1. Ian Small provides an excellent account of the textual history of the letter in his introduction to CWOW2. Nonetheless, since my emphasis is on the text’s status as a personal letter to Alfred Douglas rather than as a literary text, I have chosen to use Hart-Davis and Holland’s version from WCL. Put simply, Hart-Davis and Holland use the prison manuscript as their base text, where Small uses a combination of the prison manuscript, typescripts, and Ross’s shortened, published version. Since I am using the text of the letter rather than the shortened version that Ross first published in 1905, in deference to Small’s preferences I refer to the writing as ‘the prison letter’ rather than as De Profundis; I reserve the latter title for the text Ross excerpted from the letter. See also Ian Small, ‘Love-Letter, Spiritual Autobiography, or Prison Writing? Identity and Value in De Profundis’, Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 86–100
2. Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 212–18.
3. André Raffalovich, ‘L’Affaire d’Oscar Wilde’, Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, de criminologie et de psychologie normale et pathologique, 10 (1895), pp. 445–77, claims that Wilde’s male admirers were referred to as ‘ses fils’ and each new favorite was called ‘le nouveau boy d’Oscar’ (p. 490). Raffalovich was attacking Wilde after his arrest and may well be exaggerating for effect, but his account demonstrates that the language of filiation may have been used by the Wilde circle itself.
4. Douglas Murray, Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 10.
5. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1988), pp. 389–91.