The Harlot's House

Wandering down a city street by night, the poet and his companion stop outside "the Harlot's house",[2] hearing uproarious noise including a band playing dance-music.

[6]A holograph manuscript of an early version of "The Harlot's House", dated April 1882, is preserved in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles.

The final version of the poem was, according to Wilde's friend and biographer Robert Sherard, written in the spring of 1883 while the author was staying at the Hôtel Voltaire in Paris, and this account is probably accurate.

[8][11] The title may owe something to Joshua 2:1, "And they went, and came into an harlot's house",[12] but more secular influences on the body of the poem have been detected from the French Decadent poets and from Edgar Allan Poe.

[20] It treats the theme of prostitution in a way which is aestheticized, and indeed sensual, but at the same time macabre and unsettling, the poet seeming to be simultaneously appalled and fascinated, disgusted and enticed by the inmates of the harlot's house.

[26] When Penguin Books published their Major Works of Oscar Wilde only three of his poems were included, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Sphinx, and "The Harlot's House".