The Standard Union - Saturday, November 2, 1895

HALL'S BUDGET.
New York a City of Charities,
of Noises and of Spasms,
AND IT MAY CLAIM EITHER

I encountered to-day at the Press Club a gentleman just arrived from London, who, after looking for a long file of newspapers published during his absence said, "but your information about Oscar Wilde is all wrong. I am a friend of his and of his brother Willie, and of course took an interest in the poet's fate; and after some trouble with the red tape I procured an interview with the esthetic misdemeanant. He has never been in Pentonville Prison, for that has been pulled down; nor yet in Wormwood Scrubbs Prison, as was reported, I see, by cable. He was sent to Wandsworth Prison, on the Surrey side of London, a less rigorous one, and evidently had friends, for he never was put on the treadmill nor put to picking oakum, but was given lighter employment. Lately he has been allowed to send for books and magazines and to receive visitors. He is very plucky in bearing his ills, but suffered deprivation because he had led a life of selfish luxury. He missed his spring mattress, his perfumed den, his delicatessen on the table, his cigarette, his club, his receptions and his dolce far niente. Curiously enough his present fate was unconsciously presaged in his novel of Dorian Gray as applied to its hero; and also in one or two of his early poems, as any reader of either book can see upon turning over the leaves. He is to be allowed writing materials, as was Edmund Yates when imprisoned for libeling the last Lord Lonsdale." My informant added with much cynical bitterness: "Wilde simply offended against the Twelfth Commandment as understood by London's best society: "Thou shalt not be found out." For as long as the culprit is not found out at the West End of the city, as thoroughly immoral as Copenhagen, its society will tolerate him, and, if he be a nobleman or a clever commoner, will fete him."

A. OAKLEY HALL.