For me he's the author of The Soul of Man under Socialism and for my 8-yr-old daughter he's the writer of favourite stories such as The Happy Prince and The Canterville Ghost.

Fiolar, as the only person I know who can recite the Ballad of Reading Gaol (sic) from memory, I am sorry to say that it is just about the least impressive thing he ever wrote; not a patch on his early poems(eg Requiescat) and certainly not in the same league as the plays.

He wrote the ballad more or less to order. A leading prison reformer, aware that the educated people of those days had virtually no first-hand knowledge of life inside, had urged him to publish his impressions. Oscar left prison apparently intending to campaign for reform. But apart from the ballad, his only other initiative was a letter to the News Chronicle, written in defence of a warder dismissed for giving a biscuit to an ill child jailed for stealing a rabbit.

The ballad seems to have been influenced by Housman's wonderful epic, A Shropshire Lad, which also takes a swipe at capital puhishment, but with less sentimentality.

He had two chances to evade so-called British justice, and head for France. Brave decisions. Two yeas imprisonment with hard labour (no remission) was a travesty, but he did know that shagging rent-boys was a criminal offence in those unenlightened times. (The legislation, which dated from 1885, had been criticised from the outset as a blackmailer's charter. but in the end one of the rent boys refused a deal in which he would have been acquitted in echange for testifying against Wilde. So he also got the maximum sentence.)

Apparently that exhibition at the British Library is one of the best collections of Wilde material ever assembled. It runs until some time in February.