Eternal youth, and the portrait that pays for it
The Picture of Dorian Gray
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
The story in brief
SummaryOne summer day in his London studio, the painter Basil Hallward finishes a full-length portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man of extraordinary beauty. While Dorian sits, Basil's friend Lord Henry Wotton dazzles him with talk of pleasure, sin and the shortness of youth. Seeing the finished picture, Dorian wishes that he might stay young and the portrait grow old, and says he would give his soul for it.
The wish comes true. Dorian falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a seventeen-year-old actress, then drops her cruelly when she acts badly. She poisons herself that night, and a touch of cruelty appears in the painted mouth. Dorian locks the picture away in his old schoolroom. Guided by Lord Henry and a strange yellow book, he gives eighteen years to pleasure and vice while his face stays young and the canvas grows hideous.
When Basil confronts him about the rumours, Dorian shows him the portrait and stabs him to death, then blackmails the chemist Alan Campbell into destroying the body. Sibyl's brother, James Vane, hunts Dorian down, only to be shot by accident at a shooting party. At last Dorian stabs the picture to be free of his past. His servants find the portrait as young and beautiful as the day it was painted and, on the floor, a withered, wrinkled dead man with a knife in his heart.
Key themes
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
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The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel. It began as a commission: in August 1889, at a dinner in London, J. M. Stoddart, editor of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, commissioned work from both Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote The Sign of Four. Wilde's novel appeared in Lippincott's in July 1890, in a shorter version of thirteen chapters.
Several British reviewers attacked the magazine version as immoral. Wilde revised and expanded the story for the book edition, published by Ward, Lock and Company in April 1891, adding six chapters and the Preface. The Preface had first appeared in the Fortnightly Review in March 1891, and its aphorisms read as a reply to those reviews: 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.' The text given here is the 1891 book.
The novel came up again five years later. In the 1895 libel trial, Edward Carson, counsel for the Marquess of Queensberry, cross-examined Wilde about it. The book had already staged the argument. On the last night of his life Dorian tells Lord Henry, 'Yet you poisoned me with a book once', and Lord Henry answers, 'As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that.'
Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, July 1890; revised and expanded as a book in 1891. The text here is the 1891 book.
About this edition
- Text: the complete work from Standard Ebooks, released into the public domain (CC0 1.0). We change only the layout.
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- Audiobook: read by Bob Neufeld for LibriVox, in the public domain.
- Every quotation and glossary word in these notes is checked against the text.