Oscar Wilde: A Centennial Wreath Of Memories

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2000 by Richard Whittington-Egan

Apropos the Ballad, wearing my criminological hat, I was interested to discover the truth behind the poetic. The poem's dedicatee, 'C.T.W.', was Trooper Charles Thomas Wooldridge, of Her Majesty's Royal Horse Guards. He arrived in Reading on a capital charge in April 1896. Both he and Wilde were still young men -- Oscar 41, Wooldridge 30. Both were in their different ways doomed. Wilde's sin was that of the love that dare not speak its name. Wooldridge's sin arose out of the love that would not answer to its name.

The first weeks of March had found Trooper Wooldridge extremely dejected. His regiment had recently been ordered back from Windsor to Regent's Park Barracks in London, and the prime cause of the trooper's pessimism was his wife, or, rather, the lack of her. This state of affairs was of his own making. He and Laura Ellen Glendell, the 22-year-old local assistant postmistress at Windsor, had stolen off and got married secretly, neglecting to obtain his commanding officer's consent. Charlie and Nellie were not, therefore, in the Army's eye married, and when his regiment moved there was no provision for a wife to accompany him. Rumour has it that the marriage had not for some time been a happy one. Wooldridge misused and abused his wife. Understandably then, whenever he turned up on the doorstep of the house wherein she remained at Windsor, his reception was Icelandic. Eventually, after several visits and much wheedling and pleading, Trooper Wooldridge got Nellie to agree to come up to London the following Sunda y, 29 March, afternoon and meet him outside the barracks. Togged out full fig -- pill-box cap, dress tunic and swagger-stick -- he awaited her at the barrack gates in vain. As dusk fell on his hopes, he borrowed a cut-throat razor from a comrade and boarded a train for Windsor... and there he slit Nellie Wooldridge's throat.

On 7 July 1896, the Trooper took his stand on the trap-door under the hanging beam almost as if he were on parade, standing to attention as Mr. Hangman Billington visited upon him his final swift discharge from the army and from life.

The Ballad was not written, as many have thought, while Wilde was in Reading Gaol, but, for the most part, at the Chalet Bourgeat, at Berneval, in the last half of 1897. It was published by Leonard Smithers in February 1898. What was written in Reading Gaol was De Profundis, Wilde's Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis to Lord Alfred Douglas. Penned during the last months of his imprisonment, it is a terrible indictment of Bosie, although, contradictorily, its purpose is clearly reconciliatory. It was first published in drastically expurgated form in 1905. The full text, 50,000 words on 80 closely-written pages of twenty folio sheets of blue prison paper, doled out to C.3.3 one by one, each folio being taken away when filled and before a new blank sheet was delivered, was deposited by Robert Ross in the British Museum in 1909, with the proviso that it was to remain sealed for sixty years. However, when Douglas died in 1945, the last obstacle to full publication was removed, and an exact copy of the original manu script, which continued to repose inviolate in the British Museum, that had come into the possession of Vyvyan Holland on the death of Robert Ross in 1918, was published in 1949. Need I say that I was one of those who queued for a copy of the first edition.