Maggs Bros. Ltd.

Very slight wear to extremities of binding, but a very attractive copy. Mason, 689, where his distaste is palpable. He observes both that the preface is a recycled translation from Carrington's edition of the French translation of Intentions, and "the account of the trial, pp. 3-109, is inaccurate and incomplete" and "stated to be limited to 500 copies": as to the statement of limitation, neither issue is particularly common in commerce.

This is the earliest account of Wilde's trials. Joseph Bristow, in his authoritative Oscar Wilde on Trial (Yale University Press, 2023) writes of this book. "Charles Carrington—a publisher who traded mostly in clandestine erotica in the French capital—issued this very uneven but nonetheless revealing account. It remains uncertain if Carrington himself had any editorial hand in the selective reconstruction of the proceedings that appears in the publication. The book that Carrington issued, which offers glimpses of major incidents in the courtroom exchanges, claims (as the subtitle suggests) to reproduce sections from a set of shorthand reports, although the provenance of those records is mentioned nowhere in its pages. Importantly, the 1906 volume draws attention to one feature of the trials that some later studies downplay. The Trial of Oscar Wilde makes it clear that at least two of the witnesses testified that Wilde had committed sodomy with them. Even though the numerous press reports of the Crown prosecution refrained from printing the word “sodomy,” the newspapers of the day every now and then suggested that witnesses used this highly sensitive term. To be sure, the 1906 transcript suffers from serious muddles about names, places, and events that it splices together through ham-fisted editing. There is, however, every reason to believe that The Trial of Oscar Wilde is based on a shorthand record of some kind, since even the erratic representation of selected examinations and cross-examinations at the Old Bailey reproduces proper names and street names in a phonetic style."