The title of the book has a subtle double meaning, perhaps muffled on first publication by the prominence of the word “victim” on the cover – those were the days when the marketing of a hardback could be more lurid than the paperback that followed it. He had found a subject, and his memoir, Against the Law, was published in 1955, the year of his release. He had been a journalist, but hardly a campaigning one (he was the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail at the time of his arrest). Instead, he intended to take up his interrupted life – and he did, though with a new reformist agenda. While he was serving his sentence Wildeblood resented the well-meaning assumption, made by warders and others, that he would disappear when he was released, most likely living abroad as Wilde had done. It is the contrast in their actions after prison that marks the difference between Wilde’s and Wildeblood’s experiences of disgrace. Peter Wildeblood’s ordeal – he was tried and convicted in 1954, along with Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Michael Pitt-Rivers – is as far in the past now as Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895 was then. T he Wildeblood case was less sensational than the Wilde case, but it has had as much of an afterlife.
