author
Jack Saul
1857–1904
A vivid, controversial figure from late Victorian Britain and Ireland, this memoir-like voice is tied to one of the earliest English-language books centered on homosexual life. The man behind the name became notorious in his own time through major public scandals and the sensational testimony linked to them.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Dublin in 1857, John Saul, better known as Jack Saul or "Dublin Jack," was an Irish male prostitute who later lived and worked in London. He became widely known in the late 19th century because his name surfaced in two major homosexual scandals, making him an unusually visible figure in a period when such lives were usually forced into secrecy.
Jack Saul is also associated with The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), a sexually explicit work presented as the recollections of "Jack Saul." Scholars and catalogs often connect the book to him, though the exact authorship is uncertain, so it is safest to say the work is attributed to or framed around his persona rather than firmly confirmed as his own writing.
He died in 1904. Today, Saul is remembered less as a conventional author than as a rare, documented witness to queer urban life in the Victorian era, and as a figure whose notoriety, testimony, and literary afterlife continue to interest historians of sexuality and print culture.