You Have the Right to Refuse Silence: Oscar Wilde’s Prison Letters and Tom Clarke’s Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life

Strict silence must at all times be observed; under no circumstances must one prisoner speak to another. Rules of the “silent system,” as described by Tom Clarke¹

He sang of the sunrise, all azure and gold, He laughed at the prison wall. The joy of his song made him happy and bold. Constance Markievicz, Aylesbury Prison, 1917²

I need not remind you that mere expression is to an artist the supreme and only mode of life. It is by utterance that we live. Oscar Wilde, Letter to Robert Ross, 1897³

I. Geneaoliges of Prison Speech

Brendan Behan’s 1956 play The Quare Fellow, set in a Dublin city prison, opens and closes with the voice of an anonymous prisoner singing from the bowels of solitary confinement:

A hungry feeling came o’er me stealing And the mice were squealing in my prison cell, And that auld triangle Went jingle jangle, Along the banks of the Royal Canal.⁴

The offstage performance of this song, “The Auld Triangle,” originally written by Behan during his 1942–46 incarceration in Mountjoy Prison,⁵ permeates the onstage action of the play in a repeated yet invisible act of defiance. This ballad responds to the prominently displayed regulation “SILENCE” featured “on the wall and facing the audience ... in large block shaded Victorian lettering” (1). Though silence may be the rule of law, the prisoner’s song provides the prevailing structure of feeling for Behan’s play. Disembodied song inhabiting the stage (and in published editions of the play, the disembodied words populating the page) supplies a voice that refuses to be silenced. Behan insists on the revolutionary potential of discursive rather than material interventions in disciplinary structures; the play actively resists enforced carceral silence via a persistent call to discourse.

The longstanding tradition of Irish prison writing, particularly as voiced through published texts (John Mitchel’s Jail Journal, Michael Davitt’s Leaves from a Prison Diary, Joseph Campbell’s prison diaries, and Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, among many others), has over the past two centuries forged a national literary imagination out of the experience of incarceration.⁶ In the final decades of the nineteenth century, celebrity aesthete Oscar Wilde and Fenian nationalist Thomas J. Clarke responded to their incarceration in British jails in similarly strategic, discursive, and public forums. Subject to the prevailing “silent system” initially implemented in London’s Pentonville Prison,⁷ Wilde’s post-prison letters to the editor of the Daily Chronicle (composed 1897–98) and Clarke’s Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life (memoir of this 1882–98 incarceration, published in the republican newspaper Irish Freedom 1912–13), simultaneously functioned as textual and ethical refusals to endure disciplined prison silence. Writing in the autobiographical confessional mode of the first-person memoir, Wilde and Clarke seized the particularities of individual prison experience as a context for collective resistance to carceral and colonial codes of silence. Though neither literary nor political collaborators, both contributed to a mounting public conversation exposing the inhuman treatment of inmates and demanding penal reform as a means of anticolonial mobilization; they ultimately reclaimed the prison as a viable site of communication and aesthetic production.

The British “separate system,” first implemented in 1842 at Pentonville,⁸ was revised via the 1865 Prisons Act into a strict “silent system” that persisted through the turn of the century. (See figures

Figures 1 and 2: Separate System at Pentonville

London’s Pentonville Prison opened in 1842 and served as the “Model Prison” for the construction of new jails throughout the British colonial system (including Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison, opened 1850). Pentonville implemented the separate system of solitary confinement and panoptical organization of cells for maximal surveillance. Wilde and Clarke both served time in Pentonville.

Figure 1: Pentonville Prison: Interior of Model Prison. Steel engraving, Illustrated London News 2 (7 January 1843: 4) Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.