The Ballad of Reading Gaol

About this book

A condemned soldier waits for execution inside a prison whose routines have become a kind of slow torment. Oscar Wilde, who knew imprisonment from the inside, turns the life of the gaol into a poem about guilt, punishment and human sympathy.

The lines return again and again to the distance between official justice and private suffering. Latimer J. Wilson’s drawings and decorative borders place the poem’s prisoners, chaplain and gallows within an elaborate illustrated page. The book preserves Wilde's unmistakable voice after his fall from public favour, with a directness that can be more devastating than the brilliance of his earlier comedy.