Oscar Wilde

Wilde was the most successful playwright in London in 1895, with two comedies running at once, when he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel over a note calling him a sodomite. The case collapsed, the evidence gathered for the defence was handed to the prosecution, and he was tried and sentenced to two years' hard labour. He spent most of it at Reading, treadmill and oakum-picking, forbidden to write for the first eighteen months, and was refused permission to attend his mother's funeral.

Prison produced two things. De Profundis, a long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written on paper issued a sheet at a time, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, published under his cell number after a hanging he witnessed there — a plain argument against capital punishment and against what prison does to people. He was bankrupt on release, his plays withdrawn and his name removed from the bills, and he lived his last three years in France under an assumed name. He died at forty-six of meningitis in a cheap hotel. In 2017 the British government pardoned him, along with about fifty thousand other men convicted under the same law.