Reynolds's Newspaper - Sunday, November 17, 1895

OSCAR WILDE IN COURT.
HIS BANKRUPTCY AFFAIRS.

Mr. Oscar Wilde, having the merit of bankruptcy, was brought from prison to Portugal-street on Tuesday, to be questioned before the Registrar as to his assets and liabilities. He came in under the care of two warders wearing the black overcoat and carrying the broad-brimmed silk hat he took with him from the Old Bailey. He looked dreadfully pale and worn and ill. His face has shrunk and the skin hangs down from his cheek-bones, making ugly wrinkes on either side of his nose. They have cut his hair in a shocking way and parted it down the side, and he wears a short, scrubby, unkept beard, such as afflicts the denizens of doss-houses. He leaned on the ledge of the witness-box, but the position was not a languid pose. It was the attitude of a man without strength or energy to stand upon his feet. His one concern seemed to hide his ungloved hands, which were rough, and chafed, and broken. The Official Receiver asked him very few questions, and those purely formal--that his full names were Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde, that his age was forty, that he was a writer and dramatist, and for ten or eleven years had lived at 16 Tite-street, and that his income had been about £2,000 a year.

This as the kind of information he gave only by monosyllables, or an inclination of the head in answer to the Official Receiver's questions. There were some interesting little facts, such as that he had not kept any account books, that he had regularly lived above his income, that his affairs showed a deficiency of £1,450, that he borrowed £1,000 upon a reversionary life interest in his wife's settled income of £800 a year, and that under his father's will he was entitled to a life interest in a small property in Ireland in the event of the decease of his brother with-out sons. He only departed from his monosyllabic answers once, and that was when he was asked whether the information he had previously furnished as to his affairs was accurate and complete. "Under the circumstances in which I was placed," he said, referring delicately to Wormwood Scrubbs, "it was difficult to be accurate, but it is so to the best of my belief." The examiniatin was concluded,and Mr. Wilde, with one warder in front of him and the other following him, walked heavily out of court and was driven back to prison. Apparently he had very little liking for the scrutiny of which he found himself the object at the hands of the large numbers of well-dressed loafers and sightseers who occupied the back of the court.