Picture of Dorian Gray

271 Pages·2006·1.94 MB·English

by  Oscar Wilde

 ’ 
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
O W was born in Dublin in , the son of an eminent
surgeon and a poetess who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Speranza’.
He was educated at Trinity College Dublin and Magdalen College,
Oxford where he founded an aesthetic cult, achieved a double first,
and won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. His first volume of poems
appeared in , and he began a career as a journalist in . In
the same year he married Constance Lloyd, and his two sons were
born in  and .
In the late s Wilde began publishing his critical essays and
short stories. The notoriety of The Picture of Dorian Gray (,
revised ) was swiftly followed by the success of Wilde’s Society
Comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan (),A Woman of No Import-
ance (),An Ideal Husband (), and The Importance of Being
Earnest (). In , following his libel action against the Mar-
quess of Queensberry, he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment
for homosexual conduct, as a result of which he wrote The Ballad of
Reading Gaol () and his confessional letter De Profundis (pub-
lished in abridged form in ). On his release from prison in 
he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in .
J B is Professor of English at the University of Cali-
fornia, Los Angeles. He is the editor of the Oxford English Texts
edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (volume iii of The Complete
Works of Oscar Wilde, ). Other recent books include The Fin-
de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the s ().
 ’ 
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of
Dorian Gray
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JOSEPH BRISTOW
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford  
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First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1981
Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998
New edition 2006
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900.
The picture of Dorian Gray/Oscar Wilde.––New ed./edited with
an introduction and notes by Joseph Bristow.
p. cm.––(Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Appearance (Philosophy)––Fiction. 2. Conduct of life––Fiction.
3. Portraits––Fiction. I. Bristow, Joseph. II. Title. III. Series.
PR5819.A2B75 2006 823′.8–dc22 2006013477
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ISBN 0–19–280729–3 978–0–19–280729–8
135 79108642
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray
derives from the Oxford English Texts Edition of Oscar Wilde’s
novel that Oxford University Press issued in . It would have
been impossible for me to conduct advanced editorial work on
Wilde’s writings without the firm guidance of Professor Ian Small.
I remain extremely grateful to him.
My editorial endeavours remain indebted to excellent resources
provided by the University of California, Los Angeles. Peter Reill,
Director of the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
Studies, kindly supported my research. While focusing mainly on
humanities research based on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century collections housed at the William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, the Cen-
ter also provides support for the use of other major collections
held at the Clark, including the large archive relating to the life
and works of Oscar Wilde. The staff at the Clark––especially Scott
Jacobs, Jennifer Schaffner, and Suzanne Tatian––made a large
number of sources available to me. My research assistants,
Manushag N. Powell, Anne Sheehan, Johanna M. Schwartz, and
Tamara Zwick, helped identify and check a large quantity of
information.
Several colleagues in the UCLA English Department––
Maximillian Novak, Felicity S. Nussbaum, and Thomas Wortham––
advised me on a number of points of detail. Patrick Coleman, of the
UCLA French Department, guided me on a French idiom. Julie
Townsend helped with providing literal translations from French
sources.
After the  OET edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray
appeared, Donald Mead, Chairman of the Oscar Wilde Society,
London, kindly informed me that the manuscript of Wilde’s ‘Pref-
ace’ to the novel had been recently bequeathed to the British Library.
Sally Brown, Curator of Manuscripts at the British Library, gener-
ously allowed me access to this particular manuscript, as well as a
host of others, that belong to the Hyde Eccles collection. At Oxford
University Press, Judith Luna, editor of Oxford World’s Classics,
vi Acknowledgements
provided me with constructive responses as I prepared the present
edition.
Any editor of The Picture of Dorian Gray remains indebted to the
researches of four scholars in particular: Wilfried Edener, Bernard
Fehr, Donald L. Lawler, and Isobel Murray. I have attempted to
acknowledge their scholarship as fully as possible.
J.E.B.
January 
CONTENTS
Introduction ix
Note on the Text xxxiii
Select Bibliography xxxiv
A Chronology of Oscar Wilde xxxviii
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY 
Explanatory Notes 
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INTRODUCTION
Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to
treat the Introduction as an Afterword.
O W’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, made its
controversial first appearance in the July  issue of the popular
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Lippincott’s was a well-established
American literary periodical that, like its main rivals, Harper’s and
the Century, wished to increase its share of an expanding trans-
atlantic market. Any aspiring author would seize on the opportunity
to place his or her work in literary monthlies of this kind, since their
immense sales (running into thousands) provided writers with much
greater visibility and more handsome fees than most writers could
obtain elsewhere. In the past, the J. B. Lippincott Company, based in
Philadelphia, had given pride of place in their journal to American
fiction, sometimes of a racy kind. But in the late s, one of their
editors, J. M. Stoddart, visited London to meet with a small number
of talented literary men who had only recently come into the British
public’s eye. Stoddart arranged appointments with Arthur Conan
Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde; his plan was to invite them
to contribute a ‘novelette’ to his monthly. These up-and-coming
authors duly obliged. Doyle furnished The Sign of Four (February
), Kipling The Light that Failed (January ), and Wilde The
Picture of Dorian Gray (July ). Each of these substantial works,
which stood at the head of a list of contents that included sundry
shorter contributions, including poems and reviews, aimed to broaden
the magazine’s appeal to audiences in both America and Britain.
Stoddart’s offer was attractive to a comparatively unknown author
such as Wilde. At the time, Wilde’s literary career, which he had long
hoped would flourish, was not overwhelmingly successful, even
though he was for rather different reasons a household name. In
, when the young Oxford-educated Irishman achieved celebrity
in London as a fashionable ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, he published a
somewhat derivative volume of poems that the press was quick to
satirize. Although Wilde subsequently earned large sums from giv-
ing public lectures on ‘aesthetic’ topics, such as home decoration,