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The Sins of the Cities of the Plain - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Sins of the Cities of the Plain

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Jack Saul is a handsome young man in London, who has found his body to be his best asset and makes his way through life as a prostitute. One day, Jack is picked up by a male customer in Leicester Square, and after their encounter, the man offers to pay Jack for a written account of his experiences. What follows is The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, a narrative tracing in explicit detail the development of Jack's "vices" as he progresses from boarding school and into young adulthood amidst London's thriving but clandestine gay underworld.

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.

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

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.