Note 7 — Oscar Wilde
Reading edition
Oscar Wilde found the prison library quite unable to satisfy his wants, and he was allowed to receive books from outside. Such books are then added to the prison library. Magazines are forbidden, but novels allowed. In a letter written from prison early in 1897, Oscar Wilde said that he felt a horror of returning to the world without possessing a single volume of his own, and suggested that some of his friends might like to give him some books. 'You know what kind of books I want,' he says, 'Flaubert, Stevenson, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Dumas père, Keats, Marlowe, Chatterton, Coleridge, Anatole France, Théophile Gautier, Dante, and Goethe, and so on.'