The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

  Some of the most extensive editorial alterations, however, concern not references to homosexuality but rather passages related to promiscuous or illicit heterosexuality. I have already alluded to the elimination of three instances in which Wilde refers to Dorian’s female lovers, Sybil Vane and Hetty Merton, as his “mistresses.” By far the longest editorial deletion in this regard is a still shocking passage in Chapter XIII in which Lord Henry speculates on Hetty’s “happiness” had she become Dorian’s mistress: “Upon the other hand, had she become your mistress, she would have lived in the society of charming and cultured men. You would have educated her, taught her how to dress, how to talk, how to move. You would have made her perfect, and she would have been extremely happy. After a time, no doubt, you would have grown tired of her. She would have made a scene. You would have made a settlement. Then a new career would have begun for her.” That Stoddart or his associates deleted a total of nearly 120 words concerning Hetty Merton, including Dorian’s confession that “she promised to come with me to town. I had taken a house for her, and arranged everything,” suggests that Stoddart was as worried about reactions to the novel’s depictions of illicit heterosexual behavior as he was about its seeming endorsement of homosexuality.32 Anxieties about representations of illicit heterosexual desire also motivated the decision to delete from Chapter XIII Lord Henry’s insouciant comment that his estranged wife Victoria had been “desperately in love with [Dorian] at one time,” as well as Stoddart’s decision to eliminate from Chapter IX Wilde’s reference to the death (by suicide?) of those to whom Lady Elizabeth Devereux, Dorian’s distant ancestor, “granted her favours.” Similarly, Stoddart altered the blunt remark by Lord Henry in Chapter I—“I don’t suppose that ten per cent of the lower orders live with their wives”—to the prudishly out-of-character comment, “I don’t suppose that ten per cent of the lower orders live correctly.”

  Stoddart also oversaw the elimination of anything that smacked generally of decadence. There were a number of changes made to Wilde’s descriptions in Chapter IX of Dorian’s extreme behavior as he pushes to the limit his immersion in a world of sensation and experience. Stoddart or one of his associates altered the phrase “till the people almost drove [Dorian] out in horror and had to be appeased with monstrous bribes” to the less incriminating “until he was driven away,” while deleting references to the “strange love that he inspired in women” and to “the sinful creatures who prowl the street at night [and who] cursed him as he passed by, seeing in him a corruption greater than their own.” Stoddart was especially concerned with taming descriptions of the yellow novel that is given by Lord Henry Wotton to Dorian and comes to exert such a powerful influence over Dorian’s life. To begin with, he eliminated all references to the novel’s title and author, Le Secret de Raoul, par Catulle Sarrazin [Raoul’s Secret, by Catulle Sarrazin], rightly sensing that these fictional names allude to some of the most scandalous works and figures of the French Decadent movement. Similarly, Stoddart muted a number of passages concerning the novel’s hero, Raoul, who serves as “a kind of prefiguring type of [Dorian].” He expunged, for example, Raoul’s imagined reincarnation as Caligula, who “had drank the love-philter of Caesonia, and worn the habit of Venus by night, and by day a false gilded beard.” Raoul’s specially made tapestries, “on which were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom Vice and Blood and Weariness had made monstrous or mad,” came in for harsh treatment. In addition to substituting “Lust” for “Vice,” Stoddart deleted Wilde’s specific mention of “Manfred, King of Apulia, who dressed always in green, and consorted only with courtezans and buffoons,” as well as the narrator’s explanation that Filippo, Duke of Milan (depicted on one tapestry), “slew his wife, and painted her lips with a scarlet poison, that her guilty lover might suck swift death from the dead thing that he fondled.”

  Although previous editors disagree about whether Wilde or Stoddart made the last of these deletions, the pencil line running through the phrase is identical to that with which other words and phrases in the novel were censored, indicating that it was Stoddart or one of his associates who made it. Less certainty, however, surrounds three sentences omitted from the Lippincott’s text that concern Dorian’s discovery of “wonderful stories . . . about jewels.” Two of the sentences—“It was a pearl that Julius Caesar had given to Servilia, when he loved her. Their child had been Brutus.”—conclude a longer section added to the typescript by Wilde, in his own hand, before it was submitted to Lippincott’s. These and the sentence that begins the next paragraph in the typescript—“The young priest of the Sun, who while yet a boy had been slain for his sins, liked to walk in jeweled shoes on dust of gold and silver.”—were left unaltered by Stoddart and his associates in the typescript (as were Wilde’s other references to the effeminate Elagabalus, the “young priest of the Sun”); however, they do not appear in the Lippincott’s text (or in any later published text). Whether this was due to a typesetting error or because Stoddart or another editor excised them in the proofreading stage cannot now be determined. At any rate, these changes—if they were changes and not typesetting errors—were not alterations that Wilde ever had the opportunity to correct. They are restored here.

  Although less dramatic than the edits I have been describing so far, some of the changes Stoddart oversaw to Wilde’s punctuation, spelling, and capitalization transform the reading experience and alter meaning no less pervasively. Taken individually, such alterations may appear minor or “accidental,” but their cumulative effect, on style and mood, can be profound. For instance, Stoddart or one of his associates inserted numerous dashes into Wilde’s dialogue, often where Wilde was content with a comma. The result is speech that appears more disjointed and impulsive. These dashes were inserted not because Wilde’s punctuation is in any way deficient but rather because Lippincott’s wished to make the story’s dialogue more sensational. A good example is the re-punctuation of Sybil Vane’s whispered remark, in Chapter V, “Take me away, Dorian. Take me away with you,” as “Take me away, Dorian—take me away with you.” Here the dash changes the tone from wistful to imploring and desperate. With similar results, Stoddart or one of his associates changed Dorian’s estimation of Basil Hallward’s superiority to Lord Henry, in Chapter VII, from “‘You are not stronger. You are too much afraid of life. But you are better,’” to “‘You are not stronger,—you are too much afraid of life,—but you are better.’” Stoddart’s alteration of Dorian’s comment to the frame-maker Ashton, from “I will certainly drop in and look at the frame, though I don’t go in much for religious art,” to “I will certainly drop in and look at the frame—though I don’t go in much for religious art,” achieves a similar effect. In nearly all these instances, Stoddart can hardly be faulted as an editor because Wilde himself had punctuated much of his dialogue with dashes in order to make his character’s speech and interior thought appear more dramatic. Nonetheless, Stoddart was at best exaggerating Wilde’s own preferred punctuation style and at worst distorting it to make Dorian Gray more consistent with the reputation of Lippincott’s for sensational, impulse-driven fiction.

  Stoddart or one of his associates made significant alterations to Wilde’s spelling, too. The replacement of British spellings of common words such as “colour,” “odour,” “rumour,” “sympathise,” and “realise” (but not “theatre”), and so on, with their American equivalents (“color,” “odor,” “rumor,” “sympathize,” “realize”) is understandable given the primary American readership of the magazine (and in a few instances, it must be admitted, Wilde was inconsistent about British and American spelling). Americanizing British spellings remains a common practice today among American publishers. In one or two instances, Stoddart or one of his associates corrected obvious spelling errors that were made by Wilde or introduced into the typescript by Miss Dickens’s Typewriting Service, the agency to whom the production of the typescript had been entrusted in London. Less understandable, however, is the twi
tchiness of Stoddart or one of his associates about such words as “ribands,” “curtsey,” “reverie,” “spoilt,” “leapt,” and “syphons” (rendered as “ribbons,” “courtesy,” “revery,” “spoiled,” “leaped,” and “siphons”), all of which had precedent in American English; while the alteration of “clenched” to the more antiquated “clinched” (p. 118 and p. 142 below) arguably produces an entirely new set of associations.

  Three of the spelling changes made by the magazine’s officers deserve special comment. First, in altering “sphynxes” to “sphinxes,” Stoddart or one of his associates changed the spelling that Wilde preferred at this point in his career (it was not until much later, in a late draft of his poem “The Sphinx,” that he adopted the more modern spelling). Second, the alteration of “idyll” to “idyl” must have struck Wilde as arbitrary, because he took the trouble to reverse this change of spelling when he used offprints or unbound sheets of the Lippincott’s text to prepare the novel for book publication. Finally, the often-noted alteration, by Stoddart or one of his associates, of Wilde’s “Sybil” to “Sibyl,” a nod to the name’s derivation from the Greek sibylla, connoting “prophetess” or “oracle,” obscures a number of interesting associations. As John Espey has observed, “Sybil” was a common name and spelling in England at this time (Lord Alfred Douglas’s mother was born Sybil Montgomery). In “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” we encounter another of Wilde’s fictional Sybils, Sybil Merton, who “was . . . a symbol of all that is good and noble.” It must be noted, too, that “Sybil” is the spelling found in Melmoth the Wanderer, the 1820 Gothic novel by Wilde’s great-uncle Charles Maturin, which served as an inspiration for Wilde’s novel and which features a demonic portrait and a bargain for eternal youth.

  In an effort to correct spelling or usage, Stoddart or his colleagues sometimes made substitutions that changed meanings and associations of which they were probably unaware. The alteration of “jessamine” to “jasmine,” for instance, effaces a spelling that has a long and distinguished tradition in English literature, from Spenser and Milton to Blake to Wilde’s own contemporaries and beyond. Not too much should be made of the alteration in Chapter VI of Dorian’s memorialization of Sybil (from “a wonderful tragic figure to whom Love had been a great reality” to “a wonderful tragic figure to show Love had been a great reality”), since, absent any editorial markings on the typescript, the change must be attributed to a typesetter’s misreading of Wilde’s handwriting. However, the typesetter’s mistake has been allowed to stand in all editions of Dorian Gray before this one, and its reversal is long overdue.33 Similarly, another typesetter’s misreading—“I won’t hear it!” rather than “I won’t bear it!” (p. 138)—has been reprinted in all previous editions of the novel.

  That Stoddart frequently lower-cased words capitalized by Wilde in the typescript (“Club,” “King,” “Queen,” and so on) deserves comment. In a few instances, these changes will strike readers as defensible, and it is certainly true that Wilde was not always consistent in this matter (varying occasionally between “theatre” and “Theatre,” or “art” and “Art,” for example). But some of the decisions made by Stoddart or his associates seem arbitrary. When revising the typescript, Wilde had changed “genius,” “beauty,” and “nocturne” to the upper case: Stoddart leaves the first two intact, but reverses “Nocturne” to lower case. This is a debatable case at best. The same cannot be said of the lower-casing of “Hedonism,” which, as the annotations to the present edition show, is designed through its uppercasing to contrast with the term “Cyrenaicism” in the writings of Walter Pater (Wilde uppercased the word once again when preparing the book edition). It is true that there is something antiquated, even self-conscious, about Wilde’s predilection—common among eighteenth-century writers—to capitalize seemingly common nouns such as “Hospitals,” “Bishop,” and “Costume Ball.” But this was Wilde’s preference, and readers interested in what is distinctive about his writing will want to know about it.

  In Chapter IX of the typescript, the unusual capitalization of names of various precious stones and ecclesiastical vestments (“Diamond,” “Hyacinth,” “Hydropicus,” “Selenite,” “Morse,” “Corporals,” and “Sudaria”) suggests what Wilde in the same chapter calls the “mystic offices” of these things (see p. 171). That is to say, in employing capitalization here, Wilde wishes to transform, at least on the page, common or material objects into spiritual, mystic, or symbolic entities possessed of a power that belies everyday experience. Put another way: the upper case indicates how such objects “quickened [Dorian’s] imagination” (p. 171). Except for a small handful of cases where Wilde himself was inconsistent, these, as well as all of his original capitalizations, have been retained in the present edition.

  Decisions about such matters as punctuation, spelling, and capitalization are inevitably somewhat subjective, and a number of the changes Stoddart or his associates made in these respects may be defended as improvements.34 But many of Stoddart’s “accidental” changes were arbitrary or driven by commercial considerations, while others had unforeseen and unfortunate consequences, as I have shown. As importantly, Wilde stated categorically to one hostile reviewer that “in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the artistic value of the theory in question” (Complete Letters, pp. 429–430). For these reasons, this edition presents Dorian Gray as Wilde submitted it to Lippincott’s, stripped of all “accidental” changes that can be attributed with certainty to Stoddart or his associates.

  The present restoration of matter excised by Stoddart and colleagues gives us a more scandalous and daring novel than either of its two subsequent published versions. By presenting the typescript Wilde submitted for publication, this edition presents Dorian Gray as its author envisioned it in 1890, before commercial, social, and legal pressures motivated a number of changes to Wilde’s text, including the excision of graphic homosexual content. Wilde once said that Dorian Gray “contains much of me in it”; that Basil Hallward is “what I think I am” but “Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Wilde’s comment suggests a backward glance to a Greek or “Dorian” Age, but also a forward-looking one to a more permissive time. The appearance of Wilde’s novel in its uncensored form, 120 years after its submission to Lippincott’s, is reason for celebration.

  THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  1

  The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

  From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters who, in an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of the early June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive, and the dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.1

  In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conje
ctures.

  As he looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

  “It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry, languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. The Grosvenor is the only place.”

  “I don’t think I will send it anywhere,” he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. “No: I won’t send it anywhere.”

  Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette. “Not send it anywhere? my dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”