‌Introduction

The Picture of Dorian Gray

(New readers are advised that this introduction makes the detail of the plot explicit.)

‌On 20 tune 1890 the Philadelphian Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine published Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as the lead story for its tuly number. Wilde revised and enlarged this, his first and only novel, for appearance in book form the following April. Hitherto the thirty-five-year-old author had published a book of poems (1881; largely ignored or ridiculed), had had one play produced (unsuccessfully, in New York in 1883), published a book of fairy tales (1888; on the whole well received), and had published some essays and stories in literaryjournals.1 Wilde had reviewed many novels, and discoursed on the art of the novelist in ‘The Decay of Lying’; now was his chance to practise what he had been preaching, and to fulfil the great potential his profile had promised when he graduated from Oxford and set about promoting himself in London’s literary society. The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in the first year of the decade that would see him feted as the most successful society playwright of his day, and then pilloried as the most infamous sexual outlaw of the time, was his first significant and successful major work of art.

Characteristically, this was a succès descandale. His novel provoked, at least in Britain, an outraged response from many reviewers, providing a foretaste of the treatment he would receive five years later when what some believed they had found represented in Dorian Gray (outlawed passions and ‘unspeakable’ acts) were revealed to be part of its author’s life. Indeed, Wilde’s novel, or at least the more ‘candid’ first version, was used by opposing counsel in the first two of his three trials in an attempt to prove that he was guilty of ‘a certain tendency’ believed to be represented in Dorian Gray. In 1890 W. E. Henley’s Scots Observer thundered:

The story – which deals with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera – is discreditable alike to author and editor. Mr Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals. (5 tuly 1890)

The remark about noblemen and telegraph-boys refers to a recent scandal (last mentioned in the press only two months earlier) involving a homosexual brothel in London’s Cleveland Street, and was therefore a fairly direct suggestion that Wilde’s text was unambiguous in what it described.2 Questions of the role of art and its relation to morality, and to the author’s life dominated debate about The Picture of Dorian Gray at the time of publication, in

Wilde’s response to the reviewers, and in a number of critical works published shortly afterwards, and again at the time of his trials.3 They dominate it still, for it is di cult to discuss the novel outside of this framework or without an awareness of subsequent events. But this is understandable. To a great extent Wilde’s text encourages such debate, with its central conceit of a work of art that somehow ‘confesses’ to its creator’s desire, and bears testimony to a life of ‘immorality’ or crime. Some of these issues – of art and morality, of censorship and interpretation, of deception and revelation – will be discussed in this introduction to a work that is very much a product of its times, but which still fascinates readers over a hundred years after its first publication.

DOUBLE LIVES AND SECRET VICES

‘… there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex… They are forced to have more than one life.’ (Lord Henry, in Chapter VI)

Oscar Wilde, artist, Irishman, dandiacal mocker of the standards of his society, was also a ‘gentleman’, and was acutely aware of what this meant, and defensive of his right to this title. His father was an eminent surgeon who was knighted for his services to science, his mother (despite her radical Irish nationalism) a celebrated society hostess. Oscar was educated at Portora, a famous Irish public school, and attended both Trinity College, Dublin and Oxford University (Ireland’s and England’s oldest universities). At the latter he took an excellent double first and came close to being awarded a university fellowship, thus very nearly becoming a member of the English

‌academic establishment. By 1890 he had been married for six years and was devoted to his two sons, lived in the fashionable district of Chelsea and at various times belonged to a number of gentlemen’s clubs (which, with their systems of election and blackballings, were exclusive bastions of the metropolitan gentlemanly idea at the time). When Wilde came to revise Dorian Gray for book publication he made a last-minute change, substituting the name ‘Hubbard’ for the original ‘Ashton’ for the picture-framer who visits Dorian. Why? Because ‘Ashton is a gentleman’s name’, whereas ‘Hubbard particularly smells of the tradesman’.4 More seriously, when Wilde engaged his counsel for his first trial, and was asked by Edward Clarke if he would give his word ‘as an English gentleman’ that the allegations were not true, Wilde assented.5 Wilde would therefore have agreed with the words he gave to Basil Hallward in his tale when the latter asserted that ‘every gentleman is interested in his good name’; and yet, like Dorian, Wilde had for some time been indulging in activities that were illegal and vilified by ‘respectable’ society, and which therefore forced him to live a double life. As one biographer puts it, ‘After 1886 he was able to think of himself as a criminal, moving guiltily among the innocent’,6 being initiated into homosexual acts by his friend Robert Ross in that year. While in 1890 he had not quite abandoned himself to the reckless behaviour he would later term‘feasting with panthers’ (De Profundis), he had had a number of homosexual encounters and identified himself as a member of a clandestine sub-culture.‌‌

The theme of a double life of outward respectability, or at least of caring about one’s reputation, while secretly transgressing society’s moral codes is central to the plot of Dorian Gray. Dorian may emulate Lord Henry’s dandiacal disdain for established pieties, but even his response to Basil’s accusation that he has made Lord Henry’s sister’s name a ‘by-word’ – ‘Take care, Basil. You go too far’ (Chapter XII) – suggests that he does have some regard for his reputation or the opinion of others. As the text states, ‘he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to society’ (Chapter XI). Dorian in fact relishes his ability to indulge in his immoral, illegal or just plain shady activities whilst escaping the consequences. We are told how,

Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture… he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door… and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. (Chapter XI)

And when he appears at a society gathering not twenty-four hours after committing a treacherous murder, we are told that Dorian ‘felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life’ (Chapter XV). The passage describing Dorian’s subsequent trip to an opiumden that same evening effectively conveys his divided existence. At first the cabby refuses to take him so far from his usual beat. Bribed into making the excursion to the docks, he loses his way in the labyrinth of unpathed courts and alleys so far removed

from the well-lit, police-patrolled squares of Mayfair where Dorian lives. This area by the docks to the east of London was terra incognita for many Londoners, where the ruined Adrian Singleton, who was believed to have left the country, could escape from society, and where Dorian could indulge his cravings for opium and obscurity.

And yet, while such passages serve to establish a socio-economic as well as a topographical distance between Mayfair and Ratcliffe, ruling class and outcast, Wilde’s novel in part suggests that such divisions are not rigid or absolute. High life and low life are often conflated in Dorian Gray. ‘Culture and corruption’ (Chapter XIX) are not disparate but congruent areas of experience. Dorian passes easily from an appreciation of ‘the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song’ (the preserve of the rich and cultivated), to relish ‘the coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast’ (Chapter XVI), suggesting a close parity between these realms. Lord Henry makes this explicit when he asserts to Dorian that ‘Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations’ (Chapter XIX). The criminal and the aesthete (combined in the figure of Dorian) stand together in Wilde’s text.

However, Wilde’s novel goes further in blurring the distinctions between high and low, respectable and outcast. For while this

supposed a nity between art and criminality, idle hedonism and actual delinquency, would not shock or trouble a large portion of the respectable and industrious classes at the time (who suspected as much and had their suspicions confirmed in some learned quarters),7 Lord Henry’s rapier wit threatens to indict a much larger section of the social spectrum. The dandy’s epigrams provide a glimpse of the world Wilde would soon dissect in his social comedies, where a guilty past or present is the norm, and nearly everyone indulges in some degree of ‘Bunburying’.8 As Dorian reminds Basil, ‘we are in the native land of the hypocrite’. Therefore while Dorian constitutes an extreme combination of cultivation and corruption (the embodiment of the idea of ‘Decadence’), in some respects this supreme hypocrite is, as Henry puts it, ‘the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found’ (Chapter XIX).‌

‌By suggesting that duplicity is an essential part of existence in late-Victorian society, and that Dorian is an extreme version of an unacknowledged norm, Wilde’s novel resembles that other great fantastic tale of doubling and transformation published four years earlier: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a work which Wilde knew and admired.9 Dr tekyll creates a potion that transforms him into the criminal and bestial Mr Hyde. This potion effectively divides his nature, giving his less ‘upright twin’, as he terms Hyde, release from the constraints of social conformity, and allowing tekyll himself to still walk the path

of righteousness. Hyde provides tekyll with an alibi, indulging in violence and (unspecified) debauchery which horrifies his more respectable side. As tekyll puts it, ‘I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my [i.e. Hyde’s] vicarious depravity.’10 But what is most troubling about Stevenson’s tale is the suggestion that although the means of this physical division are clearly fantastical and the results extreme, the experience of Dr tekyll is far from unique. His divided self, it is implied, was a common experience among members of his class – a world of ‘ordinary secret sinners’, as he terms it. Recognizing that ‘Man is not truly one, but truly two’, tekyll merely contrives the means to make this division concrete. In short, the claims of ‘respectability’ necessitated Hyde. Long caged, he came out roaring.

We must bear in mind that, until its final pages and for its first readers, Stevenson’s ‘strange case’ involves not one person but two. It records friends’ various attempts to understand the relationship between two of the most unlikely companions: what the lawyer Utterson calls tekyll’s ‘strange preference’ for the grotesque thug Hyde. Utterson is determined to discover why his respectable friend is honouring Hyde’s cheques, protecting him from the law, and has even made him the principal legatee in his will; perhaps most worrying of all, he has set him up in an apartment in Soho, a distinctly shady part of town. Blackmail is suspected, and blackmail was a fact of life for middle-class homosexuals at the time. Indeed, the law that eventually convicted Wilde, which was passed the year before the publication of Stevenson’s tale, was known as the

‘blackmailer’s charter’, allowing male prostitutes and domestic servants to extort money from their employers or clients. Wilde himself was subjected to a number of blackmail attempts.11 However, while all speculation about the respectable physician’s relationship with Hyde is brilliantly dispelled at the end in tekyll’s ‘Full Statement of the Case’ (when it is revealed that two people are actually one), Wilde’s novel, especially the first published version, is more ambiguous. Unlike Stevenson, Wilde does not provide a ‘full statement’ to clear up any speculation about why Lord Henry and Dorian should take a house together in Algiers (a well-known retreat for homosexuals at the time), or why Dorian’s ‘friendship is so fatal to young men’. As a consequence it provoked the outraged response referred to above. Many reviewers believed they understood what Wilde was describing;12 and Wilde, despite his bravura and readiness to respond to the ‘prurient’ reviewers with a flat denial of any suggestion of ‘immorality’ in his tale, may have feared that he, like Basil, had ‘put too much of himself in his work of art. Perhaps he had.‌

CODES AND REVISIONS

Wilde loved secrets and mysteries. When he joined the Freemasons at Oxford, part of the attraction was its code of absolute secrecy and the arcana of its rituals. His short story, ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’, tells a tale of exactly that: a woman who surrounds herself with an aura of mystery and acts out an elaborate charade merely

‌for the love of mystery. At the premiere of his play Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), Wilde is reported to have arranged for a select group of friends as well as a member of the cast to be wearing green carnations in their buttonholes, suggesting a sub-culture of conspirators.13 The Picture of Dorian Gray perhaps wears a few green carnations of its own. It is certainly a ‘coded’ text, directing those in the know to understand its hints and suggestions. The name ‘Dorian’ itself is perhaps a coded reference to ‘Greek love’, the historical and pedagogical euphemism for the homoerotic practices that were a part of everyday life in ancient Greece, but which were glossed over or vilified by Victorian teachers of the Classics.14 By calling his principal character Dorian, Wilde is perhaps hinting at the ‘Greekness’ of his relationship with the two older men who agree that he was ‘made to be worshipped’. And when Wilde claimed that of all the characters in his novel Dorian was the one he most wished to be, but ‘in other ages, perhaps’,15 he was perhaps wistfully alluding to the fact that he would be Dorian (Greek) in a Dorian age, an age which sanctioned what, to quote Lord Henry, his own ‘monstrous age’ had ‘made monstrous and unlawful’. Other names have potential significance. At times the historical references with which the text is conspicuously laden amount to a roll-call of famous homosexuals. In one passage, which ostensibly catalogues Dorian’s interest in jewels, there is a reference to the suit of armour which Edward II gave to his lover Piers Gaveston, and to the earrings worn by tames I’s ‘favourites’. Indeed, as we learn later, one of these favourites was Philip Herbert, Dorian’s ancestor, who‌‌

was ‘caressed by the Court for his handsome face’, a circumstance that makes Dorian speculate on the influence of heredity and wonder whether it was ‘young Herbert’s life that he sometimes led’ (Chapter XI); a coded reference perhaps to the fact that he may share similar tastes to this ‘favourite’ of a king notorious for his homosexual lifestyle.

Indeed, one of the most telling signs that Wilde had not been su ciently circumspect in his depiction of male relationships in his novel was the nature of many of the revisions he made when the novel appeared in book formin 1891 (significant changes are here indicated in the Notes, pp. 231–53). Wilde had already made a number of changes in the process of transferring the novel from manuscript to typescript, cutting out or modifying even more explicit material: so he may not have been entirely surprised by some of the more forthright reviews.16 When he revised the book for volume form he went further. In the 1890 version there had been a much greater degree of physical intimacy between the principal male characters. In Chapter I, when Basil Hallward tells Lord Henry about his beautiful new friend, Henry lays ‘his hand upon [Basil’s] shoulder’. This seemingly innocent or inconsequential gesture Wilde chose to omit in 1891. Perhaps he felt he had gone too far, and could not risk being either too explicit or too ambiguous about these relationships. Thus despite defiantly asserting that ‘what Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows’17 in a letter responding to the Scots Observer’s insinuations about the Cleveland Street scandal, he none‌

the less chose to dispel some of the mystery surrounding Dorian’s activities when he revised the novel the following year. In Chapter X of the first version Basil visits Dorian to implore him to deny ‘the most dreadful things [that] are being said about you; – things that I could hardly repeat to you’. Basil then refers to a number of scandals in which Dorian appears to be implicated, and asks him, ‘Why is your friendship so fateful to young men?’ In the first version Dorian declines to answer any of these allegations, keeping his sins vague, and his responsibility for the ruin of young men a matter of readerly speculation. In 1891, however, he answers these charges, absolving himself of responsibility for the actions of others. These turn out to involve monetary fraud and misalliance, and are hardly the ‘unspeakable’ crimes some readers or reviewers might have suspected.

The most significant changes in this respect involve the role of the portrait in the relationship between the artist and his model, where the physical becomes the ideal, and the aesthetic bears the burden of (or provides a mask for) the erotic. This is most markedly exhibited when Basil explains to Dorian what his portrait revealed to its creator, and what he feared it might proclaim to the world. This is how it appeared in 1890:

‘It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time…. Well, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you, you were still present in my art.’

In 1891 Basil’s reference to never having loved a woman, as well as his mad, extravagant and absurd devotion, is replaced by a more ‘Platonic’ interpretation of the artist’s need for his model:

‘Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me you were still present in my art…’ (Chapter IX; original ellipsis)

It is now Dorian’s personality that dominates Basil’s ‘soul, brain, and power’. His adoration or ‘worship’ is transformed into a philosophical quest for a chaste and literally Platonic ideal of art.

According to Basil, this ‘aesthetic’ adoration communicates itself to the painting. In 1890, however, this process was interpreted rather differently. Then Basil explained to Lord Henry that he would not exhibit the painting because he had put into it ‘all the extraordinary romance of which, of course, I have never dared to speak to him’. In 1891 this is changed to ‘some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry’. The portrait no longer runs the risk of revealing Basil’s ‘romantic’ attachment to Dorian (making him believe he had put ‘too much of myself in the thing’, as he earlier put it); it is now merely the physical manifestation of an artistic ideal. Significantly, the unmodified versions of these passages were read out in court in 1895 in an attempt to prove that Dorian Gray was a ‘perverted book’, thus confirming Basil’s lament that art is too often regarded as a mode of autobiography.

MAGIC PAINTINGS

‌While the theme of a young man selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth is not new – as Wilde confesses, it is ‘an idea that is old in the history of literature’ (Mason, 72) – The Picture of Dorian Gray offers an intriguing and highly original treatment of this idea, principally owing to Wilde’s brilliant conceit of the portrait which masks Dorian’s life. This is not to suggest that magic, animated, or somehow revealing portraits were unknown in the pages of popular literature; they had been a stock feature of fantastic fiction since its earliest days. One of the marvellous and terrifying events which takes place in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764; the first Gothic novel) is the figure of Alfonso stepping down from his portrait, a portentous sign that Manfred’s days at the castle are numbered. A little-known (and decidedly extravagant) tale from 1812 entitled ‘Family Portraits’, by tean Baptiste Benoît Eyries, which owes much to Walpole’s novel, also anticipates aspects of Wilde’s own magic portrait.18 In Eyries’ tale, the portrait of the evil Ditmar is imbued with moral significance as manifested in its physical appearance. It was painted by a ghost as an emblem of Ditmar’s crimes, depicting his soul in all its ugliness; and, as in the denouement of Wilde’s tale, it reverts to a more attractive form once expiation for these sins is accomplished. The idea of a fatal correspondence between a painting and an individual’s life – the former being parasitic of the latter–had been brilliantly handled in Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1845), where the

artist’s obsession with capturing absolute ‘life-likeness’ in paint eventually destroys his model, the wife worn out by the arduous sittings for her portrait.

Portraits proliferate in Victorian Gothic and sensational novels, revealing dark secrets about their subjects.19 Wilde’s novel follows suit, featuring not one revelatory portrait merely, but a number of earlier ones which, it is suggested, have some link to their pictorial descendant. Chapter XI of the 1891 version tells how Dorian would visit the portrait gallery of his country house and contemplate the pictures of his ancestors. Each one has a tale to tell, encouraging Dorian to speculate on the ‘inheritance of sin and shame’ bequeathed to him by those whose ‘blood flowed in his veins’. Standing before a particular portrait he wonders whether it was ‘young Herbert’s life that he sometimes led? Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own? Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance, in Basil Hallward’s studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed his life?’ This is a powerful and intriguing suggestion, providing a ‘Gothic’ (but also scientific) explanation for Dorian’s actions. It suggests that he is haunted by his ancestral legacies rather than being entirely motivated by his own personal vanity. His portrait therefore bears not only the consequences of Dorian’s own sins, but is also the culmination of an ancestral line. For as Dorian reasons, ‘man’ was ‘a complex, multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies

of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead’.

Through such emphases Wilde gives a fantastic and supernatural twist to an idea that was a staple tenet of scientific thought at the time. Dorian is invoking the idea of hereditary ‘reversion’, which is explained by the eminent mental pathologist Henry Maudsley: ‘Now and then a person may detect in his own face in the looking-glass a momentary flash of expression of the sort which will be found formal in the portrait of an ancestor… Beneath every face are the latent faces of ancestors, beneath every character their characters.’20 Wilde supernaturalizes scientific belief, providing an occult dimension to the correspondence between physical appearance and character, and the transference of ancestral legacy. This scientific frame of reference is conspicuous in his novel, especially in its revised form, where heredity plays a crucial role in explaining character and motivation. Wilde added a whole chapter in 1891 (Chapter III) to provide some details about Dorian’s immediate ancestry. Here we learn that his maternal grandfather was ‘a mean dog’ who is suspected of bringing about Dorian’s father’s death. His mother, who had married beneath her (thus invoking her father’s revenge), makes an appearance in the portrait gallery in the revised version, thus reinforcing the suggestion that heredity in part explains Dorian’s own actions. Dorian resembles his mother physically (Chapter XI), while the transformed portrait starts to resemble the wicked grandfather: ‘There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he

remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood’ (Chapter X). Physically and morally, Dorian is a product of his heredity. His criminal tendencies derive from his grandfather (from a long line of debauchees), while his intention to marry the lower-class Sibyl Vane suggests that he is in part reverting to maternal type. For as Dorian himself asserts of the Duke of Berwick, ‘With such blood as he has in his veins, how could his record be clean?’ By stressing the role of heredity in Dorian’s actions, making him a ‘scientific’ rather than a moral study, Wilde was bringing the theme of the Faustian bargain up to date, giving it a degree of plausibility (at least with regard to his motives), and diminishing Dorian’s moral responsibility for his actions. As the narrator puts it: ‘There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move’ (Chapter XVI). Such a view is very much in line with contemporary debate on ‘Responsibility in Mental Disease’ (the title of an important work on the subject), and how forms of criminality were a consequence of ‘degenerate’ ancestry similar to Dorian’s.21 For as Wilde’s Vivian would assert in ‘The Critic as Artist’, also published in 1891: ‘the scientific principle of Heredity… has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may not

see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.’22 As Dorian’s portrait is at one point referred to as ‘the most magical of mirrors…[which] would reveal to him his own soul’ (Chapter VIII), it can be suggested that heredity provides a key to his actions and a scientific alternative to the ‘moral’ emphasis which Wilde complained was too ‘obvious’ in the 1890 version of the novel.

VISIBLE VICES

‌This scientific dimension to Dorian Gray suggests that it is really only the impossible conceit of the portrait’s transformation that makes Wilde’s tale supernatural or fantastic.23 The central motif is framed and informed by so much that was materialistic and plausible in contemporary thought. This also applies to the notion of bodily metamorphosis and the physical consequences of ‘moral’ causes, a belief that is fundamental to Wilde’s narrative. Once again, what happens to the portrait is only fantastic because it happens to canvas and paint rather than flesh and blood. The belief that underlies this transference was far from implausible at the time.

Physiognomy – the widespread belief that an individual’s appearance, particularly his or her face, reveals character – plays an important part in Wilde’s novel. A version of this logic is first encountered in its opening pages. Here Lord Henry expresses the hope that Dorian’s extraordinary good looks are not matched by intelligence. For as he reasons: ‘Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment

one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.’ This idea espouses, but also plays with, fundamental physiognomic assumptions. A ‘roman’ nose and well- developed forehead were generally considered positive attributes, indicating the intellect and moral probity associated with the learned professions which Henry goes on to disparage: ‘Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!’ However, Wilde also plays with this notion in so far as the physiognomic and phrenological registers to which he refers were usually understood to be fixed, and certainly not susceptible to the instant modification suggested here. The broad forehead (denoting a pronounced development of cerebral faculty) determined the life of the intellect rather than vice versa. This somewhat flippant discussion of physiognomic ideas of course anticipates the focus on bodily metamorphosis which Dorian (or at least his portrait) undergoes, where actions do produce ‘hideous’ physical consequences. And yet this belief also had currency in some contemporary scientific and pseudo-scientific writings, writings which help to explain the central conceit of Wilde’s ‘fantastic’ tale.

Basil articulates a version of this logic in Chapter XII when he confronts Dorian with the rumours that have been gathering about his life. As Basil reasons: ‘Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.’ It is this logic that allows Basil and

‌others who have heard the rumours about Dorian to be duped for so long. This is hardly surprising, as what Basil asserts was very much an article of faith, and can be found in a number of writings from the period. Basil refers to ‘secret vices’, something that preoccupied medics and moralists throughout the nineteenth century. Nearly all the writings on what was euphemistically referred to as ‘self-abuse’, from cheap pamphlets sold by quack practitioners to serious monographs on mental disease or urinary or venereal disorders, referred to the ‘peculiar appearance’ of those who indulged in this practice. As one distinguished physician records of a young man who had sought his professional help to cure him of the effects of this ‘vice’: ‘He still retains the peculiar physiognomy which to me is very characteristic’; or, as another physician claimed of a similar case: ‘The expression on his countenance was… at once repulsive, comical, and weird.’ These writings suggest that certain ‘immoral’ practices produced physical consequences on the body, signs that the informed could identify. Indeed, as Samuel Tissot, the most influential authority on the subject, asserts of those who are ‘addicted’ to the practice and are exposed to its supposed consequences: ‘When the vail [sic] is withdrawn, the picture of their conduct appears in the most hideous light… it is a frightful picture, and makes one shudder.’24 As Tissot’s pictorial imagery suggests, Wilde’s narrative operates within a similar framework of expectations about certain secret vices and their ‘frightful’ consequences. Again, it is only the supernatural intervention in this process that inhibits what was eminently plausible to a large section

of his readership at this time. His fantastic conceit literalizes the physician’s metaphor – eventually revealing the picture in its most ‘hideous’ light: ‘The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful’ (Chapter XIII) – while the ‘mad prayer’ and the locked attic prevent the public from detecting what would clearly be manifest: Dorian’s sins, whatever they might be.

THE PORTRAIT

The portrait of Dorian may be the vehicle for a fantastic plot device, the repository for ancestral memory, a metaphor or mask for erotic desire, or the alibi for a life of secret vices; but it is also a work of art, and therefore occupies an important place in Wilde’s text and oetime. For Wilde made his public debut as a ‘professor of aesthetics’, and made art, its relation to life and conduct, and its correct interpretation, the dominant theme of most of his writings and public pronouncements. These concerns are explored in Dorian Gray, a novel in which a painting rather than its subject is the eponymous character.

From the first pages, Basil’s painting is the object of interpretation and potential misreading. Basil, its creator, is also its first interpreter. As seen earlier, he believes that his portrait of Dorian actually reveals more about himself than the sitter. As he protests: ‘We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography’; and because he believes the portrait reveals ‘the secret of [his] own soul’ he resolves not to exhibit it.

Dorian’s response to works of art is similarly subjective. When he encounters the curious yellow book which Lord Henry lends him, he sees in its hero ‘a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it’ (Chapter XI). Similarly, when he attends a performance of Wagner’s opera Tannhauser, he sees ‘in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul’ (Chapter XI). Dorian clearly demonstrates the maxim found in the Preface which Wilde wrote for the revised edition of the novel: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.’

Works of art therefore act as subjective mirrors in Wilde’s novel. This is pre-eminently the case with Dorian’s relationship with his own portrait. On one level this is obvious and understandable. After all, there is more reason why Dorian’s extremely lifelike portrait should mirror him rather than its creator. However, the reflection here is more ‘moral’ than physical; it serves as a moral ‘ledger’, recording his transgressions according to the pseudo-scientific beliefs of the day. Dorian, who as we have seen is apt to read art subjectively, is first and foremost a ‘critic’ of his own portrait. When he first believes that the painting has altered in response to his actions he is once again reading his own life into a work of art: ‘Such things were impossible. It seemed monstrous even to think of them. And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in the mouth. Cruelty! Had he been cruel?’ (Chapter VII). Given Wilde’s professed views on art and nature, art and life, and art and morality, it is significant that Dorian’s ‘monstrous’ reading is

detrimental to the painting. Some of these views help to illuminate the central incidents of Dorian Gray.

Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’ (tanuary 1889) is principally a ‘protest’ against realism in the aesthetic realm, disparaging ‘poor, probable, uninteresting human life’, while asserting that ‘All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them to ideals.’ For Wilde, art should be ‘a veil, rather than a mirror’.25 These strictures against bringing life to art find their ‘moral’ counterpart in Wilde’s portrait of the art critic and poisoner, Thomas Gri ths Wainewright, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (tanuary 1889). Here he makes one of his first assaults on the tendency to bring ethics to aesthetics: ‘The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.’26 Such views would become central to Wilde’s thought, being the principal theme of his Preface to the revised edition of his novel, and in many of his works of criticism published subsequent to it. As he protested to the reviewer of the St James’s Gazette: ‘The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.’ For Wilde, art is superior to nature and to life, and aesthetics are always higher than ethics. However, although his most forthright statements on this theme appeared as a consequence of his experience with the critics of his novel (especially those dealing with art and morality), the earlier works referred to above indicate that Wilde held these views prior to its‌

publication. These views also inform his novel, which he called a reaction ‘against the crude brutality of plain realism’ (Mason, 74). This is found in Wilde’s depiction of Dorian and his ‘criticism’ of the painting, for Dorian brings his moral life to the portrait, confusing art with life, and ethics with aesthetics. The result is disastrous for the work of art; what should have been hailed as ‘one of the greatest things in modern art’ is transformed into a horrifying record of corruption, ‘bestial, sodden, and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it…. He kept his youth – that was enough.’ For Wilde perhaps this destruction, a form of aesthetic ‘heresy’, is Dorian’s greatest ‘sin’. As he stated in the Preface: ‘Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.’

A similar illustration of the disastrous effects of life on art, and of confusing ethics with aesthetics, is found in the tragic tale of Sibyl Vane. Dorian Gray falls in love with a beautiful young actress whom he discovers performing in a seedy, third-class theatre. From the outset it is clear that he is in love with Sibyl’s acting rather than the woman herself. As he enthuses to Lord Henry: ‘Tonight she is Imogen… and tomorrow night she will be tuliet.’ ‘When is she Sibyl Vane?’ asks Lord Henry. ‘Never,’ Dorian replies. Dorian intends to ‘take [his] love out of poetry, and to find a wife in Shakespeare’s plays… I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed tuliet on the mouth.’ Sibyl plays all the great romantic heroines of the Shakespearean stage, and while she remains within the sphere of art her performance enraptures Dorian. ‘Life’, in the form of the real

passion she feels for Dorian, ruins her art: ‘‘‘Dorian, Dorian,’’ she cried, ‘‘before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life.… I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came… [and] taught me what reality really is.… I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire’’’ (Chapter VII). Dorian’s cruel response is consistent with his aesthetic code: ‘Without your art you are nothing.… A third-rate actress with a pretty face.’ That night Sibyl commits suicide, and Dorian detects the first changes in his portrait.

However, despite the moral censure suggested by the portrait’s reaction, Wilde discourages such a straightforwardly ‘sentimental’ response to these circumstances. To do this he points to the artificiality of Sibyl and her experiences. As Dorian exclaims to Lord Henry, ‘How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.’ How is the reader, who does read about Sibyl’s death in a book, supposed to respond? Perhaps Lord Henry’s interpretation points the way:

‘… you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some tacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she never really died…. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled…. But don’t waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.’ (Chapter VIII)

Henry is being true to his cynical and amoral self, but he is actually speaking the literal truth, and offering a view that is

consistent with Wilde’s own views on art and ethics. This is not to say that Wilde encouraged his readers to adopt Lord Henry’s amorality in their own lives; but he is pointing to the fact that Sibyl is a literary creation and should be regarded as such. To encourage this response, and detract from the pathos of her death, Wilde makes the scenes with Sibyl (especially in the revised version) as artificial as possible. In Chapter V, which he added in 1891, we find Sibyl living in a fairy-tale world, with a mother who ‘plays’ life as she once played the melodramatic stage, constantly adopting striking poses and acting to an imaginary gallery. Her brother tames is also characterized in this way. As Sybil exclaims: ‘Oh, don’t be so serious, tim. You are like one of the heroes of those silly melodramas mother used to be so fond of acting in.’ Sibyl, who regards Dorian ‘merely as a person in a play’ (Chapter IV), decides that he is really Prince Charming, and echoes Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott when she complains, ‘I have grown sick of shadows.’ This all points to her artificiality as a creation, suggesting that an ‘aesthetic’ rather than sentimental response to her death – for Dorian ‘one of the great romantic tragedies of the age’ – is more appropriate. In depicting the experiences of Dorian and Sibyl in this way, Wilde provides an illustration of the basic tenets he propounded in his statements on art – that art is destroyed by life and morality, and that ethics and aesthetics belong to separate spheres of thought and judgement. His novel is in part an allegory of interpretation, and an essay in critical conduct.

Despite the specific historical references and contexts (scientific, homoerotic, aesthetic) which can help to illuminate many of the themes of Wilde’s novel, providing a background to its reception, revision and subsequent history, it is a book that continues to fascinate readers of all ages over a hundred years after its first publication. For at the centre of the narrative is a study of an individual struggling with the consequences of his actions, and coming face to face with the reality of his ‘soul’. Wilde’s study of conscience and corruption can also be understood in both ‘metaphysical’ and ‘psychological’ terms. Dorian, who emulates Lord Henry’s cultivated cynicism and adopts the course of amoral hedonism the dandy prescribes, nevertheless is compelled to believe that ‘The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and barteredaway.It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it’ (Chapter XIX). It is a powerful and disturbing conceit that Wilde employs to depict this recognition:

… the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all.… here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever- present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls. (Chapter VIII)

Dorian decides to ignore the lesson provided by this recognition, choosing to believe that the portrait would free him fromthe consequences of his actions. But Dorian is never free. Thus despite his worship of and unbridled indulgence in pleasure, he cannot escape from his fascination with the portrait, constantly examining

his ‘soul’ with an obsessional intensity to rival the sternest puritan or the most ascetic anchorite.

He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. (Chapter XI)

‘Conscience’ (whether one reads that in sacred or secular terms) is strongly delineated in the novel. Dorian believes that he has destroyed conscience, but in truth it destroys him. The portrait

had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it. (Chapter XX)

Thus although the central conceit of the physical consequences of certain acts is informed by beliefs peculiar to the time, Wilde’s depiction of how this process affects Dorian has the power to fascinate and chill readers in an age that has discarded such beliefs, and can recognize in such descriptions an outline of what now might be termed ‘paranoia’. Dorian Gray is in part an acute study of obsession and psychological collapse, depicting a mind destroying itself with its own obsessions.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is therefore a work that can be read in a number of ways. It is an enduring parable on the corruption of the soul and a study of psychological collapse, a compendium of the beliefs of its period, and an exercise in literary decadence, conspicuous in its exotica and esoteria, and defining the Zeitgeist of

the so-called fin de si`ecle. Finally it is also in part a comic novel, and in the revised version especially Wilde the humorist (a role equal to homosexual martyr in the public mind today) perfected the arts of epigram and sparkling dialogue before transferring them to the stage. In Chapter XV Lord Henry observes of Madame de Ferrol,

‘She is still décolletée… and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an edition de luxe of a bad French novel. She is really wonderful, and full of surprises. Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief

Wilde recycled this line for The Importance of Being Earnest, a practice he repeated often at this time. Such passages significantly enrich the novel, making it a more enjoyable and durable work of art, of comparable stature to anything he produced for the stage.

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), which also re-uses epigrams from the novel, appeared the year after the revised version of Dorian Gray and launched Wilde’s extraordinarily successful career as a dramatist. At the time of his public downfall he had two plays playing to packed audiences in the West End. His ostracism was swift and conclusive. First his name was taken from the hoardings of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, soon both plays were taken off, and an imminent US tour of A Woman of No Importance was promptly cancelled. On 25 May 1895 he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour; in November he was declared bankrupt. His wife changed her name to Holland, and on his release from Reading gaol Wilde changed his

own name to Sebastian Melmoth (martyr and wanderer), and left England for ever. He died in poverty in Paris in November 1900.

And yet today Wilde’s plays have never been more popular with audiences all over the world, and the book you are holding is one of the best-selling titles in the Penguin Classics series. If Dorian Gray does have a ‘moral’ we can perhaps find it in its final paragraph: the work of art, which has been subjected to hostile moral readings, shamed obscurity, and finally physical harm, remains intact in all its beauty and wonder.

NOTES

‌Wilde’s Poems were published at his own expense by David Bogue; these he reissued with a few corrections the following year. They were not a critical success, being considered pale imitations or wanton plagiarisms of Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Arnold and Swinburne. As Punch put it, ‘The Poet is Wilde,/But the poetry’s tame’. Wilde’s first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, was produced by Marie Prescott, who also played the title role, in August 1883 at the Union Square Theater in New York. It played there for only eight days, but later toured.
‌Similarly, in an editorial note in response to Wilde’s defence of his novel in that paper, the St James’s Gazette for 27 tune 1890 asserted
that this book ‘constantly hints, and not obscurely, at disgusting sins and abominable crimes’; reproduced in Stuart Mason (Christopher Millard), Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A record of the discussion which followed the publication of ‘Dorian Gray’ (London, 1907; revised 1912), 46. All subsequent references to contemporary reviews are taken from this source.
‌For material from the trials, see Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1948). Wilde addresses the subject of art and morality in response to the critics of Dorian Gray in his ‘Preface to Dorian Gray’ (published in the Fortnightly Review of March 1891 and reproduced in this edition), in ‘The Critic as Artist’ and in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, both published in 1891.
‌See Richard Ellmann’s excellent biography, Oscar Wilde (1987),
304. Although Wilde might have been having fun at his editor’s expense here.
‌Hyde, Trials, 38. The fact that Wilde assents to the designation ‘English gentleman’ here is significant; Wilde the Irishman and wordsmith clearly had his fingers crossed behind his back.
‌Ellmann, 261.
‌Wilde’s conflation of ‘culture and corruption’, and the association between art and crime, was very much in line with the views of a number of contemporary thinkers and could even be considered ‘commonsensical’ at the time. For a start, a broad section of the middle classes would not be surprised to see the aristocracy and the
so-called ‘criminal classes’, the idle rich and the underclass, put on a par. Arnold White’s comments on ‘The Sterilisation of the Unfit’ (1886) provide a typical, albeit extreme, articulation of this understanding, describing the two worlds which Dorian inhabits: ‘As luxury and success corrupt the West End, the East is corrupted by want and failure…. Comfort-worship in the West leads to extravagant prudence. Comfort-worship in the East leads to despair and its consequences’ (from The Problems of a Great City). White speaks on behalf of the ‘trustworthy, energetic element of the population – those who long to rise and do not choose to sink’, a class almost wholly unrepresented in Wilde’s novel. Furthermore, the artist was also considered by some influential writers to have many points of resemblance with both criminals and the insane. In the year that Dorian Gray was first published, Henry Havelock Ellis’s ‘scientific’ study, The Criminal (1890), asserted that ‘The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and emotional fact…. They share this character with a large proportion of artists and literary men. [Extreme vanity] marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organization, artist or criminal’ (139). That such views were not confined to ‘specialists’ is suggested by the fact that the Scots Observer pointed out that if Wilde’s ‘assumption of vanity’ (displayed in Dorian Gray and in his defence of it) was sincere it would ‘betoken either the madman or the criminal’ (Mason, 134).
‌Algernon explains to tack (or Ernest when he is in town) the principles of Bunburying in Act I of The Importance of Being Earnest:
ALGERNON: You have invented a very useful young brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable.

… Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury, and if you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know Bunbury. A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.
‌Vivian’s complaint in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that ‘the transformation of Dr tekyll reads dangerously like something out of the Lancet [a medical paper]’ is testimony to its imaginative appeal for Wilde.
‌Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, edited by Robert Mighall (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2002), 60.
‌The statute which convicted Wilde was an amendment to an Act ‘to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels and other purposes’. The principal aim of the Act was to protect young girls from the exploitation of brothel- keepers who ran a ‘trade’ in virgins, when it raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen years. Section 11, however, dealt with intimate acts between male persons, a more precise legal proscription of homosexual activities than had hitherto been enacted. The Act outlawed any and all ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person’, whether in public or private, and carried a maximum sentence of two years with hard labour, Wilde’s own sentence. On Wilde’s experience of blackmail, see Ellmann, 362, 366–7.
‌When a reviewer from the St James’s Gazette, who had hinted at criminal proceedings against Wilde, challenged the author about the sincerity of what he was describing, Wilde claimed that he meant ‘every word of what I have said, and everything at which I have hinted in Dorian Gray’. The reviewer replied, ‘Then… all I can say is that if you do mean them you are likely to find yourself at Bow Street one of these days’ (Ellmann, 303).
‌When asked what the flower meant, Wilde answered, ‘Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess.’ There are some doubts about the authenticity of this anecdote, however. Wilde claimed to have ‘invented that magnificent flower’, chosen for its artificiality, its improvement on nature (Ellmann, 345). A novel written by Robert Hitchens, an acquaintance of Wilde and also a homosexual, which transparently depicts Wilde’s relationship with Douglas, was entitled The Green Carnation. It was published in 1894, but withdrawn at the time of Wilde’s trials a year later.
‌In 1883 the homosexual apologist tohn Addington Symonds privately printed A Problem in Greek Ethics, where he argued that ‘the Dorians gave the earliest and the most marked encouragement to Greek love. Nowhere else, indeed, except among the Dorians… do we meet with pederastia developed as an institution.’ For him, ‘Greek love took its origins in Doris’ (reproduced in Ellis and Symonds, Sexual Inversion, 1897). See Espey, ‘Resources for Wilde Studies at the Clark Library’, in Oscar Wilde, Two Approaches: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, ed. Ellmann and Espey (1977).
‌As Wilde claimed: ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.’ (Letter to Ralph Payne, 12 February 1894.)
‌On these revisions, see Lawler, ‘Oscar Wilde’s First Manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (1972), 125–35; and Lawler, An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde’s Revisions of ‘‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’’ (1988).
‌As Wilde claimed, ‘Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds themhas brought them’ (Mason, 81).
‌Eyries, Tales of the Dead: The Ghost Stories of the Villa Diodati, translated by Terry Hale (1992). ‘Family Portraits’ was read by Byron, the Shelleys and tohn Polidori during their famous residence at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, which resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampire. On the Villa Diodati and what it produced, see Frayling, Nightmare: The Birth of Horror (1996) and Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1992).
‌Perhaps the most famous ‘revelatory’ portrait from nineteenth- century fiction is that described by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), where the portrait of the original Pyncheon reveals a moral and physical resemblance between its subject and his descendant tudge taffrey, allowing the narrative to reflect on hereditary transmission and to warn against repeating the past. A more recent model for Wilde was Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), where a hidden portrait allows George
Talboys to discover the truth about the character of his wife who had faked her death and re-invented herself as the eponymous Lady of the title. Revelatory portraits also appear in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Ollala’ (1885), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and slightly later in Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). On ‘magic pictures’, see Kerry Powell, ‘Tom, Dick and Dorian Gray: Magic Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction’, Philological Quarterly 62 (1982), 147–70; on the role of ‘revelatory’ portraits in Gothic fiction, see Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999), Chapter 3.
‌Maudsley, Pathology of Mind(1895), 48.t. F. Nisbet, a popularizer of scientific ideas, had made a similar observation in 1889 when he discussed the principle of ‘throwing back’: ‘Every good quality and every defect that may have existed in any of our forefathers since the reign of Queen Elizabeth is liable to be revived in ourselves The recurrence of physical character after the lapse of centuries is attested by portraits, but moral character of a normal kind… can scarcely be traced beyond the third generation’ (Nisbet, Marriage and Heredity (1889), 106–7).
‌Henry Maudsley, the major British exponent of what was called ‘degeneration’ theory, published Responsibility in Mental Disease in 1874. Maudsley was a materialist who argued that criminals were largely a product of their hereditary makeup, or were (evolutionary) throwbacks to more primitive forms of humanity. These ideas, deriving from French ‘alienists’ of the mid-nineteenth century, came
into prominence in its last decades. Maudsley published articles on ‘Heredity in Health and Disease’ in the Fortnightly Review (1886), the same journal in which a number of Wilde’s own essays appeared. Wilde himself was diagnosed as a formof‘degenerate’ when he appeared in Max Nordau’s great pantheon of the pathological, Degeneration (1892), which appeared in English in 1895 and helped provide a diagnostic sub-text to journalistic comment on Wilde’s case at the Old Bailey, despite the fact that Nordau had not even hinted at Wilde’s sexuality, at least not in the first edition.
‌‘The Critic as Artist’, Complete Works (1994), 1137.
‌And even this aspect is subjected to scientific scrutiny by Dorian. As he reasons: ‘Had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution? Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things?’ (Chapter VIII).
‌The first quote is from Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1865), 67; the second from Spitzka, ‘Cases of Masturbation (Mastur-batic Insanity)’ (1888), 34, 52; the third from Tiss ot, A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism (1760; 1832), 51, 86. On this literature, its ‘Gothic’ elements and its possible contribution to Dorian Gray, see Mighall (1999), Chapter 5.
‌Complete Works (1994), 1082, 1091.
‌ibid., 1106.

‌CHRONOLOGY‌

1854	Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilde born (he added ‘Wills’ in the 1870s) on 16 October at 21 Westland Row, Dublin.
1855	His family move to 1 Merrion Square in Dublin.
1857	Birth of Isola Wilde, Oscar’s sister.
1858	Birth of Constance Mary Lloyd, Wilde’s future wife.
1864	Wilde’s father is knighted following his appointment as Queen Victoria’s ‘Surgeon Oculist’ the previous year. Wilde attends Portora Royal School, Enniskillen.
1867	Death of Isola Wilde. 1871– 4 At Trinity College, Dublin, reading Classics and Ancient History.

1874– At Magdalen College, Oxford, reading Classics and Ancient

8 History (‘Greats’).

1875 Travels in Italy with his tutor from Dublin, t. P. Mahaffy. 1876 First poems published in Dublin University Magazine. Death of

Sir William Wilde.

1877 Further travels in Italy, and in Greece.

1878 Wins the Newdigate Prize for Poetry in Oxford with ‘Ravenna’. Takes a double first from Oxford. Moves to

London and starts to establish himself as a popularizer of Aestheticism.

1879 Meets Constance Lloyd.

1881 Poemspublished at his own expense; not well received critically.

1882 Lecture tour of North America, speaking on art, aesthetics and decoration. Revised edition of Poems published.

1883 His first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists performed in New York; it is not a success.

1884 Marries Constance Lloyd in London, honeymoon in Paris and Dieppe.

1885 Moves into 16 Tite Street, Chelsea. Cyril Wilde born. 1886 Vyvyan Wilde born. Meets Robert Ross, to become his

lifelong friend and, in 1897, his literary executor. Ross might

have been Wilde’s first homosexual lover.

1887 Becomes the editor of Lady’s World: A Magazine of Fashion and Society, and changes its name to Woman’s World.

Publication of‘The Canterville Ghost’ and ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’.

1888 The Happy Prince and Other Tales published; on the whole well-received.

1889 ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (on the forger and poisoner Thomas Gri ths Wainewright), ‘The Decay of Lying’ (a dialogue in praise of artifice over nature and art over morality), ‘The

Portrait of Mr W.H.’ (on the supposed identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets) all published.

1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray published in the tuly number of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine; fierce debate between Wilde and hostile critics ensues. ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’ (later revised and included in Intentions as ‘The Critic as Artist’) published.

1891 Wilde’s first meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’). The Duchess of Padua performed in New York. ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and ‘Preface to Dorian Gray’ published in February and March in the Fortnightly Review. The revised and extended edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray published by Ward, Lock and Company in April. Intentions (collection of critical essays), Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates (fairy-tales) published.

1892 Lady Windermere’s Fan performed at St tames’s Theatre, London (February to tuly).

1893 Salome published in French. A Woman of No Importance

performed at Haymarket Theatre, London.

1894 Salome published in English with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley; Douglas is the dedicatee. The Sphinx, a poem with illustrations by Charles Ricketts, published.

1895 An Ideal Husband opens at Haymarket Theatre in tanuary; it is followed by the hugely successful The Importance of Being Earnest at St tames’s Theatre in February. On 28 February

Wilde returns to his club, the Albemarle, to find a card from Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accusing Wilde of ‘posing as a somdomite’ (sodomite). Wilde quickly takes out an action accusing Queensberry of criminal libel. In April Queensberry appears at the Old Bailey and is acquitted, following a successful plea of justification on the basis that Wilde was guilty of homosexual behaviour. Wilde is immediately arrested, after ignoring his friends’ advice to flee the country. In May he is tried twice at the Old Bailey, and on 25 May sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour for ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person’. In tuly he is sent to Wandsworth Prison. In November he is declared bankrupt, and shortly afterwards transferred to Reading Gaol.

1896 Death of Wilde’s mother, Lady tane Francesca Wilde (‘Speranza’).

1897 Wilde writes the long letter to Douglas that would be later entitled ‘De Profundis’. In May Wilde is released from prison, and sails for Dieppe by the night ferry. He never returns to Britain.

1898 The Ballad of Reading Gaol published pseudonymously as C.3.3, Wilde’s cell-number in Reading Gaol. Wilde moves to Paris in February. Constance Wilde (who had by now changed her name to Holland) dies.

1899 Willie (b. 1852), Wilde’s elder brother, dies.

1900 In tanuary Queensberry dies. By tuly Wilde himself is very ill with a blood infection. On 29 November he is received into the Roman Catholic Church, and dies on 30 November in the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris.

1905 An abridged version of De Profundis, edited by Robert Ross, published.

1908 The Collected Works, edited by Robert Ross, are published.

‌/URTHER READING‌

Editions and Collections

Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 edition with 1891), ed. Donald L. Lawler (W. W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1987).

—, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Harper Collins: Glasgow, 1994).

—, The Uncollected Oscar Wilde, ed.tohn Wysejackson (Fourth Estate: London, 1991).

—, The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde, ed. Owen Dudley Edwards (Barrie &tenkins: London, 1989).

—, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Richard Gave (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2000).

—, Nothing Except My Genius, ed. Alastair Rolfe (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1997).

Letters and Biographies

Hart-Davies, Rupert (ed.), Letters of Oscar Wilde (Rupert Hart- Davies: London, 1962).

—, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1979).

—, More Letters of Oscar Wilde (tohn Murray: London, 1985).

Holland, Merlin and Rupert Hart-Davies, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (Fourth Estate: London, 2000).

Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1987). Harris, Frank, Oscar Wilde (Constable & Co.: London, 1938). tullian, Philippe, Oscar Wilde (Paladin: London, 1971).

Montgomery Hyde, H., The Trials of Oscar Wilde (William Hodge & Co.: London, 1948).

Pearson, Hesketh, The Life of Oscar Wilde (Methuen & Co.: London, 1954).

Roditi, Edouard, Oscar Wilde (New Directions: New York, 1986).

Criticism

Bartlett, Neil, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde

(Serpent’s Tail: London, 1988).

Beckson, Karl (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (Routledge: London, 1970).

—, An Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia (AMS: Ann Arbor, Mich., 1998). Bloom, Harold (ed.), Oscar Wilde (Chelsea: New York, 1985).

Bowlby, Rachel, ‘Promoting Dorian Gray’, Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987), 147–63.

Cohen, Ed, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (Routledge: New York and London, 1993).

Danson, Lawrence, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism

(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1997).

Espey, tohn, ‘Resources for Wilde Studies at the Clark Library’, in Richard Ellmann andjohn Espey (eds.), Oscar Wilde, Two Approaches: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library: Los Angeles, Calif, 1977).

Gagnier, Regenia, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Scolar Press: Aldershot, 1986).

Goodman, tonathan (ed.), The Oscar Wilde File (a collection of newspaper accounts of Wilde’s trials) (Allison & Busby: London, 1988).

Hassler, Terri A., ‘The Physiological Determinism Debate in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Victorian Newsletter 84 (1993), 31–5.

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‌A NOTE ON THE TEXT‌

The text reproduced here is the first book edition (i volume), published by Ward, Lock and Co. in 1891. Important textual variants between this and the version published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (tuly issue) the previous year are given in the Notes (the significance of these changes is discussed in the Introduction). The revised version of the novel was both ‘censored’ and indisputably improved. The most significant changes involve the degree of intimacy displayed by the male characters. In 1890 Basil tells Henry how he ‘worships’ Dorian, and begs him not to ‘take away the one person that makes life absolutely lovely to me’. This becomes ‘the one person who gives my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him’. Art rather than love is the principal concern of the Basil Hallward we meet in 1891.

Wilde also extended and enriched the novel in 1891. The original thirteen chapters became twenty, the final chapter being divided in two in 1891. The addition of chapters and long passages involved the fleshing out of Dorian as a character, providing details about his ancestry (Chapter III), and making his psychological collapse more prolonged and more convincing. It also specified some of his shady activities, such as his trip to the opiumden in

Chapter XVII. Wilde added the character of tames Vane, Dorian’s failed avenger, a plot line that increases the suspenseful incident of Wilde’s sensational tale. He also greatly developed the passages of social comedy where Lord Henry displays his verbal pyrotechnics to great effect, making it a much funnier novel.