The Sins of the Cities of the Plain

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Jack Saul, a handsome young man in London, navigates life as a prostitute, relying on his physical appeal. One day, after an encounter with a male customer in Leicester Square, he is offered payment for a written account of his experiences. This leads to a narrative that explores Jack's "vices" as he transitions from boarding school to young adulthood within London's secretive gay underworld. Blending fact and fiction, the work incorporates real figures linked to the Cleveland Street Scandal, the Oscar Wilde trials, and other notorious legal matters of the time. It stands as one of the earliest and most candid explorations of homosexuality in Victorian England. Read by Oscar Wilde and influencing the well-known gay erotic novel Teleny (1893), this work was privately printed in two volumes in 1881 and is now rare. The new edition features the unabridged text from the first edition at the British Library, alongside a new introduction by Wolfram Setz and facsimile title pages from the original volumes. Unlike previous modern editions, which were significantly altered, this version represents the first complete reprinting of the original text.