> >Yes Oscar Wilde was genteel. So what. He definitely had no place in a
> >ditch.
> >Jennifer Young
>
>Well, that depended on the type of boys who did the digging.
The Victorian prohibition of homosexuality -- including love of comely boys, aristocratic as well as working-class -- eventually led to Wilde's conviction ("acts of gross indecency"). Wilde was then sentenced to two years of _hard labor_ in a London prison, which practically killed him:
***** Wilde was taken to Pentonville prison where he was confined alone in a small whitewashed cell. During the first few nights, he couldn't sleep on the wood boards that passed for a bed and at meal times he declined the stinking gruel he was offered. Only a little time passed before exhaustion cured his insomnia and he ate whatever the guards brought. Cramps from food poisoning followed his first prison meal, and like the other prisoners at Pentonville, he was cursed with chronic diarrhea. The cells lacked plumbing, so the once fastidious Wilde was forced to live with a pot of his own excrement that he could only empty when the guards permitted.
Regardless of his health, prison officials forced him to meet a daily work quota. At first he had to walk a treadmill six hours a day, but later he was assigned to work at oakum picking in his cell. A traditional workhouse task, oakum picking required that he untwist old rope into its constituent fibers, often until his fingers bled. Conditions improved a little in November 1895, when he was transferred to another prison, Reading Gaol. He still had to work, but now at bookbinding and gardening instead of oakum picking, and he was allowed pen and paper, a privilege denied him at Pentonville. Finally allowed to express himself, Wilde wrote de Profundis....
<http://www.gayhistory.com/rev2/events/wilde.htm> *****
Read _A Ballad of Reading Gaol_ by Wilde at <http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wilde/prisonwritings.html>.
It's hard work being a Wilde socialist, politically & artistically. As for Wilde's artistic hard labor, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; "Wilde's Hard Labor and the Birth of Gay Reading," _Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Essays_, ed. Jonathan Freedman, NY: Prentice Hall, 1996.
Yoshie