De Profundis

Oscar Wilde, born in 1854 and died in 1900, was the most celebrated playwright in London in the 1890s, the author of plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest and of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1895 he was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years of imprisonment with hard labour. Near the end of his sentence he wrote a long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man with whom he had been close, and this letter is what we know as De Profundis, a Latin title meaning “out of the depths”.

The text was first published in a shortened form in 1905, some years after Wilde’s death, and a fuller version came later. The edition recorded here is the one dated 1913. It is read in four parts, for a total of about an hour and three-quarters, by a single LibriVox volunteer. The text is a rare thing, a work in which a famous wit writes without the mask of wit, setting down his sorrow, his sense of guilt and his thoughts about art and about Christ with startling sincerity.

Today, De Profundis is read as a document of personal honesty and as a part of the history of how society treated those it condemned. It is not an easy book, but it is a moving one, and hearing it in one voice gives its intimacy full weight. Wilde reflects on pleasure and pain, on art and on the lessons of suffering, and his sentences have lost none of their beauty. It is a text that many readers return to at different times in their lives, and the spoken voice gives it a force that silent reading may not.