De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Memoir · Letters

De Profundis

By Oscar Wilde · (Published 1905) · Text from the 1913 Methuen edition · All Oscar Wilde books

Word Count ~18,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 1.0 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #921

Source Edition Project Gutenberg #921

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The season of sorrow, from the letter’s opening

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .

A week later, I am transferred here. Three more months go over and my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Messages of sympathy reached me from all who had still affection for me. Even people who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me. . . .

The excerpt below is the opening of the letter: the passage in which Wilde fixes the prison’s relation to time. Sorrow is one long moment that cannot be divided by seasons, and time does not progress but revolves round one centre of pain. The second paragraph describes the grey light creeping through the barred window into a cell that is always twilight, and it asks the reader to remember that what he has long ago forgotten is happening now, and will happen again tomorrow. The third moves from the general to the particular: his transfer, his mother’s death three months afterwards, and the name he had disgraced.

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Further Reading

Read next: The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Scarlet Letter

Free edition

The Picture of Dorian Gray

By Oscar Wilde · The novel whose scandal sent Wilde to the prison that wrote this letter

Free edition

The Scarlet Letter

By Nathaniel Hawthorne · The American novel of public shame, to set beside Wilde’s private one

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: Summary, Ideas & Arguments

This page offers a summary and analysis of De Profundis, taking the letter in the order the 1913 text prints it and setting out what each movement argues. Oscar Wilde wrote it in Reading Gaol in the first months of 1897, and it was published in 1905. The text followed here is the 1913 Methuen edition, transcribed by David Price, and the note at its head is the transcriber’s: it records that later editions contained more material and that the most complete of them are still in copyright in the United States. The letter has no chapters of its own, so the eleven parts below are editorial. It is a single address, not a treatise, and it moves by association rather than by argument: the same themes return, and the reader follows the turns of a voice rather than a sequence of headings. The Project Gutenberg #921 transcription is the source of every passage summarised here, and the edition belongs with the rest of the Classic Fiction on the site.

The first movement is the prison itself. Suffering is one long moment, time revolves round a centre of pain, and the cell has its own season, which is sorrow. He records the transfer, his mother’s death three months afterwards, and the wife who travelled from Genoa to break the news to him. From there he turns to what prison means for a man of his rank: the poor call it being ‘in trouble’, while his own world makes a pariah of him and takes his children away. He adds that the thieves and outcasts in the prison with him are in some ways more fortunate, since they came from obscurity to notoriety while he came from fame to infamy, and the world has shrivelled to a handsbreadth for him. The hat raised to him at the Court of Bankruptcy is the one act of love he will not treat as a debt he can repay.

The argument is made in the second half. Sorrow is not a misfortune to be explained away: it is the supreme emotion, the type and test of all great art, and the ground on which the outward can be made expressive of the inward. Art, he says, is a symbol because man is a symbol, and the artistic life is simply self-development. He is not claiming that suffering is good in itself; he is claiming that it is the material the artist has to transform, and that the letter is itself an attempt at that transformation. The proof he offers is his own work, in which he now reads the theme already written: the note of doom that runs through Dorian Gray, the bishop’s question in The Young King, the prose poem of the bronze image. This is where the letter becomes a defence of his art rather than of his conduct.

The longest movement is on Christ, and it is the part of the letter most often quoted. Wilde places him among the poets, calls him the supreme individualist and the first romantic, and reads the Passion as the last act of a tragedy that Greek drama could not stage, because its protagonist is blameless. The argument is not doctrinal: Christ matters because he is like a work of art, and because his imagination was a form of love. Wilde notes that the Church plays the tragedy without the shedding of blood, and that the Greek chorus survives in the servitor answering the priest at Mass. The passage on the Greek Testament, read a dozen verses at a time each morning in the cell, belongs here too.

The letter ends with two subjects for future work, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and with the sea. Wilde says that if he writes again it will be on Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life, and on the artistic life considered in its relation to conduct. The reading of Hamlet’s college friends as little cups that can hold so much and no more is a last piece of criticism, and it makes the point the whole letter has been making about the limits of sympathy. He is to be released towards the end of May, and the last paragraphs turn to Nature, to the mystical and to the three trials, asking for a deeper note in his art, not width but intensity. The Scarlet Letter is the natural companion in fiction, since it too makes public shame the making of a life.

Historical Context

The edition is the 1913 Methuen text, transcribed by David Price for Project Gutenberg, and its headnote is the transcriber’s, not Wilde’s: it records that later editions of the letter contained more material and that the most complete of those editions are still in copyright in the United States. The letter is printed without dedication or preface: the note is followed at once by the title and by the opening words on sorrow. Nothing in it was written for print. Wilde wrote it in Reading Gaol in the first months of 1897, and it was published in 1905, so the text read here is the shortened version that made the letter famous rather than the full text established later.

The prison detail is exact. Wilde was brought from London to Reading on 13 November 1895 and stood handcuffed in convict dress on the centre platform at Clapham Junction while the crowd laughed. He had been in Wandsworth before, where he longed to die, and he dates his release to the end of May and his sentence to two years. The letter names the plank bed, the oakum shredded from hard ropes, the menial offices, the dress, the silence and the solitude, and it measures the sentence by the weeping that came at the same hour every day for a year. The trial itself is compressed to a sentence: three times he was tried, the first time leaving the box to be arrested, the second to be led back to the house of detention, the third to pass into a prison for two years.

The letter is furnished like a library. Dante is read through Pater’s Renaissance and followed in the college library; Goethe comes by way of Carlyle; Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Renan’s Vie de Jesus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Bacon and Emerson are all named. The Greek Testament is read in the cell, and the argument that Christ spoke Greek is urged against Renan. The works of his own that Wilde cites are The Happy Prince, The Young King, Dorian Gray, The Critic as Artist, The Soul of Man and Salome, and the two subjects he proposes for future work are named in the same passage. The range of reference is part of the argument: the letter is a defence of a whole aesthetic, and the names are its evidence.

Key Ideas & Arguments

• Sorrow: The supreme emotion of which man is capable, and at once the type and test of all great art. Wilde calls it one long moment that cannot be divided by seasons, and at times the only truth; out of sorrow, he says, the worlds have been built, and behind it there is always a soul. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.
• Humility: The last thing left in him and the best, the ultimate discovery and the starting point for a fresh development. It cannot be acquired except by surrendering everything, and it comes only when all things are lost. In the artist it is the frank acceptance of all experiences.
• The artistic life: Self-development rather than a career. Expression is the only mode under which the artist can conceive life, and what is dumb is dead to him; art is a symbol because man is a symbol. Wilde names two subjects for future work: Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement, and the artistic life in its relation to conduct.
• Christ: Placed among the poets and called the supreme individualist. His conception of humanity sprang from the imagination, which in him was a form of love; he took the voiceless world of pain as his kingdom and became its mouthpiece, the image of the Man of Sorrows. His life is the most wonderful of poems.
• The Philistine: Not the man who fails to understand art: fishermen and shepherds know nothing of it and are the salt of the earth. The Philistine is the man who upholds the heavy, mechanical forces of society and does not recognise dynamic force when he meets it. Christ mocked the whited sepulchre of respectability, and that war is the one every child of light wages.
• Individualism: Wilde says he must be far more of an individualist than he was, and that his ruin came from too little individualism, not too much. The disgraceful act was appealing to society for help and protection. Those who want a mask have to wear it, and the final mystery is oneself.

Core Arguments & Influence

• Sorrow as the test of art: The letter’s central argument is that sorrow is not an interruption of life but its secret, and that art which has not passed through it stays on the surface. Wilde defines truth in art as the unity of a thing with itself, the outward rendered expressive of the inward, and says that no other experience supplies this unity so directly. The test is not whether a work is sad but whether it has been through the experience and come out unified. The claim is tried on his own books, where he finds the theme already present, and on the Passion, which he reads as the tragedy Greek drama could not write because its protagonist is blameless. Pleasure is for the beautiful body, pain for the beautiful soul.
• Humility and the acceptance of experience: Humility arrives as a discovery, not a virtue: it is what remains when name, position, wealth, freedom and children have gone, and it cannot be acquired except by surrendering everything. Its artistic form is the acceptance of all experience, which Wilde calls the artistic life itself. The letter therefore refuses to forget or to deny anything. To regret one’s experiences is to arrest one’s development, and to deny them is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. The method is the proof: the letter returns to the same scenes and reads them again instead of leaving them behind. Whatever is realised is right, and the supreme vice is shallowness.
• Christ as the archetype of the artist: Wilde’s Christ is not a teacher or a philanthropist but an imagination that became a person. He understood the leper, the blind and the rich, and he took the inarticulate world of pain as his kingdom because expression is what the artist cannot do without. The argument lets Wilde claim that the romantic movement in art is Christian in origin, and that where there is romance there is the soul of Christ. It is the bridge between the letter’s criticism and its self-defence, and it lets him place himself: the artist who has suffered is the one who can speak for those who cannot.
• Prison, shame and society: The letter is a document about penal practice as much as about art. The platform at Clapham Junction, the convict dress, the oakum and the silence are set down as evidence, and the argument is that society punishes and then abandons, and that its supreme vice is shallowness. The poor, who call prison simply being in trouble, are wiser than his own rank, which makes a pariah of him and takes his children. What he asks is not pity but recognition that the punishment has been suffered. Later he adds that the prison style is entirely wrong, and that he intends to try to alter it when he goes out.
• Expression and the future work: The last movement turns from the past to what can still be made. Wilde names the two subjects he wants to write on, refuses the idea that the artistic life ends in disgrace, and finds in the cry of Marsyas the note of modern art. Between art and himself, he says, there is no gulf. The letter closes with the release, the sea, the Greek attitude to nature and the search for the mystical, so that the letter which began as an indictment ends as a programme.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of De Profundis?

The download is the whole letter as the 1913 Methuen edition printed it, from the first paragraph on sorrow to the last on the three trials, with the transcriber’s note at the head and nothing rearranged. The long passage on Christ, the reading of Hamlet’s college friends, the account of the platform at Clapham Junction and the two subjects for future work are all here in the order the text gives them. Nothing in the file is a paraphrase of the letter.

The page is arranged to be read beside the letter. Eleven parts follow the movements of the text rather than an invented chapter scheme, six notes explain the ideas the argument turns on, and five themes follow it from the prison to the sea. A short historical section identifies the edition, the prison and the writers Wilde refers to, so that a name in the text can be placed without leaving the page. Nothing on the page takes the place of the text itself.

The files come in three formats with the same text. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. No account is needed, nothing is locked or time limited, and the text is the same in all three, so a passage found in one can be found in another.

• Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #921 — the complete 1913 Methuen text, transcribed by David Price, with the transcriber’s note at the head and the letter unbroken.
• Eleven parts, no invented chapters The letter has no chapters of its own, so the divisions here follow its movements, from the cell and the season of sorrow to the release and the sea, and each part stops where the text turns.
• The 1913 text as it was printed Nothing is added from the later and longer editions and nothing is cut from this one, so the letter reads as its first readers had it, initials and dashes included.
• EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the divisions kept and nothing to install beyond the reading app you already use.

Part of: Classic Fiction · Oscar Wilde