Leonard Smithers that is holy "all" obscene drawings." Smithers ignored Beardsley’s wishes, and continued to sell reproductions as well as forgeries of Beardsley's work. After the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, Smithers was one of the few publishers prepared to handle "decadent" literature, such as Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" in 1898, and "The Savoy". He went bankrupt in 1900, and died in 1907 from drink and drugs. His naked body was found in a house in Parson's Green on his 46th birthday, surrounded by empty bottles of Dr J. Collis Browne's Chlorodyne. He was buried in an unmarked grave,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol of a steady income which he did not outlive, as he died less than four years after the Ballad first appeared. It has been suggested that Wilde was, to some degree, inspired by poem IX in A. E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" (1896), which alludes to the hanging of condemned prisoners: <poem>They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail: And trains all night groan on the rail Although there is no specific documentation to show Wilde's active revising after the appearance of the first edition, there were some slight changes made in the second edition, which was printed only two weeks