The Picture of Dorian Gray (Annotated)

With a Critical Companion | Oscar Wilde | Erato Press

Oscar Wilde wrote the only novel that could have destroyed him — and then revised it to conceal what it said. Both versions are here.

The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared first in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 and was immediately denounced as immoral, unclean, and fit only for outlawed classes. The critics were not wrong about what they were reading. A beautiful young man who trades his soul to preserve his youth. A painter who loves him with a devotion that dares not speak its name. A lord who corrupts him with pure aestheticism. Beneath the surface of a gothic fable about vanity and corruption runs something the London of 1890 could recognize but not name.

For the 1891 book edition, Wilde softened the language, removed passages, added the famous Preface. The revision is an act of self-censorship performed under the shadow of the Labouchere Amendment — the same law that would send Wilde to Reading Gaol four years later. This edition follows the 1891 text, and the critical companion addresses both versions directly: what changed, why it changed, and what the changes reveal.

Dorian Gray — seventeen when Basil paints his portrait, ageless forever after, watching the canvas accumulate every sin he commits while his face remains untouched; the novel's central horror is not supernatural but psychological.

Basil Hallward — the painter who cannot stop painting the same face; whose devotion is the engine of Dorian's destruction and his own; who understands what the portrait means before anyone else does.

Lord Henry Wotton — the aesthete who argues that the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it; who corrupts Dorian with pure philosophy and bears none of the consequences.

The Portrait — which ages as Dorian does not; which records every cruelty, every sin, every moral failure; which is both the novel's central metaphor and its most disturbing character.

✦ The complete, unabridged text of The Picture of Dorian Gray following the 1891 edition — every chapter, Wilde's Preface included — together with a full Critical Companion by Henry Bugalho.

This edition also includes:

✦ On Dorian Gray: A Critical Essay — a sustained reading of the novel: the aestheticism that is also moral philosophy, the homoeroticism the text could not directly name, the relationship between the 1890 and 1891 versions, and what Wilde was attempting that Victorian England could not allow

✦ Historical Context — the London of 1890: the Labouchere Amendment, the aestheticism movement, the trial of Oscar Wilde, and the social conditions that made the novel both necessary and dangerous

✦ Oscar Wilde: A Life — from Dublin to Oxford to London's drawing rooms to Reading Gaol to Paris; a full biographical account of one of the most brilliant and catastrophically destroyed careers in English literature

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Gothic fiction and the Victorian dark imagination — at its most elegant and most subversive

✦ Dark romance and the literature of obsession, corruption, and beautiful destruction

✦ Classic English literature read without evasion — including what it could not say directly

✦ Oscar Wilde's complete achievement — and the novel that made it impossible to look away

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."