by Oscar Wilde
It had become increasingly clear in the course of the libel trial that, as a result of the evidence arrayed in defense of Queensberry, Wilde had opened himself up to criminal prosecution under Statute 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Moreover, at one point, Wilde’s counsel had quoted from a letter, written from Queensberry to his father-in-law, ostensibly about Queensberry’s ex-wife’s “encouragement” of Lord Alfred Douglas, in which the names of Lord Rosebery and William Ewart Gladstone—respectively Britain’s prime minister and his predecessor—were mentioned. By reading from the letter in court, Wilde’s counsel had meant to imply that Queensberry was paranoid and vindictive for suspecting the two high-ranking politicians of covering up a homosexual affair between Rosebery and Queensberry’s oldest son, Francis Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig, who had committed suicide in dubious circumstances in 1894. But according to Carson’s biographer, once Rosebery’s and Gladstone’s names were introduced in court, it was inevitable that Wilde would be tried, in order to avoid the appearance that Rosebery and Gladstone were intervening on Wilde’s behalf to protect themselves.18 Realizing that the inevitable was coming, Wilde’s counsel offered to protract the libel trial by calling further defense witnesses, to give his client (who was not legally obliged to remain in court) time to flee the country. But Wilde declined, and though some hours intervened between the end of the collapsed libel trial and the issuing of an arrest warrant, Wilde was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel at 6:20 P.M. on April 5, 1895, a half-packed suitcase on his bed and a book with a yellow cover in his hand.19
Wilde was tried twice on the criminal charges against him. The first trial opened at the Old Bailey on April 26, 1895. Two days before the start of the trial, the entire contents of Wilde’s family home were sold off at public auction, by bailiffs sent in by Queensberry to collect the court costs awarded him. Around this time Wilde’s name was removed from the billboards and programs of the theaters where his plays The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband were running. The Crown made extensive use of the evidence gathered by Queensberry’s detectives and lawyers, and this time the witnesses were produced in court. An array of young male prostitutes, hotel servants, and others were called to offer evidence for the prosecution—some of it quite lurid in its details. “[P]erhaps never in the nineties was so much unsavory evidence given so much publicity,” Ellmann writes (Ellmann, p. 462). Charles Gill, the Crown’s attorney, also read aloud to the jury Edward Carson’s cross-examination of Wilde about Dorian Gray. The judge, however, took a dim view of the prosecution’s use of literary evidence, and later enjoined the jury not to base their judgment on the fact that Wilde was the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and not to allow themselves “to be influenced against [Wilde] by the circumstances that he has written a book of which you, in so far as you have read extracts from it, may disapprove.”20 During his cross-examination of Wilde, Gill questioned Wilde about another literary work—Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem “Two Loves.” He asked Wilde to explain the meaning of the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name” (now of course little more than a clichéd euphemism for homosexuality). Wilde’s answer provided what is perhaps the most indelible moment of the two criminal trials:
“The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo. . . . It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.21
Wilde’s words were met with a spontaneous outburst of applause from the public gallery. When a hung jury was declared, on May 1, matters might have ended there, with Wilde utterly disgraced in the public’s eye. Even Edward Carson is said to have appealed to the Crown to let up. But the politics of a highly publicized trial demanded the Crown proceed afresh, with Sir Frank Lockwood, the solicitor-general, leading Wilde’s prosecution this time. A verdict of guilty on all counts was delivered on May 25, four days after the second criminal trial had begun. The presiding judge, Justice Wills, called it “the worst case I have ever tried” and imposed a sentence of two years in prison with hard labor, the maximum sentence allowed under the law. Addressing Wilde directly, Justice Wills said, “In my judgment [the sentence] is totally inadequate for a case such as this.” Amid the cries of shame heard in the court, Wilde was reported to have said, “And I? May I say nothing, my lord?”—but Wills dismissed Wilde, indicating with a wave of his hand that the warders should remove him from the courtroom.22
That Dorian Gray was used as evidence in Wilde’s court trials underscores again how incendiary the novel really was and how much Wilde risked in bringing it before the public. I have already indicated how, at his publisher’s insistence, Wilde toned down much of its homoerotic and sexually explicit material when he revised and enlarged the novel. Some of his other revisions at this time were also attempts to deflect criticism—introducing into the 1891 book version more patently melodramatic and sentimental elements of plot; expanding Lord Henry’s witty repartee so that the novel might be seen as a work of “silver-fork” fiction, not unlike the novels of Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton; incorporating material designed to suggest that Dorian’s “sins” consisted at least partly of financial malfeasance and opium abuse; and bringing the novel to a clearer, more conventional moral conclusion.23 The process of purging the novel of its most controversial elements, however, had begun even earlier, before the novel’s appearance in Lippincott’s. When the typescript of the novel, containing over 3,000 words of handwritten emendations by Wilde, arrived at the Lippincott offices in the spring of 1890, it caused immediate alarm. J. M. Stoddart, the editor of the magazine, had commissioned Wilde to write a fiction of 35,000 words, but he could not have anticipated the occasionally graphic nature of the novel that finally appeared on his desk. After consulting with a handful of advisors to determine whether—and if so how—the novel might be published, Stoddart decided to proceed cautiously. He now set about making or overseeing numerous changes to Wilde’s typescript, including the excision of some 500 words that he feared would be objectionable—or worse. As the response by the British press and W. H. Smith & Son would soon demonstrate, Stoddart’s anxieties were entirely justified, at least from the standpoint of what British readers would tolerate. We can imagine that Stoddart, when he learned of the outcry against the novel in Britain, must have felt he hadn’t removed quite enough of the “objectionable passages.” For reasons explained in the Textual Introduction that follows, Wilde almost certainly never saw any of the edits to his novel until he opened his personal copy of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Had he been given the opportunity to review Stoddart’s edits, would he have approved them? Such a question cannot be answered with certainty. It is entirely possible that, as a still relatively inexperienced author, he would have been governed by his editor’s judgment. On the other hand, Wilde, always the aesthete, might have taken the aesthetic high ground, as he was to do with critics of the novel soon after its publication, and objected to Stoddart’s tampering with his “art.” In his life and writing, Wilde was playing a dangerous game of hiding and revealing his sexual orientation.
The version of the novel that appears in this book follows Wilde’s emended typescript: it represents the novel as Wilde envisioned it in the spring of 1890, before Stoddart beg
an to work his way through the typescript with his pencil and before Wilde’s later self-censorship of the novel, when he revised and enlarged it for Ward, Lock, and Company. The result is a more daring and scandalous novel, more explicit in its sexual content, and for that reason less content than either of the two subsequent published versions in adhering to Victorian conventions of representation. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, published in 2011, on which this edition is based, marked the first time Wilde’s typescript has been published, more than 120 years after its author submitted it to Lippincott’s for publication—a fitting, timely embodiment of what Wilde meant when he confessed that Dorian Gray is “what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”
When defending Dorian Gray against the attacks to which it was subjected in the British press, Wilde repeatedly took the aesthetic high ground in his exchanges with newspaper editors, at least initially, before his resolve was worn down and he felt at last browbeaten into addressing—as openly as he could—charges of the novel’s immorality. But early in these exchanges, we see him insisting again and again on the separation of art and ethics (“I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticised from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate . . .”) and asking readers to attend to the artistic merits of his novel.24 His preface to the 1891 edition and his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” also constitute responses to critics of the novel, and in these writings Wilde resorted to the same kind of exalted pronouncements on art that typify his early correspondence with the papers (“They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.” “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” “The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself.” “The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything.”).25 On one level of course, Wilde was trying to deflect criticism from the novel’s more controversial elements (he knew very well what kind of book he had written); on the other hand, these pronouncements are entirely in concert with the aesthetic principles he had been espousing for years. Art and its proper relationship to life are after all the central preoccupation of Wilde’s fictions, plays, essays, and lectures. It is worth keeping in mind, too, that Wilde was a lecturer on art and aesthetics long before his fame as a fiction writer and playwright. An understanding of Wilde’s enduring artistic concerns is as important to a larger appreciation of Dorian Gray as some knowledge of his biography and the circumstances in which his novel was published.
No reader perhaps can fail to appreciate that Dorian Gray is a novel that abounds in commentary on painting and portraiture (Chapter I is an extended conversation between Lord Henry and Basil Hallward about the painter’s portrait of Dorian). Wilde was greatly influenced in his writing of the novel by the cult of aesthetic portraiture that then dominated the transatlantic arts scene and that stands at the imaginative center of his novel (the novel takes its title not from its central character but from a picture or portrait of him). Artistic portraiture was undergoing a major renaissance in the late Victorian era: it reached its apogee in the early 1890s in the celebrated portraits of John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and G. F. Watts. These artists were all early members of the Society of Portrait Painters (now the Royal Society of Portrait Painters) established in 1891. They were less interested in a strictly faithful depiction of their subjects than in a more interpretive rendition, and they often exaggerated their sitters’ beauty or the lavishness of their dress and surroundings. They were greatly influenced by the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who, in the 1860s and 1870s, strove to capture a transcendent, unearthly ideal in his portraits of his lovers Fanny Cornforth, Alexa Wilding, and Jane Morris. Rossetti’s paintings—and those of his fellow Pre-Raphaelites—emphasized an aesthetic of beauty for its own sake, and for that reason Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites are often said to be precursors to the Aesthetic movement and an important influence on the thought and writings of Wilde.
The Pre-Raphaelites were also interested in the decorative arts. In 1861, Rossetti and the painter Edward Burne-Jones joined William Morris’s design firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (later Morris & Co.), renowned for its stained glass, furniture, textiles, wallpapers, and jewelry. William Morris, a versatile poet, novelist, designer, and printer, was devoted to handcrafted work and a decorative arts ideal that took its inspiration from the workshop practices of late-medieval Europe. His firm was founded in response to what Morris saw as a growing gap between fine and applied arts and the shoddy machine-made products then making their way into English homes with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution. He also promoted the idea of a completely designed and unified living environment—which explains in part the wide range of Morris’s interests in the industrial arts. In his emphasis on such an environment and the need to beautify everyday existence, he was enormously influential on Wilde. “Your work comes from the sheer delight of making beautiful things,” Wilde told Morris: “no alien motive ever interests you,” so that “in its singleness of aim, as well as in its perfection of result, it is pure art.”26 Wilde’s early lectures “Art and the Handicraftsman,” “The House Beautiful,” and “House Decoration” owe a clear debt to Morris. Morris’s more indirect influence on Dorian Gray can be felt in the novelist’s careful attention to domestic interiors and furnishings. Wilde often decorates the rooms in his novel according to the principles of the “house beautiful.”
In his letter to the Daily Chronicle of June 30, 1890, when Wilde called Dorian Gray “an essay on decorative art,” he was signaling his indebtedness to Morris and Rossetti. He was making a claim, too, about the novel’s departure from nineteenth-century realism and the fact that its real power lay in its language:
Finally, let me say this—the aesthetic movement produced certain colours, subtle in their loveliness and fascinating in their almost mystical tone. They were, and are, our reactions against the crude primaries of a doubtless more respectable but certainly less cultivated age. My story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the crude brutality of plain realism. It is poisonous if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at.27
“A lover of words . . . will avail himself of . . . the elementary particles of language . . . realized as colour and light and shade,” the critic Walter Pater declared in his essay collection Appreciations, a book Wilde enthusiastically reviewed for the Speaker in March 1890. “[O]pposing the constant degradation of language by those who use it carelessly,” Pater said, “he will not treat coloured glass as if it were clear.”28 Taking his cue from the Pre-Raphaelites and from Pater, Wilde sought to lend color and texture to language by accentuating the rhythms and imagery of his own, often decorative prose. We can see this most clearly perhaps in Chapter IX, the novel’s most intractable and difficult chapter, where Wilde largely abandons dialogue and narrative technique in favor of language that approaches prose poetry:
There was a gem in the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and “by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe” the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep, and slain. According to the great alchemist Pierre de Boniface, the Diamond rendered a man invisible, and the Agate of India made him eloquent. The Cornelian appeased anger, and the Hyacinth provoked sleep, and the Amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The Garnet cast out demons, and the Hydropicus deprived the Moon of her colour. The Selenite waxed and waned with the Moon, and the Meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly-killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. The bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the Aspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire.
Like Le Secret de Raoul, the novel that comes
to exert such an intoxicating influence over Dorian, Wilde’s language in Chapter IX possesses a “curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases.” Foreign and esoteric objects abound in the chapter, and it is a well-documented fact that many of Wilde’s descriptions of textiles, jewels, and musical instruments draw heavily from published sources such as William Jones’s History and Mystery of Precious Stones (1880). Claims that such passages are instances of plagiarism are misplaced, however. Wilde’s creative appropriations from nonfiction works are motivated by the imaginative possibilities of the fact—or what Lord Henry would call the “mystery of the visible.” Wilde wants to render both the perceptual reality of things and their suggestiveness or mystery. For this reason he uppercases words such as “Diamond,” “Cornelian,” “Hydropicus,” and “Selenite,” the unusual capitalization giving them a symbolic value we associate more often with poetry than with prose. Unlike the realist writer, Wilde does not seek to render a familiar world. He seeks to capture the world’s strangeness—to defamiliarize it, as the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky would say, since “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life: it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”29
