De Profundis (letter)
De Profundis is a letter written by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde wrote 1895-1897 during his detention in various penitentiaries in the United Kingdom at his former friend and lover Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas. It is an open letter of about 50,000 words in length. The name of the font is a quote from Psalm 130: " de profundis [ ad te Domine clamavi ] " ( " Out of the depths [ I cried, Lord, to Thee ]").
Formation
The emergence of De Profundis marked a low point in Wilde's life. On May 25, 1895, he was convicted of indecency to two years imprisonment with hard physical hard labor. As part of the scandal over his contacts with male prostitutes his wife had left with their children the country. Wilde's mother, Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde died in 1896 during ableistete the punishment, he was declared bankrupt.; the harsh prison conditions led to health problems, from which he never fully recovered.
Wilde was successively detained in the prisons of Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading. He was not permitted to submit the letter from prison, but he could take with him to the end of the sentence. He gave the written work to his friend and editor Robert Baldwin Ross with the request, Alfred Douglas to send you a copy. Whether Ross this request is nachkam unclear; Douglas denied that he had received the letter.
Content
In De Profundis Wilde looks at his previous life critical and describes it as superficial and hedonistic. He describes the conditions of detention, for example, the day on which he had to stand in handcuffs under the eyes of a mocking crowd at Clapham Junction station, and its after much suffering now humble emotional state. After a financial inventory ( " I am completely Call penniless, and absolutely homeless. " ), He commented that he will help in the coming hard times neither morality nor religion or reason. The addressee Alfred Douglas he makes bitter accusations. At the same time De Profundis is an apologia for Wild Life; He argues with his rise and fall he was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of his age.
Versions
Robert Ross published a shortened version of the letter about two-thirds in 1905 ( four years after Wilde's death). In the output Wild collected works from 1908 a slightly longer version was included. Ross gave the letter then the British Museum under the condition that he will not be published before 1960. Wilde's son Vyvyan Holland 1949, another version of the letter out, previously contained unreleased parts, but it was based on a partially defective typewriter copy that had left him Ross. The first complete and correct publication learned the manuscript in 1962 in the band The Letters of Oscar Wilde.