The Picture of Dorian Gray

About this book

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel. It first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, where it drew sharp criticism from several British reviewers for its treatment of morality. Wilde revised and lengthened it for book publication the following year, adding a preface made up of aphorisms about art that has since become almost as well known as the story itself.

The novel is usually read alongside Wilde’s plays and essays as the clearest statement in fiction of the aesthetic ideas he championed in the 1880s and 1890s. It has lasted because it works on two levels at once: as a Gothic story about a portrait that ages while its subject does not, and as a sustained argument, carried on in the characters’ conversation, about whether beauty and pleasure can be ends in themselves.

The story

Basil Hallward, a painter, has made a full-length portrait of a young man of exceptional beauty, Dorian Gray, and is reluctant to exhibit it because he feels he has put too much of himself into it. While Dorian sits for a final session, Basil’s friend Lord Henry Wotton talks to him about youth, pleasure, and the brevity of both. Dorian, hearing the ideas for the first time, is shaken by them, and looking at the finished portrait he wishes that it might grow old in his place.

Under Lord Henry’s influence Dorian sets out to make his life a series of sensations. A romance with a young actress, Sibyl Vane, ends badly, and afterward Dorian notices a change in the painting. From then on the portrait records what his face does not, and the novel follows the widening gap between his public reputation and his private conduct over nearly twenty years.

Themes and historical context

Wilde wrote at the height of the aesthetic movement, which held that art should be judged by its beauty rather than its moral usefulness. Lord Henry speaks for that view in its most provocative form, and the preface insists that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. The story itself is harder to pin down: Dorian’s experiment in living for sensation has consequences, and readers have long disagreed over whether the novel endorses Lord Henry or exposes him.

The book belongs to the same decade as Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and like that novella it is a late-Victorian version of the Gothic double, with the respectable self and the hidden self split between a man and his image. The settings are West End drawing rooms, theaters, and East End opium dens rather than ruined abbeys.

The 1890 magazine text was attacked in the press as immoral, and passages from the novel were later read out in court during Wilde’s trials in 1895. For the 1891 book Wilde toned down some of the material that had caused offense while adding new chapters, including the subplot involving Sibyl Vane’s brother.

Who should read it

At roughly 78,000 words in the 1891 version, this is a short novel, and the conversational chapters move quickly. Some readers find the middle section, which catalogs Dorian’s enthusiasms for jewels, perfumes, and embroideries, slow going. The prose is polished and the dialogue full of reversals and paradoxes, which is either the main attraction or an irritation depending on taste. It suits readers who like ideas argued in fiction, admirers of Wilde’s plays, and anyone who enjoys Gothic stories with a social surface.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #174 was prepared by Judith Boss, with an HTML version by Al Haines. The record does not specify which of the two versions it follows; the presence of twenty chapters and the preface would indicate the 1891 book text.