Italian novel charts the downfall of Oscar Wilde
Philip Willan
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9 October 2025
Oscar Wilde and Reading Gaol
ROME -- Oscar Wilde is known for his irrepressible wit and sense of humour. Less so for the prison ordeal, following a conviction for homosexuality, which crushed his creativity and led to depression and an early death at the age of 46.
Italian investigative journalist Roberto Ippolito has tracked the parallel lives of the Irish poet, playwright and aesthete and Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, who was sentenced to be hanged for murdering his wife in a fit of jealousy.
Wilde was convicted of gross indecency with other men and sentenced to two years hard labour after plummeting from a peak of fame and popularity to almost universal shame and rejection. In his lightly novelised account, “Wilde Come Se” (Wilde As If), Ippolito describes the fleeting contact between the two disgraced men when they shared time in Reading Gaol.
“Every word in this novel is based on research documents. I have invented nothing. Unfortunately,” Ippolito said.
Wooldridge’s plight emerges in Wilde’s famous poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, where he describes walking in circles in the prison yard at the same time as the condemned murderer.
“I walked with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing’.”
Ippolito’s meticulous research reveals the humiliating inhumanity of 19th century English prisons, which had a crushing effect on Wilde, a fastidious and flamboyant dandy.
Prisoners were not allowed to speak to other inmates, wearing special caps and masks to prevent communication.
In an 1897 letter to his friend Reginald Turner, Wilde made light of the situation. “There are many good nice fellows here. I have seven or eight friends: they are capital chaps: of course we can’t speak to each other, except a word now and then at exercise, but we are great friends.”
But in an earlier letter he had hinted at his despair. “The utter solitude, the isolation from all humane and humanising influences, kill one’s brain-power, the brain loses its life, becomes fettered to monotony of suffering.”
Wilde’s downfall came after he was accused of the crime of sodomy by the Marquess of Queensberry, who objected to Wilde’s relationship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas.
Queensberry, remembered as the inventor of the modern rules of boxing, left a visiting card for Wilde at his club marked with the words: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite (sic).” Wilde made the mistake of suing his nemesis for libel, with the result that the evidence of homosexual activity that emerged in the civil proceedings subsequently led to his prosecution and conviction in a criminal trial.
Ippolito explores the anomalies of 19th century English law, which punished “gross indecency” among consenting males, even in private, but did not extend the punishment to homosexual women.
Lawmakers had decided not to discuss such a possibility in case it gave people ideas. “‘Women don’t do these things’,” is the comment attributed to Queen Victoria when she was presented with the proposed law,” Ippolito writes.
Ippolito recounts how Wilde had to defend himself against the perceived immorality of characters in his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.
Edward Carson, Queensberry’s defence lawyer in the libel case, had embarked on the novel judicial manoeuvre of “identifying an author with his invented character, and written behaviours with lived ones,” Ippolito says.
“Could the affection and love of the artist for Dorian Gray induce an ordinary person to believe that he might be of a certain tendency?” Carson asked at the libel trial. “I’m not familiar with the views of ordinary people,” Wilde retorted.
Ippolito cites contemporary accounts of an aristocratic exodus to France following the poet’s arrest. “Every train to Dover was packed; every ferry to Calais filled with the aristocratic and wealthy classes, who seemed to prefer Paris, or even Nice out of season, to a city like London.”
Wilde was condemned for betraying his class with working class rent boys as much as for his homosexuality, Ippolito suggests. “The eccentric who breached Victorian customs and the class system suffers the rigours of conformism,” he writes.
Three lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the only literary creation of note following Wilde’s release and decision to go into exile in France and Italy, appear to draw a parallel between the convicted murderer and the convicted homosexual.
“The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,” Wilde wrote, perhaps mindful that his own actions had cost him the affection and company of his wife Constance and children, whom he did not see again after his imprisonment.
The author of a non-fiction book about the suspected murder of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda by the regime of Augusto Pinochet, Ippolito reaches a similar verdict on Wilde: “Power has crushed the poet.”
“Having left prison with his body, he didn’t leave it with his head. He remains tied to those who shared the darkness of punishment,” Ippolito observes.
Crushed in spirit, the formerly exuberant poet died, lonely, impoverished and dejected, in a grubby Parisian hotel on November 25 1900. Ippolito’s unusual book binds his tragedy to that of the condemned Horse Guards trooper, who briefly shared his hardship in Reading Gaol and inspired his last poem.
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