Tear Down Reading Gaol

"Prison life makes one see people and things as they really are. That is why it turns one to stone. It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusions of a life in constant motion. They revolve with life and contribute to its unreality. We who are immobile both see and know."

Excerpt from the Preface of De Profundis

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long. 

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol," Part V by Oscar Wilde


Two BBC News articles, from May 30 and June 6, reported that a building now derelict that was formerly known and utilized as Reading Jail faces an uncertain future: "The Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which owns the Grade II listed jail, announced last month it would sell the site. It said it was working with the local authority to look at alternative uses for the site, including housing. It added it wanted the site to 'get value for money for taxpayers'."

This news item would not have attracted attention (it wouldn't have been in the news in the first place) if a cell in Reading Jail hadn't been occupied between 1895 and 1897 by Oscar Wilde, imprisoned at hard labor for "gross indecency" (i.e., homosexuality, which was illegal in England until 1967). Now people and groups in Reading and around the world are trying to have the site protected as some kind of national heritage center.(1)

The same day I read the BBC report, Reuters News Service issued a report that "Public education officials in Colorado are considering a plan to tear down and rebuild Columbine High School, saying the site remains a “source of inspiration” for potential gun violence 20 years after a mass shooting there left 15 people dead."(2) Strange, how different people in different places think so differently about the disposition of sites of great suffering and injustice. Reading Jail is becoming a place of pilgrimage for LGBT people, just like Oscar Wilde's tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. But it appears that, because of their interest, the derelict old jail may soon be protected from demolition and turned into a tourist attraction.

Look at the remaining buildings at Auschwitz in Poland. It was the location of a Death Camp at which the Nazi Final Solution sought to, and nearly succeded in, exterminating every European Jew. The whole complex is protected and no one would think of pulling it down. It seems to me that Reading Jail, too, stands there rather like the remaining buildings at Auschwitz - as a monument to injustice and human suffering. But the injustice carried out upon Oscar Wilde in that place, irrespective of the totality of the suffering that was carried out there upon all of its far less famous inmates, whom Wilde describes in moving detail in his great long poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," that was written and published in France after his release, is personal, applicable to one man, and not to the more than one million people who perished at Auschwitz.

George Orwell once wrote that "The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp."(3) The Nazis tried to destroy the evidence of their crimes, but they didn't have time enough to complete the task. The preservation of the Nazi concentration camps (as well as the labor camps and death camps) as reminders of human depravity has its own special importance, especially when half of the millennials recently polled could not identify Auschwitz from photographs.

I think there is something distastefully fetishistic about the campaign to preserve Reading Jail - something sadomasochistic, like the Christian symbol of the cross, which is an instrument of torture. But if we could consult Oscar Wilde himself about the issue of the disposition of Reading Jail, is there any doubt that he would enthusiastically recommend what the people in Colorado are considering - that the offending structure should be razed to the ground? And that perhaps the site should instead be devoted to joy in the form of a peaceful park or a children's playground? A plaque should be all that is necessary to remind visitors to the site of what once stood there, commemorating its historical (and literary) importance, without having to go to the ridiculous expense of maintaining the decrepit building, which must by now be in danger of collapse.


(1) "Campaigners fight to save Oscar Wilde prison in Reading". Between January and March 1897, Wilde wrote "De Profundis" ("from the depths"), a letter to Sir Alfred Douglas.
(2) Reuters.
(3) "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali," George Orwell: Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).