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 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