The Picture Of Dorian Gray (5 page)

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.John Wysejackson (Fourth Estate: London, 1991).

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

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
(John 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).

Jullian, 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).

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, John, ‘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, Jonathan (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.

Lawler, Donald L., ‘Oscar Wilde’s First Manuscript of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
’,
Studies in Bibliography
25 (1972), 125–35.

—,
An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde’s Revisions of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
(Garland: New York, 1988).

Lawler, Donald L., and Charles E. Knott, ‘The Context of Invention:
Suggested Origins
of Dorian Gray’, Modern Philology
(1976), 389–98.

Mason, Stuart (Christopher Millard),
Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A record of the discussion which followed the publication of Dorian Gray’
(Frank Palmer: London, 1907; revised 1912).

Mikhail, E. H.,
Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism
(London, 1978).

Moore-Gilbert, B.J., ‘Oscar Wilde and Reader-Response Criticism’, in Gary Day (ed.),
The British Critical Tradition: A Re-evaluation
(Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1993), 49–66.

Page, Norman,
An Oscar Wilde Chronology
(London, 1991).

Powell, Kerry, ‘Tom, Dick and Dorian Gray: Magic Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction’,
Philological Quarterly
62 (1982), 147–70.

Raby, Peter,
Oscar Wilde
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988).

Sinfield, Alan,
The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment
(Cassell: London, 1994).

Acton, William,
Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs
, 4th edn. (John Churchill & Sons: London, 1865).

Arata, Stephen D.,
Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Sìcle’
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996).

Baudelaire, Charles,
Selected Poems
, trans. Carol Clark (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1995).

Beckson, Karl (ed.),
Aesthetes and Decadents of the i8gos: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose (Academy
Chicago Publishers: Chicago, 1982).

Chamberlin, J. E.,
Ripe was the Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde
(New York, 1977).

Dowling, Linda,
Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

Ellis, Henry Havelock,
The Criminal
(Walter Scott: London, 1890).

Ellis, Henry Havelock, and John Addington Symonds,
Sexual Inversion
(Wilson & Macmillan: London, 1897).

Eyries, Jean Baptiste Benoit (trans. and ed. Terry Hale),
Tales of the
Dead: The Ghost Stories of the Villa Diodati
(Gothic Society: Chislehurst, 1992).

Fletcher, Ian (ed.),
Decadence and the i8gos
(Edward Arnold: London, 1979).

Flint, Kate,
The Victorian Novelist: Social Problems and Social Change
(Groom Helm: London, 1987).

Frayling, Christopher,
Vampyres: From Lord Byron to Count Dracula
(Faber and Faber: London, 1992).

—,
Nightmare: The Birth of Horror
(BBC Books: London, 1996).

Gaunt, William,
The Aesthetic Adventure
(Jonathan Gape: London, 1945).

Gibbons, Tom,
Rooms at the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary
Criticism and Ideas, 1880–1920
(Nedlands University Press: Western Australia, 1973).

Greenslade, William,
Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994).

Huysmans, Joris-Karl,
Against Nature
, trans. Robert Baldick (1884; Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1959).

Jackson, Holbrook,
The Eighteen Nineties
(1913; Pelican: Harmondsworth, 1939).

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von,
Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886; F. A. Davis & Co.: Philadelphia, 1892).

Le Gallienne, Richard,
The Romantic ’gos
(Robin Clark: London, 1993).

Maudsley, Henry,
Pathology of Mind
, 3rd edn. (Macmillan: London, 1895).

Mighall, Robert,
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares
(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1999).

Milligan, Barry,
Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture
(University of Virginia Press: Charlottesville, 1995).

Nisbet, J. F.,
Marriage and Heredity: A View of Psychological Evolution
(Ward & Downey, 1889).

Nordau, Max Simon,
Degeneration
(1892; English translation 1895; Nebraska University Press: Lincoln and London, 1993).

Spitzka, Edward Charles, ‘Cases of Masturbation (Masturbatic Insanity)’,
Journal of Mental Science
34 (1888), 52—61.

Stokes, John,
In the Nineties
(Harvester-Wheatsheaf: Hemel Hempstead, 1989).

Sweet, Matthew,
Inventing the Victorians
(Faber & Faber: London, 2001).

Thornton, R. K. R.,
The Decadent Dilemma
(Edward Arnold: London, 1983).

Tissot, Samuel,
A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism
, trans. ‘A Physician’ (1760; Collins & Hannay: New York, 1832).

Tylor, Edward,
Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom
, 2 vols. (John Murray: London, 1871).

Von Eckardt, Wolf, Oilman, Sander L., and Ghamberlin, J. Edward,
Oscar Wilde’s London
(Michael O’Mara: London, 1987).

White, Arnold,
The Problems of a Great City
(Remington & Co.: London, 1886).

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
(July 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 James 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.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.

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.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR WILDE