Word: gaol
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...Ballad of Reading Gaol...
...discovery with the decision to make a penal settlement of New Holland. Reason has its crimes: since the American dumping ground for Puritan and Catholic dissidents had been lost by the Revolution, it was quite sensible in London to decide that the new continent should be used for a gaol. In 1788, the year of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, civilization in the form of white slavery arrived at Cook's Botany Bay. So came about a bush Belsen, with men in iron shackles under the bemused eyes of the natives trying to grow food in a land...
Under the Orlop. "A ship," Dr. Samuel Johnson once remarked, "is worse than a gaol. There is, in gaol, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger." Johnson's opinion, uttered in 1776, was still relevant in 1797. Britain's infamous press gangs roamed the country, seized any able-bodied men that caught their eyes, and flung them aboard ships that, Dugan writes, were "not built to fit men; the men were warped to fit the ship." In fact, some of them were. In many...
...wrote the unhappy prisoner of Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas in the long, bitter, loving letter that is the core of this collection and that must be the basis of any attempt to understand Oscar Wilde. Wilde's favorite paradox was: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person; give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." But there are rare crises when the mask is torn away and truth spills from the naked soul. The mask of England's sharpest wit and most industrious idler fell away in Reading Gaol...
Shima's waka, reminiscent at times of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, were inspired by a book of poetry sent him in jail by the wife of his former schoolmaster. Poetry writing has long been considered an effective form of rehabilitation in Japanese prisons. There are utakai, or poetry clubs, in all of Japan's 73 penitentiaries, with an average membership of no each; the number of poetasters behind bars is estimated at more than 16,000. *Prison magazines are filled with their efforts, and several prison wardens are famed versifiers. Explains the director...