Featuring a mixture of fact and fiction and incorporating real-life personages involved in the Cleveland Street Scandal, the Oscar Wilde trials, and other infamous legal proceedings of the period, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain was one of the first and frankest works on homosexuality in Victorian England. Read by Oscar Wilde and an influence on the more famous gay erotic novel Teleny (1893), The Sins of the Cities of the Plain was privately printed in two volumes in 1881 and is completely unobtainable today. This new edition contains the unabridged text of the first edition housed at the British Library, together with a new introduction by Wolfram Setz and a facsimile reproduction of the original volumes' title pages. Although two previous modern editions have been published under this title, they are severely altered and rewritten versions of the story; this edition marks the first complete reprinting of the original text.
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9781934555316
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Publication Date: 08-30-2012
Pages: 114
Product Dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.29(d)
Series: Valancourt Classics
About the Author
Jack Saul (1857-1904) was an Irish prostitute and author of popular erotica. Born in a Dublin tenement slum, Saul was raised in a poor Catholic family alongside seven siblings. He turned to sex work at a young age, moving to London in 1879 to earn more money for his impoverished mother. There, he gained a reputation as a professional prostitute and was swept up in the Cleveland Street scandal of 1887. During the trial, Saul’s confession, which likely risked implicating aristocrats and members of the Royal Family, resulted in his release from custody. In 1881, the erotic novel The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, appeared in print. Marketed as Saul’s memoirs, the novel was likely written through the combined efforts of Saul and either Simeon Solomon or James Campbell Reddie, both of whom wrote popular Victorian erotica.