![\"OscarWIldeBooks.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/OscarWIldeBooks.jpg\")
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A new biography of Oscar Wilde is coming out called Oscar’s Books<\/a> Maddox writes:<\/p>\n Among the humiliations Wilde suffered after being sent to prison were not only compulsory silence – prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another – but deprivation of books. All he had in his cell at Pentonville, apart from his bed (a plank laid across two trestles), were a Bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. When at last his sympathetic MP won him permission to have more books, Wilde nominated Pater’s The Renaissance along with the works of Flaubert and some by Cardinal Newman. These were allowed, but only at the rate of one a week. Moved to Reading Gaol, he found himself under a more sympathetic prison governor. His book request lists after July 1896 show him developing an interest in more recently published titles, including novels by George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Wilde later said that he also read Dante every day in prison and that Dante had saved his reason. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n 2nd US President John Adams once wrote a letter to his son John Quincy, giving him a word of advice: “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket”, and – speaking from my own experience – it is true. I am never alone if there is a book somewhere near me.<\/p>\n So Wilde felt unhinged without his books. Where did they go? Who would he be without them?<\/p>\n Unbelievably moving to me.<\/p>\n To read a biography of Wilde focusing on his library is spectacularly exciting<\/i> to me, and I wish it were out NOW.<\/p>\n The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. Maddox writes:<\/p>\n When he was discharged in May 1897, he was not allowed to take his accumulated books with him and faced what he called the horror of ‘going out into the world without a single book’. But friends rallied round. Entering the hotel room in Dieppe where he was to begin his exile, he found it full of books furnished by his friends and he broke down and wept. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Blankets, pillows, warm clothes? Pshaw. Canned goods? Leave ’em at the door.<\/p>\n If I go into exile, send me all my books, please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new biography of Oscar Wilde is coming out called Oscar’s Books, by Thomas Wright and I am frothing at the mouth to get my grubby little paws on it. Brenda Maddox reviews it in The Literary Review and the … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0805092463\")
\n— Oscar Wilde<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n