1899 [1908] The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Description

Publishers' Original Binding

An unauthorised edition, based upon the seventh printing of the work, which was the first to feature Wilde's name to the title page.

Identified as an unauthorised edition by the lack of a publisher's address to the title page, while Wilde's name appearing to the cloth back strip means that this was published following the death of the original publisher - Leonard Smithers - in 1907, and was the last unauthorised edition produced.

According to Mason's Wilde bibliography, about one thousand copies of this edition were seized by Wilde's literary executor, with litigation threatened, thus ending the production of these unauthorised editions. Mason, 585.

With a French language inscription, dated 1911, to the front free endpaper.

A smart copy of the scarce final pirate edition of this important work from Wilde, penned during his incarceration at Reading Gaol, where he had in 1895 been convicted of 'gross indecency'.