The Winnipeg Daily Tribune - Monday, June 24, 1895

WILDE’S CONDITION.
He Has Not Lost His Mind — Conduct Reported as Exemplary.

London, June 24 — The weekly report of the governor of the Pentonville Prison, where Oscar Wilde, the erstwhile aesthete, poet and dramatist, is now languishing in durance vile, confirms the previously circulated denial of the assertion that the noted prisoner has lost his mind. The report says that Wilde’s health has been so robust that for the past three weeks he has been furnishing motive power for a treadmill in accordance with the usual customer, and that he will shortly be put at the hard task of bag making for the remainder of his term. His conduct is reported as exemplary, which, if continued, will entitle him to release four months prior to the expiration of his two years sentence. He will not be allowed to see any of his friends until the latter part of August, and then only a limited number and for a very short time. Notwithstanding the heinousness of Wilde’s crime there is a marked tendency on the part of the public to regard him with more or less pity, inasmuch as it is generally admitted that he has been made a scapegoat, and that the crime for which he has been incarcerated is so far from rare, that a wholesale application of the drastic methods applied in his case could involve many who now affect the most profound contempt for the dethroned literateur.