Letters on Dorian Gray

Wilde defends The Picture of Dorian Gray against the newspapers that attacked it in the summer of 1890. In eight letters to the St. James's Gazette, the Daily Chronicle and the Scots Observer he argues that art and ethics are separate spheres, that a critic should judge the work and not the man, and that no Government has any right to censor imaginative literature. Bad people, he says, are fascinating to art; good people are commonplace.

The letters are a running quarrel, each answering the paper's latest reply. Wilde turns the attack on its head: the book, he insists, has a moral, and a terrible one, that all excess and all renunciation bring their punishment, and its only fault is that the moral is too plain. The correspondence ends in mock surrender to the Scots Observer, whose critics Wilde pretends were puppets invented by the editor himself. By then he has answered three reviews out of two hundred and sixteen.

Key themes

• Art apart from ethics
• The moral he did not want
• Censorship and the rights of literature
• The mirror of the reader
• Contempt for the press

The Picture of Dorian Gray first appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890, and the reviews that greeted it prompted these letters, written between late June and mid August 1890 to the St. James's Gazette, the Daily Chronicle and the Scots Observer. The source line under each title gives the paper and the date of first publication. Wilde revised and expanded the story as a book in 1891, the volume edition he mentions when he hopes to make the moral less apparent.

Robert Ross collected the letters in Miscellanies, a volume of the Methuen collected edition of 1908. They are the fullest statement Wilde made in his own voice about the book while the quarrel over it was still live, and their lines on the reader, the moral and the artist's detachment are often quoted beside the novel itself.

First published as letters to the St. James's Gazette, the Daily Chronicle and the Scots Observer between 26 June and 16 August 1890.

About this edition

• Text: Miscellanies. Methuen & Co., 1908. Public domain. We change only the layout.
• Every quotation and glossary word in these notes is checked against the text.