De Profundis (letter)

De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths") is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in
Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas. During its first half Wilde recounts their previous relationship and
extravagant lifestyle which eventually led to Wilde's conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency. He
indicts both Lord Alfred's vanity and his own weakness in acceding to those wishes. In the second half,
Wilde charts his spiritual development in prison and identification with Jesus Christ, whom he characterises
as a romantic, individualist artist.
Wilde wrote the letter between January and March 1897, close to the end of his imprisonment. Contact
had lapsed between Douglas and Wilde and the latter had suffered from his physical labour and emotional
isolation; a new warden thought that writing might be more cathartic than prison labour. Wilde's work was
closely supervised and he was not allowed to send the letter, but took it with him upon release, whereupon
he entrusted the manuscript to an ex-lover, the journalist Robert Ross, with instructions to have two copies
made: one to be sent to the author himself and the other to Douglas. Ross published the letter in 1905, five
years after Wilde's death, giving it the title "De Profundis" from Psalm 130. It was an incomplete version,
excised of its autobiographical elements; various editions gave more text until 1962 when the complete
and correct version appeared in a volume of Wilde's letters.

Background

Trials

In 1891 Wilde began an intimate friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a young, vain aristocrat. As the two
grew closer, family and friends on both sides urged Wilde and Douglas to lessen their contact. Lord Alfred's
father, the Marquess of Queensberry, often feuded with his son over the topic. Especially after the death of
his eldest son, the Viscount Drumlanrig, Queensberry privately accused them of improper acts and
threatened to cut off Lord Alfred's allowance. When they refused, he began publicly harassing Wilde. In
early 1895 Wilde had reached the height of his fame and success with his plays An Ideal Husband and The
Importance of Being Earnest on stage in London. When Wilde returned from holidays after the premieres,
he found Queensberry's card at his club with the inscription: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite
[sic]".[1][Notes 1]
Unable to bear further insults, and encouraged by Lord Alfred (who wanted to attack his father in every
possible way), Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel. Wilde withdrew his claim as the defence began,
and the Judge ruled that Queensberry's accusation was justified. The Crown promptly issued a warrant for
his arrest and he was charged with gross indecency with other men under the Labouchere Amendment in
April 1895. The trial was the centre of public discussion as details of Wilde's consorts from the working class
became known. Wilde refused to admit wrongdoing and the jury were unable to reach a verdict. At the
retrial Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, to be held to hard labour.[2]

Imprisonment

He was imprisoned in Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading Prisons, where the poor food, manual labour,
and harsh conditions greatly weakened his health.[3] He quickly began suffering from hunger, insomnia,
and disease.[4] He was visited in Pentonville by R.B.S Haldane, a liberal, reforming MP whom he had known
before. Haldane championed his case and arranged for access to religious, educational, and historical
books.[5] Whilst in Wandsworth Wilde collapsed in the Chapel and burst his right ear drum, an injury that
would later contribute to his death. He spent two months recovering in the infirmary.[6] Friends arranged
for him to be transferred to Reading Prison, where he was prescribed lighter duties and allowed to spend
some time reading but not writing.[6] Depressed, he was unable to complete even these duties, and under
Colonel Isaacson, the strict Warden of Reading Prison, Wilde became trapped in a series of harsh
punishments for trivial offences. The failure to complete them led to renewed sanction.[7]
Wilde, who still loved Lord Alfred, became upset as contact from him became rare, then annoyed when he
learned that the latter planned to publish Wilde's letters without permission and dedicate poems to him
unasked. He wrote to friends immediately, forbidding the former and refusing the latter.[8] Wilde still
maintained his belief that the Queensberrys owed him a debt of honour arising from his bankruptcy trial.[9]

Composition

Wilde's friends continued pressing for better conditions and, in 1897, Major Nelson, a man of a more
progressive mind, replaced Col. Isaacson as Warden. He quickly visited Wilde and offered him a book from
his personal library, the sympathy bringing Wilde to tears.[10] Soon Wilde requested lists of books,
returning to Ancient Greek poets and Christian theology, and studying modern Italian and German, though
it was Dante's Inferno that held his attention.[11]
Wilde was granted official permission to have writing materials in early 1897, but even then under strict
control: he could write to his friends and his solicitor, but only one page at a time. Wilde decided to write a
letter to Douglas, and in it discuss the last five years they had spent together, creating an autobiography of
sorts.[12] Wilde spent January, February, and March 1897 writing his letter. Textual analysis of the
manuscript shows that Nelson probably relaxed the stringent rules, allowing Wilde to see the papers
together: three of the sheets are of relatively fair copy, suggesting they were entirely re-written, and most
do not end with a full-stop.[12] Wilde requested that he might send the letter to Lord Alfred Douglas or
Robert Ross, which the Home Office denied, but he was permitted to take it with him on release.[13] Wilde
never revised the work after he left prison.[14]

Structure and content

HM Prison, Reading
Dear Bosie,

After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine,
as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having
received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain ...

First part: Wilde's account of time with Douglas[edit]

Wilde's work was written as a prose letter on twenty sheets of prison paper. It contains no formal divisions
(save paragraphs) and is addressed and signed off as a letter. Scholars have distinguished a noticeable
change in style, tone and content in the latter half of the letter, when Wilde addresses his spiritual journey
in prison.[15] In the first part, Wilde examines the time he and Lord Alfred had spent together, from 1892
until Wilde's trials in the spring of 1895. He examines Lord Alfred's behaviour and its detrimental effect on
Wilde's work, and recounts Lord Alfred's constant demands on his attention and hospitality. Poignancy
builds throughout this section as Wilde details the expenses of their sumptuous dinners and hotel-stays,
many costing over 1,000; it culminates in an account of Douglas's rage in Brighton whilst Wilde was ill.
Though he was a constant presence at Wilde's side, their relationship was intellectually sterile.[16]
Throughout Wilde's self-accusation is that he acceded to these demands instead of placing himself within
quiet, intellectual company dedicated to the contemplation of beauty and ideas, but instead succumbed to
an "imperfect world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit,
and formless greed".[15] This passage concludes with Wilde offering his forgiveness to Douglas. He
repudiates him for what Wilde finally sees as his arrogance and vanity; he had not forgotten Douglas's
remark, when he was ill, "When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting."[17]

Second part: Christ as a romantic artist

The second part of the letter traces Wilde's spiritual growth through the physical and emotional hardships
of his imprisonment. Wilde introduces the greater context, making a typically grandiose claim: "I was one
who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age",[18] though he later writes, in a more
humble vein, "I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of
my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in
symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering." Briefly sketching his
ascendancy and dominance of the literary and social scenes in London, he contrasts his past position and
the attendant pleasure with his current position and the pain it brings. Pleasure and success are an artifice,
he says, while pain wears no mask. He turns to humility as a remedy, and identifies with the other
prisoners.[19]
Wilde uses a quotation from Isaiah to introduce his Christian theme: "He is despised and rejected of men, a
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and we hid our faces from him." Though Peter Raby
acknowledges the "obvious relevance" of this quotation to Wilde's situation, he argues that the line does
not necessitate the comparison with Christ implicit in his description of Robert Ross doffing his hat to Wilde
after his conviction.[19] Wilde adopts Jesus of Nazareth as a symbol of western kindness and eastern
serenity and as a rebel-hero of mind, body and soul.[20] Though other romantics had discussed Jesus in
artistic terms, Wilde's conception is the most radical. He moves methodically toward this conclusion: his
earlier antinomian attitude is re-iterated and he finds no recompense in traditional morality. Though Wilde
loved the beauty of religion, he dismissed it now as a source of solace, saying "My Gods dwell in temples
made with hands". Reason was similarly lacking: Wilde felt that the law had convicted him unjustly. Instead
Wilde reworked his earlier doctrine of the appreciation of experience, all of it must be accepted and
transformed, whatever its origin. Wilde declared he would actively accept sorrow and discover humility, be
happy and appreciate developments in art and life.[21]
He also felt redemption and fulfillment in his ordeal, realising that his hardship had filled the soul with the
fruit of experience, however bitter it tasted at the time:
I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world ... And so, indeed, I went out,
and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me
the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.[22]
Simon Critchley argues that the major element of De Profundis is self-realisation. Wilde, having lost
everything dear to him, does not accuse external forces, justified as this might have been, but rather absorb
his hardships through the artistic process into a spiritual experience.[23]

Style and themes

Though a letter, at 50,000 words long De Profundis becomes a sort of dramatic monologue which considers
Douglas's supposed responses.[24] Wilde's previous prose writing had assumed a flippant, chatty style,
which he again employed in his comic plays. In prison Wilde was disconnected from his audiences, which
Declan Kiberd suggested was possibly his harshest punishment. He characterises Wilde as an Irish critic of
English social mores ultimately silenced for his polemics, and reports that while convalescing in the sick-
bay, Wilde entertained his fellow-patients and carers with stories and wit until the authorities placed a
warder beside his bed.[25]
In a preface to the 1905 (and, later, 1912) edition,[26] published as a popular edition by Methuen, Robert
Ross, Wilde's literary executor, published an extract from Wilde's instructions to him which included the
author's own summation of the work:
I don't defend my conduct. I explain it. Also in my letter there are several passages which explain
my mental development while in prison, and the inevitable evolution of my character and intellectual
attitude towards life that has taken place, and I want you and others who stand by me and have affection
for me to know exactly in what mood and manner I face the world. Of course, from one point of view, I
know that on the day of my release I will merely be moving from one prison into another, and there are
times when the whole world seems to be no larger than my cell, and as full of terror for me. Still at the
beginning I believe that God made a world for each separate man, and within that world, which is within us,
one should seek to live.[27]
According to Kiberd, Wilde follows Christ's individualist theme of self-perfection into a testing new zone:
prison. Wilde, who had always looked to test English society's hypocrisies, declined the opportunity to flee
to France.[28] Kiberd places Wilde within the long tradition of prison writing by Irish Republican prisoners;
when Wilde wanted to criticise the penal system after release, he contacted Michael Davitt, an Irish
political reformer who had himself been imprisoned in England.[25]

Publication history

On his release, Wilde gave the manuscript to Ross with the putative title Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis
("Letter: In Prison and in Chains"),[29] instructing him to make two typed copies, one for Lord Alfred and
the other for Wilde himself. Due to its length, Ross could not have it fully typed until August.[30]
In 1905, Ross published the letter with the title "De Profundis", expurgating all references to the
Queensberry family. This edition would go through eight printings in next three years, including de luxe
editions.[31] The title, meaning "from the depths", comes from Psalm 130, "From the depths, I have cried
out to you, O Lord;". In 1924, when Lord Alfred served six months in prison for libel against Winston
Churchill, he wrote a sonnet sequence entitled In Excelsis ("from the heights"), intentionally mirroring
Wilde's letter.[29]
A second, slightly expanded, version of De Profundis appeared in the edition of Collected Works of Wilde
published by Ross between 1908-1922. Also included were three other letters Wilde wrote from Reading
and his two letters to the editor of the Daily Chronicle written after his release.[32] Ross then donated the
manuscript to the British Museum on the understanding that it would not be made public until 1960. The
manuscript is now in the British Library.[33]
In 1913, the entire letter was read to the court after Douglas sued Arthur Ransome for libel and parts were
published subsequently in the London Press.[34] Douglas testified that he had received the letter from
Ross, but after reading Ross's cover note threw it in the fire unread. He later claimed that he had never
received the package at all.[35] Observers reported that Douglas could not bear it when he learned that the
letter was addressed to him and heard its full contents.[36] Ross quickly brought out another edition: The
Suppressed Portion of "De Profundis", to claim the copyright on Wilde's work. It contained about half of the
complete text.[34]
In 1949, Wilde's son Vyvyan Holland published the full text, but used a faulty typescript bequeathed to him
by Ross. Ross's typescripts had contained several hundred errors, including typist's mistakes, his own
emendations, and other omissions.[13]
In 1960, Rupert Hart-Davis examined the manuscript in the library of the British Museum, and produced a
new, corrected text from it which was published in The Letters of Oscar Wilde in 1962. He wrote that:[37]
In July Ruth and I had the excitement of being the first people to see the original manuscript of Oscar's
longest, best, and most important letter De Profundis, which had been given to the British Museum by
Robbie Ross with a fifty-year ban on anyone's seeing it, so as to make sure Lord Alfred Douglas never saw it.
To our delight, we found that the published versions were wildly inaccurate, so our version in The Letters
was the first accurate text in print.
The British Library published a facsimile of the original manuscript in 2000.[38]
In 2005, Oxford University Press published Volume 2 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. In this volume,
entitled De Profundis; 'Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis', editor Ian Small tried "to establish an authoritative
(and perhaps definitive) text" of Wilde's prison letter. The volume also aimed to "present the complete
textual history of one of the most famous love letters ever written".[39] According to Thefreelibrary.com,
Ian Small "creates an 'eclectic text' based on Vyvyan Holland's 1949 text into which he has collated and
interpolated material from the manuscript. There has been some reordering and the omission of 1000
words, here included in square brackets".[40]
German academic Horst Schroeder has compared the previously published typescripts of the text to
German translations that were published in the first quarter of the 20th century and were prepared by Max
Meyerfeld from typescripts he had received from Robert Ross. Based on his findings Schroeder argues that,
due to the large amount of typing errors and unauthorised changes, no previously published typescript of
the text (including the 1949 Holland edition) is suitable as a base text and that only the British Museum
manuscript is "what really matters."[41]

Reception

G. S. Street, who had earlier been an intellectual opponent of the decadents, had two impressions of De
Profundis: one, "that it was poignantly touching, the other it was extraordinarily and profoundly
interesting".[42] Street dismissed contemporary complaints that the letter lacked sincerity, saying this was
just a manifestation of those who opposed Wilde's graceful writing style.[43]
Max Beerbohm, an old friend of Wilde's, wrote a signed review, "A Lord of Language," for Vanity Fair. He
described the writing in De Profundis as having achieved the perfect grace of Wilde's earlier work, and said
that Wilde had remained a detached artist of words, concluding: "We see him here as the spectator of his
own tragedy. His tragedy was great. It is one of the tragedies that will always live on in romantic
history."[44]
T. W. H. Crosland, a journalist and friend of Douglas after Wilde's death, negatively reviewed De Profundis
in 1912.[45] He strongly criticised Ross's editing, but claimed the entire document was even more morally
bankrupt than the published version: "A blacker, fiercer, falser, craftier, more grovelling or more
abominable piece of writing never fell from a mortal pen", he wrote.[46]
A version abridged by Merlin Holland was performed by Corin Redgrave in 2000 at the Royal National
Theatre in London. It was revived in 2008.[47]
An abridged version was set for speaking pianist by composer Frederic Rzewski.
Extracts were set to music for chorus and orchestra in 2012 by the British composer Matthew King.