to await his trial for murdering his common-law wife (and promptly presenting himself and confessing to a policeman) on 29 March 1896. On 17 June, Wooldridge was sentenced to death and returned to Reading for his execution which took place on Tuesday, 7 July 1896—the first hanging at Reading in 18 years. Though Wilde observed Wooldridge in the prison yard only from a distance, he dedicated The Ballad of Reading Gaol to Wooldridge as C. T. W. Wilde was released from prison on 18 May 1897, and promptly went to France, never returning to Britain. He died in Paris, at the age of 46, on 30 November 1900. While in France, surviving on an allowance from his wife of three pounds a week—deliberately meagre to discourage the sort of high living that had led to his 'downfall'—Wilde endeavoured to find additional money. In August 1897, he sent the publisher Leonard Smithers an initial draft of the Ballad, which made such an impression that Smithers was enthusiastic about publishing it and even approached Aubrey Beardsley to do an illustration for it (which was not done). Thereafter there was a very active correspondence between the two of them, as Wilde was repeatedly revising and expanding the text, and supervising from afar the choice and size of typeface and the layout of the work. However, even the printing house hired to do the book demanded a change—for fear that the prison doctor would sue over the line which originally read "While the coarse-mouthed doctor gloats", it was changed to "While some coarse-mouthed doctor gloats". As one biographer, Leonard Cresswell Ingleby, said, "Never, perhaps, since Gray's Elegy had a poem been so revised, pruned, and polished over and over again as this cry from a prison cell". Originally the first edition—with no assurance of a second edition—was planned for only 400 copies, but when Wilde calculated the printing expenses, he realised that even selling all 400 would not cover costs, and at his instigation Smithers instructed the printing house to double the number of copies and keep the printing plates in hopes of a reprinting. As publication day approached, Wilde was occasionally seized by a sort of panic over his finances and the risks of the poem failing to sell well, and made some half-hearted efforts to sell the poem's copyright for immediate cash; there were only a few disappointing nibbles and no such