THE IMPORTANCE OF READING EARNESTLY
Every Wednesday, Alex Johnson delves into a unique collection of titles. This week: Oscar Wilde’s prison library
Collected Works of Matthew Arnold City of God by St Augustine The Confessions of St Augustine Various Works by Charles Baudelaire The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
The Prioress’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri Collected Works of John Dryden Trois Contes by Gustave Flaubert La Tentation de St Antoin by Gustave Flaubert Illumination by Harold Frederic The Passes of the Pyrenees by Charles L Freeston Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Brittany by Baring Gould Collected Works of Hafiz The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy The Longer Poems of John Keats Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature by William Paton Ker The Courtship of Morrice Buckler: A Romance by AEW Mason An Essay on Comedy by George Meredith The History of the Jews by Henry Hart Milman History of Latin Christianity by Henry Hart Milman History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen Juvenile Offenders by William Douglas Morrison A History of Ancient Greek Literature by Gilbert Murray Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman Two Essays on Miracles by John Henry Newman Idea of a University by John Henry Newman Essays on Grace by John Henry Newman
Provincial Letters by Blaise Pascal Pensées by Blaise Pascal The Renaissance by Walter Pater Gaston de Latour by Walter Pater Miscellaneous Studies by Walter Pater Egyptian Decorative Art (paperback) by WM Flinders Petrie Letters and Memoir by Dante Gabriel Rossetti Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz The Student’s Chaucer by Walter William Skeat Collected Works of Edmund Spenser Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson Collected Works of August Strindberg The Study of Dante by JA Symons Richard Wagner’s letters to August Roeckel Collected Works of William Wordsworth
In 1895 Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labour for gross indecency and was shuttled between Newgate, Pentonville and Wandsworth prisons before finally reaching Reading. Initially, his access to books was extremely limited but eventually he was allowed to build up a small library, examples of which were put on display at HM Prison Reading in 2016 and are listed above.
During prisoners’ first three months behind bars they were only allowed to read a prayer book, a hymn book and the Bible, but after special pleading by Liberal MP Richard Haldane, the authorities relented (Wilde gave the governor at Reading a special signed copy of The Importance Of Being Earnest as a thank you present for allowing more books in). Wilde was not only allowed to keep books in his cell, he was also permitted to leave his light on as late as he wanted to read them.
The first titles he asked for in June 1895 were The Confessions of St Augustine, various volumes of works by Baudelaire and Cardinal Newman, and one of the key books in his life, The Renaissance by Walter Pater. This was a leading text in the aesthetic movement and instilled in Wilde the drive to turn his life into a work of art. “The Library here contains no example of Thackeray’s or Dickens’s novels,” he wrote in one of his requests for new books. “I feel sure that a complete set of their works would be as great a boon to many amongst the other prisoners as it certainly would be to myself.”
Wilde was declared bankrupt and his personal library at home was split up and auctioned. Only around 50 are available in public collections and around 3,000 have never been tracked down. A reconstructed version is available on the Library Thing site (www.librarything.com) and explored in huge detail in Thomas Wright’s book Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, which also reveals Wilde’s tendency to tear off and eat the top corner of each page as he read it.
‘A Book of Book Lists’ by Alex Johnson, £7.99, British Library Publishing
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