De Profundis. Being the First Complete and Accurate Version of ‘Epistola: in Carcere et Vinculis’ the last prose work in English of Oscar Wilde. With an Introduction by Vyvyan Holland. London, Methuen and Co. Ltd. 1949. First Edition, Limited Issue. Original red morocco boards with initials in gilt to upper cover, top edge gilt. Book-plate of Sibyl Esther Napier. A very good copy.

Limited De Luxe Edition, one of 195 copies Signed by Vyvyan Holland, for the Collectors’ Book Club.

Consists of the Methuen sheets with added limitation statements and a special binding. This edition of “De Profundis” is taken from one of two typed versions Ross had done from Wilde’s manuscript and which he bequeathed to Vyvyan Holland. It is considerably fuller than the 1905 Methuen edition, but it was not until the publication of the Hart-Davis 1962 edition of Wilde’s letters that a reliable transcription of De “Profundis” taken from the original MS in the British Library appeared.

Vyvyan Holland – born Vyvyan Oscar Beresford Wilde – (1886 – 1967) was the second-born son of Wilde and Constance Lloyd. According to Holland’s accounts in his autobiography, Wilde was a devoted and loving father, and the sons’ childhood was a relatively happy one.  Later, after Wilde was convicted of the charge of “gross indecency” and imprisoned in 1895, Constance changed her surname, and those of their sons, to Holland, and forced Wilde to give up his parental rights. Though Holland never saw his father again, he followed the trials and publications with vivacity, and in July 1909 he accompanied his father’s friend Robert Ross to witness the reinternment of Wilde’s remains from Bagneux Cemetery to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.