SOURCE: Youngs, Tim. “‘A Sonnet out of a Skilly’: Oscar Wilde's ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’” Critical Survey 11, no. 3 (1999): 40-7.

In the following essay, Youngs analyzes Wilde's poignant poem about a prison execution to highlight the ways in which prison changed the poet and his writings, concluding that the sordid, bestial conditions of prison compelled Wilde to confront realism.

One remarkable career may have been launched at an institution in Reading (John Lucas's, which this volume honours, at the University), but another reached an inglorious end at a different institution there: Oscar Wilde's in Reading Gaol. Perhaps the arrival of John, a lover of the national sport, is anticipated in Wilde's line: ‘A cricket cap was on his head’, but there the similarity probably ends.¹

After being convicted on 25 May 1895 for indecency and sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour, Wilde eventually arrived at Reading Gaol on...