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Wilde, Oscar.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol By C. 3. 3.
Publisher: Leonard Smithers Royal Arcade London W, London;
Date of Publication: 1894
Stock Code: 14845
First edition, first printing; one of 800 unnumbered copies printed on handmade paper; 30 were simultaneously printed on Japanese vellum. Large post octavo, pp., [viii], 31, [1] blank. Publisher’s original cinnamon-colour linen, white linen spine; titles gilt to spine. Printed at the Chiswick Press, but not named on the imprint. Soiling to inner edges of boards, corners slightly bumped, top edge dusty. Contents clean and rather bright. A very good copy. In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for ‘gross indecency’. This poem, written while Wilde was in exile in France and Naples in 1897, uses the case of his fellow inmate Charles Thomas Wooldridge to highlight the brutality of the prison system and the irony of the state sentencing a man to death for exactly the same crime. Even without Wilde’s name on the title-page, the first 800 copies sold out within a week.
£1000.00