"The convict is always kept apart and not allowed to speak even to his gaoler except at certain moments. All correspondence and reading is forbidden, save for the Bible and Prayer book placed at the head of the wooden plank, which serves him for a bed; and relatives are not admitted to see him excepting at the end of the year.
"His food consists of meat and black bread, and of course only water is allowed. The meal-times take place at fixed hours, for naturally he has to follow a regular _régime_, in order to accomplish the hard labours that are incumbent upon him.
"Many of the convicts have been known to say, on coming out of prison, that they would have far more preferred to pass ten years in penal servitude than work out two years of hard labour. The moral suffering men like Oscar Wilde are forced to undergo is probably superior even to their physical distress, and I can only repeat that this labour is the severest which the laws of England impose."
Wilde endured this martyrdom to the bitter end, the only favour allowed him being permission, towards the end of the time, to read a few books and to write. He read Dante in his entirety, dwelling longer over the poet's description of Hell than anything else, because here he recognized himself "at home."
Before the doors of the gaol had been bolted on him, he wrote with a pen that had been dipped in colourless ink, letters of tears, sobs and pains, which were issued to the world only after the unhappy man had winged his flight for another planet. Those letters bear every mark of the deepest sincerity. They are not so much literature as the wail of a broken heart, which had attached itself to the only human affection he believed was still faithful to him. It is impossible to treat lightly the passionate anguish which refrains from expressing itself with the same intensity as the sorrows it had suffered, stricken with infinite sadness at the utter shipwreck of all hope and the cowardice of the human nature that had brought him to such low estate.
That he should have conjured up the happy times he had seen decked out in all the charming graces of youth, and which smiled back his visage from the limpid mirror of his marvellously artistic intelligence, is only perfectly natural; and this evocation of happier times took on a new and horribly strange beauty, just as the feeblest ray of light stealing through prison walls gains in puissance from the sheer opacity of enveloping darkness.