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.
Charlotte Melmoth 18th century, as "Mrs Courtney Melmoth" part of an acting duo with her supposed husband, Samuel Jackson Pratt who used the stage name "Courtney Melmoth". It is not known whether she adopted her husband's stage-surname "Melmoth" or, as has been speculated, "Melmoth" was her real surname and Pratt adopted it as his own stage name. Most biographers give her year of birth as 1749, the same as Pratt's. However this would put her in her twenties in the early 1770s, when she first met Pratt, in contradiction of another biographer's claim that she was still at school when this meeting