De Profundis, Ballad of Reading

De Profundis Oscar Wilde’s last prose work, is an extended letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, written during Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading Gaol. A document remarkable for its sensitivity and power, it provides a record of the author’s fateful relationship Douglas, his bitterness at the selfish extravagance of the younger man and ultimately an acknowledgement of his own responsibility for the disaster the befell him. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem first published in 1898 over the pseudonym C.33. Wilde’s number as a convict. One of his best-known works, it evokes the mounting tension experienced by other inmates as they watch the daily exercise of a young man while preparations to hang him are under way.