The MS of Oscar Wilde's A Wife's Tragedy belonging to the Clark Library comprises 28 unbound foolscape sheets, including one partial sheet, all of which are feint ruled except for one (20 A) which is plain. There is an additional small quarto sheet of plain correspondence paper with the watermark ‘Silver Linen’. Wilde provides no continuous pagination (and litte pagination of any kind), so I have numbered the sheets according to what I consider their most likely and satisfactory continuity, denoting the two sides of each sheet by A and B. The single quarto sheet, bearing merely an incomplete title, ‘Wife's Tragedy’, is not included in this sequence of pagination.

It is commonly known that Victor Hugo felt only contempt and hatred for Napoleon III and his Second Empire, so readers of Hugo's History of a Crime might easily expect that the Emperor's vengeful wrath would fall on the poet. However, far from trying to destroy Hugo financially, Napoleon not only allowed the sale of numerous of his masterpieces in France (with the exception of Châtiments and other writings considered insulting to the regime) but he did not interfere with the performance of the Hugolian repertoire on the stage of Parisian theatres.