This is -- of course -- by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Or, to give him his full handle, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (there seem to be various spellings of these extra bits, so I've gone with the BBC's version).

This is his only novel. It was originally published in 1890 in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, and came out as a book in 1891.

My audio-version was beautifully narrated by Edward Petherbridge, whose clipped English accent is absolutely perfect for the book and the era.


Petherbridge played Lord Peter Wimsey -- who inhabits the same kind of social class as we have here -- in the 10-episode TV adaptation in 1987 (which I never saw)

I was barely 20 when I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray (along with the other bits of Wilde's work contained in Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, and separately, the stories collected under the title Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime). But Wilde has started to stalk these blog pages in the way Byron once did, so I thought it would be fun to revisit it after all these years.


The text is also available from Internet Archive. I love the connections here... This copy -- with the 1931 illustrations by Lui Trugo -- once belonged to the Allahbad Agricultural Institute...

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It's a very powerful story, which probably everyone knows:

Basil Hallward paints a remarkable portrait of an extraordinarily beautiful young man called Dorian Gray. Hallward is more than a little obsessed with his subject, who has become his muse: "I couldn't be happy if I didn't see him every day. He is absolutely necessary to me... I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life."

Lord Henry, a friend of Hallward's, takes the young Gray under his world-weary wing. He's a sort of siren, a magus, a Mephistopheles -- arousing the young man's curiosity, and reeling him in with his disquisition on hedonism and beauty, amorality and desire: "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it," he suggests. "Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful."

Lord H. is an aphorism a minute: "Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances." And he's particularly eloquent on the subject of youth: "When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it... Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful... Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing."

And Gray feels that this man has unlocked for him all life's mystery...

So when Hallward offers him the portrait, the young man makes an unfortunate declaration: "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this painting will remain always young... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that -- for that -- I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!"

Oh dear, be careful what you wish for...

Because that's what happens. As Dorian makes his way through an increasingly dissolute life, ruining many others in the process, he stays young and immaculately beautiful. His picture, on the other hand, takes on all the traits of evil and corruption and perversion.


Lui Trugo's frontispiece

Horrified, the young man hides the painting away, and becomes increasingly obsessed that someone will find it. But eventually, he shows Hallward what has happened to his beautiful work. The artist is appalled, and appeals to him to turn his life around. Gray blames him for what has happened, and kills him.

But he still seems to be leading a charmed life. He blackmails someone into cleaning up the crime; he continues to be received by society (albeit surrounded by clouds of rumour); and he not only survives an attack by the brother of a woman he had wronged, but sees this person accidentally shot dead.

He even attempts to repent. But there's no reversing the damage his depraved and degenerate life has inscribed on the painting. Rather, the vanity and hypocrisy of his attempts at a good deed add yet more grotesque features to the canvas.

What else can he do but get rid of the accursed picture? So he stabs it. The servants hear a crash, and creep upstairs, only to witness a macabre sight: "When they entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the ring that they recognised who it was."

And that's how it ends...


Another wonderful Lui Trugo

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A number of sites -- here, here, and here, for example -- have much more detailed summaries, and reams of useful analysis.

In this post, I'm going to focus on just a couple of elements.

1. The aesthetic

As I was cataloguing my book collection, before I scattered it to the four winds, I noted of my Wilde volumes: "Wonderful stuff, but I needed to take it in small doses. Aestheticism did funny things to my brain."

When I was reading Wilde, first time round, it was in the context of lots and lots of German Romanticism, and its even more rarefied cousin and descendant, French Symbolism. It was very heady stuff. And I was not, I suppose, very grounded. I sometimes scared myself.

So what is this strangely alluring aestheticism? One answer: "During the mid-19th century, the provocative and sensuous Aesthetic movement threatened to dismantle Britain's fussy, overbearing, and conservative Victorian traditions. More than a fine art movement, Aestheticism penetrated all areas of life -- from music and literature to interior design and fashion. At its heart was the desire to create 'art for art's sake' and to exalt taste, the pursuit of beauty, and self-expression over moral expectations and restrictive conformity. The freedom of creative expression and sensuality that Aestheticism promoted exhilarated its adherents, but it also made them the object of ridicule among conservative Victorians. Nonetheless, by rejecting art's traditionally didactic obligations and focusing on self-expression, the Aesthetic movement helped set the stage for global, 20th-century modern art."

Key proponents, inter alia, were James Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Oscar Wilde. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, the art of Japan, and the writings of Theophile Gautier and Walter Pater, the movement eventually diverged into different paths: William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement, on the one hand; Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and Decadence, on the other.

Wilde was a "living embodiment" of aestheticism, and his Preface to Dorian Gray exemplifies much of his credo:

-- "Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
-- "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." (Yes... I think that was what I was finding as a young reader...)
-- "All art is quite useless."


One of the sources of summaries and detailed notes

Throughout, Lord Henry Wotton is also an elegant if unlikeable spokesman for aestheticism:

-- "I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for."
-- "Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away."
-- He says of Dorian: "I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets."

And, of course, the descriptions are just gorgeous... This is how The Picture of Dorian Gray opens:

"The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

"From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes. Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ."

You see? It does draw you in... In, in, in, to strange, beautiful worlds that most of us have no experience of. I still find it intriguing, though much less giddily beguiling than my younger self did...

This is probably also the place to mention the curious "yellow book" that Lord Henry gave to Gray: "It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain..." Its hero, a "wonderful young Parisian", seemed to Gray to prefigure the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. And Gray himself then embodies for others "the true realisation of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. To them he seemed to be of the company of those whom Dante describes as having sought to 'make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty.' Like Gautier, he was one for whom 'the visible world existed.'"

But Gray struggles to free himself of the influence of this book. And under its spell, "there were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful".

The "yellow book" is probably based on an 1884 novel called A rebours (Against the Grain) by J.K. Huysmans (1848-1907). "The foremost exponent of the Decadent school", Huysmans was the direct heir of Baudelaire and Gerard de Nerval, and with A rebours "became the center of a new literary development. He is thus the link between the early art-for-art's-sake writers and the generation that followed him."


This is the 1920 edition, with illustrations by Auguste Leroux

Cuthbert Wright, reviewing the English translation of A rebours in March 1923, writes, in a loftily deprecating tone: "Volumes continue to be written on the English Nineties, the aesthetic period which found its most conspicuous exponent in the late Oscar Wilde, and the single novel by that writer is nothing more than A Rebours diluted into the literary idiom of Oxford University. Personally, we may think The Picture of Dorian Gray very small beer, and its author one of the most overrated of minor comedians, but no less a personage than M. Jean Cocteau has declared in cold print that this novel 'poisoned' his youth. That the aesthetic arbiter of contemporary Paris should have been poisoned by a book which is, substantially, the Magdalen-cum-Mayfair version of another book now thirty years old, throws an interesting light on a literary aspect of our own time."

Anyway, there's lots more on Aestheticism here, here, and here. And Chapter 11 of The Picture-- in which we're shown the way Gray acts out the proposition that "Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation" -- is a pretty good illustration.


My Lady's Chamber by Walter Crane. From Clarence Cook's The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks

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2. The Gothic

Lauren Armstrong argues that The Picture of Dorian Gray "is one of the most quintessentially Gothic texts of its time", and Mathias Juenger catalogues the tropes of Gothic fiction that appear in the novel (these include: A bargain with the devil; a secret room; a doppelgaenger motif; unpredictable outbreaks of violence and malevolence; and scary bits of chemistry).

The language is also imbued with the Gothic in places. This wonderful passage, for example, has Gothic stamped all over it: "There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known."


Venice, 2023. To take his mind off the murder, Gray is reading Gautier's On the Lagoons, which includes the lines: "Devant une facade rose, sur le marbre d'un escalier (before a pink facade, on the marble of a staircase)." He repeats these lines over and over: "The whole of Venice was in those two lines... There was romance in every place. But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything"

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3. The gay

The Picture of Dorian Gray also carries a pronounced "queer subtext". Indeed, it's a landmark work in this regard: "Beneath the novel’s surface lies a deeper, more dangerous truth, one that the Victorian world was not prepared to acknowledge. In an era that criminalised same-sex desire and demanded conformity, Wilde crafted a narrative that whispered what could not be spoken aloud: a yearning between men, veiled in art, wit, and aestheticism... Wilde wove his own experiences and suppressed desires into the fabric of his only novel. Through coded language, complex male relationships, and an undercurrent of obsession, Wilde both conformed to and subverted the norms of his time."

There's a perceptible charge among the three men at the centre of the narrative. Hallward is obviously obsessed with Gray's beauty; he "worshipped him". Lord Henry speaks of him with fascination: "Though couched in aesthetic terms, Henry’s language often borders on flirtation and manipulation."

Some changes were made to the original text, to make it more somewhat more amenable to the mores of its time. But despite the editing, "they could not rid the text of the queer undertones, which eventually became proof of Wilde’s 'gross indecency'... In the context of contemporary readings, the novel offers rich ground for exploring how queer identities were encoded, concealed, and expressed in a repressive Victorian society, and how those narratives resonate with modern discussions around visibility, identity, and legacy."

There's lots more detail in this article by Gabriela Sotelo, who points out all the coding -- flowers, silk, strawberries, gestures -- that reinforces the homoerotic element without ever being specific.


This site gives a wonderful overview of Dorian Gray covers. Here's my favourite (a British edition from the 1960s)

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Although it didn't suck me in and drag me under in quite the way it did all those decades ago, The Picture of Dorian Gray is still a hugely enjoyable read/listen.

And it's possibly more relevant than ever: "Modern readers live in a world of filters, profile pictures, and carefully edited versions of ourselves. Wilde’s story feels oddly prophetic. Dorian Gray is the ultimate 'curated image': he edits reality so that only his flattering surface is visible. The portrait in the locked room is everything he tries not to show -- guilt, shame, damage, fear."

In fact, for all its cynicism and effete exoticism, it's a highly moral tale...