“The “labour” given him to do was absolutely ridiculous for a man of his bent; first of all for a certain number of hours, he had to sit on a stool in his cell and disentangle and reduce to small quantities ship-rope of enormous size used for docking ocean liners, the only instruments allowed him to effect the work being a nail and his own fingers. The result of this painful and atrocious penitence was to tear and disfigure his hands beyond all hope.
“After that he was conducted into a court where he had to displace a certain number of cannon-balls, carrying them from one place to another and arranging them in symmetrical piles. No sooner was this edifying labour terminated, than he had himself to undo it all and carry back the cannon-balls one by one to the place from whence he had first taken them.
“Then finally, he was made to work the tread-mill which is a harder task than those even that we have endeavoured faintly to describe. Imagine if you can, an enormous wheel in the interior of which exist cunningly arranged winding steps. Wilde, mounting on one of the steps, would immediately set the wheel in motion by the movement of his feet; then the steps follow each other under the feet in rapid and regular evolution, thus forcing the legs to a precipitous action which becomes laborious, enervating, and even maddening after a few minutes. But this enervating fatigue and suffering the convict is obliged to overcome, whilst continuing to move his legs for all they are worth, if he would escape being knocked down, caught up and thrown over, by the revolving movement of the wheel. This fantastical exercise lasts a quarter of an hour, and the wretch obliged to indulge in it, is allowed five minutes rest before the silly game recommences.
“The convict is always kept apart and not allowed to speak even to his gaoler except at certain moments. All correspondence and reading is forbidden, save for the Bible and Prayer book placed at the head of the wooden plank, which serves him for a bed; and relatives are not admitted to see him excepting at the end of the year.
“His food consists of meat and black bread, and of course only water is allowed. The meal-times take place at fixed hours, for naturally he has to follow a regular régime, in order to accomplish the hard labours that are incumbent upon him.
“Many of the convicts have been known to say, on coming out of prison, that they would have far more preferred to pass ten years in penal servitude than work out two years of hard labour. The moral suffering men like Oscar Wilde are forced to undergo is probably superior even to their physical distress, and I can only repeat that this labour is the severest which the laws of England impose.”
Wilde endured this martyrdom to the bitter end, the only favour allowed him being permission, towards the end of the time, to read a few books and to write. He read Dante in his entirety, dwelling longer over the poet’s description of Hell than anything else, because here he recognized himself “at home.”
Before the doors of the gaol had been bolted on him, he wrote with a pen that had been dipped in colourless ink, letters of tears, sobs and pains, which were issued to the world only after the unhappy man had winged his flight for another planet. Those letters bear every mark of the deepest sincerity. They are not so much literature as the wail of a broken heart, which had attached itself to the only human affection he believed was still faithful to him. It is impossible to treat lightly the passionate anguish which refrains from expressing itself with the same intensity as the sorrows it had suffered, stricken with infinite sadness at the utter shipwreck of all hope and the cowardice of the human nature that had brought him to such low estate.
That he should have conjured up the happy times he had seen decked out in all the charming graces of youth, and which smiled back his visage from the limpid mirror of his marvellously artistic intelligence, is only perfectly natural; and this evocation of happier times took on a new and horribly strange beauty, just as the feeblest ray of light stealing through prison walls gains in puissance from the sheer opacity of enveloping darkness.