Showing results for "The Reading Adventure" in Classics

Always a lover of fairy stories yet unable to believe in their truth, young Davy finds himself whisked away on a "Believing Voyage" one magical Christmas Eve by a little red goblin. In a strange country full of wonders, Davy finds himself coming face to face with a whale in a waistcoat; Robin Hood; the last member of the band of Forty Thieves; Robinson Crusoe; talking dogs, horses, and cows; and Mother Hubbard herself, living side by side with Jack's beanstalk!

Between 1895 and 1897 Oscar Wilde served a prison sentence for offences "of gross indecency". Most of this time was spent at Reading Gaol, where Wilde encountered another prisoner, Harles Thomas Wooldridge, sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. Wooldrige was hanged at the gaol on 7th July, 1896. Wilde wrote the poem in France in 1897 after his release from prison. The poem is a long reflection on the inequity and ineffectiveness of statutory punishment and the redeeming power of the Christian message of forgiveness.

Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope. In this moving poetic study of his experiences in the Victorian penal system, Wilde relates the relentlessness and tedium of prison life, and of the haunted thoughts which trouble these "souls in agony" within their "numbered tombs". Oscar Wilde wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" after his two-year imprisonment at the establishment. During his incarceration, a former trooper was convicted of the murder of his wife and hanged at the Gaol. This event is central to the poem's narrative.