{"id":272213,"date":"2017-03-10T14:38:12","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T19:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/?p=272213"},"modified":"2020-10-26T22:20:37","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T02:20:37","slug":"oscar-wildes-jail-key-and-letter-on-display-in-malta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/oscar-wildes-jail-key-and-letter-on-display-in-malta\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscar Wilde\u2019s jail key and letter on display in Malta"},"content":{"rendered":"
RAEL\u2019S COMMENT:<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n
Never forget and never forgive this primitive British society’s crimes against homosexuals, responsible for the suffering and death of numerous people, most of them geniuses like Oscar Wilde.<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The key to Oscar Wilde’s cell at Reading Gaol, and a letter he wrote to a newspaper are to be publicly displayed for the first time, in Malta.<\/p>\n

The author was imprisoned for two years in 1895 for gross indecency.<\/p>\n

The handwritten letter was sent by Wilde to a newspaper in 1894, denying he was the anonymous author of the controversial book The Green Carnation.<\/p>\n

Both items are owned by Francis Spiteri Paris, founder of a Maltese estate agency, who collects Wilde artefacts.<\/p>\n

They are being put on display among other Wilde-related items in the town of Attard by the Storm Petrel Foundation, a Maltese non-profit voluntary organisation,\u00a0the Times of Malta reports.<\/p>\n

The key was sold in an auction at Sotheby’s in December. It opened the door to cell block C, landing 3, cell 3 in Reading Gaol – where Wilde carried out his hard labour sentence.<\/p>\n

He was convicted over his homosexual behaviour, considered a crime at that time.<\/p>\n

The letter on display is the one he wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette on 2 October 1894, to deny claims he had written The Green Carnation, first published anonymously in 1894.<\/p>\n

The novel’s main characters are closely based on Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas – the latter of whom the real author, Robert Hichens, knew personally.<\/p>\n

The book, which caused a scandal on both sides of the Atlantic, also formed part of the evidence used against Wilde during his prosecution for indecency. A first edition of the novel is included in the Maltese exhibition.<\/p>\n

Mr Spiteri Paris said: “I became obsessed with Oscar Wilde in 1966 when I was on a working trip in the UK and had gone to watch the play An Ideal Husband.<\/p>\n

“Since then I must have read every single book about him – I’m fascinated by his genius and complete absence of malice.”<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/world-europe-39230065<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RAEL\u2019S COMMENT: Never forget and never forgive this primitive British society’s crimes against homosexuals, responsible for the suffering and death of numerous people, most of them geniuses like Oscar Wilde.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":281035,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}