When his wife visited him in Reading Gaol, she witnessed a heart-breaking transformation. During more than a year of solitary confinement, Wilde’s mind became like a gruesome private cinema. Vilified by society, condemned to walk a treadmill for six hours a day and sleep on a plank, witness to daily spectacles of violence, he was spared few humiliations. His eight-year-old brother, Vyvyan, came home from school to find his mother crying over press-cuttings boldly headlined “OSCAR WILDE.” Vyvyan and Cyril never saw their father again. Nobody dared to mention the gross indecency his father had been convicted of. When he asked what it meant, he got an evasive answer. Wilde’s youngest son, Cyril, who was then nine years old, got his first inkling of his father’s fate when he saw a placard in Baker Street in London.

Deprived of human contact, he could do nothing but brood. He spent much of his time in solitary confinement. Once the darling of Victorian society, within weeks he was tried and sent to jail for two years at hard labour. In 1895, Oscar Wilde had his reputation unmade at a stroke. Professor of English and American Literature Assistive equipment & procedures and recommended self-help & study skills reading.Even buildings need isolation (Sinan Acikgoz, Engineering).Thomas Nashe: ‘Plague’s Prisoner’ (Chris Salamone, English).Social distancing and quantum computing – are we all qubits now? (Jason Smith, Materials Science).Social Distancing in Ancrene Wisse (Lucinda Rumsey, English).Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’ (Ruth Scobie, English).Power and politics amidst COVID-19 seclusions-perspectives from geography (Amber Murrey, Geography).Physically, but not socially, isolated: Insights from a small Micronesian island.Oscar Wilde in prison (Michèle Mendelssohn, English).Magnets in isolation (Stephen Blundell, Physics).Isolation and Revelation (Alison Salvesen, Oriental Studies).

Doing Community in Isolation: Mosques, Mecca and One Direction.

Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (Ros Ballaster, English).

Avoiding an Empty Universe with Solitary Neutrinos (Steve Biller, Physics).

3rd and 4th Century Social Distancing in the Desert (Jenn Strawbridge, Theology).

A Brief History of Mansfield's Women (For Screenreaders).

A Photographic History of Mansfield's Women: 1979 - 2020.

Oscar wilde prison writings