The Ballad of Reading Gaol

In May of 1895 Oscar Wilde, the century’s most dazzling man of letters, was sentenced to two years with hard labour for ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person.’ On his release he moved to France, where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol: an indictment of the prison system and the death penalty, an anguished plea for prison reform, and a passionate expression of sympathy for his fellow prisoners, those ‘souls in pain’. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was a success from its first publication, and to this day some of its lines are among the most famous in the English language. Peter Hay’s powerful images are retained in this new edition which contains an Afterword by Peter Stoneley, drawing on unpublished material in the prison archives.