Oscar Wilde renewal. He immediately wrote to the Society of Jesus requesting a six-month Catholic retreat; when the request was denied, Wilde wept. "I intend to be received into the Catholic Church before long", Wilde told a journalist who asked about his religious intentions. He spent his last three years impoverished and in exile. He took the name "Sebastian Melmoth", after Saint Sebastian and the titular character of "Melmoth the Wanderer" (a Gothic novel by Charles Maturin, Wilde's great-uncle). Wilde wrote two long letters to the editor of the "Daily Chronicle", describing the brutal conditions of English prisons and advocating penal reform.
Samuel Jackson Pratt 1773 had become entangled in a scandalous love affair and left the church to become an actor under the stage name 'Courtney Melmoth" Some time in the early 1770s, Pratt entered into a marital-like relationship with a lady who thereafter referred to herself as "Mrs Charlotte Melmoth" (Melmoth being Pratt's stage-name). Her maiden name is unknown. According to "A History of The City of Brooklyn", Charlotte "had been duped into a sham marriage, while at boarding school, by a Mr. Pratt (known in the literary and theatrical circles of that day as Courtney Melmoth ), and with him went upon