The Picture Of Dorian Gray
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
OSCAR FINGAL O’FLAHERTIE WILLS WILDE
was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of an eminent eye-surgeon and a nationalist poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Speranza’. He went to Trinity College, Dublin, and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or ‘Art for Art’s Sake’) Movement. Despite gaining a first and winning the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. He published a largely unsuccessful volume of poems in 1881 and in the next year undertook a lecture tour of the United States in order to promote the D’Oyly Carte production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera,
Patience
. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction,
The Happy Prince
(1888),
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
(1891) and
A House of Pomegranates
(1891), together with his only novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), gradually won him a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his society comedies –
Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.
Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.
ROBERT MIGHALL
completed a Ph.D. on Gothic fiction and Victorian medico-legal science at the University of Wales, and then spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford. In 1997 he became the editor of Penguin Classics; he now works as a consultant and occasional writer. His publications include an edition
of Oscar Wilde’s poems for Everyman Paperbacks, a study of Victorian Gothic fiction for Oxford University Press (1999) and the Penguin Classics edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror
. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He lives in London.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
ROBERT MIGHALL
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1891
Published in Penguin Classics 2000
Reprinted with minor revisions 2003
1
Introduction and Notes copyright © Robert Mighall, 2000
Appendix (Introduction to the First Penguin Classics Edition)
copyright © Peter Ackroyd, 1985
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
9780141442518
APPENDIX
1
Selected Contemporary Reviews
of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
APPENDIX
2
Introduction to the First
Penguin Classics Edition, by Peter Ackroyd
I would like to thank the very helpful staff at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, California, for letting me consult the typescript of the
Lippincotts
edition. A number of experts and friends have shared their expertise with me. My thanks to Owen Dudley Edwards, who I have no doubt relished the opportunity to edit his editor; to Barry Milligan and Matthew Sweet for advice on the opium passages; to Linda Dowling, Lawrence Normand, Merlin Holland, Bill Bynum, Sonia Massai and Patricia Ingham for clues here and there; and thanks to Laura Barber for some good ideas and wonderful assistance over the years. Thanks to Helen and Phil, and John and Jeremy at the outset, and to Michele at the Californian conclusion.
(New readers are advised that this introduction makes the detail of the plot explicit.)
On 20 June 1890 the Philadelphian
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
published Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
as the lead story for its July 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 July 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 difficult 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.
‘… 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 affinity 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 Jekyll 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 Jekyll himself to still walk the path of righteousness. Hyde provides Jekyll with an alibi, indulging in violence and (unspecified) debauchery which horrifies his more respectable side. As Jekyll 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 Jekyll 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’, Jekyll 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 Jekyll’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 Jekyll’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.
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 James 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.
