De Profundis

[Billy_B]

De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths")

' The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. ' Oscar Wilde 1897.

De Profundis is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to "Bosie" (Lord Alfred Douglas).

Wilde wrote the letter between January and March 1897, close to the end of his imprisonment. Contact had lapsed between Douglas and Wilde and the latter had suffered from his close supervision, physical labour, and emotional isolation. Nelson, the new prison governor, thought that writing might be more cathartic than prison labour. He was not allowed to send the long letter which he was allowed to write "for medicinal purposes"; each page was taken away when completed, and only at the end could he read it over and make revisions. Nelson gave the long letter to him on his release on 18 May 1897

 

[Billy_B]

Oscar Wilde in New York in 1882; by 1897 he had lost much weight after a year and a half in prison.​

 

[PumpkinPie]

Thank you for sharing, wow! Basics of human nature written beautifully.

 

[Billy_B]

The Publication:

In July Ruth and I had the excitement of being the first people to see the original manuscript of Oscar's longest, best, and most important letter De Profundis, which had been given to the British Museum by Robbie Ross with a fifty-year ban on anyone's seeing it, so as to make sure Lord Alfred Douglas never saw it. To our delight, we found that the published versions were wildly inaccurate, so our version in The Letters was the first accurate text in print.

 

[Billy_B]

This is the original manuscript of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis; a long, harrowing letter written to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, whose dysfunctional relationship with his father Wilde blamed for his trial and imprisonment from 1895–97.