The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of gross indecency with other men in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison.
He adopted the proletarian ballad form, and suggested it be published in Reynold's Magazine, "because it circulates widely among the criminal classes – to which I now belong – for once I will be read by my peers – a new experience for me".
[13] On 25 May 1895 Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour—a punishment that was considered more severe than mere penal servitude.
He was first sent, briefly, to Newgate Prison for initial processing, and the next week was moved to Pentonville prison, where "hard labour" consisted of many hours of pointless effort in walking a treadmill or picking oakum (separating the fibres in scraps of old navy ropes), and allowed to read only the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress.
On 23 November 1895 he was again moved, to the prison at Reading, which also had similar rules, where he spent the remainder of his sentence, and was assigned the third cell on the third floor of C ward—and thereafter addressed and identified only as "C.3.3.
[15] While in France, surviving on an allowance from his wife of three pounds a week—deliberately meagre to discourage the sort of high living that had led to his 'downfall'—Wilde endeavoured to find additional money.
Thereafter there was a very active correspondence between the two of them, as Wilde was repeatedly revising and expanding the text, and supervising from afar the choice and size of typeface and the layout of the work.
As one biographer, Leonard Cresswell Ingleby, said, "Never, perhaps, since Gray's Elegy had a poem been so revised, pruned, and polished over and over again as this cry from a prison cell".
Wilde did acknowledge (evidently to several people, since numerous separate sources recalled this) a glaring error in the very first line of the poem, "He did not wear his scarlet coat"—because Wooldridge, as a member of the Royal Horse Guards, had a blue uniform—but justified this poetic licence because the second line would make no sense if it said "For blood and wine are blue".
[19] The poem has been translated into countless languages, including French (1898) by Henry Durand-Davray, Spanish (1898), German (1900), Russian (1904), and many others.
The line is a nod to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, when Bassanio asks "Do all men kill the things they do not love?
For he has a pall, this wretched man, Such as few men can claim; Deep down below a prison-yard, Naked, for greater shame, He lies, with fetters on each foot, Wrapt in a sheet of flame!
