Andy Miller

It's the old 80s and 90s Oxford World Classics.

Edition of The Soul of Man and Prison Writings by Oscar Wilde, edited by Isabel Murray.

This is really excellent.

This has the essays, The Soul of Man, De Profundis, some letters and The Ballad of Reading Jail.

So all the contextual material is there as well.

Well, we're going to delve into the various versions, so it's edge-of-the-seat stuff.

The next exciting thing I was about to say, Andy, was that the publishing history of De Profundis is complicated.

It was first published in 1905 by Wilde's friend and literary executor, Robert Ross, who published the text, shorn of the autobiographical elements and the references to Bossey and the rest of the Queensberry family.

The full version wasn't published until it appeared in 1962 in the letters of Oscar Wilde, edited and published by Rupert Hart Davis.

So it's a book of two halves.

The first is a long examination of Weil's relationship with Boese Douglas and just how it destroyed his life and reputation.

The second is a remarkable meditation on the life of Jesus Christ, not in his usual role as divine saviour, but as the model of a creative artist.

Now established as one of the greatest prose works in the English language, most readers would agree with Max Beerbohm's early review

that in De Profundis, we see Wilde here as the spectator of his own tragedy.

His tragedy was great.

It is one of the tragedies that will always live on in romantic history.

I wanted to play it in because it premieres in 1891, which is the first great Annis Moribilis for Wilde.

He buys a box for the opening night.

So this idea of him as modern celebrity, which is much remarked upon, but he's already become famous in London for being Oscar Wilde.

And then he's become famous in America for touring with lectures.