![]() ![]() ![]() Nelson was more liberal than his predecessor and was ready to relax the rules. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.” Wilde was later to praise Nelson, who had arrived at Reading in July 1896, as “the most Christlike man I ever met”. Towards the end of his sentence, the governor of the jail, Major Nelson, remarked to Wilde’s friend Robert Ross: “He looks well. For the first month, Wilde was tied to a treadmill six hours a day, making an ascent, as it were, of 6,000 feet each day, with five minutes’ rest after every 20 minutes. He could not sleep, he was permanently hungry and he suffered from dysentery. ![]() Allowed one hour’s exercise a day, he walked in single file in the yard with other prisoners but he was not allowed to communicate with them. In total isolation, first in Pentonville and Wandsworth, and then in Reading gaol, to which he was moved in November 1895, Wilde slept on a plank bed with no mattress. ![]()
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