The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. The magazine’s editor feared the story was indecent, and without Wilde’s knowledge, deleted roughly five hundred words before publication. Despite this censorship, The Picture of Dorian Gray offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said Oscar Wilde merited prosecution for violating the laws guarding public morality. In response, Wilde aggressively defended his novel and art in correspondence with the British press, although he personally made excisions of some of the most controversial material when revising and lengthening the story for book publication the following year.

     The longer and revised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray published in book form in 1891 featured an aphoristic preface—a defense of the artist’s rights and of art for art’s sake—based in part on his press defenses of the novel the previous year. The content, style, and presentation of the preface made it famous in its own right, as a literary and artistic manifesto. In April 1891, the publishing firm of Ward, Lock, and Company, who had distributed the shorter, more inflammatory, magazine version in England the previous year, published the revised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

     The only novel written by Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray exists in several versions: the 1890 magazine edition (thirteen chapters) with important material deleted before publication by the magazine’s editor, J.M. Stoddart; the “uncensored” version submitted to Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine for publication (thirteen chapters) with all of Wilde’s original material intact, first published in 2011 by Harvard University Press; and the 1891 book edition (twenty chapters). As literature of the Nineteenth Century, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an example of Gothic fiction with strong themes interpreted from Faust.

     In the novel Dorian Gray is the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist who is impressed and infatuated by Dorian’s beauty; he believes Dorian’s beauty is responsible for the new mode in his art as a painter. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, and he soon is enthralled by the aristocrat’s hedonistic worldview: beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only things worth pursuing in life.

     Newly understanding his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied and amoral experiences, while staying young and beautiful; all the while his portrait ages and records every soul-corrupting sin.