Wilde, Oscar

8vo, FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED TO GEORGE LEWIS (Oscar Wilde | hopes that his | friend George Lewis | will like his | poems") on the front free endpaper, one of 250 copies, original white parchment gilt, large gilt prunus blossom design on corners of the covers and length of spine, top edge gilt, collector's folding morocco box, decorated with morocco onlays and stamped in gilt, offsetting to endpapers, binding a little soiled

Simon Nowell-Smith and Judith Adams Nowell-Smith, booklabels; Bertram Rota, Catalogue 300: Poetry. The Simon Nowell-Smith Collection, 2002, item 792

Mason 304

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INSCRIBED TO WILDE'S FRIEND AND SOMETIME LAWYER, SIR GEORGE LEWIS (1833-1911). Lewis, as head of the firm Lewis and Lewis, was a canny, and successful lawyer, known for keeping many of his clients free from public notoriety: "Everyone in society desired to be represented by Lewis" (ODNB).

Although Wilde had previously engaged Lewis to represent Lord Alfred Douglas (when Douglas was being blackmailed as a result of an incriminating letter; Lewis eventually arranged to pay the blackmailer £100 for its return), he did not appoint him as his solicitor when it came to his libel case against Queensbury, possibly because Lewis, who was much more familiar with the details of Wilde's private life, would have never recommended he pursue the suit. It was not until the collapse of the case that Wilde sought his help: in the hours before his arrest, Wilde visited Lewis who "threw up his hands and said, 'What is the good of coming to me now?'" (Ellman, Oscar Wilde (1987), p.428).

By the time of Wilde's imprisonment, it seems the friendship between the poet and his lawyer had begun to fade. In the letter which would eventually be published as De Profundis, Wilde writes how since 1892 (when he had asked Lewis to assist Bosie against his blackmailer), "I began to lose his esteem and friendship, a friendship of fifteen years' standing. When I was deprived of his advice and help and regard I was deprived of the one great safeguard of my life" (Holland and Hart-Davis, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (2000), p.702).