Today in History—May 25: Oscar Wilde Goes to Prison

If Oscar Wilde were alive today, he’d probably smirk at any talk of coming out of the closet.

Why? Because in his time, he was trying to come out of something infinitely worse: prison.

On this day in 1895, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency for his homosexual relationships—a crime in Victorian England. The charge stemmed from his relationships with young men, most notably Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas.

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Wilde had sued Bosie’s father, the marquess of Queensberry, for libel after the marquess had left a card at the Albemarle Club accusing Wilde of sodomy. It was a critical miscalculation. When the suit collapsed, it triggered two criminal trials against him: The first ended in a hung jury, but the second ended with Wilde’s conviction.

On May 25 at the Old Bailey courthouse, the jury pronounced Wilde guilty. Inside prison—first Pentonville, then Wandsworth, and finally Reading Gaol—Wilde withstood solitary confinement for more than a year. For a writer of Wilde’s stature, mental starvation was a greater torment than physical hardship. In a plea to the home secretary, he described being “without writing materials whose use might help to distract the mind: without suitable or sufficient books, so essential to any literary man, so vital for the preservation of mental balance.” Permitted only two books a week, he reread them until the words swirled.

In his final months at Reading, Wilde was given pen and paper. What emerged was De Profundis (1905)—a long, anguished letter to his lover Bosie.

And once released, he wrote one final poem: “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898). Its famous lines carry all the anguish the prison walls had bottled up: “For each man kills the thing he loves, / Yet each man does not die.”

In 2017 Wilde was among thousands of gay and bisexual men posthumously pardoned. He’d have something devastating to say about how long that took.

Famous Birthdays

1803: Ralph Waldo Emerson—American lecturer, poet, and essayist

1878: Bill “Bojangles” Robinson—American dancer, best known for appearing with Shirley Temple

1889: Igor Sikorsky—American engineer who developed the helicopter

1976: Cillian Murphy—Irish actor