gently, as he might have patted my head had I been a child. ‘You have done well. You should be happy with what you have learnt. I am happy for you.’

  ‘I must learn how to be happy,’ I said. ‘Once I knew it, or thought I knew it, by instinct. It was always springtime once in my heart. My temperament was akin to joy. I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine. Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me.’ I looked about my cell and spread out my fingers on either side of me on the hard board that was my bed. ‘Despair is my bedfellow here.’

  ‘Despair is a sin,’ said the chaplain.

  ‘I know. I must not wilfully live in melancholy. But there are times here when I think I will go mad.’

  ‘Are the warders cruel to you?’

  ‘No, some are harsh, but none is cruel.’

  ‘Is it your fellow prisoners?’

  ‘My neighbour torments me,’ I said. ‘I will go mad.’

  ‘The dwarf? You surprise me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, laughing, ‘not the dwarf. C.3.2. – Private Luck.’

  ‘The Indian? The half-Indian or whatever he is. I rarely see him. He will not see me. He is a Hindu or a Buddhist or somesuch. He is not a Christian.’

  ‘I am petitioning the Home Secretary. It is my right. I have been here long enough, among murderers and blackmailers. I must get out or I will go mad.’

  ‘Be patient,’ urged the chaplain, breathing heavily. ‘Think of all that you have been telling me just now; think of all that you have learnt thus far. A year from today you will be released – a better and a wiser man. It is not long.’

  ‘It is too long,’ I said, closing my eyes, suddenly exhausted. ‘I will petition the Home Secretary for my release. My mind is set on that. Pray for me, padre, and wish me well with my petition.’

  ‘I wish you well with your petition,’ said the chaplain, slowly. ‘It may even be granted,’ he added, ‘who knows? We have another prisoner here who is petitioning the Home Secretary and is hopeful of success. I have just come from him.’

  I opened my eyes. ‘Who is that? The poisoner, Atitis-Snake? He, too, is desperate, I know.’

  ‘No – a new prisoner, by the name of Wooldridge. He arrived two days ago. He is in the condemned cell. He is destined for the gallows. He murdered his wife in a jealous rage. He slit her throat from ear to ear – with a cut-throat razor. Ugly business. He gave himself up to the police and now he’s here. It’s three years since we last had a hanging.’

  ‘And this man is seeking a reprieve?’

  ‘No,’ answered the chaplain, smiling. ‘Quite the reverse. He wants to be hanged. At his trial, the jury, when they brought in the guilty verdict, put in a plea for clemency. The judge ignored the jury and all sorts of committees have sprung up demanding that Wooldridge’s life be spared. But he wants none of it. He told me when I saw him just now that he wants to die to pay for the crime he has committed. A life for a life. He is petitioning the Home Secretary to ignore those who are pleading for him to be spared. I think the Home Secretary will grant his wish. I am not so sure, C.3.3., that he will grant yours.’

  ‘Will you pray for me, padre?’ I asked, earnestly.

  ‘I will pray for you. We are all of us in need of God’s mercy.’

  On Thursday, 2 July 1896, I had a brief interview with Colonel Henry Isaacson, governor of Reading Gaol, at the conclusion of which he agreed to forward to the Home Secretary the petition I had drafted:

  HM Prison, Reading

  Prisoner C.3.3. – Oscar Wilde

  2 July 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 he does not desire to attempt to palliate in any way the terrible offences of which he was rightly found guilty, but to point out that such offences are forms of sexual madness and are recognised as such not merely by modern pathological science but by much modern legislation, notably in France, Austria and Italy, where the laws affecting these misdemeanours have been repealed, on the ground that they are diseases to be cured by a physician, rather than crimes to be punished by a judge . . .

  The petitioner is now keenly conscious of the fact that while the three years preceding his arrest were from the intellectual point of view the most brilliant years of his life (four plays from his pen having been produced on the stage with immense success, and played not merely in England, America and Australia, but in almost every European capital, and many books that excited much interest at home and abroad having been published), still that during the entire time he was suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania, which made him forget his wife and children, his high social position in London and Paris, his European distinction as an artist, the honour of his name and family, his very humanity itself, and left him the helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and of a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and then drove him to hideous ruin.

  It is under the ceaseless apprehension lest this insanity, that displayed itself in monstrous sexual perversion before, may now extend to the entire nature and intellect, that the petitioner writes this appeal which he earnestly entreats may be at once considered. Horrible as all actual madness is, the terror of madness is no less appalling, and no less ruinous to the soul.

  For more than thirteen dreadful months now, the petitioner has been subject to the fearful system of solitary cellular confinement: without human intercourse of any kind; without writing materials whose use might help distract the mind: without suitable or sufficient books, so essential to any literary man, so vital for the preservation of mental balance: condemned to absolute silence: cut off from all knowledge of the external world and the movements of life: leading an existence composed of bitter degradations and terrible hardships, hideous in its recurring monotony of dreary task and sickening privation: the despair and misery of this lonely and wretched life having been intensified beyond words by the death of his mother, Lady Wilde, to whom he was deeply attached, as well as by the contemplation of the ruin he has bro
ught onto his young wife and his two children . . .

  For more than a year the petitioner’s mind has borne this. It can bear it no longer. He is quite conscious of the approach of an insanity that will not be confined to one portion of his nature merely, but will extend over all alike, and his desire, his prayer, is that his sentence may be remitted now, so that he may be taken abroad by his friends and may put himself under medical care so that the sexual insanity from which he suffers may be cured. He knows only too well that his career as a dramatist and writer is ended, and his name blotted from the scroll of English Literature, never to be replaced: that his children cannot bear that name again, and that an obscure life in some remote country is in store for him: he knows that, bankruptcy having come upon him, poverty of a most bitter kind awaits him, and that all the joy and beauty of existence is taken from him for ever; but at least in all his hopelessness he still clings to the hope that he will not have to pass directly from the common gaol to the common lunatic asylum . . .

  There are other apprehensions of danger that the limitation of space does not allow the petitioner to enter on; his chief danger is that of madness, his chief terror that of madness, and his prayer that his long imprisonment may be considered, with its attendant ruin, a sufficient punishment, so that the imprisonment may be ended now, and not uselessly or vindictively prolonged till insanity has claimed soul as well as body as its prey, and brought it to the same degradation and the same shame.

  Oscar Wilde

  Five days after I had submitted my petition, on Tuesday, 7 July 1896, Charles Wooldridge was hanged in Reading Gaol. His petition was considered before mine and, in Wooldridge’s case, the Home Secretary was ‘pleased to accede to the prisoner’s request that there should be no reprieve in this instance and no delay to his execution’. The hanging took place, as was the custom, at 8.00 a.m., as the clock outside the prison walls struck the hour. According to Dr Maurice, who witnessed it, alongside the governor, the chaplain, the undersheriff and two warders on ‘special duty’ for the occasion, it was a ‘clean execution’: Wooldridge died instantly, his death caused by dislocation of the vertebrae. But a rumour ran round the prison that as the condemned man swung from the rope his neck stretched by eleven inches and his face was distorted beyond recognition.