Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish author, poet and playwright. After writing in different literary styles throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular and influential dramatists in London in the early 1890s.
His poem is one of the greatest ever written.
The audio has been made into approximately ten minutes files: For easy listening and downloading.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he wrote two years after his release, hypnotically details the psychological and physical horrors of living in isolation in unsanitary single-cells for 23 hours a day.
I wanted to hear it sung because it is called a ballad and ballads are traditionally sung in Ireland. Elvis Costello contributed versus of a haunting, a cappella rendition of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” to the 1990 film Dear Sarah, using the harrowing verses to underscore the devastating reality of state-sanctioned executions and wrongful convictions of the Maguires.
It also reveals the mind-numbing conditions and physically exhausting jobs that were relentlessly inflicted on prisoners in Wilde’s day. They were required to ascend 56 steps a minute for nine hours a day on a treadmill, break stones and pick oakum (fibres from the ropes used on ships). And to do so in complete silence.
Although Wilde, himself, was to suffer the psychological and physical effects of his imprisonment until the end of his short life two years later, the 1898 Act saw the treadmill abolished, ensured solitary confinement could only be used for a maximum of 28 days and children were separated from adult prisoners. And yet, sadly, Wilde’s description of “the foul and dark latrine” of “humanity’s machine” continues to reverberate today.
He died on 30 November 1900 (age 46 years), in Paris, France where he is buried.
Wilde probably died of meningitis stemming from an ear infection, and his last days were probably spent in terrible agony.
There is plenty of information on the internet about Oscar. This is a good site:
https://www.grunge.com/191262/the-tragic-real-life-story-of-oscar-wilde/
