60 Great Books - 61 - Bauman Rare Books “For Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves”: Fine Signed Limited Author’s Edition Of Wilde’s The Ballad Of Reading Gaol, One Of Only 99 Signed Copies 59. WILDE, Oscar. The Ballad of Reading Gaol by C. 3. 3. London, 1898. Slim octavo, original half cream cloth, custom half morocco clamshell box. $35,000. Signed limited Author’s Edition of this ballad exposing the brutality of British prison life during the Victorian era, one of only 99 copies signed by Oscar Wilde. A fine copy. At the beginning of 1895, Oscar Wilde was at the height of his success and creative ability: his plays The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband were both running in London to rave reviews; fashion flowed according to his aesthetic ideals; his bonmots were on everyone’s lips; he was at the center of a great social circle; and he was involved in a passionate love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. By late 1895, he had lost everything. Sentenced to two years’ hard labor in prison for “gross indecency,” abandoned by virtually all of his friends, he was irrevocably ruined socially and economically. In Reading Gaol, he was put under the power of a particularly sadistic warden, whose arbitrary, harsh punishments were physically and psychologically debilitating, and contributed greatly to Wilde’s despair. When Wilde was finally released in mid-1897, he entered into a brief and lonely life of exile. Much of his energy in 1897 was devoted to The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the only work he completed between his release from prison and his death in 1900 at age 46. It was an anguished attack on the cruelties of the British penal system, and an examination of good and evil. Because he was a pariah, it was first published under the name “C.3.3.”, Wilde’s Reading prison designation. This edition, referred to as both the author’s edition and the third edition, is the first to include Wilde’s name on it, in the form of his signature only. His name would not appear as part of the text until the seventh printing, in 1899. This was printed in March 1898, two months after the first edition. The Ballad met with immediate and unexpected success—upon publication, it “was selling as no poem had sold for years.” Even critics who expressed reservations agreed that “a literary event of importance had occurred” (Ellman, 559-560). In March 1898, the Pall Mall Gazette declared the work “the most remarkable poem that has appeared this year.” With illustrated boards by Charles Ricketts. Mason 374. A very nearly fine copy, remarkable in this condition.
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