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Two edits suggested, to be implemented by someone with editing rights on this page:
1. where it says that £60 in 1895 is "equal to £8,800 today", this latter figure should be updated to "£10,000" (October 2024)
2. Re the sentence that says "Another teenager who said they had engaged in sex acts with Wilde, Walter Grainger, who was 16 at the time, said Wilde had threatened him with "very serious trouble" if he told anyone about their relationship": the fifth word should be corrected from 'they' to 'he'. (It makes no sense to use an anonymous "they" pronoun here, when male pronouns are correctly used twice later in the same sentence to refer to the same person.) 82.7.176.216 (talk) 16:48, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
1. I have replaced the inflation template used in this article so that the modern-day reference dates will automatically update. They will not refer to up-to-the-minute exchange rates: currently, values for 2023 are given.
In the final paragraph of the 'Trials' section Walter Grainger's age is given as 16 at the time of his encounter with Wilde - he was actually 17 (see Iain Ross, "I Took Pleasure where it Pleased Me", The Wildean 55 [1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/48569322.
I have read Ross's article and Edmonds's book and agree with both points made above.
On the first point: The age of 16 for Grainger appears to have taken from Field's article for the Independent, which there is no reason to trust over Ross's article – the definitive article on the ages of Wilde's known sexual partners that has not been superseded since it was published in 2019. I also note that Edmonds refers to Grainger as "a boy of the same age as Arthur Fenn" (p. 33; Fenn was 17, p. 32).
On the second point: The quotation of Edmonds does feel like it could mislead readers. The phrase "which is a criminal offence" would seem to be the tricky point, as the act referred to (paying for sex with youths under 18) is a criminal offence today but was not in 1895. The phrasing cannot be changed as it is part of Edmonds's quotation (taken from the Independent). But another option might be to quote the relevant part of Edmonds's book instead. He says "Today men who have sexual relations with boys under sixteen can be sentenced up to fourteen years in prison, and paying for sex with a boy of sixteen or seventeen carries a sentence of up to seven years. Wilde probably committed the first of these offences, and he was certainly guilty of the second." (pp. 143–4)
I would also say that the first sentence of the relevant paragraph ("Although it is widely believed that the charges were related to Wilde's consensual activities") seems to need a citation. Who believes this widely? Although I agree that this IS widely believed, without a citation it is speculation. Tamara Gardens (talk) 07:59, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
level-4 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
