Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture - Ohio University Press & Swallow ...

A Critical Study contains the following indiscreet assertions: “The letter, a manuscript
of ‘eighty close-written pages on twenty folio sheets,’ was not addressed
to Mr. Ross but to a man whom Wilde felt he owed some, at least, of the circumstances
of the public disgrace. It was begun as a rebuke of this friend, whose
actions, even subsequent to the trials, had been such as to cause Wilde considerable
pain. It was not delivered to him, but given to Mr. Ross by Wilde, who
also gave instructions as to its partial publication” (157). Once he learned of
Ransome’s insinuations, Douglas was indignant. He launched a libel suit against
the publisher, the printer, the Times Book Club of London (which distributed
copies), and the author. In 1913, when he stood before the court, Douglas confronted
the fact that much of the work from which Ross had taken extracts was
exactly as Ransome characterized it—a wholehearted rebuke of himself. As
lengthy transcripts in the Times show, the defense read out large sections from
those parts of De Profundis that Ross had suppressed in his edition. Under
cross-examination, Douglas withstood a further barrage in the form of letters
that he had sent to Wilde, which Ross had appropriated at the time of their
friend’s death. With such questionable evidence held against him, Douglas had
no chance of a verdict in his favor, even when he revealed from his passbooks
that during the last ten months of Wilde’s life he had generously given his friend
“£390 in cheques (in addition to a lot of ready money).”⁷⁹ Years later, in 1925,
Douglas informed Harris that at the start of the Ransome trial he had “not the
slightest idea that it was a letter addressed by Wilde” to him—though this is a
claim open to some question.⁸⁰ Douglas, it is worth noting, reviewed the 1905
volume in Motorist and Traveller. There he shrewdly remarks, “If Oscar Wilde’s
spirit, returning to this world in a malicious mood, had wished to devise a
pleasant and insinuating trap for some of his old enemies of the press, he could
scarcely have hit on a better one than this book.”⁸₁ He adds, almost as if the
point hardly mattered at all, that “this interesting post-humous book . . . takes
the form of a letter to an unnamed friend.”
Although Douglas lost his case in 1913 (the judge took delight in humiliating
him, and the costs were a hefty £1,500), Methuen tried to settle matters by emending
the offending paragraphs in a second imprint of Oscar Wilde: A Critical
Study.⁸² But there was no smoothing over the conflict. In 1912, in preparation for
the trial, Crosland had access to the manuscript of De Profundis, and he quickly
issued an invective in verse, titled The First Stone: On Reading the Unpublished
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