‌APPENDIX 2:‌

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Introduction to the /irst Penguin Classics Edition, by Peter Ackroyd

The composition of The Picture of Dorian Gray was determined, like so many of the events in Oscar Wilde’s life, by chance: Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle were dining with an American publisher, t. M. Stoddart, and during the course of this dinner Stoddart commissioned both of them to write for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Conan Doyle has taken up the story:

Wilde’s contribution was The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book which is surely upon a high moral plane, while I wrote The Sign of Four.

As soon as he received the commission Wilde wrote swiftly – the sad history of Dorian Gray was no doubt one he carried in his head – and the story appeared in the tuly 1890 issue of Lippincott’s.

Although Conan Doyle may have considered Dorian Gray to be a ‘high moral plane’, his opinion was not shared by the first reviewers who condemned the work for its speculative treatment of immoral or at least uncomfortable subjects. Charles Whibley, in the Scots Observer, declared that ‘Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten’ (the ‘again’ refers to Wilde’s earlier essay on Shakespeare’s admiration for a boy actor, The Portrait of Mr W.H.

); and he went on,‘… he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys’. This was an unambiguous reference

to a homos*xual scandal of 1889, which had compromised both Lord Arthur Somerset and a number of Post O ce employees who frequented a male brothel in Cleveland Street.

Wilde made a spirited reply to this and to other damaging attacks, and in the month of its publication declared to an acquaintance that the story would be ‘… ultimately recognized as a real work of art with a strong ethical lesson inherent in it’. To Conan Doyle himself he wrote, ‘I cannot understand how they can treat Dorian Gray as immoral.’ That may be so, but there can be no doubt that the public controversy unnerved Wilde: book publication was planned for the following year, and he took care not only to add chapters which are of a more conventional Victorian nature (specifically the sub-plot concerning the putative revenge of tames Vane upon Dorian Gray) but also to give a less ‘purple’ tone to those passages which might be described as homoerotic in spirit. It is possible that he had written the first version too quickly, or with the thoughtlessness of inspiration, and did not realize that it was as self- revealing as it now seemed to be; but, despite the changes he made, the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray marked the first stage in Wilde’s long descent into open scandal and eventual infamy.

The point was that Dorian Gray presented in oblique form an image of the double life which Wilde himself was leading at this time, and there are some critics who believe the book to represent Wilde’s need for confession if not expiation. His adolescence had been in certain respects a conventional one, but his years after

Oxford were marked by his pose as an Aesthete. Then in the spring of 1884 (in his twenty-ninth year) he married Constance Lloyd; their first child, Cyril, was born a year later. It seems at first to have been a happy marriage, despite the sharp remarks about matrimony made in this novel, and Wilde retired into an obscurity only alleviated by his brief editorship of Woman’s World. But in 1886 he met a young man, Robert Ross, who became something more than a disciple: it is from this date that Wilde began to engage in homos*xual practices and to become part of a ‘Uranian’ circle in London. So by the time Dorian Gray was published in Lippincott’s, there had already been rumours about his behaviour, and the taint of a clandestine life meant that there were occasions when he was snubbed in public places –this is, of course, the life to which Dorian Gray is forced to become accustomed in the novel, and there is no doubt that Wilde is drawing directly upon his own experiences in order to furnish that atmosphere of scandal which fills its last chapters.

But there were certain other parallels with Wilde’s own life which made the book’s reception peculiarly important to him. When he was at Oxford he became a close friend of Frank Miles, a painter, and through Miles he met the homos*xual aesthete Lord Ronald Gower. It seems possible that both Miles and Gower are represented in Dorian Gray by Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton, just as the philosophies of Pater and of Ruskin (whom Wilde had also met at Oxford) animate the more theoretical disquisitions in the novel. There is much here, also, that might act as an emblem of Wilde’s own emotional life – not just in the note of mystery and secrecy

which is struck at the beginning, but in the mood of ennui and even despair which envelops the narrative at the close. That Wilde himself was prey to such feelings is not in doubt; in his correspondence there is a sense of world-weariness and personal failure (of being ‘burned out’, as he claimed in 1880), and of his belief that he was walking upon an artificial stage. This novel is more than a veiled account of Wilde’s s*xual predilections, it is also an exploration of that accidie which amicted him in his private moments.

Oscar Wilde was also an intensely superstitious man – although it cannot be said that his numerous visits to palmists and to fortune- tellers materially assisted him – and The Picture of Dorian Gray is from the beginning invaded by the idea of fatality and doom. The tone is introduced very early, in some of Basil Hallward’s first words to Lord Henry Wotton: ‘… we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly’. And it was when Wilde himself was suffering in just such a manner, while locked up in a cell within the confines of Reading gaol, that he returned to this theme and meditated upon its annunciation in the novel which he had composed only seven years before his great fall: ‘Doom,’ he wrote in the famous prison letter that was later to be called De Profundis, ‘that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray.’ In the novel itself there are strange anticipations of Wilde’s own eventual fate:

Here, one should never make one’s début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.

Shades of the Marquess of Queensberry appear in a further sentence, which Wilde also remembered in his prison cell:

I say, in Dorian Gray somewhere, that ‘a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies’…

And it might be pointed out that, on their second meeting in tuly 1891, Wilde gave a copy of this book to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man who in so many ways is prefigured in the character of Dorian Gray and who would be the catalyst of Wilde’s ill-fortune. Never has a novel been surrounded by so many portents.

And never has a novel so marked out its author. Before its publication Wilde was perhaps best known for his fairy stories – The Happy Prince and Other Tales had been published in 1888 – and for his contributions to aesthetic criticism – The Decay of Lying was published in 1889. Of course his youthful pose as an aesthete had earned him a temporary notoriety, but after Dorian Gray everything changed and, as Philippe tullian has remarked, ‘the name of Wilde became a synonym for all that was most unhealthy’. There was one sense in which this was inevitable for, by introducing the painted portrait of Dorian Gray as an emblem of sin, he was also putting his finger on a peculiar Victorian complex which was associated with the idea of s*xual guilt: as Owen Burdett has suggested, in the late nineteenth century ‘art and scandal came to be associated, and the imaginative life began to take vice for its province’.

It was not just a question of ‘scandal’, however, since in this novel Wilde had effectively challenged English society on a number

of levels; he continually characterizes it, for example, as the haven of the hypocrite or the dissembler: ‘My dear fellow,’ Dorian Gray observes to Basil Hallward, ‘you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.’ English readers were not accustomed to such a forceful characterization of their civilization, and Wilde went even further than this; he mocked both the artistic pretensions and the social morality of the English, and some of the most powerful passages in the novel disclose the grinding poverty and hopelessness against which ‘Society’ turned its face. Wilde, an Irishman, was putting a mirror up to his oppressors – and their shocked reactions would eventually encircle him when he stood in the dock at the Old Bailey.

It would be wrong to suggest, however, that the contemporary reaction was entirely one of horror or of outrage: W. B. Yeats described it as a ‘wonderful book’ and Walter Pater characterized it as ‘really alive’; and it can fairly be said that those who were not fatally compromised by the Victorian ethic found much in Dorian Gray to admire and to praise. It is significant, in this context, that the reviews in America were much more favourable. Wilde himself was not slow to emphasize its merits and, after the first shock of scandal had passed, he was always at pains to defend his novel. He speaks of it in the fondest terms in De Profundis and, after his release from custody, he wrote to one publisher, ‘I only know that Dorian Gray is a classic, and deservedly.’

Like any classic, of course, it is established upon other classics, although it would be di cult to offer more than a tentative provenance for it. Several sources for Dorian Gray have been identified, among them Huysmans’s À Rebours, Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, Gautier’s Mademoiselle duMaupin and Pater’s Gaston de Latour. Echoes of these books are no doubt present (and Wilde was not one to shrink from open plagiarism, even plagiarism of himself, when the occasion warranted) and it is also true, as Wilde once noted, that the strange book which ‘poisons’ Dorian Gray is meant to be an extrapolation from À Rebours: ‘It is’, he told one correspondent, ‘a fantastic variation on Huysmans’s over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age.’ But it would be rash to assert Wilde’s resemblance to other writers, or his debt to other books, in too deterministic a manner. As he said in an interview in 1895:

Setting aside the prose and poetry of the Greek and Latin authors, the only writers who have influenced me are Keats, Flaubert, and Walter Pater; and before I came across them I had already gone more than half-way to meet them.

It will be noted that two out of the three authors mentioned here are English, and so it was perhaps slightly over-enthusiastic of Arthur Ransome to assert of Dorian Gray that it is ‘the first French novel to be written in the English language’.

Certainly its emphasis upon strange sins, and its somewhat uninventive borrowings from Huysmans in such matters as the

symbolism of jewels, give it a French demeanour; but the book’s wit is Irish and its melodrama is English. There was always a streak of vulgarity in Wilde’s imagination (like summer lightning, it appears at the most unexpected moments), and he was rarely able to refrain from taking a readily available convention to excessive lengths: as a story of passion, Dorian Gray is closer to the work of Hall Caine than of Flaubert, and in the morbid sonorities of its prose there is more than a hint of Victorian pathos. The characters of Sibyl and tames Vane, for example, might have been derived from the kind of play which Wilde himself was prone to mock; they might even have stepped from the one example mentioned in the novel itself: ‘The Idiot Boy or Dumb but Innocent. Our fathers used to like that sort of piece, I believe.’ It is a mark of Wilde’s most complicated temperament that he was able to parody the faults from which he himself was not immune – magniloquence of a sentimental kind being one of them.

But that is not the sum of his achievement in this book and, in a work which is striated with images of duality and the double life, it is not surprising that Dorian Gray should be composed in two distinct tones – one being that of sentimental tragedy, the other of outrageous epigram. This is of course a distinctive feature of Wilde’s work – in his earliest drama, Vera, the epigrams are given to the aristocrats and the melodrama is lavished upon the revolutionaries – but it reaches its most elaborate form here. Dorian Gray in fact stands at the pivotal point of Wilde’s writing: both the aesthetic discussions and the theatrical plot look back to his earlier essays and

stories, while the flourishes of epigrammatic wit (most notably in the sections he wrote later, for the volume edition) anticipate the plays for which he will always be remembered. It is no accident that he should have begun work on the first of these dramas, Lady Windermere’s Fan, at the time he was completing his revision of Dorian Gray. And it could be said that, just as the novel’s publication marked the onset of Wilde’s fatal reputation, it also gave him the self-confidence (as well as the style) with which to start the composition of his major works.

But Dorian Gray is filled with more troubled intimations and it is the oscillation between epigram and tragedy, between the celebration of individualism and the assertion of doom, that properly characterizes the book. In the conversations of Lord Henry Wotton and the behaviour of Dorian Gray there is clearly a sense in which Wilde is continuing to celebrate the triumphs of a truly individual life and to suggest that, in the perfection of personality, self-expression can be turned into an art. And yet this world of self- assertion and self-development is one that is seen to fall apart. For beneath the brilliant surface of Wilde’s prose there is the mordant gaze of the moralist, and it would not be too much to say that on occasions there was a congenital Puritan lurking behind his mask of the Aesthete or the Dandy. He loved that bright world which he created, but he also allows it to be destroyed with Dorian Gray’s cry, ‘so horrible in its agony’. In his own life he saw through his ‘pose’ and even courted his eventual destruction; in his fiction, he raised a

world in his own image and then condemned it for its emptiness and its follies.

In that sense Wilde represents in plangent form the most abiding preoccupations of his period – at the end of a century, it was a time of sadness and sterility when the most acute talents understood that a world, and a world of values, was coming to an end. They mocked it as it died or, like George Gissing, produced threnodies on its behalf, but they could find nothing to put in its place. That is one reason for the emptiness and despair at the heart of Dorian Gray, and on one level we may read this book as an epitaph for Victorian civilization.

Yet it would be wrong to attach too long a moral to this tale since, as Wilde himself says here,

… the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.

This is one aspect of his aesthetic bravado but it is true in the sense that Wilde is on this occasion a novelist rather than a philosopher or even a cultural historian, and it is as a novel that Dorian Gray must finally be judged. As such, it is a considerable success; it may be melodramatic in inspiration but it is a triumph of execution. Wilde knew how to end one chapter with thunder and begin the next with trumpets; he knew how to orchestrate the emotions of a scene and, in that sequence where Sibyl Vane loses her powers as an artist as soon as she has found love, he demonstrates an evocative sympathy which is not always present in his later dramas. And if Dorian Gray

is one of the best narrations of the ‘double life’ of a Victorian gentleman, so it is also one of the best accounts of the divisions within London itself. As the narrative moves from the dining tables of the rich to the hovels of Whitechapel or Limehouse, Wilde’s descriptive powers lift the book far above the casual sonorities of his conventional prose; and as we marvel at this, we can see also the burgeoning comedy of Wilde’s dialogue in those scenes where Lord Henry Wotton appears.

One might say of this novel, then, what Wilde says of Society in its pages:

Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.

Here Wilde plays with paradox, which is fitting in a novel that is iridescent with paradox and with the sensibility that is mediated through wit and effortless display. Only shallow people refuse to judge by appearances, to paraphrase our author, which is perhaps why The Picture of Dorian Gray has largely escaped the attentions of the more sombre critics and why its popularity has endured for almost one hundred years.

Peter Ackroyd

London, 1985

‌NOTES‌

These notes are designed to help the reader understand Wilde’s novel, and provide a background to the publication and revision of its final form. They include references to significant variations in the two published editions of this novel, and a few to the changes made to the typescript Wilde submitted to Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. These references to textual variants are not designed to be exhaustive, or to enable the reader to reconstruct the earlier text. They record the process of ‘self-censorship’ that the text underwent, and also the artistic enrichment from which it benefited. Readers who are interested in the process of revision from manuscript to typescript and between the two published versions should consult Donald F. Lawler’s very useful An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde’s Revisions of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (Garland: New York, 1988); those who wish to read the 1890 edition should consult the text prepared by Lawler for Norton (New York, 1987). When Wilde revised the novel he added long descriptive passages of Dorian’s various enthusiasms for exotic items. These were designed, as Wilde put it, to ‘surround him in an atmosphere of moral corruption’, producing a distinctly ‘decadent’ and exotic effect (Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A record of the discussion which followed the publication of ‘Dorian Gray’ (London (1912), 80). Many of these references are there solely for the sake of this effect, and the modern reader gains little by having each term or allusion explained. In a few cases I

have relied on the notes provided by Peter Ackroyd for the earlier Penguin edition. These cases are identified as (Ackroyd).

PRE/ACE

‌Wilde published ‘A Preface to Dorian Gray’ in the March issue of Frank Harris’s journal, the Fortnightly Review. He devised this as a response to the critics who had condemned the first edition of his novel for its ‘immorality’ and ‘unhealthiness’. Having rehearsed these arguments in his letters to critics, he now sought to preach his aesthetic credo, a version of the principle of art for art’s sake’, first formulized by Théophile Gautier and Edgar Allan Poe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and adopted by Wilde’s sparring partner, the painter tames McNeill Whistler, in the 1880s. The Fortnightly Review (1865–1954) was a highbrow literary and scientific journal, which published contributions by Thomas Henry Huxley, Francis Galton, Henry Maudsley, and H. G. Wells as well as Oscar Wilde. The Preface, of course, also advertised his novel, which was published the following month in its extended form by Ward, Lock & Co. He reprinted the Preface with an additional maxim: ‘No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything’ with the novel.

CHAPTER I

‌Japanese eßect: An interest in tapanese art and decoration developed in the 1860s when the painter Whistler introduced the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti to this exotic world, thus establishing a veritable cult of tapan within this Bohemian circle. By the 1880s ‘taponisme’ had become a major influence on the art and decoration of the time, leaving its mark on Whistler’s paintings and designs (principally the ‘Peacock Room’, now installed in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum). The décor of Hallward’s studio reflects these tastes and influences. Wilde himself participated in this cult, referring to ‘the influence which Eastern art is having on us in Europe, and the fascination of all tapanese work’ in a lecture he gave in America in 1882 (‘The English Renaissance of Art’); and celebrating the artificiality of this art in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889).
‌the Grosvenor. The Academy: By contrasting the Grosvenor Gallery with the Royal Academy Wilde indicates an opposition between the avant-garde and the establishment which divided the British art world at this time. The Royal Academy had been founded in the late eighteenth century under its president Sir toshua Reynolds, and served as a training ground for artists to emulate the best antique models and aspire to the grand manner. By the mid nineteenth century it represented to the young and adventurous a stultifying restriction of original expression and artistic experiment. The Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 principally by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, tohn Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt,

was a youthful and spirited revolt against this academic stranglehold on English art. This in turn encouraged the establishment of alternative exhibition spaces, the most famous of which was the Grosvenor Gallery, founded by Sir Coutts Linsay in 1877 in London’s New Bond Street. That year Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold – the Falling Rocket’ was shown, the painting which tohn Ruskin attacked in his magazine Fors Clavigera, bringing about the famous lawsuit between him and Whistler which brought Aestheticism, as represented by Whistler, to the attention of the public. From then on the Grosvenor became synonymous with aesthetic revolt. It is therefore natural that Lord Henry should recommend the Grosvenor for Basil’s painting. Wilde himself attended this first exhibition and published a review of it while still an undergraduate at Oxford. When Gilbert and Sullivan came to satirize Aestheticism (including Wilde himself) in their comic opera Patience (1881), they included a character called Archibald Grosvenor and characterized the aesthetic type as ‘a greenery- yallery, Grosvenor Gallery, / Foot-in-the-grave young man!’. Wilde’s pronouncements on art led to the popular Academician William Powell Frith depicting Wilde in his painting ‘A Private View, 1881’, showing the young Oscar pontificating on the exhibits at the Academy to an enraptured group of fashionable women while a stern-looking group of Academicians scowl in disapproval.
‌Adonis… Narcissus: In classical mythology these figures stand as consummate types of male beauty. Narcissus tragically fell in love

with his own reflection, an appropriate analogy for Dorian, of whom it is later reported: ‘Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him’ (Chapter VIII).
‌and the two young men went out into the garden together: In the version of 1890 Basil is clearly troubled by Lord Henry’s interest in Dorian. Here Wilde has deleted the words, ‘and for a time they did not speak’, reducing the tension that had existed between them.
‌I grew afraid: Wilde deleted from 1890 the words: ‘I knew that if I spoke to Dorian I would become absolutely devoted to him, and that I ought not to speak to him’.
‌Stars and Garters: Denoting members of the knightly Order of the Star and Garter, an ancient chivalric order; this reference establishes the aristocratic tenor of the occasion. Wilde, Irish and middle-class, was fascinated by this world, and often depicted it in his comedies.
‌Hallward shook his head: In 1890, ‘Hallward buried his face in his hands’, in evident dismay.
‌I don’t suppose that ten per cent. of the proletariat live correctly: Wilde had originally written ‘I don’t suppose ten per cent. of the lower orders live with their own wives’. This was too explicit for Wilde’s editor at Lippincott’s, who amended it to ‘correctly’; Wilde changed ‘lower orders’ to ‘proletariat’ in 1891.
‌I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t see him every day: In 1891 Wilde deleted the lines, ‘ “Of course sometimes it is only for a few minutes.

But a few minutes with somebody one worships mean a great deal.” “But you don’t really worship him?” “I do.” ’
‌artistic idolatry: Originally ‘extraordinary romance’ in the 1890 version. Similarly, Wilde qualified the use of ‘romance’ a few pages on in 1891, when Lord Henry observes that ‘a romance of any kind… leaves one so unromantic’.
‌the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: In the l8go version this read: ‘the one person that makes life absolutely lovely to me, and that gives to my art whatever wonder or charm it possesses’. Again, the personal and passionate is rephrased in aesthetic terms, with Wilde adding ‘my life as an artist depends on him’ in 1891.

CHAPTER II

‌a club in Whitechapel: This refers to an institution established by wealthy philanthropists to ‘better’ the poorest inhabitants of London, providing education and attempting to wean them away from the music-halls and gin palaces which proliferated in these areas. The most famous charitable institution was Toynbee Hall, founded in Commercial Street near Whitechapel in 1884. Philanthropy increasingly focused on the East End of London, especially Whitechapel and neighbouring Bethnal Green, when these areas were considered the poorest, unhealthiest and most criminalized districts of the capital towards the end of the century.

Whitechapel was especially notorious following the brutal crimes of the Whitechapel murderer, or tack the Ripper as he came to be known, in 1888. In 1889 Charles Booth published the first volume of his exhaustive survey Labour and Life of the People, based on the East End, which established Bethnal Green as the poorest district of London with over 45 per cent of its inhabitants living below sustenance level. Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago (1896) drew a sensational picture of life in this area, attempting to alert the public to the plight of its inhabitants.
‌No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him: The line ‘He was made to be worshipped’ was deleted in 1891.
‌Eton: The most famous, prestigious and aristocratic public (that is, private) school in England.
‌The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives: By alluding to savage ‘survivals’ Wilde is drawing on, but also characteristically distorting, an idea that was influential in a number of disciplines at the time. This idea was central to the ‘comparative method’ of ethnology, whereby contemporary ‘savages’ helped to construct hypotheses about the earliest forms of human civilization. The distinguished ethnologist Sir Edward Tylor explains the doctrine of ‘survivals’ to which Wilde refers: ‘These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain proofs and examples of an older condition of culture of which a newer has

been evolved…. Such examples often lead us back to the habits of hundreds and even thousands of years ago’ (Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1 (1871), 15). Wilde’s suggestion that ‘self-denial’ was actually a ‘savage’ vestige of a less evolved culture perverts the orthodox application of these concepts, as Tylor and ‘social Darwinists’ like Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley who influenced Tylor’s views, would regard such impulses as a more advanced improvement on the characteristic habits and unbridled passions of primitive man and contemporary ‘savages’. This is one example of how Wilde, who had a thorough understanding of Evolutionary ideas, uses paradox to invert the logic of contemporary thought.
‌Stop!… He was unconscious of the silence: Wilde added these passages at typescript stage, strengthening the theme of ‘influence’ which dominates his tale. The term ‘influences’ which appears in this passage was originally ‘impulses’ in 1890. This passage also introduces for the first time the idea of the ‘poisonous book’, in this case referring to Lord Henry’s experience when he was sixteen.
‌Hermes or your silver Faun: Hermes in Greek mythology was the son of Zeus and Maia, and was the patron of merchants and thieves. He is usually depicted with winged sandals, and is identified with the Roman god Mercury, messenger of the gods. A faun was a demi- god associated with forests. Pan was a faun.
‌Oh, if it were only the other way!… mock me horribly: Extraordinarily, Wilde did not add these lines, upon which the story turns, until a very late stage. Along with the reference to Dorian

appearing to be ‘praying’, they were inserted by Wilde in the typescript of the 1890 edition.
‌White’s: The oldest gentlemen’s club, situated in St tames’s and founded as White’s Chocolate Club in 1693.
‌‘I shall stay with the real Dorian,’ he said, sadly: Oddly Basil was originally ‘smiling’ when he said this, but his mood changed at typescript stage.
‌love… is purely a question for physiology: A view established by Charles Darwin in his Descent of Man (1871), where he proposed the principle of s*xual selection which united the human race with the animal kingdom.

CHAPTER III

(This was the first of the seven new chapters Wilde added in 1891 and supplies details about Dorian’s immediate ancestry.)

‌the Albany: Apartments until recently exclusively for single men, which still survive today on Piccadilly. Famous tenants have included Byron, ‘Monk’ Lewis, Gladstone, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Aldous Huxley, t. B. Priestley and Graham Greene.
‌when Isabella was young, and Prim unthought of: Refers to the queen of Spain, Isabella II (1833–68), and tuan Prim, a general from this period.
‌a hero to his valet: Madame Cornuel claimed that ‘no man is a hero to his valet’ (Lettres de Mlle Aisse, XII, 1728); but Byron changed the emphasis, which Wilde follows, in stanza 33 of his Beppo, which declares: ‘In short, he was a perfect cavaliero, / And to his very valet seem’d a hero.’
‌Blue-book: O cial parliamentary reports were thus designated on account of their blue wrappers.
‌jarvies: Cab-drivers.
‌There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence: Influence is an important theme in the novel and takes a number of forms. There is the influence which Dorian has on Basil’s art, the influence Lord Henry exerts on the impressionable Dorian, the corresponding ‘fatal’ influence which Dorian has on young men, the influence that heredity and ‘race-instinct’ have on various individuals, the influence of real life on Sibyl Vane’s acting, the influence that Dorian’s actions have on his portrait, and the influence of certain books on their readers. Once again, Wilde is reflecting concerns that were conspicuous at the time. The quasi- scientific tenor of Henry’s musings, and the idea that a person’s ‘soul’ could be projected into another individual, points to ideas of ‘mesmeric’ influence and metempsychosis which were then preoccupying such bodies as the Institute for Psychic Research and which found their way into sensational fictions such as H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite (1894),

George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897).
‌Buonarotti: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), the Florentine painter famous for his decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, was also a poet, whose love poems celebrate male beauty. Wilde followed others in identifying Michelangelo as homos*xual, and included him among those who knew ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ in his famous apologia for idealized male love at his second trial at the Old Bailey in 1895. A version of this justification is also found in Chapter X of Dorian Gray; see below.
‌Bacchante: A follower of Bacchus, the god of wine.
‌Omar: Omar Khayyam, a twelfth-century Persian poet, whose Rubaiyat was made popular by the translation of Edward Fitzgerald in 1859.
‌Athenæum: One of the most imposing gentlemen’s clubs, situated in Pall Mall. Founded in 1824, it became associated with the arts.

CHAPTER IV

‌Clodion… Les Cent Nouvelles… Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve: The decorative details and specific references here find Wilde embellishing his narrative with indicators of opulence and rarefied taste.
‌Manon Lescaut: A highly popular novel published in 1731 by the Abbé Antoine-François Prévost.
‌Wagner’s music: Richard Wagner (1813–83), German composer and dramatist, whose theories (principally in The Art-work of the Future, 1850) and operas were highly controversial at this time. To favour Wagner indicated advanced tastes; Swinburne championed him, Aubrey Beardsley drew ‘The Wagnerians’, and Max Nordau stigmatized Wagner as the consummate fin-de-siècle musician, ‘in himself alone charged with a greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together’ (Nordau, Degeneration, 1892). Dorian and Lord Henry therefore naturally favoured Wagner.
‌the price of everything, and the value of nothing: Wilde re-used this line (added at typescript stage) in the third act of his play Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892).
‌the search for beauty being the real secret of life: Wilde inserted the adjective ‘poisonous’ at typescript stage, but changed this to ‘real’ when he revised the novel in 1891. This may have been in response to the condemnation of his ‘poisonous book’, ‘spawned from the literature of the French Décadents’ (Mason, 65). To search for a ‘poisonous beauty’ encapsulates the very idea of ‘Decadence’, and Wilde perhaps wished to tone this element down. He certainly changed a reference to ‘the French school of Décadents’ to ‘Symbolistes’ in 1891; see note 8 to Chapter X, below.
‌a labyrinth of grimy streets: This was a common, if not cliched, trope for representing the topography of poorer and criminalized districts of the capital at this time. Oliver Twist finds himself lost in ‘a labyrinth of dark and narrow courts’ in the ‘low neighbourhood’ of Saffron Hill, in Dickens’s novel (1838), indicating that he is now in serious danger; while a journalist described the infamous ‘Rookery’ of St Giles in 1842 as ‘one great maze of narrow crooked paths crossing and intersecting in labyrinthine convulsions’ (W. Weir, ‘St Giles, Past and Present’, in Flint (ed.), The Victorian Novelist (1987), 132–4. St Giles, albeit decidedly diminished by the time Wilde was writing, is a likely candidate for the area through which Dorian passes. A trip eastward from Piccadilly, at flâneur pace, eventually bringing Dorian to the theatre in Holborn, would take him through St Giles, and possibly Seven Dials, another ‘labyrinth’ described by Charles Dickens in one of his Sketches by Boz in 1837.
‌The Idiot Boy, or Dumb but Innocent: Sentimental and melodramatic pieces popular with lower-class audiences at the time.
‌hautbois: Oboe.
‌One evening she is Rosalind… reed-like throat: Referring to some of Shakespeare’s heroines. Rosalind is a character in As You Like It, in which she wanders through the forest of Arden disguised as a boy. Imogen appears in Cymbeline, tuliet in Romeo and Juliet poisons herself in this manner. Ophelia in Hamlet is driven mad, and Desdemona is strangled by the Moor in Othello.
‌Don’t run down dyed hair and painted faces: Henry is subscribing to the Aesthetic and ‘Decadent’ celebration of artifice. Charles Baudelaire wrote ‘In Praise of Cosmetics’ (1863), and Max Beerbohm followed with ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’ in the infamous Yellow Book (1894).
‌what are your actual relations with Sibyl Vane?: Wilde had originally written ‘– tell me, is Sybil [sic] Vane your mistress?’, and a few lines later, ‘I suppose she will be your mistress some day’, but his editor at Lippincott’s altered these to ‘what are your relations’, and ‘she will be yours some day’. Wilde added ‘actual’, and made this ‘belong to you’ in 1891.
‌The Bristol: A hotel on Piccadilly.
‌People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves: Wilde had originally had Dorian ask Henry if ‘ “Basil has got a passion for somebody?” “Yes, he has. Has he never told you?” ’, but he altered this on the typescript to the slightly less explicit: ‘ “You don’t mean to say that Basil has got any passion or any romance in him?” “I don’t know whether he has any passion, but he certainly has romance,” said Lord Henry, with an amused look in his eyes. “Has he never let you know that?” ’ He removed these lines in 1891.
‌He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science: Despite his antipathy to the Naturalism of Emile Zola, Wilde’s description of Lord Henry’s interests comes close to describing that novelist’s fictional methods. Wilde made fun of Zola’s ‘tedious

document humain’ (a phrase from Zola’s manifesto, ‘The Experimental Novel’, where he advocated a ‘scientific’ approach to character and incident in fiction) in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889). And yet such a ‘vivisection’ of human psychology, the application of the ‘experimental method’ to an analysis of the ‘passions’ is just what Lord Henry advocates here. Wilde was himself fascinated by science, as the numerous references to various physical phenomena and the schools of psychologists in his novel testify. His emphasis on the role of heredity in the characterization of Dorian and tames Vane even comes close to Zola’s methods in this respect.

CHAPTER V

(Added in 1891, this chapter introduces the characters of tames Vane and his mother, adding intrigue, melodrama and comic elements to the narrative.)

‌bismuth-whitened hands: A cosmetic preparation, suggesting that Sibyl’s mother was one of the ‘painted’ actresses whom Dorian disparages a few pages before.
‌tableau: This was a common spectacle in the popular theatre at the time, whereby elaborate (and often risque) scenes were staged as ‘living paintings’. Each act of popular plays would often end with a tableau, which froze the action at its most intense and melodramatic heights. The melodramatic art was basically gestural, relying on a repertoire of striking stances to convey passions. Wilde had little

sympathy with the sentimentality of the melodrama, but would have appreciated its artifice.
‌Euston Road: A poor area, where Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross railway termini serve the North and Midlands.
‌hated him through some curious race-instinctfor which he could not account: Here Wilde reinforces the importance of heredity in the novel, making tames something of a counterpart to Dorian, whose ancestry is also his destiny. As is revealed shortly, the ‘instinct’ that causes tames to hate gentlemen is a consequence of the fact that his father came from this class. Dorian is similarly constituted, as his aristocratic mother married beneath her. The reference to tames’s response to the whispered sneer about his origins – ‘He remembered it as if it had been the lash of a hunting-crop across his face’ – further hints at this. Intriguingly and (it would appear) coincidentally, Thomas Hardy had used a similar image for a similar purpose in Chapter XLVII of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), where Tess slaps Alec round the face with her leather glove: ‘It was heavy and thick as a warrior’s, and it struck him flat on the mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of a trick in which her mailed progenitors were not unpractised.’ The narrator is suggesting that this action recalls Tess’s own ‘race instinct’, a throw back to her long-buried aristocratic ancestry, which reverts to feudal type in action. Wilde’s use of this image appeared for the first time in April 1891, and Hardy had finished with the proofs of his novel by February, making this shared reference to behavioural atavisms
by two authors equally fascinated by heredity coincidental. Hardy’s novel also features ancestral portraits, which suggests the re- emergence of moral character in physical appearance similar to that found in Chapter IX of Dorian Gray (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Chapter XXXIV, developed in the second edition). On Hardy and heredity, see Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (1994).
‌Achilles Statue: This twenty-foot-high bronze statue, which stands in Park Lane, was cast from French guns in 1822 in honour of the victorious Duke of Wellington. Erected by the ‘women of England’, it was the first public nude statue displayed in England.

CHAPTER VI

‌Hallward started, and then frowned: In 1890 Hallward ‘turned perfectly pale, and a curious look flashed for a moment into his eyes, and then passed away, leaving them dull’. Wilde tones down Basil’s obvious dismay at learning he has a ‘romantic’ rival in Sibyl.
‌Messalina: Wife of the emperor Claudius, she was a byword for adulterous conduct.
‌to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man’s existence: Wilde added this line in 1891. ‘Organization’ carries a scientific connotation referring to the ability of life forms to adapt and thrive. The philosopher Herbert Spencer laid down that the first principles

of evolutionary development consist in the movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity, or from simple to complex forms.

CHAPTER VII

‌Miranda… Caliban: Characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Miranda is the beautiful daughter of Prospero, the enchanter who keeps the monster Caliban as his abject slave. Wilde uses Caliban to exemplify ugliness in the Preface to his novel. Robert Browning did, however, give Shakespeare’s tormented creature a degree of pathos and humanity in his dramatic mono logue ‘Caliban on Setebos’ (1862).
‌Rosalind… Cordelia: Heroines in Shakespeare’s plays As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing and 7ing Lear respectively.
‌I have grown sick of shadows: These lines echo Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’, where the Lady complains: ‘I am half sick of shadows’. This reference is appropriate here, as Tennyson also describes a woman trapped in an artificial world, forced to view life through a mirror. When she breaks from her bonds in pursuit of Sir Lancelot, a ‘curse’ is effected which kills her. This theme was popular with artists at the time, and many paintings were produced in the Pre-Raphaelite style depicting Tennyson’s tragic figure and often carrying the refrain which Wilde borrows here.
‌Covent Garden: Once the garden belonging to the Convent of St Peter of Westminster, from the mid seventeenth century it was a busy market. The market itself outgrew its bounds in central London, and was moved to Battersea, across the river, in 1974. Covent Garden is currently a highly popular tourist trap, which retains some stalls selling market produce.
‌In the huge gilt Venetian lantern… It was certainly strange: Wilde greatly extended and embellished this passage in 1891, significantly heightening the dramatic effect of this key moment in the narrative.

CHAPTER VIII

‌Was there some subtle affinity… what that soul thought, they realized: The speculations found in this passage had originally been statements. The typescript had originally stated that ‘there was some subtle a nity’ and ‘what the soul thought, they realized’, but Wilde adopted this more speculative tone when he amended the typescript in 1890.
‌Patti: Adelina Patti (1843–1919), a famous singer.
‌Imust sow poppies in my garden… I had buried my romance in abed of asphodel: Both flowers are associated with death and the underworld of Greek mythology. Asphodels were planted on graves, and the groves of Hades were known as the plains of Asphodel. Poppies were associated with Ceres, corn goddess, but also mother of

Persephone, reluctant wife of the king of the underworld. Dorian’s claim that he will sow poppies in his garden may point to the fact that he later turns to opium (made from poppies) in pursuit of forgetfulness.
‌Conscience makes egotists of us all: An adaptation of Hamlet’s line, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’ (Hamlet, III. i).
‌Webster… Ford… Tourneur: tohn Webster (1578?–1632?), tohn Ford (1586?–1639) and Cyril Tourneur (1575?–1626) were tragedians who flourished at the time of tames I. Their plays are characterized by violent plots, usually centring on revenge by the most elaborate means.
‌Poor Sibyl!… and looked again at the picture: Wilde added this paragraph to the typescript in 1890.
‌For a moment he thought of praying… Why inquire too closely into it?: Wilde added this paragraph to the typescript in 1890, introducing one of the many passages of ‘scientific’ speculation which increased with the various revisions to his novel.

CHAPTER IX

‌Gautier: Theophile Gautier (1811–72), poet and novelist, whose Preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (a highly ornate tale of lesbianism and cross-dressing, published in 1834) articulated the principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, providing a rallying cry for writers

from Baudelaire to Wilde. Wilde greatly admired Gautier, and often referred to his works.
‌Marlow: Wilde had originally spelt this town in Buckinghamshire ‘Marlowe’, perhaps after the homos*xual poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–93). This may of course be merely a typo, missed by Wilde and his editor, and corrected in 1891. However, the reference to the two men being ‘down at Marlowe together’ does seem somewhat gratuitous in this context, and may be a sly homoerotic reference.
‌The painter felt strangely moved: Wilde had originally written ‘Hallward felt strangely moved. Rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness’, but deleted these lines in 1891.
‌Georges Petit… Rue de Sèze: A Parisian gallery opened in 1882 which promoted painters like Renoir, Sisley, Boudin and Whistler.
‌Dorian, from the moment I met you…: In the 1890 version this confession began, ‘It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend.’ Wilde had added ‘of feeling’, and his editor changed ‘should ever give’ to ‘usually’ at typescript stage. See the Introduction for a discussion of the changes Wilde made to this passage.
‌I had drawn you as Paris… the marvel of your own face: This passage originally appeared in a different form in the first chapter of the 1890 edition, when Basil tells Lord Henry about his new model.

Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy, and carried off Helen, the wife of Menelaus, thus causing the Trojan war, narrated in Homer’s Iliad. In Greek mythology Adonis was a youth of exceptional beauty, beloved of Aphrodite, goddess of love; he was killed by a boar while hunting. Antinou¨s, a favourite of the emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a woodland pool.
‌every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret: Wilde’s editor at Lippincott’s deleted the sentence ‘There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion’ that originally followed here. But that was all: Wilde cancelled the line ‘He felt no romance for him’ which followed here in the typescript.
‌But that was all: Wilde cancelled the line ‘He felt no romance for him’ which followed here in the typescript.
‌really influenced my art: Wilde had originally written ‘You have been the one person in my life of whom I have been really fond. I don’t suppose I shall often see you again. No, there is no use our meeting.’ He cancelled the last sentence in 1890, and amended the first part in 1891.
‌in a friendship so coloured by romance: Wilde’s editor at Lippincott’s cancelled the line ‘something infinitely tragic in a romance that was at once so passionate and so sterile’ in 1890.

CHAPTER X

‌It seemed to him… Or was that merely his own fancy?: Wilde added these lines to the typescript, introducing the first signs of the ‘paranoia’ that starts to develop in Dorian, which Wilde heightened as he revised the book in 1891. In 1891 he also cut some comic business with the housekeeper Leaf, which had shown a more human side to Dorian.
‌Michael Angelo… and Shakespeare himself: Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), French essayist; tohann Winckelmann (1717–68), an art historian who influenced the Classicism of Goethe and Schiller. Wilde made a similar connection between these figures and their supposed adoption of an idealized form of homos*xual love in his second trial at the Old Bailey in April 1895. The prosecution used some letters Wilde had written to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and some poems the latter had published in a journal called the Chameleon, fastening on a line of a poem called ‘Two Loves’ which referred to ‘the Love that dare not speak its name’. Asked if this meant ‘unnatural love’, Wilde replied:

‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and tonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much

misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.’ This speech was met with loud applause, mingled with some hisses. (Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1948), 236.)
‌Fonthill: Fonthill Abbey was the ambitious, if not outrageous, Gothic architectural fantasy of William Beckford, which was built in 1796 and collapsed (under the sheer weight of its extravagance) in 1825, although most of the extraordinary collection of objets d’arthad been sold off in 1822. Beckford’s life of scandalous homos*xual extravagance compelled him to live in seclusion and exile.
‌I don’t go in much at present for religious art: Understandably, for a man who had just seen his own soul staring at him from a canvas.
‌I am afraid it is rather heavy: This had originally been the occasion for a rather poor joke about modern art. Wilde changed it at typescript to a more serious reference to the psychological burden that the painted conscience forced Dorian to carry around with him: ‘a terrible load to carry’; but in 1891 he changed the tone again to the matter-of-fact statement retained here.
‌or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a shred of crumpled lace: Wilde added this final sentence to the typescript, introducing a heteros*xual suggestion to what might otherwise have been too ambiguous.
‌It was the strangest book that he had ever read: This book is sometimes identified as toris Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours (‘against nature’, or ‘against the grain’; 1884). In 1892 Wilde wrote that the book was ‘partly suggested by Huysmans’s A Rebours… It is a fantastic variation on Huysmans’s over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age’ (letter to E. W. Pratt, in Hart- Davies, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1979), 116), and repeated this suggestion when he stood in the Old Bailey in April 1895 (see Hyde, Trials, 130). Wilde greatly admired Huysmans’s novel, which recorded the strange hedonistic, aesthetic and s*xual experiments, and eventual physical collapse, of an aristocratic Parisian recluse. Many of Dorian’s own experiments in pleasure and art are modelled on Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s novel, as is the ‘scientific’ and experimental approach Lord Henry adopts to experience. However, the book is only partly modelled on Huysmans’s ‘breviary of Decadence’. Wilde had originally given this book a fictitious title and author, Le Secret de Raoulpar Catulle Sarrazin, but cancelled this in the typescript, wisely shrouding the book in mystery, hinting at rather than specifying a number of likely candidates.
‌finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes: Symbolism in poetry was never organized into a ‘school’ as such, but centred around the

work of Paul Verlaine (1844–96) and Stephane Mallarme (1842– 98), and the dramatist Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838–89). It was characterized by formal and linguistic experiment, mysticism and the evocation of moods and feelings through the concentration on objects or natural phenomena. Many of the poets and painters identified as ‘Symbolists’ were admired by Des Esseintes, and analysed in Huysmans’s book. Originally Wilde had characterized the work as ‘Deca-dent, but changed this to ‘Symboliste ’ in 1891, perhaps in response to the review that accused Dorian Gray of being ‘spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents- a poisonous book’ (Mason, 65). The terms associated with this curious book –jewelled, monstrous, morbid, poisonous, malady – evoke the key tones from the ‘Decadent’ palette. Arthur Symons, the poet and critic, published a study of these poets in 1893 entitled ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, which he, like Wilde, changed to ‘Symbolist’ when he revised it in 1898, perhaps as a consequence of Wilde’s downfall, when he was called the ‘high priest of the Decadents’.

CHAPTER XI

‌to ‘make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty’: A line quoted by the art critic Walter Pater in his novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), which does not in fact come from Dante (Ackroyd).
‌Dandyism: Dandyism as a code of dress and conduct derived from Regency days, and the extraordinary influence of George ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778– 184.0), companion and sartorial adviser to George IV when Regent. Wilde’s description of Dorian’s influence on young men who would copy his style and seek guidance on the wearing of a jewel or a necktie is modelled on Brummell’s own function in his heyday. Dandyism survived in the bohemian circles of Paris, and was typified by the attitude of Charles Baudelaire, who adopted dandyism in his revolt against bourgeois mediocrity. The dandy’s clothes betoken his contempt for conformity. As a young man Wilde often cultivated dandyism, seeking to cause a sensation with some of the outfits he designed for some of his public appearances.
‌the author of the ‘Satyricon’: Petronius Arbiter, who acted as Nero’s ‘judge of taste’. The Satyricon is a Latin novel which has survived in a fragment and which is attributed to him. Petronius is Des Esseintes’ favourite Latin author.
‌element of strangeness that is so essential to romance: Echoes Walter Pater’s claim that ‘It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the romantic character in art’ (‘Romanticism’, 1876).
‌antinomianism: Being exempt from the law of God.
‌Darwinismus movement in Germany: Versions of Darwin’s theories were highly influential in Germany, where scientists like Ernst Haeckel elaborated on his theories and applied them to diverse areas of physiology. This reference reinforces the theme of

physiological determinism that is prevalent in the novel; here Dorian is his own psychologist.
‌And so he would now study perfumes: Dorian’s various enthusiasms delineated at great length and detail in this chapter owe much to Huysmans’s novel, where Des Esseintes pursues similar, and even more elaborate, schemes and experiments.
‌‘Tannhauser’, and seeing… a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul: An opera by Richard Wagner from 1844. The theme of the poet Tannhauser, who spends a year with Venus but fails to be granted absolution for his sins from Pope Urban IV, was popular with artists and poets of the late nineteenth century, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edward Burne-tones and Aubrey Beardsley.
‌He discovered wondeful stories, also, about jewels… Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful: Wilde added these historico- mystical descriptions (and those detailing his interest in ecclesiastical vestments) in manuscript to the typescript he submitted to Lippincott’s in 1890.
‌dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields: South of Whitechapel, and close to Shadwell, this area had a reputation for vice and criminality throughout most of the nineteenth century. It was also known for its opium dens, and we later learn that Dorian makes occasional trips to the docks to visit such establishments. Originally Wilde had been no more specific than referring to ‘dreadful places near the docks’, but altered this in the typescript, as he did the lines stating that

Dorian would stay in one of these places ‘day after day, till they almost drove him out in horror, and had to be appeased with monstrous bribes’. However, by the time Wilde was writing, Blue Gate Fields had effectively ceased to exist, having been recently cleared away by urban regeneration policies. Like the cabbie who later gets lost taking Dorian to such establishments far from his usual beat, Wilde had but a vague knowledge of this side of the capital. He was probably relying on sensationalist accounts of the few dens in this area that had gone into popular circulation through the papers and works such as Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) (see note 2 to chapter XVI below). On the fascinating history of opium dens in this area, see Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians, pp. 86–102.
‌I think not: This is the only place in the book where the narrator ventures an opinion directly.
‌He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country house…: Wilde’s principal model for this passage, and Dorian’s musing on the role of heredity in determining his life, is Huysmans’s A Rebours, which opens in a similar gallery, and refers to the ‘freak of heredity’ which linked Des Esseintes with a ‘distant ancestor [a] court favourite’. Thomas Hardy made similar use of ancestral portraits in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, also published in 1891. The importance of Dorian’s ancestral portraits and the various contexts which inform Wilde’s use of them is discussed in the Introduction.
‌Prince Regent… Mrs Fitzherbert: In 1785 George, Prince of Wales (later George IV) married the Catholic Mrs Fitzherbert, but the marriage was later declared invalid.
‌wonderful novel: ‘dangerous novel’ in 1890.
‌Tiberius… Caligula… Domitian: A roll-call of debauched and decadent Roman emperors.
‌Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book: Wilde cancelled the phrase ‘and by a picture’ in the typescript.

CHAPTER XII

‌the eve of his own thirty-eighth birthday: In the 1890 edition the date given is 7 November, and his thirty-second birthday. In the later version Wilde gives the events of Dorian’s life a longer duration in which to develop.
‌Victoria: A major London railway terminus (in fact, at the time two stations in one), serving Brighton and the South Coast, and also Chatham and Dover, allowing access to the English Channel and thence to France.
‌the most dreadful things are being said against you in London: In the 1890 edition this had been followed by the line, ‘– things that I could hardly repeat to you’, cancelled in 1891.
‌If a wretched man has a vice…. There was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated: Wilde gave this idea a comic twist in his short story ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, where the eponymous character has his palm read by the ‘cheiromantist’ Mr Podgers, who discovers there the signs of a murderer: ‘How mad and monstrous it all seemed! Could it be that written on his hand, in characters that he could not read himself, but that another could decipher, was some fearful secret of sin, some blood-red sign of crime?’ In desperation Savile murders Podgers, fulfilling his own prophecy. See the section ‘Visible Vices’ in the Introduction for the significance of this belief at the time Wilde wrote his novel.
‌Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?: Wilde had originally written ‘Why is it that every young man that you take up, seems to come to grief, to go to the bad at once?’, but his editor changed this in the typescript.
‌You ask me why…: The details of these various scandals were added in 1891. Originally Dorian refused to answer these allegations, allowing the nature of the rumours to remain in mystery or ambiguity.
‌What about your country house, and the life that is led there?: Wilde had originally followed this line with ‘It is quite su cient to say of a young man that he goes to stay at Selby Royal, for people to sneer and titter’, but his editor cancelled it in the typescript.
‌always a staunch friend to you: ‘devoted to you’ in 1890.
‌bad, and corrupt, and shameful: ‘infamous’ in 1890.

CHAPTER XIII

‌you met me, flattered me: ‘devoted yourself to me’ in 1890; the word ‘ideal’ later in this passage was ‘romance’ in 1890.
‌This is the face of a satyr: In Greek mythology a satyr was a woodland demi-god, associated with lechery and usually represented in grotesque form. Hamlet refers to his uncle Claudius as having the face of a satyr when he contrasts him with his own father, whom he compares with Hyperion, the sun (Hamlet, I, ii).
‌bull’s-eye: A lantern with a thick disc of glass, resembling the ‘bull’s-eye’ at the centre of an archery target.
‌Blue Book: A society directory.

CHAPTER XIV

‌he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward: This idea, which effectively indicates the onset of Dorian’s psychological decline, had earlier been used by Wilde in his study of the poisoner Wainewright, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’. He remarks how ‘M. Zola, in one of his novels [His Masterpiece], tells of a young man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of perfectly

respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance to the victim.’
‌those lovely stanzas upon Venice:

To see, her bosom covered o’er With pearls, her body suave, The Adriatic Venus soar

On sound’s chromatic wave.

The domes that on the water dwell Pursue the melody

In clear drawn cadences, and swell Like breasts of love that sigh.

My chains around a pillar cast I land before a fair

And rosy-pale facade at last, Upon a marble stair.

(Taken from The Works of Theophile Gautier, trans. Agnes Lee, 1903) (Ackroyd)
‌Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde…‘monstre charmant’: A large pink granite obelisk from Luxor in Egypt, counterparts of which are found in London and New York, is set in the centre of the Place de la Concorde at the foot of the Champs-Elysees in Paris. The monstre charmant (‘sweet monster’) is a statue of a hermaphrodite found in the Louvre, not far from the similarly displaced obelisk.
‌Natural Science Tripos: The undergraduate degree at Cambridge, so called because it is made up of three parts. Cambridge has for some time been associated with science – both Newton and Darwin were

at Cambridge – while Oxford has traditionally attracted and cultivated artists. Wilde was an Oxonian.
‌Rubinstein: Artur Rubinstein (1829–94), Russian pianist and composer.

CHAPTER XV

(Wilde added this and the next two chapters in 1891.)

‌chaud-froid: Cold jellied meats.
‌her hair turned quite gold from grief: A line Wilde liked so much he re-used it in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Mrs Erlynne, the ‘pushing nobody’ who appears at this gathering in Dorian Gray, pushes her way into Wilde’s comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), to play quite an important role.
‌trop de zèle… Trop d’audace: Too zealous; too audacious/impudent.
‌fin de siècle: The phrase simply means ‘end of the century’, but carries a weight of connotations about a state of mind (weariness, cynicism and a supposed laxity of morals or standards), and a sense of foreboding; hence it being coupled within du globe, ‘end of the world’, here. The phrase, and the sensibility associated with it, were beginning to enter the popular consciousness at around this time, with commentators attempting to make connections between various social and artistic phenomena, suggesting that these things heralded an impending collapse in standards. Principal among these

was the physician and polemicist Max Nordau, whose Degeneration (Entartung, 1892; English translation, 1895) diagnosed the fashionable classes of Europe as being held in the grip offin-de-siècle hysteria, manifested in their taste for morbid art, Wilde’s included. Here Nordau sums up the fin-de-siècle condition to which Wilde alludes: ‘One epoch in history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is announcing its approach. There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with to-day. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that is worth an effort to up-hold them’ (5–6).
‌Debrett: A directory providing details of the lineage of the British and Irish aristocracy.
‌Inside was a green paste waxy in lustre: The substance here is presumably opium. Opium was widely used for a number of ailments at this time, usually in the liquid form of laudanum, and we already know that Lord Henry smokes opium-tainted cigarettes. However, raw opium, which would be waxy, would either be dark brown (from Smyrna) or reddish brown (from Constantinople or Egypt). A greenish substance is more likely hashish; so perhaps Dorian decides this will not give him the oblivion he seeks, and resolves to visit an opium den.

CHAPTER XVI

‌Once the man lost his way, and had to drive back half a mile: Wilde is employing a common trope for depicting the approach to a low-life neighbourhood, that it is terra incognita, unknown territory. Given that Dorian is in pursuit of opium it is appropriate to quote Thomas de Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) provides an early-nineteenth-century representation of this idea; describing how in his midnight rambles in the poorer districts he often ‘came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, bame the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost believe, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.’ While De Quincey is probably depicting St Giles or Seven Dials, near his Oxford Street lodgings in the West End of London, Wilde is clearly alluding to these associations (poverty, opium and a baming topography) for Dorian’s trip east.
‌He stopped, and gave a peculiar knock: Dorian visits an opium den somewhere near the docks, between Shadwell and Limehouse (areas associated with these establishments). The most famous fictional account of an opium den was provided by Dickens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where the eponymous character, like Dorian, lives a double life of outward respectability and clandestine indulgence in opium. Dickens visited a den which he claimed was near Shadwell,

and so was probably Blue Gate Fields, where Dorian himself keeps a room (see note 10 to Chapter XI, above). Arthur Conan Doyle published the Sherlock Holmes case of ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, which has two characters who lead double lives between respectable suburbia and East London opium dens, in 1891, a few months after the publication of Wilde’s revised novel.

CHAPTER XVII

‌Tartuße: A character typifying hypocrisy, from Moliere’s play The Hypocrite.
‌the survival of the pushing… It is a malady: This exchange exemplifies the polarities that were drawn at the end of the nineteenth century, between ‘getting on’, and the attitude cultivated by self-consciously avant-garde artists. Again, Max Nordau’s Degeneration provides the best testimony to this opposition. Here the principles of ‘social Darwinism’, the application of evolutionary laws to social phenomena in order to explain why the ‘fittest’ (bourgeois) citizens would triumph, was celebrated, and the ‘diseased’ tendencies of unconventional art were stigmatized. For Nordau such aesthetic ‘degenerates’ as Nietzsche, Wagner, Zola, Huysmans, Ibsen, Baudelaire and Wilde ‘must succumb… They can neither adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization, nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against the healthy.’ For Nordau, conventional art was healthy, and

unconventional art – and therefore its practitioners – were unhealthy, and would fail in the struggle for existence. Lord Henry typifies the ‘Decadent’ celebration of disease in opposition to the values which Nordau champions.
‌the Parthian manner: A Parthian retreat is one in which a combatant attacks while appearing to retreat from the field of battle.

CHAPTER XVIII

‌ennui: boredom. In stigmatizing boredom in this way, and using the French word, Wilde is following Charles Baudelaire, who famously prefaced his infamous book of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (‘Flowers of Evil’), with a poem dedicated to the reader. In this he claims ‘ennui’ is the ugliest and foulest of all vices, and rounds on the reader as the scandalous poet’s ‘counterpart’ and ‘brother’.
‌Artemis: A Greek goddess who was fond of hunting, called Diana in Roman mythology.
‌strawberry leaves: A ducal crown is embellished with strawberry leaves.

CHAPTER XIX

(Originally this was the final chapter, coming directly after Campbell had disposed of Basil Hallward’s body (now Chapter XIV). Wilde divided it in two in 1891.)

‌Do you think this girl will ever be really contented now with any one of her own rank?: Wilde may be thinking of a scene from Huysmans’s À Rebours, where Des Esseintes deliberately creates such a situation. In Chapter 6 Des Esseintes attempts to turn a street urchin into a murderer by introducing him to refined vices, and then, when they have become a necessity to him, cutting off his supply: ‘I shall have contributed, to the best of my ability, to the making of a scoundrel, one enemy the more for the hideous society which is bleeding us white’ (Against Nature, trans. Baldick (1959), 92). The amoral Lord Henry has many points of comparison with Des Esseintes.
‌Waterbury watch: A watch of little value.
‌simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations: This paragraph was added in 1891.
‌A face without a heart: Hamlet, IV. vii.
‌some vulgar street-preacher: In 1872 the right of assembly was granted to the area at the north-east corner of Hyde Park, where speakers could express their views in freedom. Speakers’ Corner, as it is now known, exists today and is –inexplicably – a popular Sunday attraction.
‌Marsyas: In Greek mythology Marsyas was a satyr who learned to play the flute and challenged Apollo to a music contest. He lost, and

was flayed alive by the god.
‌What an exquisite life you have had!: Originally this was followed by the lines ‘I have always been too much of a critic. I have been afraid of things wounding me, and have looked on’, but Wilde cancelled these lines in the typescript.
‌You have crushed the grapes against your palate: An echo of Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which ends with the lines:

Though seen by none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst toy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
‌As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that: In l891 Wilde added this refutation of one of the most significant ideas in the novel. Lord Henry’s denial of the dangerous effects of literature is aimed at the critics who had labelled Dorian Gray itself ‘poisonous’, a common term in the repertoire of moralistic criticism at the time. Lord Henry’s contention that ‘The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame’ elaborates on the strategy Wilde employed when he defended the 1890 edition of his book in the press: ‘Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them’ (letter to the Scots Observer; Mason, 81). It also illustrates the maxims found in the Preface concerning Caliban’s rage at the reflective power of art.

CHAPTER XX

(This chapter originally formed part of Chapter XIII, the final chapter in the 1890 edition. The major changes Wilde effected when he revised this chapter were to make explicit the motive behind Dorian’s final actions. He sought to tone down the ‘too obvious’ moral and to make it clear that Dorian rebelled against the burden of conscience that the portrait had become, and sought to free himself from its reproaches.)

‌Was there no hope for him?: Wilde added the next two paragraphs, from ‘Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion’, to ‘Youth had spoiled him’ in 1891.
‌No. There had been nothing more… He recognized that now: Wilde added this realization in 1891.
‌It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace: Wilde added this important sentence in 1891, making it explicit that Dorian sought freedom from the claims of conscience.