Download The Ballad of Reading Gaol AudioBook Free
Between 1895 and 1897 Oscar Wilde dished up a prison word for offences "of gross indecency". Most of this time was put in at Reading Gaol, where Wilde encountered another prisoner, Harles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Equine Guards, who had been sentenced to loss of life for the murder of his better half. Wooldrige was hanged at the gaol on 7th July, 1896. Wilde published the poem in France in 1897 after his release from prison. The first written and published version identified the writer only as C.3.3, the name assigned to Wilde as a prisoner. The poem is a long representation on the inequity and ineffectiveness of statutory abuse and the redeeming electricity of the Christian concept of forgiveness. In his foreword, Frank Harris published: I project to duplicate here what I have said in various ways for practically twenty years now, that Oscar Wilde's condemnation of prisons and abuse must lead directly to their abolition. The old bad recent will pass away and Oscar Wilde's ballad helped to kill it.
