{"id":90801,"date":"2015-10-13T13:24:11","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T17:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=90801"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:42:50","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T17:42:50","slug":"suffering-is-one-very-long-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"Suffering Is One Very Long Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Oscar Wilde\u2019s prison sentence\u00a0changed him.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas, ca. 1893.<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from behind bars<\/a><\/em>, here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The first time Oscar Wilde saw the inside of a prison, it was 1882\u2014thirteen years before he\u2019d serve the famous criminal sentence that produced De Profundis<\/a><\/em>, his 55,000-word letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Financially pressed and known primarily as a public speaker\u2014by then he had only published a thin volume of poems\u2014he\u2019d committed to a nine-month lecture tour of America. During his stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, he and the young literature professor George Woodberry were taken to visit the local penitentiary. The warden led them into a yard where, Wilde later wrote the suffragist journalist Helena Sickert, they were confronted by \u201cpoor odd types of humanity in striped dresses making bricks in the sun.\u201d All the faces he glimpsed, he remarked with relief, \u201cwere mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1889, Wilde\u2019s judgments about prison had become less snobbish, if no less flippant. Reviewing a volume of poetry by Wilfred Blunt \u201ccomposed in the bleak cell of Galway Gaol,\u201d he agreed with the book\u2019s author that \u201can unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.\u201d And yet the idea that prison was basically common, a strengthening exercise for the lower classes, still attracted him as a dark, wicked opportunity to conflate the awful with the trivial. As late as 1894, he could have the mischievous, debt-ridden Algernon insist midway through The Importance of Being Earnest<\/em> that \u201cI am really not going to be imprisoned in the suburbs for dining in the West End.\u201d When Algernon hears from a threatening solicitor that \u201cthe gaol itself is fashionable and well-aired; and there are ample opportunities of taking exercise at certain stated hours of the day,\u201d he answers indignantly: \u201cExercise! Good God! No gentleman ever takes exercise.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Early in De Profundis<\/em>, Wilde admiringly quotes his old Oxford don Walter Pater to the effect that \u201cfailure is to form habits,\u201d and his own class snobberies were appropriately inconstant and unpredictable. Fastidious in his own dress and decorative taste, he could be ruthless at sizing up a person\u2019s cultural capital. (\u201cMy heart was turned by the eyes of the doomed man,\u201d he is said to have quipped after asking one of the death-row inmates in Nebraska about his reading habits, \u201cbut if he reads The Heir of Redclyffe<\/em> it\u2019s perhaps as well to let the law take its course.\u201d) At points in De Profundis<\/em>, he presents his association with young, working-class male prostitutes as a kind of moral and creative lapse, a bout of slumming that distracted him from the free practice of his art: \u201cI let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease \u2026 I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and meaner minds.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet elsewhere, he casts himself as a Christ figure condemned by \u201cthe British Philistine\u201d for the same reason the Pharisees condemned Jesus: fraternizing with the allegedly disreputable and low. \u201cChrist mocked at the \u2018whited sepulchre\u2019 of respectability,\u201d Wilde writes in the long dissertation on the gospels, two-thirds of the way through De Profundis<\/em>. \u201cHe treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised \u2026 He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man.\u201d If Wilde\u2019s habit of taking handsome grooms and valets to dine at expensive, discerning restaurants was a way of indulging in \u201csensual ease,\u201d it was just his way of affronting\u2014as he claims Christ affronted\u2014\u201cthe tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind.\u201d His, he would maintain in certain moods, was a mind of such nobility as to be free of petty class prejudices. No doubt the irony of mobilizing Victorian England\u2019s fine-grained class rhetoric in defense of what the court called his \u201cacts of gross indecency with other men persons\u201d was not lost on Wilde. \u201cI did not know it,\u201d Wilde replied during one of his trials when asked if he knew what common jobs the brothers Charles and William Parker worked, \u201cbut if I had I should not have cared. I didn\u2019t care twopence what they were. I liked them. I have a passion to civilize the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilde may have considered working-class male escorts like the Parkers noble enough to civilize the community, but his closest romantic associations were with fellow artists and intellectuals. For the full decade leading up to his trial, condemnation, and two-year imprisonment for \u201cgross indecency,\u201d he was the center of gravity for a handful of figures who shone brightly in their own right. The art critic Robert Ross, who became Wilde\u2019s first literary executor and one of his few stalwart lifelong friends; the poet John Gray, whose verse output arguably outranks Wilde\u2019s own; and the feckless, alluring, hot-tempered Douglas all campaigned to be accepted as gay men with a consistency and directness that Wilde never entirely matched. When he spoke about what Douglas famously called \u201cthe love that dare not speak its name,\u201d it was often in parables and fairy stories, the tone of which he\u2019d soaked up from his Irish parents\u2019 artistic interest in their country\u2019s folklore. When he defended the love in question, it was usually in its idealized, chaste Platonic form. (\u201cIt is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection,\u201d he insisted during a rousing speech in his first trial.) When he reflected cryptically on it in a 1886 letter to his young companion Harry Marillier, it was in a resoundingly ambivalent, searching key:<\/p>\n

\n

You too have the love of things impossible \u2026 Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as a romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance\u2014that is all \u2026 And, strangely enough, what comes of all this is a curious mixture of ardour and indifference. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In those lines, you can hear Wilde discovering a tone far from the snide, pithy one on which he relied in Nebraska. It would eventually become the tone of De Profundis<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To say that imprisonment helped Wilde develop that tone would be to make the same mistake that Wilde himself made about Wilfred Blunt. Certain passages in De Profundis<\/em> do seem to credit prison with strengthening and deepening their author\u2019s nature, but only to the extent that, by subjecting him to intolerable, constant, and thoroughgoing misery, it gave him something against which to muster all his creative energies and all his verbal powers. \u201cThe important thing,\u201d he writes himself telling Douglas at one of the letter\u2019s turning points, \u201cthe thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, or be for the brief remainder of my days one maimed, marred and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear or reluctance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilde wrote De Profundis<\/em> between January and March of 1897, near the end of his internment in Reading prison. His health had improved slightly since his early time in Pentonville, where he suffered miserably from dysentery and malnutrition. Sentenced to hard labor but ruled too weak for truly back-breaking work, he\u2019d initially been ordered to pick oakum\u2014a mind-numbing job involving the unraveling of rope into strands\u2014alone in his cell. After his transfer to Reading, he was put in charge of distributing books from the prison\u2019s limited library. When he eventually won the right to compose a letter in his cell, it was with the stipulation that each day\u2019s pages be collected at nightfall. (Wilde only had occasional chances to read over the manuscript in full.) These odd restrictions suggest why so many thoughts and phrases\u2014\u201cthe supreme vice is shallowness\u201d\u2014recur unchanged throughout De Profundis<\/em>, but Wilde\u2019s goal was clearly to produce a text that could transcend the circumstances of its production. \u201cAs for the corrections and errata,\u201d he writes near the end of the letter in reference to the many edits he made once he had a chance to revise it,<\/p>\n

\n

I have made them in order that my words should be an absolute expression of my thoughts \u2026 Language requires to be tuned, like a violin; and just as too many or too few vibrations in the voice of the singer or the trembling of the string will make the note false, so too much or too little in words will spoil the message.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At first glance, De Profundis<\/em> can seem anything but tuned. It is petulant, vindictive, bathetic, indulgent, excessive, florid, massively arrogant, self-pitying, repetitive, showy, sentimental, and shrill, particularly in its first half: a sixty-some-page rebuke directed at Douglas for matching Wilde\u2019s loving devotion (and financial extravagance) with cruelty and indifference. It\u2019s also one of the glories of English prose. Wilde had spent horrible months earlier in his sentence reading Dante and the gospels, and the voice he created on the page in De Profundis<\/em> was Biblically robust, propulsive, resonant, and rich. Five years after Wilde\u2019s early death, his friend Max Beerbohm marveled in the pages of Vanity Fair<\/em> that in De Profundis<\/em> \u201cone does not seem to be reading a written thing.\u201d And yet the long, elaborate sentences that fill the letter announce themselves as the products of a strenuous effort to find just<\/em> the right string of words for their subject\u2014a search for, as Wilde puts it, \u201cthat mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which Form reveals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

An illustration of Wilde on trial, 1895.<\/p><\/div>\n

In his earlier work, from the 1889 philosophical dialogue \u201cThe Decay of Lying\u201d to The Importance of Being Earnest<\/em>, Wilde treated deception and imposture as virtues. Now he was after a language that would directly embody\u2014in its terse contractions and luxuriant expansions, in its roiling internal rhythms and hard stops, in the music that could result from pairing pithy sentences with intricate ones and setting heavy words against their light counterparts\u2014the turbulent emotional states it described. Early in De Profundis<\/em>, Wilde remarked that Douglas\u2019s influence over him was \u201cthe triumph of the smaller nature over the bigger nature.\u201d One way to read the book is as Wilde\u2019s effort to prove his nobility\u2014his largeness of spirit relative to both the Victorian philistines who sentenced him and the \u201cmeaner\u201d young men with whom he spent some of his nights\u2014by creating a voice powerful enough to carry out the triumph on the page he\u2019d failed to carry out over Douglas.<\/p>\n

Another, more charitable way to read De Profundis<\/em> would be to take seriously what Wilde identifies as his own hopes for it. \u201cPerhaps,\u201d he wonders late in the letter,<\/p>\n

\n

there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends. But something must come into my work, of fuller harmony of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious colour-effects, of simpler architectural-order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Reading those lines recently, the voice I heard sounded jarringly like Emerson, whom Wilde quotes at one juncture of De Profundis<\/em> and whose tone I started to hear him channeling throughout the letter. Wilde shares Emerson\u2019s love of epigrammatic sayings. (\u201cOur very dress makes us grotesque. We are zanies of sorrow.\u201d) But he also shares the American writer\u2019s habit of arranging conflicting sentiments in close proximity to one another, his morbid fixation on matters of doom and fate, and his way of creating sentences in which the underlying ground always seems to be shifting dangerously under the reader\u2019s feet.<\/p>\n

Prison, it might be fair to say, demanded this sort of writing from Wilde. It forced him to change out the voice of a snobbish aesthete for that of a survivor, that of a sufferer, that of a jilted lover, that of a prophet, and\u2014another Emersonian voice\u2014that of an educator. \u201cYou came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art,\u201d Wilde tells Douglas in the letter\u2019s lovestruck last sentence. \u201cPerhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n

After De Profundis<\/em>, Wilde published only the long poem \u201cThe Ballad of Reading Gaol\u201d and two letters to the Daily Chronicle<\/em> advocating for specific reforms designed to mitigate the \u201ccruelties of prison life.\u201d He died at forty-six, broke, despondent, and\u2014at the last minute\u2014baptized. He had lived extravagantly, suffered greatly, defended his wounded pride to the end, and hit, in De Profundis<\/em>, upon a lavish, full harmony of words.<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em>n+1, <\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em>The Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from behind bars<\/a><\/em>, here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Oscar Wilde\u2019s prison sentence\u00a0changed him. Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from behind bars, here. The first time Oscar Wilde saw the inside of a prison, it was 1882\u2014thirteen years before he\u2019d serve the famous criminal sentence that produced De Profundis, his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":851,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19434],"tags":[4846,2823,19768,19762,19761,19436,14307,19764,11213,1435,8902,19435,19763,19769,15410,19767,19765,19766],"class_list":["post-90801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prison-lit","tag-britain","tag-class","tag-courtroom","tag-de-profundis","tag-gaol","tag-incarceration","tag-jail","tag-lord-alfred-douglas","tag-nebraska","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-prison","tag-prison-literature","tag-prison-writing","tag-reading-prison","tag-suffering","tag-trial","tag-victorian-england","tag-wilfred-blunt"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Did Prison Change Oscar Wilde? On \u201cDe Profundis\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 13, 2015 \u2013 How Oscar Wilde\u2019s prison sentence\u00a0changed him.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Suffering Is One Very Long Moment by Max Nelson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 13, 2015 \u2013 How Oscar Wilde\u2019s prison sentence\u00a0changed him.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-10-13T17:24:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-10-13T17:42:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"694\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"568\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Max Nelson\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Max Nelson\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"12 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Max Nelson\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/139181db553bd1ca03238652f90fde6a\"},\"headline\":\"Suffering Is One Very Long Moment\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-10-13T17:24:11+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-10-13T17:42:50+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/\"},\"wordCount\":2335,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Britain\",\"class\",\"courtroom\",\"De Profundis\",\"gaol\",\"incarceration\",\"jail\",\"Lord Alfred Douglas\",\"Nebraska\",\"Oscar Wilde\",\"prison\",\"prison literature\",\"prison writing\",\"Reading prison\",\"suffering\",\"trial\",\"Victorian England\",\"Wilfred Blunt\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Prison Lit\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/\",\"name\":\"How Did Prison Change Oscar Wilde? On \u201cDe Profundis\u201d\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-10-13T17:24:11+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-10-13T17:42:50+00:00\",\"description\":\"October 13, 2015 \u2013 How Oscar Wilde\u2019s prison sentence\u00a0changed him.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Suffering Is One Very Long Moment\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/139181db553bd1ca03238652f90fde6a\",\"name\":\"Max Nelson\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/bda6c91ad125b8c3739397e65eab48bd7dd4f2d676ac2b8021a8a90fe2619e58?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/bda6c91ad125b8c3739397e65eab48bd7dd4f2d676ac2b8021a8a90fe2619e58?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Max Nelson\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/mnelson\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"How Did Prison Change Oscar Wilde? On \u201cDe Profundis\u201d","description":"October 13, 2015 \u2013 How Oscar Wilde\u2019s prison sentence\u00a0changed him.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Suffering Is One Very Long Moment by Max Nelson","og_description":"October 13, 2015 \u2013 How Oscar Wilde\u2019s prison sentence\u00a0changed him.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2015-10-13T17:24:11+00:00","article_modified_time":"2015-10-13T17:42:50+00:00","og_image":[{"width":694,"height":568,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Max Nelson","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Max Nelson","Est. reading time":"12 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/"},"author":{"name":"Max Nelson","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/139181db553bd1ca03238652f90fde6a"},"headline":"Suffering Is One Very Long Moment","datePublished":"2015-10-13T17:24:11+00:00","dateModified":"2015-10-13T17:42:50+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/"},"wordCount":2335,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg","keywords":["Britain","class","courtroom","De Profundis","gaol","incarceration","jail","Lord Alfred Douglas","Nebraska","Oscar Wilde","prison","prison literature","prison writing","Reading prison","suffering","trial","Victorian England","Wilfred Blunt"],"articleSection":["Prison Lit"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/","name":"How Did Prison Change Oscar Wilde? On \u201cDe Profundis\u201d","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg","datePublished":"2015-10-13T17:24:11+00:00","dateModified":"2015-10-13T17:42:50+00:00","description":"October 13, 2015 \u2013 How Oscar Wilde\u2019s prison sentence\u00a0changed him.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on writers who found God from","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oscarwildehislif02harruoft_0008.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/13\/suffering-is-one-very-long-moment\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Suffering Is One Very Long Moment"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/139181db553bd1ca03238652f90fde6a","name":"Max Nelson","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/bda6c91ad125b8c3739397e65eab48bd7dd4f2d676ac2b8021a8a90fe2619e58?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/bda6c91ad125b8c3739397e65eab48bd7dd4f2d676ac2b8021a8a90fe2619e58?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Max Nelson"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/mnelson\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/851"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90801"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90818,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90801\/revisions\/90818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}