Arrested development

The cellmate of the hanged man did not so much confess as boast that he had intimidated the dead man into hanging himself. He had threatened to cut his throat in his sleep if he did not hang himself first, and the man, who was two weeks from his release, chose the rope—or rather, the bedsheet torn into strips, dampened and braided into a noose. The cellmate helped him up on to the chair and obligingly kicked it away from under him.

The hanging before last that I attended was complicated by the fact that the dead man had on his chest a small puncture wound that penetrated to his heart, inflicted by the thrust of a ball-point pen, which I had not until then considered a potentially lethal weapon. No explanation of how the man came by this wound was ever forthcoming: but it seems that, even where there is a high illiteracy rate, as in prison, the pen is as mighty as the sword.

There have been many more hangings in my prison since the abolition of the death penalty than there ever were before. It is as if the gods demand human sacrifices, and if the state does not carry them out, the prisoners themselves have to step into the breach in their own amateur fashion. It seems from the statistics that an official execution, with all its attendant solemnity and ceremony, is more pleasing to the gods than three or four suicides and murders. The gods like a little formality.

I suppose it will be granted that sentimentality is unlikely to remain for long the vice of the prison doctor, though cynicism might easily replace it. Sometimes I wonder whether, through constant contact with the sordid, I have or might one day become the “coarse-mouthed Doctor” of The Ballad of Reading Gaol who


… gloats and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows
and who later comforts the condemned prisoner thus:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact.
Irrespective of the ethics of capital punishment, I am glad that among my duties has never been that of pronouncing a man fit for execution: for by what criterion is the doctor supposed to judge? Is the fitness to be thus pronounced physical or mental, a lack of incapacitating anxiety, perhaps? (Albert Pierrepoint, one of the last hangmen of England—a position for which, in the days of judicial hanging, the Home Office used to receive five applications a week, year in, year out—wrote in his autobiography that all the condemned men he knew behaved correctly at their execution, save one: “and he,” wrote Mr Pierrepoint by way of explanation, “was a foreigner.”) The last doctor I met who had examined men for fitness for execution—in a former British colony—was an alcoholic, though I cannot positively say that he was driven to the bottle by a disturbed conscience.
Whenever I enter my prison, I am always accompanied by The Ballad of Reading Gaol—not literally, for my own copy, written by Oscar Wilde and published by Leonard Smithers in 1898, is too valuable for me to risk in a congregation of thieves—but mentally. This invariable accompaniment is strange, because Oscar Wilde is not a literary figure I much admire: though brilliantly gifted, he was one of the first authors to prefer the route of publicity and self-promotion to that of achievement, and his actual work paid the price. Not only was he himself ultimately the victim of his own choice, but he was a harbinger of genuine decline to come.

I first heard The Ballad read over the radio when I was a child, and its pathos moved me, though I knew nothing of prisons and could not have guessed that I would ever enter one. Wilde was still considered a slightly risqué figure at the time, over whose personal proclivities it was best to draw a veil of silence, and though his works were published and performed, he was not yet the hero and martyr he was soon to become. I remember my father spluttering with outrage at the film made with Peter Finch in the title role of The Trials of Oscar Wilde: not at the injustice or cruelty of the eventual sentence, but at the idea that anyone should have thought Wilde innocent or undeserving of his punishment.

My prison belongs, architecturally, to the same era as Reading Gaol. It is of the panopticon type, so that, theoretically speaking, the whole prison could be surveyed from an observation point at its center. The Victorian ironwork is magnificent, and in a happier context would invite admiration; and though the outer aspect of the prison is forbidding, there are features of the gothic revival within. The prisoners still trudge round the exercise yards as depicted in Victorian paintings.

Prison is another country: they do things differently there. I go abroad every time I enter it, and even the sky changes for me. Like a cheap tune whose chorus infects the brain as an insect bores into wood, I recall the lines

… that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
Later in The Ballad, the famous line becomes more personal
… that little tent of blue
We prisoners call the sky.
and the change from the third to the first person reminds me of my own recurring nightmare, in which I am received into the prison not as a doctor, but as a prisoner. I wake up in a sweat: How will I bear the humiliation of it and the need constantly to ask permission of the warders to do even the simplest things? Or will I, like Dr. Ragin of Ward No. 6, who is admitted as a lunatic to his own ward in Chekhov’s story of that name, sink into despairing apathy and die for lack of will to live? In fact, educated and intelligent people survive surprisingly well as prisoners, perhaps by detaching themselves from their predicament and observing everything around them in a deliberately unemotional way: but their surprising resilience does not prevent my nightmare from recurring.
Some things have not changed very much since Wilde’s days in Her Majesty’s penitentiaries. Men who live in the most squalid and litter-strewn parts of our cities are transformed temporarily into fanatics of cleanliness: brass railings are polished over and over until they gleam and glitter.

We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails;
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.
It is still as if, in the official mind, a spotless floor and an immaculate railing signified a reformed character: a sound mind in a clean prison, as it were.
Because there are no executions any longer, there is no prisoner who

… does not bend his head to hear
The Burial Office read,
Nor, while the anguish of his soul
Tells him he is not dead,
Cross his own coffin, as he moves

Into the hideous shed.
But the execution chamber of my prison is still colloquially known as the Topping Shed, and the (no doubt apocryphal) story is told in the prison of how one of the last prisoners to be executed there was taken from the condemned cell to the gallows, passing a little space of open air en route, and, looking up at the little tent of gray we English call the sky, said to the warders accompanying him, with the banality of finality, “Looks like rain.” “It’s all right for you,” one of them replied, “you’re not coming back.”
When a prisoner is suicidal, warders may still, as in Wilde’s day, be set


Who watch him night and day;
Who watch him when he tries to weep,
And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.

But it is here that, realistic and truthful as Wilde’s lines undoubtedly are, other reflections rise to my mind based upon my own experience: for though Wilde is speaking the truth, it is not the whole truth by any means. His poem is programatic or propagandistic in intent, a clarion call to prison reform in times of indisputable harshness, and nonetheless worthy for that: but reformers are apt to lose sight of Man’s fallen nature in their zeal for betterment, and this leads to wilful simplification.
When a man is known in prison to be suicidal, he does not necessarily arouse the compassion of his fellow-prisoners, contrary to Wilde’s letter to The Daily Chronicle soon after his release, extolling prisoners’ “sympathy for each other, their humility, their gentleness, their pleasant smiles of greeting when they meet each other.” On the contrary, they will do everything possible to aid a man in his efforts to kill himself, from providing the pills to passing the razor blade. They do this not because they believe in an abstract, Humean right to suicide, or because they have a personal grudge against the person who is suicidal, but because they know that a suicide embarrasses the authorities, and a man’s life is a small price to pay for doing this. I recall, for example, a man who had repeatedly cut his wrists and his throat, who was under the direct observation of two warders night and day. It is surprisingly difficult to observe a man constantly without lapses of concentration: and when the man saw that the two warders were temporarily abstracted, he slipped out a razor blade that he had inserted between his gum and his cheek and gashed his throat with it (not fatally, in the event). The razor blade had been passed to him in his food by a well-wishing fellow-prisoner, and he had secreted it in his mouth, to await his opportunity to use it. And prisoners, who usually hang on to their medication as something very precious, are quite prepared to donate it to others in a good cause such as a suicide attempt.

On the night before an execution in Reading Gaol


… there is no sleep when men must weep
Who never yet have wept:
So we—the fool, the fraud, the knave—
That endless vigil kept,
And through each brain on hands of pain
Another’s terror crept.
Then came the morn of the execution itself:

With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair,
Like the sound that frightened marshes hear
From some leper in his lair.
But it is different when a man hangs himself in prison: if he is a run-of-the-mill prisoner, the life of the prison continues as if nothing has happened. He disappears like a pebble in a pond, but without the ripples, and he is not spoken of again. If, on the other hand, he is a notorious sex-murderer, as one who hanged himself in my prison not long ago was, news of his death is greeted with triumphant cheers, the entire prison erupts with glee, the building echoes with a joyous percussive chorus of struck metal pipes and railings. If the very same man had been officially executed, his death would have been the object of the despair Wilde describes, because it was the authorities that hanged him: and the despair he describes is therefore that of antinomian solidarity defeated, not a manifestation of humanitarianism. And in De Profundis, Wilde’s long letter to Bosie from Reading Gaol, he states quite openly that he is “a born antinomian,” as if it were something rare and precious, as if he were one of the elect: “I am,” he wrote, “one of those who were made for exceptions, not for laws.”

The Ballad of Reading Gaol is dedicated to “C. T. W. Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards. Obiit H.M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire, July 7th, 1896.” C. T. W. was Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a soldier who killed his estranged wife in a fit of jealous fury “and so he had to die.”


He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
Wilde heightens the pathos by famously suggesting that we are all, at heart, or potentially, C. T. W.:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
There is an undoubted humanity in these verses. The murderer is my brother, he is a member of the human race, his passions are human, all too human. Recently in the prison, for example, I spoke for several hours to a murderer who had killed from motives of jealousy. I could not but recall C. T. W. as we spoke, and the man’s story aroused my pity. Murder may be the worst of crimes in the eyes of the law, but murderers are often not the worst of criminals.

The man was in his middle age, of previous good and upright character, and had been married for thirty years to the wife he eventually killed. She was a terrible drunkard, whom I had seen, as it happens, several times in my hospital. When drunk, as she was most days, she was unbearable in her shrewishness. She denied that she had ever touched a drop even with a glass of whisky in her hand. She drank so much that she became doubly incontinent. When still capable of some degree of coordination, she was violent, and had stabbed her husband, bitten and scratched him, thrown saucepans at his head. She turned their house into a cesspit, secreted bottles everywhere, and destroyed everything of value by smashing it. Into the bargain, she was intensely jealous, phoning him ten times a day at work, and creating a violent scene at home if he were a minute late from work or shopping.

“For thirty years,” he said, “I looked after that woman. I provided for her, I cleaned up after her, I washed away the vomit, I cleaned her, I put her to bed. She couldn’t have survived without me.”

“Why did you do it?” I asked.

“I loved that woman, I worshipped the ground she stood on.”

At such moments, one has difficulty in understanding what understanding would be: at what point can one say, like Archimedes, “Aha, now I understand!”? My murderer-patient mused on.

“Then she announced one day that she was returning to her first lover. He had become a very rich man. I said, ‘You can’t do this to me, not after thirty years. I’ve looked after you for thirty years, and now you’re just going to leave me all alone. You’ve taken thirty years of my life.’ She said, ‘Well, I’m going anyway.’”

“And so you killed her?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember. But I loved her, and my life is over without her.”

Several times before and since, he has tried to end his life. I caught him once with a noose around his neck—he was going blue—and had to wrestle it from him. His self-pity was far greater than his guilt, of course, but his story was nonetheless tragic and pitiable. I congratulated myself for being so sympathetic a listener, and felt the warm glow of rectitude suffuse my being as he thanked me for my kindness to him.

This warm glow is precisely the sensation that Wilde’s poem imparts to us, as we compassionate with the wretched and the despised: how broad are our sympathies, how generous our sentiments!

Perhaps not quite broad or generous enough, however: or perhaps they need to be a little more firmly under intellectual control. I have omitted certain details from my account of my murderer: he gouged his wife’s eyes out and decapitated her. Likewise, and for precisely the same emotional effect, Wilde, to heighten our sympathy for C. T. W., says he murdered her in her bed. This suggests to us that he suddenly lost control, that he was momentarily overcome by passion, as any of us might be in the right circumstances. But Wooldridge’s plea for clemency was turned down because, in actual fact, he did not kill the thing he loved in her bed: he lay in wait for her with a razor at the ready and cut her throat three times. This indicated an unforgivable degree of premeditation, and he was hanged.

One imagines from reading The Ballad that Reading Gaol was an insatiable Moloch, waiting to be fed victims, indifferent to the justice of the proceedings. But in the half century of Reading Gaol’s existence before Wilde’s arrival, there were actually only five executions there: that of Thomas Jennings in 1844, for having poisoned his four-year-old son with arsenic, which he deliberately misled him into thinking was salt; that of John Gould in 1862, for having cut his seven-year-old daughter’s throat; that of Henry and Francis Tidbury in 1877 for the joint murder of two policemen; and that of John Carter in 1893, for the murder of his third wife, he being strongly suspected of having murdered his second wife as well. Wilde was “lucky,” therefore, at least in the literary sense, to be incarcerated when there was an execution to give power to his poem, for the statistical chances were against it. And in the remaining seventy-one years in which the death penalty was still in force, there were only four further executions at Reading Gaol.

The tragedy of C. T. W. is not that of harsh and rough justice meted out to him: it is that of a man who acted from motives understandable and perhaps even shared by everyone, and yet whose crime had to be expiated for the good of society. Even without the execution, or with a last-minute reprieve, there was no possible happy ending to the all-too-human story: and that, not ill-treatment, is its tragedy.

The power of The Ballad is not in its propagandistic or prison-reformist message, therefore, but in its implicit recognition of the frailty and imperfectibility of man. No number of prison reforms would reduce it to a document of merely historical interest. We know that there will still be C. T. W.’s in the best-ordered societies, because man is a fallen creature, and the passion to which C. T. W. succumbed springs eternal, just as the need to punish springs eternal. The law (“I know not whether Laws be right,/ Or whether Laws be wrong”) can perhaps control or tame such passion a little, but never eliminate it finally: and we would not wish it to if it could, for all the misery it causes. Life can never be unblemished joy, though that is what we should like it to be.

The Ballad occupies a special place in Wilde’s oeuvre, of course. It was the last thing he wrote for publication, and the only one after his release from prison. He was a broken man, but was he broken only by the harsh treatment he had received? For a brilliantly gifted man who had moved only in the beau monde of late Victorian England, prison gruel, oakum picking, floor scrubbing, and buckets for excrement must, of course, have been a severe shock. He was used to ceaseless conversation and gaiety, and in prison there was enforced silence; a great reader, he was reduced to one book a week, and that a mere crude religious tract.

But the shock, I suspect, was far deeper than any supplied by physical hardship, serious as this was for him. Only a few months before he went to jail, when he was no mere youth any longer but a man of forty years of age, he had written Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, for an Oxford undergraduate magazine called Chameleon. These few maxims were a quintessence of what he claimed to believe, and of the attitudes upon which he had built his glittering career. Here is a sample:

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

The sheer callow, shallow, spoilt-child silliness of all this—upon the propagation of which the brilliantly gifted Wilde wasted so much of his life and energy and which ruins so much of his work—must have been obvious the very moment he passed through the prison door. Wilde was never a wicked man. It was nevertheless only in prison that he learned the value of truth, sincerity, and goodness, and by then it was too late.
Prison has taught me much also.


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From The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 10, June 2002
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