Oscar Wilde Visits Two U.S. Prisons
—Updated from its original posting in 2015—
State penitentiaries are not generally considered tourist destinations.
Yet in a curious twist in Oscar Wilde’s conventional social activity during his lecture tour of North America in 1882, he took the opportunity to visit TWO American state prisons within the space of three days: one during a train stop on his way to lecture in Atchison, KS; and a second (along with its insane asylum) before his next evening lecture in Lincoln, NE.
Did Wilde have a special interest in places of incarceration? Or, aware of his appeal to notoriety, was fate prefiguring for him a life on the inside?
Lansing, Kansas
In April 1882, Oscar Wilde was continuing his American lecture tour in the state of Kansas traveling between scheduled events in Lawrence and Atchison, when his train halted at Lansing to take on coal.
During the short stopover, Wilde visited the imposing brownstone Kansas State Penitentiary, now the Lansing Correctional Facility which was then a 688-cell fortress built by convict labor and placed with medieval mockery in a pastoral setting facing the Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Galveston railway half-a-mile away.1
The The Leavenworth Weekly Times reported the event:
After the visit, as the report says, Oscar continued on his way to lecture at Corinthian Hall in Atchison,
Atchison was to be his final stop in Kansas, after which he would leave the Sunflower State2 for his next speaking engagement in Nebraska—a day’s train journey away. Time enough for Oscar to anticipate his social calendar prior his next lecture in the city of Lincoln, which happened to be the home of the Nebraska state penitentiary.
Lincoln, Nebraska
11th and R Streets, Lincoln, NE (now 920, O Street)
On the morning of April 24, 1882, Oscar Wilde was taken to see the state university of Nebraska, which at the time amounted to not much more than University Hall, the first building of what is now the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. Back then at the end of a dirt street, the hall housed administration, a recitation hall, student classes, a boys’ dormitory, the library, and a chapel where Wilde gave an address to the students. Although the talk appears to have been impromptu, it warrants being listed as a formal lecture owing to its setting and didactic content.
With the afternoon free before his advertised evening lecture in Lincoln at the elusive City Hall, Oscar was invited to visit the state penitentiary and asylum across town.
He wrote to Helena Sickert about the visit the following day from his next lecture stop in Fremont, NE. In the letter, Wilde reported the whitewashed cells, the hideous dress and manual labor of the prisoners, describing them as “poor sad types of humanity”. He went on,:
“In one [cell] I found a translation of Dante, and a Shelley. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol.
Complete Letters, p. 165.
In recounting his experience Wilde was unknowingly presaging the sorrowful circumstances of his own incarceration years later in Reading Gaol, and in particular the similar books he requested including the works of Dante, which he read in full during his imprisonment.
As for Wilde’s disturbing visit to the insane asylum, which again foreshadowed his own fears for his sanity in Reading Gaol, I need not dwell—it has been admirably covered by Rob Marland here:
Rob Marland: Oscar Wilde at the Nebraska State Hospital for the Insane
On reflection, there is probably not too much beyond coincidence that can be read into these two mid-western prison visits, other than to remind us what an unfamiliar and formative experience the year of 1882 was for Oscar Wilde.
© John Cooper, 2024.
Footnote:
- Patronage and Profits: A History of The Kansas State Penitentiary 1861-1917. Harvey Richard Hougen, [A Master’s Thesis]. B.A., Park College, 1968. ↩︎
- The State of the Sunflowers: Oscar Wilde in Kansas. ↩︎
See also:
Paris Review: Suffering Is One Very Long Moment
Illustration by John Vassos.
Thanks for mention and link, John.