My graphic novel about Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment: The Season of Sorrow

Now available! A collected edition of my series of comics about Oscar Wilde's imprisonment. See sample pages and buy your copy here! You can read more about the book below.

With two plays running in London’s West End and at the height of his success, Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years with hard labour. Many know of Wilde’s spectacular rise and dramatic fall, but perhaps less familiar are the circumstances of his ordeal behind the iron bars and stone walls of the brutal Victorian prison system. In The Season of Sorrow, Rob Marland depicts perhaps the most transformative period of Wilde’s life as he follows the fallen poet from conviction to eventual release.

There are many biographies of Wilde, but The Season of Sorrow is the first in graphic novel form. Marland draws on Wilde’s letters and the memoirs of friends and prison officers so that we hear the story as if from Wilde’s own mouth, and witness the tortures of Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading as if through Wilde’s own eyes.

The rules and regulations of “Humanity’s machine” enforce silence and solitude on one of history’s greatest talkers but, as Marland shows, Wilde finds solace both in the companionship of the prisoners with whom he daily tramps the prison yard and in the writings of Dante, that “supreme modern poet” who had also “been in the depths and drunk the bitter lees of despair”. Denied his customary diet of ortolans wrapped in Sicilian vine leaves and pâté from Strasbourg, Wilde learns to savour the crumbs of a slice of white bread, or a ginger biscuit offered by a sympathetic guard. The man who once wrote that “I can sympathise with everything, except suffering” comes to realise that “nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all”.

The Season of Sorrow, with an approach unique to Wilde biography, both tells and shows how prison changed Wilde from a sybaritic dandy into “a mouthpiece for the world of Pain.”

Oscar Wilde: The Season of Sorrow by Rob Marland can be purchased here etsy.com/shop/RobMarlandComics