The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Common card · No. 231971

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol" is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand and Naples, after his release from HM Prison Reading (Reading Gaol, RED-ing jail) on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of gross indecency with other men in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison. During his imprisonment, on Tuesday, 7 July 1896, a hanging took place. Charles Thomas Wooldridge had been a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards. He was convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen, earlier that year at Clewer, near Windsor. He was aged 30 when executed. Wilde wrote the poem in 1897, beginning it in Berneval-le-Grand and completing it in Naples. The poem narrates the execution of Wooldridge; it moves from an objective story-telling to symbolic identification with the prisoners as a whole. No attempt is made to assess the justice of the laws which convicted them, but rather the poem highlights the brutalisation of the punishment...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Oscar Wilde, Public domain