Imagination

(via The Writer’s Almanac)

On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested in room 118 of the Cadogan Hotel in London. He was arrested for “gross indecency” for sodomy.

The day before he had lost a libel case he’d brought against his lover’s father, John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry. The Marquess had called Wilde a sodomite, and Wilde wanted to humiliate him and show off his own wit by taking him to court. Wilde was the one who famously said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

The whole thing backfired. Wilde lost the libel case, and Douglas gathered enough evidence to have him arrested. Still, it took two trials to convict Wilde, though it helped that the prosecution paid Wilde’s former lovers to testify.

He was sentenced to two years of hard labor. He walked six hours a day in 29-minute increments, with five minute breaks, until he’d covered a distance equal to a 6,000-foot incline. He slept on a wooden plank, and for the first several months he was not allowed books, writing utensils, or paper.

When he finally got them, he wrote the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, an allegory of his downfall. It was published anonymously until its seventh printing, when Wilde finally told his publisher it was OK to add his name to it.