De Profundis (Wilde)

De Prófundis - Oscar Wilde's confession letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas contains 50 thousand words.

Written in Reading Prison from January to March 1897 . After his release, Wilde gave the manuscript to Robert Ross and asked to send it to Alfred Douglas, the latter, however, later denied that he received it. Wilde called the work “ Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis ” (Message: in prison and fetters).

The edited and abridged text was first published in German in 1904, after the death of Wilde with the permission of Robert Ross , who was his literary executor and close friend. He gave the title to the work “De Profundis”, the expression itself goes back to Psalm 129 : De profundis clamavi ad te Domine (“From the depths I called upon you, Lord”). All hints that he was directed to Alfred Douglas were removed from the text. In England, the book was published in February 1905. A slightly expanded work was included in the collection of works by Wilde in 1908 . The text was then transferred to the British Museum, provided that it would not be made public until 1960 . The full text was first published in 1962 in The Letters of Oscar Wilde . The British Museum published a facsimile of the original manuscript in 2000 .

In 1924, Lord Alfred Douglas, while in prison, wrote a kind of parody of Oscar Wilde's work In In Excelsis.