The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

  32. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, ed. Gerald Monsman (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2008), p. 62, hereafter cited in text as Marius.

  33. See especially the accusations of “Hedonism” leveled negatively against The Renaissance in 1873 in reviews by Sidney Colvin, John Morley, and “Z,” in Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Seiler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 53, 68, and 75.

  34. Walter Pater, signed review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, November 1891, rpt. in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, p. 84.

  35. Complete Letters, p. 429.

  36. Donoghue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls, p. 192.

  37. Complete Letters, p. 740.

  38. See Osborne, Introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Moral Entertainment (London: Samuel French, 1973), p. 5.

  39. Complete Letters, p. 435.

  40. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions and the Soul of Man, ed. Guy, p. 96.

  41. See Mighall, Introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, pp. xxiii–xxvii, esp. Mighall’s comment that the novel is in part “an allegory of interpretation, and an essay in critical conduct” (p. xxvii).

  42. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” p. 84.

  43. Complete Letters, p. 478.

  44. Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 244.

  TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION

  1. The novel was first published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic on June 20, 1890, in the July number of Lippincott’s. The typescript on which the present edition is based is now housed at the William Andrews Clark Jr. Memorial Library, at the University of California in Los Angeles.

  Wilde was one of the first British authors to embrace the medium of the typewriter as a mechanism for literary production (see Nicholas Frankel, “The Typewritten Self: Media Technology and Identity in Wilde’s De Profundis,” in Frankel, Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s [High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2009]), and there is considerable reason for thinking that the decision to submit the novel in the form of a typescript rests with Wilde alone. “The only thing to do is to be thoroughly modern, and to have it type-written,” Wilde said in 1897 about his prison letter De Profundis; and the “best edition,” he remarked in the four-act version of The Importance of Being Earnest, is “one written in collaboration with the typewriting machine.” While it is true that none of the short stories and prose criticism that Wilde produced in the period 1885–1890 involved the production of a typescript, Wilde went to considerable lengths, from 1891 onward, to have longer works, such as plays and his poem “The Sphinx,” produced in the form of a typescript. In submitting Dorian Gray in the form of a typescript, Wilde might possibly have been mindful, too, of the kind of advice that The Writer: A Monthly Magazine for Literary Workers gave its readers some months later, that “every editor prefers typewritten manuscripts” (Will P. Hopkins, “What Kind of Manuscripts Do Editors Prefer?” The Writer: A Monthly Magazine for Literary Workers [Boston], 4:11 [November 1890], p. 250). The Picture of Dorian Gray was commissioned by Lippincott’s simultaneously with Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Sign of Four, and the fact that Conan Doyle’s story was accepted in the form of a holograph manuscript constitutes important evidence that it was Wilde, rather than J. M. Stoddart, the editor of Lippincott’s, who was responsible for the submission of Dorian Gray in the form of a typescript. As importantly, Dorian Gray is typewritten on heavy laid paper, not the inexpensive, somewhat shoddy, paper that was typical for Stoddart’s business transactions. (Wilde was adamant that “good paper, such as is used for plays,” be used for the act of typewriting, not “tissue paper” (Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis [New York: Holt, 2000], p. 447). This choice of paper was almost certainly Wilde’s alone, since Wilde—notoriously extravagant about matters of cost—was consistently alive to how the very materials of writing affected the act of reading.

  2. As John Espey writes, “we have in the Clark text [the emended typescript] the original intention of the author at a particular time” or “the full text as Wilde submitted it to Stoddart” (“Resources for Wilde Study at the Clark Library,” in Oscar Wilde; Two Approaches: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, April 17, 1976 [William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977], p. 35); and in paraphrasing Espey’s argument, Donald Lawler writes that the emended typescript could reasonably be deemed “the only version of the text with unadulterated authorial sanction,” given that later texts of the novel incorporate editorial changes that Wilde had little opportunity or authority to reverse (“A Note on the Texts,” in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald L. Lawler, Norton Critical Editions [New York: Norton, 1988], p. xi). While Lawler and Espey are correct in suggesting that later texts of the novel incorporate “adulterations” of one kind or another, the typescript upon which the present text is based by no means represents either Wilde’s original intentions or his final intentions for his novel, as this Textual Introduction makes clear. Even if it were possible to recover an author’s “original” or “final” intentions, to suggest that such intentions are entirely stable and self-consistent is to misrepresent how literary works often change, in the lifetime of their own authors, as the result of a combination of factors, including readers’ reactions, published reviews, editorial control, and the author’s own evolving sense of his or her own work. This is especially true of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which met fierce resistance from readers—as well as censorship from its first editor—even before it had seen the “published” light of day. Readers interested in texts embodying Wilde’s earlier or later intentions for the novel are urged to consult the unpublished holograph manuscript of the novel currently housed in the Morgan Library in New York, as well as Joseph Bristow’s excellent edition of the two texts published in Wilde’s lifetime (The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, Volume 3 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [Oxford University Press, 2005]). By contrast, the present edition is designed to clarify how Wilde’s own personal intentions for his novel were seriously compromised by the extraordinary circumstances surrounding its early publication. The copy-text for the present edition, to be sure, represents an expression of Wilde’s intentions for the novel at a crucial moment in its history; but this Textual Introduction clarifies the social and editorial processes whereby those intentions were “adulterated.”

  3. Joseph Bristow, Introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, Volume 3 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, gen. ed. Ian Small (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. xii; Elizabeth Lorang, “The Picture of Dorian Gray in Context: Intertextuality and Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine,” Victorian Periodicals Review 43:1 (Spring 2010), 33. Lorang writes that the articles and stories that appeared alongside Wilde’s novel in the July 1890 number of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, far from being incidental elements, are critical for understanding Wilde’s novel, since “the individual components of a magazine act as discursive, intertextual counterparts, the ideas in one drawing on, engaging, enriching, and complicating or contradicting ideas in another” (22). Lorang focuses especially on the connections between Wilde’s novel and three other articles that appeared in the July 1890 number (two of which appeared only in the British edition): Edward Heron-Allen’s “The Cheiromancy of Today”; Coulson Kernehan’s unsigned story “A Dead Man’s Diary”; and “The Indissolubility of Marriage,” by Elizabeth R. Chapman and George Bettany. For details of Lorang’s argument, see p. 132, n. 3, and pp. 214–215, n. 10.

  4. Unsigned notice of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Scots Observer, July 5, 1890; rpt. in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 75.

  5. H. Montgomery Hyde, letter to the editor, Times Literary Supplement, August 9
, 1974. Hyde is here paraphrasing, as well as endorsing, the views of an anonymous TLS reviewer who, on reviewing Isobel Murray’s Oxford University Press edition of Dorian Gray two weeks earlier, had commented that the changes Wilde made to the novel prior to its publication in book form were “inspired by nothing grander than expediency” and amounted to “censorings,” not “thematic changes,” as Murray claimed (“Not So Fond After All,” anon. rev. of The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. I. Murray [Oxford University Press, 1974], in TLS, July 26, 1974, p. 3).

  6. Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: Perennial, 2004), pp. 82, 86.

  7. See the defense of the Erotic School, published by Stoddart’s close associate William S. Walsh in his Handy Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1893), pp. 332–333.

  8. Bristow writes that “it is reasonable to infer that Stoddart . . . made most of the editorial changes to the typescript” because “most of the insertions that are not in Wilde’s distinctive hand bear a strong resemblance” to known examples of Stoddart’s handwriting (“Editorial Introduction” to The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, pp. lxi–lxii). While Bristow’s inference is true for the most part, the typescript contains at least a few emendations—notably the alteration of “Sybil” to “Sibyl,” of “leapt” to “leaped,” and of “curtsey” to “courtesy”—in a hand that is neither Wilde’s nor Stoddart’s. Moreover, Bristow’s important comment that “where Wilde tended to cancel passages in squiggly lines with a thicker pen, Stoddart by and large scored through passages with straighter lines and lighter markings” needs qualification, since in places the typescript was censored using squiggly lines in a hand that appears to have been neither Wilde’s nor Stoddart’s (as Bristow characterizes it here). For more on the nature of the changes overseen by Stoddart, see Espey, “Resources for Study,” pp. 26–35; and Bristow, “Editorial Introduction,” pp. lxiv–lxvii.

  9. Bristow, “Introduction,” pp. xxxix–xl.

  10. Wilfred Edener’s edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (Nuremberg: H. Carl, 1964) had also reprinted the Lippincott’s text in its entirety. But Edener’s edition, with introductory matter and notes in German, was published for a German-speaking readership. For Lawler’s characterization see Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Lawler, p. 200, n. 1. Like many of Lawler’s textual and critical notes, this note is retained intact in the recent, second edition of Norton’s Critical Edition, edited by Michael Patrick Gillespie (New York, 2007), p. 214. In the new Preface that he supplied to the Norton edition, Gillespie notes that “Stoddart did not hesitate to excise portions that he felt would be too graphic for his readers’ sensibilities” (p. xii).

  11. Isobel Murray, “Note on the Text,” in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford University Press, 1974), p. xxvii; Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 233.

  12. Guy and Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession, p. 233.

  13. Espey, “Resources for Study,” p. 32.

  14. N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 64, 63.

  15. Bristow, Editorial Introduction, p. lxii.

  16. Before being acquired by William Andrews Clark Jr. (in whose library it currently resides) in 1933, the typescript was sold at a 1920 auction of Wilde items previously owned by the Wilde collector John B. Stetson Jr. The sheer number of items listed alongside the typescript as deriving from J. M. Stoddart in the sale catalogue (The Oscar Wilde Collection of John B. Stetson Jr. [New York: Anderson Galleries, 1920]) strongly suggests that Stetson—like Stoddart, a Philadelphian—acquired the typescript from Stoddart directly.

  17. Donald Lawler speculates that the holograph manuscript is a fair-copy of a now-lost “proto-manuscript.” See Lawler, “Oscar Wilde’s First Manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Studies in Bibliography, 25 (1972), 125–135; also Lawler, An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde’s Revisions of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 145–147.

  18. J. M. Stoddart, letter to J. Garmeson, June 2, 1890, J. B. Lippincott Co. Records 1858–1958, Collection 3104, Box 61, Item 2 [foreign letter-book 1889–1894], p. 111, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

  19. See the uncatalogued file of print and manuscript materials documenting the efforts of J. M. Stoddart in 1906 to produce a definitive edition of Wilde’s works, especially the letter concerning Dorian Gray from Ferdinand I. Haber to J. M. Stoddart, dated October 6, 1906, in which Haber reports, “I find several marked differences between our manuscript and the printed text” (William Andrews Clark Jr. Memorial Library, uncatalogued). I have not yet determined whether Ferdinand I. Haber was related to the Louis I. Haber from whom the Morgan Library’s present ownership of the holograph manuscript derives.

  20. W. H. Smith & Son, letter to Ward, Lock, and Company, July 10, 1890, quoted by Holland in The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, p. 310., n. 113.

  21. Ward, Lock, and Company, letter to Oscar Wilde, July 10, 1890, quoted in Hyde, letter to the editor.

  22. See Stoddart’s letter to Craige Lippincott, April 29, 1890, in which Stoddart finds it “strange that Ward Lock & Co. do not expect much success with Oscar Wilde’s story” (J. B. Lippincott Co. Records 1858–1958, Collection 3104, Box 61, Item 2 [foreign letter-book 1889–1894], Pennsylvania Historical Society); also George Lock’s letter to Oscar Wilde, July 7, 1890 (rpt. in “Stuart Mason” [Christopher Millard], Bibliography of Oscar Wilde [London: T. W. Laurie, 1914], p. 105), in which Lock suggests changes to the novel’s ending and a greater focus on Lord Henry Wotton’s character, while commenting approvingly on Wilde’s proposal “to add to the story so as to counteract any damage done” by its appearance in Lippincott’s. Six weeks prior to publication, Ward, Lock, and Company’s misgivings were evidently great enough that they reduced their order for the July number: Ward, Lock had ordered 10,000 copies of the January number (J. M. Stoddart, letter to J. Garmeson, October 8, 1889, J. B. Lippincott Co. Records 1858–1958, Collection 3104, Box 61, Item 2 [foreign letter-book 1889–1894], Pennsylvania Historical Society), and in February Stoddart had proposed sending 10,000 copies of the May number, too (J. M. Stoddart, letter to J. Garmeson, February 25, 1890, J. B. Lippincott Co. Records 1858–1958, Collection 3104, Box 61, Item 2 [foreign letter-book 1889–1894], p. 83). On April 22, the date on which he announced his intention to publish Dorian Gray, Stoddart wrote to Craige Lippincott, “I should think they could use to advantage 12 or 15,000 copies” of the July number. Two weeks later he was forced to confess to Lippincott, “The order for the July number has just been received; it is for 5000 copies and of course at the full price” (letter to C. Lippincott, May 6).

  Circulation figures for the American edition of the July number are harder to come by, but it is certain that in the months preceding the publication of Dorian Gray, Stoddart wished to deceive his British distributors about circulation in the United States: “Be careful in conversation with Ward Lock & Co. not to give away our true circulation,” Stoddart wrote to Lippincott on April 10, “as I have led everyone to understand that we average a circulation of 100,000 copies. I have not communicated the real facts of the case to Garmeson as it might weaken his appreciation of it. Ward Lock & Co. think we are having a big sale here as we are, and it is better to let them be of the same opinion” (J. M. Stoddart, letter to Craige Lippincott, April 10, 1890). The disintegration of Lippincott’s arrangements with Ward, Lock, and Company continued, in the wake of the disastrous publication of Dorian Gray, with Ward, Lock’s order for just 2,000 copies of the October number. On February 12, 1891, Stoddart lamented that J. B. Lippincott could not “make an additional payment” to Wilde, as he had requested, because “the publication of Dorian Gray was, in a comparative sense, a mistake, and instead of being a commercial success it was really in the nature of a failure” (Stoddart, letter to Wilde, February 12, 1891, J. B. Lippincott Co. Records 1858–1958, Collection 3104
, Box 61, Item 2 [foreign letter-book 1889–1894], pp. 180–181).

  23. In both published versions, when Dorian reflects toward the end of the novel on his “renunciation” of Hetty Merton, Wilde poses an urgent series of questions: “Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that?” only to answer them with, “There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell?” This phrasing, as well as suggesting that Dorian is tortured by conscience, implies that Dorian’s renunciation of Hetty might have been motivated by altruism, pity, or fellow-feeling. While it is true that Wilde only hints here at the possibility of good in Dorian, the ambiguity seems deliberate, humanizing Dorian and allowing room for moral debate about the deepest well-springs of his nature.

  Such subtle hedging of the issue had elicited fierce remonstrance in 1890—for example, that “it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health, and sanity” and that Wilde “does not take the trouble to make his moral logically cohere with his subject matter.” In an effort to answer such criticisms, Wilde added the following important rejoinder in 1891:

  No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now.

  The first five sentences of this rejoinder were inserted precisely so as to eradicate the moral ambiguity present in the ending of the first published version and to underscore—as Walter Pater was to iterate upon reviewing the novel in book form—that Dorian Gray contained “a very plain moral, pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse and ugly.”

  Wilde made a second revision in 1891 that similarly heightens Dorian’s monstrosity and levels the moral ambiguity of the 1890 ending. Dorian determines upon “killing the portrait,” Wilde tells us in both published versions, because this “would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free.” Although this motivation seems consistent with Wilde’s comment, just previously, that Dorian strikes the portrait to destroy “conscience,” since the portrait “brought melancholy across his passions” and “marred” his “joy,” Wilde’s formulation allows for the possibility, as the scholar Donald F. Lawler puts it, that “Dorian struck against the portrait in revulsion at the monstrous evil he saw in it and that his action was therefore a repudiation of his past life of vice and crime.” Such a reading is underscored, in fact, by the lines leading up to this moment, in which Wilde tells us, with somewhat heavy-handed symbolism, of Dorian’s determination to “clean” the murder instrument “till there was no stain left upon it.”