Wilde found much to defend himself against when the harsh notices for Dorian Gray hit the streets. The novel was proclaimed “stupid and vulgar,” “dull and nasty,” “incurably silly,” “poisonous,” “coarse and crude,” “a sham,” and, strangely enough given its celebration of such things, “false art.” This “Wildest and Oscarist work” that “delights in dirtiness and confesses its delight” was “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction,” promoted “tawdry mysticism,” and left a “contaminating trail of garish vulgarity.” Its author was a “driveling pedant” who “bores you unmercifully” with his “prosy rigmaroles” and “clumsy and unideal treatment.” The general consensus in the press: The Picture of Dorian Gray was prurient, immoral, unethical, dangerous, and conclusively “very lame.” Of course, Wilde had many admirers, and, in part perhaps to appeal to them, he responded in kind, upholding the right of his work to separate art from ethics, and asking that his new work be left “to the immortality it deserves.”

  When The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in book form in 1891, the publishers Ward, Lock, & Co. dressed it in a simple, elegantly hand-lettered cover created by influential designers Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon; it was also issued in a deluxe, limited oversize edition. Wilde expanded the novel from its original thirteen chapters to twenty and made numerous revisions, deleting in particular some explicitly homosexual sentiments. The publisher also added Wilde’s epigrammatical “Preface” (originally published on its own in the March 1891 Fortnightly Review, edited by Wilde’s friend and future biographer Frank Harris), which contains some of his more clever aphorisms, most of which were devised specifically as parries against the novel’s critics. (The present edition does not include an “Artist’s Preface,” which was not a part of the original publication in either its periodical or book form. Signed by “Basil Hallward,” this additional prologue, which sets forth an alleged real-life circumstance that caused Wilde to write the novel, surfaced for the first time in an American edition, published by Charterhouse in 1904.) The novel’s expansion and revisions made no tremendous difference for the second round of critiques, however. Reviewers dubbed Dorian Gray “the very genius of affectation crystalised in a syrup of words” and ironically bemoaned its “almost utter lack of true humanity.” Walter Pater, Wilde’s philosophical progenitor, commented favorably upon the novel, highlighting its cleverness, originality (rather humorous, considering how many of its ideas were cribbed from Pater in the first place), lively dialogue, “artistic management” of decorative detail, its plain moral, and the opportunity it gave the reader to “compar[e Wilde’s] practise as a creative artist with many a precept he has enounced as critic concerning it.”

  Critics have located numerous fictional sources for Dorian’s fantastical predicament, some within the well-represented tradition of Victorian magic-picture tales, the allure of which a few of Wilde’s other writings, in addition to his mother’s, sometimes exploit. In Lady Wilde’s 1849 translation of Wil helm Meinhold’s Gothic romance Sidonia the Sorceress (1847), for example, which absorbed Wilde as a boy, the beautiful but voraciously evil title character, a sixteenth-century witch, ultimately destroys an entire Pomeranian royal court. Sidonia’s curious portrait depicts the witch as a young woman, while the spectral figure of her aged self lurks in the background. (The Sidonia subject fascinated many other contemporary figures, including Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones; Sidonia Von Bork (1860) was one of his first paintings.) In Wilde’s short story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (1889), the title object, a forgery, purports to represent the youthful male dedicatee of many of William Shakespeare’s love sonnets. Its mysterious discovery seems to uphold the hypothesis put forward by the characters that W. H. was a beloved boy actor in Shakespeare’s company. However, doubts over the theory’s validity lead to suspicious suicides and thus convey, as Dorian’s story does, issues of homosexual crisis, as well as the questionable nature of artistic “truth.”

  Other influences on The Picture of Dorian Gray have less bearing on the plot—inasmuch as this novel has been said to have a plot at all (some critics and readers have misguidedly, but perhaps understandably, lamented its plot’s frequent postponement and occasionally maddening near-absence). Wilde cannibalized two of the novel’s sources for near-verbatim citations in the text. The axiom “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses,” for example, is lifted from the 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater, an Aesthetic sage whom Wilde admired at Oxford. Wilde also closely paraphrases the Conclusion to Pater’s era-shaping art-historical treatise, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873; see “For Further Reading”), when he writes, “[New Hedonism’s] aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be.” In that Conclusion, Pater’s insistence on the primacy of beauty, artistic harmony, and pleasurable experience as ends in their own right scandalized many contemporary readers; the section influenced so many more young, impressionable people than it did art historians that this allegedly harmful section was suppressed in later editions. (See this edition’s notes for further citations of the many phrases Wilde lifted from Pater, as well as from other of his own works.)

  One of the more extreme influences on The Picture of Dorian Gray remains the strongest candidate for the unnamed “poisonous book” that Lord Henry gives to Dorian, thereby engendering a narrative-halting digression that rivals any in pre-Modernist literature. This book so fixates Dorian that he begins to model his interests, décor, and behavior after its protagonist’s unusually obsessive activities and strange tastes, just as Wilde’s chapter-long tangent accurately imitates this mysterious book’s own style and preoccupations. The book is À Rebours (translated into English as Against Nature or Against the Grain), the seminal Decadent novel by the French author Joris-Karl Huysmans. Wilde first read À Rebours on his Paris honeymoon shortly after its publication in 1884. (He would later describe Huysmans’s text as his own “golden book,” in an echo of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, which also features a “golden book” that shapes the titular hero’s development.) Artistic Decadence essentially came in its contemporary form to England from France. (Similar elements had existed previously in English literature, most notably in the works of the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, but were differently la beled.) With its morbid emphasis on death, decay, pleasurable suffering, illness, strange sensations, sexual experimentation or perversion, and substance abuse, Decadence succeeded in shocking the bourgeoisie, as well as the artistic establishment.

  Although critics have named French poet Charles Baude laire (most active in the 1850s) as the grandfather of Decadence, literary history locates the pinnacle of the style—if, in fact, it can be called a style rather than a collection of related traits—with the publication of À Rebours. In that novel, a neurotic hedonist from a decaying, soon-to-be-extinct branch of a patrician family spends his days pursuing curious, often-kinky pleasures that, although generally sensual, also can seem downright unpleasurable. All the nuances of Decadence are there, except, perhaps, for the whiff of the charnel house that permeates Baudelaire’s verse. The novel’s hero, a dandyish young French aristocrat named Jean Floressas des Esseintes, retreats to the countryside after succumbing too strongly to the temptations that plagued his Parisian life and fed his myriad phobias and manias. Des Esseintes is the quintessential neurotic obsessive. The serial fixations he soon cultivates with various objects, historical periods, and physical sensations, in addition to his bizarre, compulsive fits of luxurious redecorating, render him only more nervous and gravely ill in body. At one point he orders the shell of a tortoise to be encrusted with gold and precious jewels; the animal soon dies. At another, he devises what can only be described as a fantastic smell-typewriter, which pumps “phrases” of various scent combinations into the air at the touch of its levers. He collects liturgical vestments, as does Dorian, and agonizes over whether his strong liking for them constitutes sacrilege. (Huysmans would later recover his childhood Catholicism and spend two years as a Benedictine oblate, or lay brother.) Chapter XI of The Picture of Dorian Gray clearly parodies Huysmans’s inordinately name-dropping, ornate style and its almost obscenely excessive concatenation of details via Dorian’s own consecutive obsessions with Renaissance criminals, jewels, liturgical cloths, ancient Roman emperors, and his family ancestors, to name only a few. Wilde also apparently lifted, again often verbatim, many of the descriptions of textiles, exotic gems, and musical instruments from contemporary museum handbooks, particularly those of the South Kensington Museum in London, known today as the Victoria and Albert. Wilde does try a little to cover the Huysmans traces, however, with a few red herrings about the borrowed protagonist’s identity. The teasingly absent title also has led critics to Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance and to John Addington Symonds’s seven-volume detailed history, The Renaissance in Italy (1875-1886).

  Although by comparison À Rebours is almost entirely without plot, Wilde’s narrative strategy throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray exploits a similarly delicious sense of delay. Many readers have expressed frustration with what they view as the novel’s procrastination, but more sensitive souls may linger over the exquisite passages Wilde inserts primarily for their own sake—that is, their own aesthetic merit. Chapter I is a case in point, and its technique resurfaces throughout the book, as plot devices are put off in favor of sparring wits and commentary. The first two paragraphs dally over details, and gently mock themselves for doing so, with the comparison of the lovely summer afternoon to a significantly charged yet static image from a Japanese print. Wilde introduces various sensual particulars: the heady smell of roses, lilacs, and thorn; the gentle summer wind; the taste of cigarettes; the vibrant color of a laburnum that can hardly endure its own outrageous beauty; the buzzing of bees; the distant noises of the city. Dorian’s painted image next appears, with Basil Hallward, its maker, physically attempting to push back into his skull, and thereby further delay, the effects of the overpowering, dreamlike sensation the portrait raises within him. The artistic idolatry that Dorian creates in Basil contains a fervor that only romantic love can induce, and the passion Basil later confesses to Dorian is clearly sexual, even though the novel cannot cite that exact sentiment. But if the text is to progress past the first chapter, Basil’s fantasy must be released, and the beautiful spell is broken by Lord Henry Wotton, whose near-constant chatter, however languidly delivered, dominates the tone of the book from this moment forward.

  With Lord Henry’s first words comes the beginning of a novel-long deluge of epigrams, bons mots, and unsolicited opinions from this quintessential Wildean mouthpiece and avatar. His remarks range from the cynical class commentary of such thoughts as “The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself, he is poaching on their preserves” (p. 11) to the Groucho Marx-esque “I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world” (p. 11). The quips appear as quickly as Lord Henry can pluck daisies from the ground and tear them to shreds with his long, nervous fingers; like daisies, such sentences are bright but overabundant and prone to spread, becoming themselves ironically too common. The chapter’s narrative progression mirrors Basil’s own stalling tactics in his unwillingness to introduce Lord Henry and Dorian. Although we do not meet Dorian until Chapter II, he has already begun to haunt the novel. Near the chapter’s end, Dorian’s physical presence is tauntingly anticipated with the butler’s portentous announcement, “Mr. Dorian Gray is in the studio, sir” (p. 15).

  What conclusions can be drawn from this mysterious young man’s name? Dorian’s unique first name, from which the Oxford Dictionary of First Names strips all magic by explaining it as logically the masculine form of Doris, apparently was not in use before Wilde bestowed it on his disreputable hero (there have been more than a few brave Dorians since). It conjures the ancient Greeks, specifically the tribe known as Dorians who settled in the Peloponnese and conquered Mycenean civilization in the pre-Classical era. Fitting for this character, the name connotes an element of danger and savagery as well, because the Athenians regarded their more rustic Dorian neighbors as uncivilized; the name was also given to the most simple of ancient architectural orders, the unadorned Doric. Musicians may also recognize Dorian as a mode of scale, ending on D. More widely, Dorian’s Greek resonance suggests Greek— that is, homosexual—love and the lovely young male pages and darlings from classical history and myth, such as Antinous and Adonis, to whom Dorian’s admirers repeatedly compare him in the novel. His beauty itself is even described in classical terms: As an idolatrous lover writes in praise, “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold” (p. 226), conjuring the legendary chryselephantine temple statues of the classical gods, with their ivory flesh and gold drapery.

  Although Gray appears in this context to be an ironically flat surname for such a luminous, inspirational young man as Dorian, Wilde had many precedents, both fictional and personal, for his choice. More obvious literary sources for Wilde’s naming purposes include Vivian Grey (1826), the first novel (published anonymously) by twenty-two-year-old future British Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. In this very popular book, which spawned a series of sequels, the unprincipled, cynical titular hero begins, like Dorian, as a charming boy but comes to excel at manipulation in the political realm, as opposed to Dorian’s artistic, social one. Vivian also kills in defense of his interests, in his case in a duel, and is disgraced. Critic Isobel Murray has uncovered another fictional source in Edward Heron-Allen’s novel Ashes of the Future (A Study of Mere Human Nature): The Suicide of Sylvester Gray (1888). Heron-Allen was a friend of Wilde’s who also published frequently on palm-reading, one article on the subject coincidentally appearing in the same issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine that debuted Dorian Gray. Sylvester Gray is also extremely good-looking, and his mask-like face seems never to register advancing age; he has a sister named Sybil and a few tragic romantic attachments. Sylvester’s own self-slaughter stems from his inability to reconcile such troubling binaries as falsity and sincerity, and mask and reality.

  The most obvious biographical source for Dorian’s name and good looks was John Gray, a strikingly handsome young poet, translator, and enthusiastic early proselytizer for French Symbolist literature, who in all probability was one of Wilde’s lovers at the time of Dorian Gray’s writing. (Although it cannot definitively be proven that Wilde and Gray had a physical sexual relationship, Gray certainly was homoerotically inclined, and the two at the very least had formed a meaningful, romantic mentor-acolyte attachment, which lasted for a few years). Wilde biographer Richard Ellmann has hypothesized further that Gray was the original recipient of Wilde’s “ivory and gold” come-on. The circumstances of Gray’s life hardly match those of the charmed, aristocratic Dorian, however. Having come from a working-class background, Gray essentially was an autodidact who was forced to leave school at age thirteen to be apprenticed as an artisanal laborer in order to help support his many siblings. He eventually worked his way up to various clerkships in the civil service, most significantly in the Foreign Office, where he was working at the time he met Wilde. Gray had been introduced to London artistic and homosexual social circles at the home of his first mentors, Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, a homosexual couple. Shannon and Ricketts were renowned for book designs and illustrations of the 1880s and 1890s, having designed and published volumes for many contemporary authors through their Vale Press (their oeuvre included the first edition of Dorian Gray). Aside from serving as the alleged “model” for Dorian, Gray would be most remembered for his 1893 collection of Decadent-inflected poems, Silverpoints, a volume more famous for its delicately engraved, unusually narrow Ricketts and Shannon binding, an icon of Aesthetic bookmaking, than for any verses contained within.

  Gray and Wilde are believed to have met by 1889, when Wilde was working on his novel. But again, little concrete information about their relationship has survived, primarily because Gray, who seems to have panicked about his own sexual preference, ultimately broke from Wilde in disillusionment with the older author’s growing infatuation with Lord Alfred Douglas. It is easy to read with hindsight that Dorian Gray existed in the person of Douglas, whom a romantic might call the great, tragic love of Wilde’s life, but whose childish grand appetites ultimately brought about Wilde’s downfall. However, the author did not meet Douglas until well after The Picture of Dorian Gray had been written. Yet the fact does lead us to another option under which to categorize Wilde’s novel: self-fulfilling prophecy. (Life imitates art, indeed.)

  Precipitated by a near-complete mental and physical collapse, during which he spoke of suicide, John Gray by 1892 had formed an anti-Wildean alliance with the deeply sublimated homosexual French author André Raffalovich, who often had been fodder for some of Wilde’s harsher witticisms, and whose psychological study Uranisme et Unisexualité (1896) would later praise the virtues of a celibate—and thus, according to the author, more exalted—homosexual nonpractice. Gray’s tremendous anxiety demonstrates powerful psychic confusion over his public and private identity—much as, one might say, Dorian Gray exhibits in Wilde’s novel. Gray’s own self-reinvention, however, although not having a result as dramatic as Dorian’s, was more effective.