A copy of The Importance of Being Earnest, inscribed by the author to the man who allowed him access to books, expected to fetch thousands
'A great and noble kindness' … Oscar Wilde in 1893. Photograph: Roger Viollet/Getty Images
An edition of The Importance of Being Earnest personally inscribed by Oscar Wilde to the prison governor who the playwright said did him "a great and noble kindness" in allowing him access to reading and writing materials will be auctioned for thousands of pounds this summer.
Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency in May 1895, and moved from Wandsworth prison to Reading gaol that November, where his stay was overseen initially by prison governor Henry Isaacson, a man Wilde said had "the soul of a rat". The author had feared he was losing his mind under Isaacson's regime, writing to the home secretary of "the fearful system of cellular confinement", the absence of writing materials, and the absence of books which he called "so vital for the preservation of mental balance".
The prisoner, wrote Wilde – in an echo of today's ban on prisoners being sent books by their families – "is deprived of everything that could soothe, distract, or heal a wounded and shaken mind", and "horrible as all the physical privations of modern prison life are, they are as nothing compared to the entire privation of literature to one to whom Literature was once the first thing of life, the mode by which perfection could be realised, by which, and by which alone, the intellect could feel itself alive".
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Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency in May 1895, and moved from Wandsworth prison to Reading gaol that November, where his stay was overseen initially by prison governor Henry Isaacson, a man Wilde said had "the soul of a rat". The author had feared he was losing his mind under Isaacson's regime, writing to the home secretary of "the fearful system of cellular confinement", the absence of writing materials, and the absence of books which he called "so vital for the preservation of mental balance".
The prisoner, wrote Wilde – in an echo of today's ban on prisoners being sent books by their families – "is deprived of everything that could soothe, distract, or heal a wounded and shaken mind", and "horrible as all the physical privations of modern prison life are, they are as nothing compared to the entire privation of literature to one to whom Literature was once the first thing of life, the mode by which perfection could be realised, by which, and by which alone, the intellect could feel itself alive".
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