The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

  Pine, Richard. The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.

  Powell, Kerry. “Oscar Wilde ‘Acting’: The Medium as Message in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Dalhousie Review 58 (1978): 104–115.

  ———. “Tom, Dick, and Dorian Gray: Magic-Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction.” Philological Quarterly 62, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 147–170.

  ———. “Who Was Basil Hallward?” English Language Notes 24, no. 1 (September 1986): 84–91.

  ———. Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre and Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  Raby, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  Ragland-Sutherland, Ellie. “The Phenomenon of Aging in The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Lacanian View.” In Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis, ed. K. M. Woodward and M. M. Schwartz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

  Ransome, Arthur. Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study. 1912; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1971.

  Riquelme, John Paul. “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 610–631.

  Roden, Frederick S., ed. Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

  Roditi, Edouard. Oscar Wilde. 1947; rev. ed. New York: New Directions, 1986.

  Ross, Iain Alexander. “The New Hellenism: Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece.” D.Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 2008.

  Salamensky, S. I., ed. Oscar Wilde, Jews and the Fin-de-Special issue Siècle. of Oscholars (Summer 2010). Available at www.oscholars.com/TO/Specials/Wilde/ToC.htm.

  Sammells, Neil. Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde. New York: Longman, 2000.

  Sandulescu, George, ed. Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Gerard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994.

  San Juan, Epifanio. The Art of Oscar Wilde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.

  Sanyal, Arundhati. “Taboo in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In Bloom’s Literary Themes: The Taboo, ed. and intro. Harold Bloom, vol. ed. Blake Hobby, 147–156. New York: Infobase, 2010.

  Sato, Tomoko, and Lionel Lambourne, eds. The Wilde Years: Oscar Wilde and the Art of His Time. London: Barbican Art Galleries, 2000.

  Satzinger, Christa. The French Influences on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1994.

  Schaffer, Talia. “The Dandy in the House: Ouida and the Origin of the Aesthetic Novel.” In Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.

  ———. “The Origins of the Aesthetic Novel: Ouida, Wilde, and the Popular Romance.” In Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Bristow.

  Seagroatt, Heather. “Hard Science, Soft Psychology and Amorphous Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 38 (1998): 741–759.

  Senelick, Lawrence. “Wilde and the Subculture of Homosexual Blackmail.” In Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Bristow.

  Shewan, Rodney. Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism. London: Macmillan, 1977.

  Siegel, Sandra F. “Wilde on Photographs.” Wildean: Journal of the Oscar Wilde Society 17 (2000): 12–30.

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  Sloan, John. Oscar Wilde. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

  Smith, Philip E., II, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Modern Languages Association, 2008.

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  Tanitch, Robert. Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen. London: Methuen, 1999.

  Thomas, Ronald R. “Poison Books and Moving Pictures: Vulgarity in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture, ed. Susan D. Bernstein and Elsie B. Michie. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.

  Tufescu, Florina. Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism: The Triumph of Art over Ego. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008.

  Upchurch, David. Wilde’s Use of Celtic Elements in The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

  Vaninskaya, Anna, ed. The Soul of Man: Oscar Wilde and Socialism. Special issue of Oscholars (Spring 2010). Available at www.oscholars.com/TO/Specials/Soul/ToC.htm.

  Varty, Ann. A Preface to Oscar Wilde. New York: Longman, 1998.

  Wainwright, Michael. “Oscar Wilde, the Science of Heredity, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 54, no. 4 (2011): 494–522.

  Waldrep, Sheldon. The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

  Walker, Richard J. “The Psychopathology of Everyday Narcissism: Oscar Wilde’s Picture.” In Walker, Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, 91–115. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.

  Whyte, Peter. “Oscar Wilde et Théophile Gautier: le cas du Portrait du Dorian Gray.” Bulletin de la Societé Théophile Gautier 21 (1999): 279–294.

  Willoughby, Guy. Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993.

  Womack, Kenneth. “‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 168–181. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.

  Wood, Julia. The Resurrection of Oscar Wilde: A Cultural Afterlife. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2007.

  Woodcock, George. The Paradox of Oscar Wilde. London: Boardman, 1949. Rpt. as Oscar Wilde: The Double Image. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989.

  CONTEXTUAL REFERENCES

  While the range of contextual references is potentially limitless, readers may find the following short selection useful for understanding Wilde’s novel in its broader contexts.

  Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

  Beckson, Karl. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History. New York: Norton, 1993.

  Caird, Mona. The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays. London: G. Redway, 1897.

  Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

  Charlesworth, Barbara. Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.

  Cook, Matt. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

  Corbett, David Peters. The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

  Davidoff, Leonore. The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season. London: Croom Helm, 1973.

  Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

  ———, ed. Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

  Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

  Dowling, Linda. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

  ———. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

  Eckardt, Wolf Von, Sander L. Gilman, and J. Edward Chamberlin. Oscar Wilde’s London: A Scrapbook of Vices and Virtues, 1880–1900. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1987.

  Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 4 vols. New York: Random House, 1936.

  Ellis, Havelock, and John Addington Symonds. Sexual Inversion. 1897; rpt. New York: Arno, 1975.
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br />   Feltes, N. N. Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

  ———. Literary Capital and the Late-Victorian Novel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

  Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, tr. Robert Hurley, 5 vols. New York: Vintage, 1986–1990.

  Frankel, Nicholas. Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s. High Wycombe, UK: Rivendale Press, 2009.

  Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

  Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience: From Victoria to Freud, 5 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984–1998.

  Gilman, Sander L., and J. E. Chamberlain, eds. Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

  Gilmour, Robin. The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981.

  Hamilton, Walter. The Aesthetic Movement in England, 3rd ed. London: Reeves and Turner, 1882.

  Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.

  Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Cleveland Street Scandal. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1976.

  Jackson, Holbrook. The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. 1913; rpt. Franklin, Tenn.: Tantallon Press, 2002.

  Johnson, Robert V. Aestheticism. London: Methuen, 1969.

  Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

  Lambourne, Lionel. The Aesthetic Movement. London: Phaidon, 1996.

  Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, eds. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  Ledger, Sally, and Scott McCracken, eds. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

  Marshall, Gail, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

  Mason, Philip. The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  McDonald, Peter D. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. New York: Viking, 1960.

  Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

  ———, ed. After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

  Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

  Reade, Brian, compiler. Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900. New York: Coward, McCann, 1971.

  Reed, John R. Decadent Style. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.

  Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking, 1990.

  Simpson, Colin, Lewis Chester, and David Leitch. The Cleveland Street Affair. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.

  Stokes, John, ed. Fin de Siècle, Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.

  Thornton, R. K. R. The Decadent Dilemma. London: E. Arnold, 1983.

  Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), ed. Martha Banta. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in the Late-Victorian City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

  Warwick, Alexandra, and Martin Willis. Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

  Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quartet, 1977.

  West, Shearer. Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1994.

  ———. Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  White, Chris, ed. Nineteenth Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 1999.

  PARODIES AND IMITATIONS

  Hichens, Robert. The Green Carnation, ed. Stanley Weintraub. 1894; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

  [Leverson, Ada]. “An Afternoon Party.” Punch, or the London Charivari 105 (15 July 1893), 13.

  Reed, Jeremy. Dorian: A Sequel to “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” London: Peter Owen, 1997.

  Reed, Rick R. A Face without a Heart. Darien, Ill.: DesignImage, 2000.

  Self, Will. Dorian: An Imitation. New York: Grove, 2002.

  Street, G. S. Autobiography of a Boy. 1894; rpt. New York: Garland, 1977.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am immensely grateful to John Kulka, my editor at Harvard University Press, for the meticulousness, imagination, and generosity with which he has helped me edit Dorian Gray. This work also received terrific support from numerous colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University: James Coleman, Dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences; Fred Hawkridge, his immediate predecessor; Terry Oggel, Chair of the English Department; Nick Sharp, David Latané, Catherine Ingrassia, Katherine Bassard, Eric Garberson, Susann Cokal, Laura Browder, Bryant Mangum, Josh Eckhardt, Kate Nash, Richard Priebe, and Tom Gresham. Work would have ground quickly to a halt without divine interventions from the angels in the office, especially Margret Schluer, Ginnie Schmitz, and the staffs of the VCU English and Interlibrary Loan offices. I am grateful to all of these individuals, departments, and administrators, for making VCU a wonderful place in which to work.

  A special debt is owed to Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, who generously granted me permission to publish material still in copyright, and whose own scholarship influenced my work profoundly. Michael Winship deftly and generously guided me through the labyrinthine archives of J. B. Lippincott and Co. My two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press provided useful criticisms and saved me from embarrassing mistakes at a crucial stage. Jerome McGann provided invaluable assistance with the Textual Introduction and later with the Preface, which was originally published, in a slightly different format, in Times Higher Education (“Censor Sensibility,” May 19, 2011). My wife, Susan Barstow, also commented incisively and frequently during the introductory essays’ composition. This book would not have been possible without the support and partnership she offers on a daily basis. Together with my children, Max, Theo, and Oliver, she continues to be a source of inspiration.

  Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Bibliographical Society of America enabled research and writing in the Summer of 2009. Adriana Kirilova and Heather Hughes expertly steered this edition through the press. I am indebted also to the staffs of the Pennsylvania Historical Society and the William Clark Andrews Jr. Memorial Library, especially Scott Jacobs, for many kindnesses; to Declan Kiely, Curator of Manuscripts at the Morgan Library; and to Rachel Foss, Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library. The work of previous editors of Wilde’s novel—especially of Joseph Bristow, Donald F. Lawler, and Isobel Murray—constitutes the foundation on which I have built. My debts to these previous editors run deep.