Shortly after Wilde’s arrest, while he sat in Holloway prison awaiting trial, the entire contents of his house in Chelsea was sold at the demands of his creditors. During the sale, Wright tells us, the front door of the house was left open and people rushed in to loot it. Wilde’s friends attempted to stop the outrage and the police had to be called in. Some 2,000 precious volumes, plus countless magazines, photographs and manuscripts, went for about £130. In this case, the fate of Wilde’s books tells us more about the society that condemned him than about the reader who collected and cherished them.

There is however a happy post- scriptum to this sad affair. In December 2006, Wright was awarded a £5,000 prize by the Royal Society of Literature, a sum which would help him pay the ‘extortionate rent’ of his London flat, when he heard that, the next week, Sotheby’s was going to auction Wilde’s copy of Swinburne’s Essays and Studies. And even though he knew that books owned by Wilde were selling at five times that amount, Wright decided to bid for it. He got the book, with the words ‘Oscar Wilde Magdalen College July 1877’ inscribed on the initial blank page in Wilde’s ‘beautiful charactery’ and two of Wilde’s doodles imprinted on end-pages. Wilde would have no doubt approved.

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