The National Police Gazette - Saturday, June 15, 1895

WILDE ON THE TREADMILL.
Sketch of His life in Pentonville Prison, London
GARBED IN CANVAS CLOTHES.
His Couch is Nothing More than a Hard Plank, with No Pillow.
WHAT HE WAS AND WHAT HE IS.
FROM OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT
EXIT Wilde. Vale to the poet, the aesthete, the wit. Fancy him walking a treadmill six hours a day. And yet there are titled men in England today who ought to be on the same mill.

At last, after a career that had been, up to a certain point, brilliant as well as successful, Oscar Wilde, aesthete, author and poet, has been convicted of a series of revolting and unnatural crimes, dragged down from the height at which he had placed himself, and thrust into a prison cell. To-day he is wearing the garments of the English felon; he is clad in the rough, arrow dotted garments of the prison, upon his closely-cropped head is set a Scotch cap from the roughest material, and he is dressed with the heaviest and rudest of brogans.

Note the comparison.

It isn’t so very long when he was a successful and pampered man of the world; when his books were receiving successful recognition, and when his plays were produced upon the stages of two continents. Then he was in possession of a beautiful and gifted wife and two handsome boys. His home was the resort of cultured people of the world, and the Wilde wit and the Wilde epigrams were famous.

Look at the reverse of the picture:

A lean, sallow man, in whose eyes there is no sparkle of hope, in whose life there is no future. A man shunned by even his fellow convicts. This brings to mind that paragraph which he wrote in one of the last chapters of that book in which it seemed as if he had pictured his own life.

Hallward, one of the characters in the volume, is talking to Dorian Gray and he asks him:

"Why is it, Dorian, when I am away from you and I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you I don’t know what to say? Why is it that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house not invite you to theirs?

Lord Cawdor said that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman would sit in the same room with. I asked him what he meant and he told me right out before everybody. It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fateful to young man? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide; you were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son and his career? What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with him? Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous. Then there are stories-stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise to the foulest dens in London. Are they true?"

Never was humiliation and fall so complete. He was sentenced to prison — to two years at hard labor, which means a great deal more in England than it does in America — on Saturday, May 25, and he was then taken immediately to Holloway Jail in the Northern part of London. No distinction was shown to him because at one time he had been great; he was turned over to the unsympathetic warden just as if he had been so much baggage; just as if he had been a petit larceny crook going away to do his third our fourth "bit".

He was taken into the receiving room and a man went through his pockets and removed everything they contained. Then his clothes were taken from him and he was left standing alone with but a shirt to cover his nakedness, while a lynx-eyed official wrote down in the prison registrer a most minute and detailed account of his personal appearance, the color of his hair, his eyes, as well as any marks or blemishes which were on his person.

Then for the bath.

His shirt, the last thing he owned, was taken from him and he was taken to a hot bath, and scrubbed just as if he had not at all his life been most careful and fastidious in his personal habits.

When he came forth a heap of drab canvas clothes, piled disorderly on a chair, awaited him, as well as a prison suit of course linen underclothing. There was no argument here, and he dressed himself in silence, while his countenance seemed to those who looked to turn a shade more ashy. He had scarcely time to collect his thoughts when he was taken in to dinner. And such a meal as it was! Nothing but a small allowance of very thin porridge and a small loaf of brown bread. He had fed his dogs better in those other days! He was kept behind the iron bars and stone walls of Holloway Jail for two days, and then he was taken to the scene of his hard labors, Pentonville Prison, which is near the Holborn viaduct.

There is where the hard labor will come in, and there is where he will spend his days working at the most severe tasks and his nights trying to sleep and forget, for even a brief while, the bright sunshine of those other days when he was free.

The labor in this prison is so severe that it is necessary that a convict should be examined by a physician to see if he can stand it. And so, like the rest, Wilde was examined thoroughly.

Then to work!

For a month the treadmill. For four weeks; for thirty days, six hours a day; for one hundred and eighty hours, walking up that relentless incline, which is always moving; a walk that must be kept up and which does not advance the walker one step. A walk that is kept up for twenty minutes continually, then five minutes rest, and then repeated. A walk that, resoling itself into figures, shows an ascent of 0,000 feet a day. That’s his hard labor. That's his day's routine.

How about the nights?

A plank to sleep on.

A board raised a few inches from the floor, two sheets, a thin rug and a coverlet. There will be no dreaming of the "twilight of Gothic things" on that board, and his couch is not calculated to conjure up visions of rosebud youth or the kisses of madness.

His breakfasts are as plain and rude as were ever dignified by the name — cocoa and bread. His dinners are scarcely better, and a specimen meal consists of bacon and beans and potatoes.

His month on the treadmill is a sort of initiation for him — simply a foretaste of what hard labor really is, and after it has been concluded he will be put to some kind of legitimate work, and something which will be profitable to the prison, perhaps bag making, tailoring or picking oakum.

Fancy the Wilde picking oakum. Seems almost ridiculous. Imagine him, if you can, making a jute bag. He, the genius, the wit, the playwright, the adorer of a lily, the writer of passionate things, the really clever, gifted, talented man.

His exercise, after the month at the wheel, of course, will be confined to a walk around the ward in which he is confined for one hour every day. He will walk in Indian file with the rest of the convicts, and he will not be permitted to talk.

After three months of this life he will be permitted to communicate with the outside world. He can write one letter and receive one letter, and he can receive for twenty minutes three friends to the visiting cell in the presence of a warden, but he will be separated from his visitors by wire blinds. But he can only see his friends, read his letter and receive one communication in intervals of every three months, providing, however, he is industrious and good.

At the end of the two years Oscar Wilde will have earned the princely sum of £250, which he can have all at once if he wants it.

Concerning Taylor, his accomplice, nothing has been said. He is not so prominent as Wilde, and consequently has not attracted so much attention.

When Wilde first came to America he was not received with open arms, but he was taken up by a few well-known persons who were only too glad to accept the teachings of his very cult. He presented a most faultless appearance, dressing, as he did, in the extremely aesthetic style, with satin tree breeches, ornamented with satin bows and buckles at the knees; with silk stockings and ruffled shirt front.

He lectured and gave select talks, and he shouldered the ridicule and pocketed the dollars, which rolled into him. Financially he was a success.

When he returned to England his course was steadily upward, and he became more than clever — he developed into a positive genius. His plays, books and poems were all far and away above the average, and it wasn’t very long before his income assumed proportions that were enormous to say the least.

The primary cause of his downfall was his bringing of a suit for libel against the Marquis of Queensberry, who he claimed had invited him by leaving a card for him at his club, upon which was written indecent language. The history of the failure of Wilde’s suit and his subsequent prosecution by the crown is of too recent occurrence to need repeating in these columns. Before he was arrested a couple of his friends advised him to put a bullet to his head and end it all.

The trial was of the most sensational character, and most of the evidence was of an unprintable character.

While Wilde’s case has absorbed public attention for weeks, the records of the London police courts show that persons accused of the offense of which he is convicted came frequently before the magistrates. On the very day he was convicted John Goodchild, twenty-eight years old, and said to have a good education, was sentenced to two years at hard labor for the identical crime.

The Judge remarked that no country can remain great while such persons are allowed to live free in it. He believed, indeed, that they should not be allowed to live at all.

One of the leading newspapers of London has treated editorially, the vice for which Wilde and Taylor are convicted, and it gives, for the first time utterance through the public press to frightful accusations which have been talked of for years in private here. It has a voice raised against practice alleged to be of now rife and long standing in the great public schools of England in Eton and in Harrow.

When a number of the most prominent young men fled from England, a few years ago, after the Cleveland direct exposure, it was current talk that vice was learned at these schools and was an incident of the "fagging" system — that is, the system under which lower class students do mental work for those in upper classes. The fact that the names of many men of high position have been connected with the present scandal has revived these charges.