Sex, Lies, and Poetry: The Ballad of Reading Gaol

This article dwells upon instances of untrue statements in Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The colour of the executed trooper’s coat is given as ‘scarlet’ when it was blue, and his wife’s murder is portrayed as taking place ‘in bed’, when it happened at the street door of their house, or in the road nearby. The possibility that ‘each man’ does not kill ‘the thing he loves’ is addressed to explore complexities in Wilde’s art related to aesthetic-politics in ‘The Decay of Lying’ and the discovery that, after a fashion, Wilde had been telling the truth all along.