The Ballad of Reading Gaol as C.3.3., although many reviewers, and of course those who bought the numbered and autographed third edition copies, knew that Wilde was the author, but the seventh edition, printed on 23 June 1899, actually revealed the author's identity, putting the name Oscar Wilde, in square brackets, below the C.3.3.. It brought him a small income in his remaining lifetime. The poem consists of 109 stanzas of 6 lines, of 8-6-8-6-8-6 syllables, and rhyming a-b-c-b-d-b. Some stanzas incorporate rhymes within some or all of the 8-syllable lines. The whole poem is grouped into 6 untitled sections of 16, 13, 37, 23,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol living that had led to his downfall—Wilde endeavoured to find additional money. In August 1897, he sent the publisher Leonard Smithers an initial draft of the Ballad, which made such an impression that Smithers was enthusiastic about publishing it and even approached Aubrey Beardsley to do an illustration for it (which was not done). Thereafter there was a very active correspondence between the two of them, as Wilde was repeatedly revising and expanding the text, and supervising from afar the choice and size of typeface and the layout of the work. However, even the printing house hired to do the