Gray began by destroying every letter that he had received from Wilde, not wanting to be associated with him in the public consciousness at all—particularly during Wilde’s trials, for which Gray also engaged a lawyer on a “watching brief” to monitor the proceedings for any mention of his name. There was none, and Wilde later would deny that Gray had been the model for Dorian. Yet what sources have remained note that Gray initially encouraged such a belief. His only extant letter to Wilde is signed “Dorian,” and his fellow poets Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson frequently refer to Gray as Dorian in their own letters. (Dowson also recalled Wilde naming Ricketts as the model for Basil Hallward.) For the remainder of his life, however, Gray systematically would continue to eliminate and suppress any incriminating evidence of his place in Wilde’s circle. He even took the somewhat drastic step of buying up stray copies of his own book of poetry, Silverpoints, which features several homosexually resonant poems, for the express purpose of destroying them. What volumes of other Decadent verse he did decide to keep held their place on his bookshelves with their spines to the wall. Gray had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1890, one of the first to succumb to the curious Catholic conversion phenomenon that affected many fin-de siècle writers. He was ordained a priest in 1901, eventually becoming the respected Canon Gray of Edinburgh. There, he and Raffalovich, with whom he remained “partnered” for the rest of his life, designed and had constructed St. Peter’s Church, a high Aesthetic shrine for Gray.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray also intersects with other nineteenth-century artistic movements, just as elements of Wilde’s text reappear like ghosts in those of the twentieth century. Nearly all of Wilde’s artistic oeuvre seemingly claims, for example, to deliver us from the diametrically opposed Naturalism of his contemporary Émile Zola, with its belief in inescapable genetic destiny and its exploration of deliberate ugliness. Yet Dorian Gray, for all its emphasis on the creation of personality, simultaneously employs Naturalism’s trappings for both its class-prejudiced observations and its own ironically escapist purposes. For example, Dorian seeks refuge in the marginal London docks and the squalor of their neighboring opium dens, to which he resorts because they are “more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art” (p. 191). The adaptability inherent in Wilde’s own iconic text makes it vulnerable in hindsight to cannibalizing in the same way that Wilde so liberally stitched the ideas of Walter Pater into his own work. Wilde’s preface, which readily provides merchandising slogans today, points us neatly toward Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifestos of World War I, “with their epigrammatic assertion, echoing Wilde’s pithy ‘All art is quite useless’ and “Art needs an operation.’” And Lord Henry’s contention that “repetition converts an appetite into an art” (p. 201), although delivered in the context of a discussion concerning love affairs, uncannily provides a rationale for Andy Warhol’s serial paintings, pop-advertising sculptures, and silk-screened multiples of the 1960s and 1970s.

  What can be learned from Wilde’s life and cultural history that will help us to understand the prominence of Dorian Gray as a work of literature? Essentially that nothing quite like it had been published in the popular press before. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, who sought more vocally than almost anyone to redefine the relationship between art and life, was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854. This was the year of the Crimean War Battle of Balaclava and its wasteful, devastating Charge of the Light Brigade, celebrated, also in that year, by poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s elegiac poem of the same name. Coventry Patmore published the first part of his series “Angel in the House,” a popular, sentimental poem enshrining Victorian domestic womanhood. Pope Pius IX officially declared the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary as an article of Catholic faith that year, while under the rectorship of the influential religious convert and future Wilde idol Cardinal John Henry Newman, Dublin opened the Catholic University of Ireland, what would later become University College, Dublin, future alma mater of James Joyce. The year also saw the birth of George Eastman, the photographic innovator, and of Arthur Rimbaud, tragic poet and youthful lover of Catholic Decadent hero Paul Verlaine.

  Wilde died in French exile and in English social disgrace, on November 30, 1900, his death from meningitis coinciding with the close of the fin de siècle that he so tragically had come to define. On his deathbed, he finally converted to Roman Catholicism, with which he had been flirting for much of his life. By the end of Wilde’s last year, Britain was fighting in the South African Boer Wars, Boxer rebellions had occurred against Europeans in China, and German theoretical physicist Max Planck had formulated a quantum theory. Along with Wilde, maddened philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and art historian John Ruskin, a seminal figure for Wilde’s beloved Aesthetic movement and an early enthusiast of the Pre-Raphaelite school of English painters, likewise did not outlive the century. Sir Arthur Sullivan, who with his partner, Sir William Gilbert, had satirized Wilde as the effeminate, pop-star-like über aesthete Reginald Bunthorne in their 1881 operetta Patience, also died, while German composer Kurt Weill, who would deeply darken popular musical theater in the twentieth century, was born. And Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya debuted, calling for a well-deserved rest for the troubled, the disappointed, and the weary.

  During the intervening years, Wilde shaped perhaps more than any other figure—not merely more than any other artist—the tenor of his culture: As its most public face, he almost single-handedly engineered the Aesthetic movement’s latter-day development, as well as, later, the popular conception of what being a successful artist meant. In a more everyday sense, his wit and gift for aphorism were legendary if often abrasive, his abilities as a raconteur were widely observed as unparalleled, and the ease with which he could speak, when necessary, to people of all social classes was remarkable, particularly given his numerous elitist public pronouncements (as an example, consider his success in winning over Colorado miners during his American lecture tour of 1882). As many who watched him hold court at dinner parties or in clubs have recalled, he seemed able to weave stories and fables out of thin air, albeit often recycling epigrams and themes from his published work. He was likewise gifted at working items from his table talk into his plays.

  Over the course of his career, Wilde achieved personal success in several writing genres, but the justification for his great popular fame was achieved primarily through his comedic plays, most notably Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). But Wilde also had a more experimental side, evidenced by his Symbolist-inflected, one-act drama Salomé (1893), written in French. The printed version was accompanied by the stiffly erotic pen-and-ink illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley (who would also convert to Catholicism shortly before his own death). Wilde also excelled at the romantic, fabulist short-story form; notable among his efforts were “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Birthday of the Infanta,” and “The Selfish Giant.” As a journalist, reviewer, and editor he published in and edited some unexpected periodicals, including, for two years, Woman’s World (although, as an advocate for liberation in dress reform, this particular choice was perhaps not so unusual). His earliest creative attempts were made at poetry, some of it religious in nature and often detailing his European travels. Among his more notable poems are “Rome Unvisited,” “The Harlot’s House,” his poem written from prison, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

  This paragon was born to William Wilde, a successful oculist surgeon knighted in 1864, and Jane Wilde (née Elgee), who, as “Speranza,” would publish Irish nationalist verse. Her proud, self-styled grand character no doubt strongly influenced her son (as may have her husband’s own example of marital infidelity). Lady Wilde’s sentimental patriotism and romantic imagination also found expression in her younger son Oscar’s lengthy given name, parts of which she culled from Irish legend. Fittingly, in his last years Wilde used the alias Sebastian Melmoth, indirectly derived from his mother’s family. Wilde borrowed the surname from the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), about a tortured man who seeks freedom from a satanic pact he has made for long life; Speranza’s ancestor Charles Maturin, an Anglican priest, wrote the novel. Wilde adopted the name Sebastian from the homosexual-icon saint, depicted in his hagiography as a beautiful youth tied to a pillar and riddled with arrows; Wilde praised this image effusively in an early poem. Wilde attended Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford University, where he excelled at classical scholarship and became a respected student poet, winning the school’s Newdigate Prize in 1878 for his poem “Ravenna.”

  At Oxford, Wilde absorbed the writings of Walter Pater, who at the time was an Oxford don, and began to achieve notoriety for his precisely cultivated, Aesthetic movement-influenced neo-dandyism. Pater had espoused, but did not invent, the loose doctrine symbolized by the term “Art for Art’s Sake,” which set art apart from any considerations of morality or ethical value, believed by him to be unnecessary, but in staid Victorian England this was an extremely controversial viewpoint. We can trace Aestheticism’s artistic precursors back to the late 1840s and the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters, most famously among them the mystical painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As implied by their name, the Pre-Raphaelites sought to recover an artistic impulse from earlier centuries in attempting to capture the color, subject matter, and pseudo-naive perspective of medieval artists such as Giotto. Also deeply influenced by English literature, they loved the Romantic poets, particularly John Keats. After the Brotherhood’s collapse, Rossetti became central to the second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism, which included the painter Edward Burne-Jones, the controversial Decadent poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, and the Socialist designer William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press revolutionized nineteenth-century book arts by almost literally taking a page from medieval manuscripts. In doing so, Morris prepared the ground for Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Morte d’Arthur.” Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement called for the reinvigoration of English art and design (and consequently, in its particular hierarchy, English life) through the appreciation of beauty, organic design, and excellent hand-craftsmanship.

  In the 1870s, the designers and architects of the Aesthetic movement introduced a mania for Japanese design techniques and composition, to which Wilde pays homage on the first page of Dorian Gray: “The fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains . . . producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio” (p. 3). The collection of Asian blue-and-white ceramics that Wilde displayed in his rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, was noteworthy, as was his well-publicized worshipful assertion that he hoped he could live up to it. (An 1880 Punch cartoon satirized a stereo-typical young Aesthetic couple paraphrasing Wilde’s words in reference to their own newly bought teapot, and it should also be noted that Dorian Gray admires his own “blue-dragon” bowl.) Wilde probably also met the poet/priest Gerard Manley Hopkins while at Oxford, although such a meeting has not been recorded. Wilde had begun attending Catholic services in a local chapel where Hopkins served (since Hopkins’s work remained largely unpublished until 1918, however, twenty-nine years after his death, his literary importance would have been unforeseen at the time, even for Wilde). Wilde also managed to tour the Continent during one legendary university holiday, and his innate gift for exaggerated proclamation was again in early evidence when he visited the Italian capital, where he prostrated himself on the grave of the Romantic poet John Keats, in the city’s Protestant Cemetery, declaring the spot to be the holiest place in Rome.

  After coming down from Oxford to London, Wilde became extremely well known in artistic circles—as much for his aggressively Aesthetic dress and declarations as for his published verse, criticism, and stories. Wilde’s very public example of dandy showmanship was not quite as extreme as that of earlier nineteenth-century French writer Gerard de Nerval, who walked a lobster tethered to a ribbon through the Palais Royal gardens because, he claimed, it didn’t bark and knew the secrets of the sea. Even so, Wilde’s fondness for pseudo-medieval knee breeches, unusual colors, lilies, and sunflowers separated him from dour, conventional Victorian masculinity. No less a commentator than Max Nordau, hyperactive German physician /author and scorner of all things Aesthetic, Decadent, or mystical, took careful note of Wilde’s appearance in his mocking, 560-page rant Degeneration (1892). He writes, “It is asserted that [Wilde] has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi-heraldic symbol of the Aesthetes” (p. 317). Nordau does not mention what he surely would have named as immorality or even dementia in Dorian Gray, which he probably had not read before writing his own text, but he does draw psychological conclusions based on Wilde’s studied attempts to shock:

  When, therefore, an Oscar Wilde goes about in ‘aesthetic costume’ among gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule or their wrath, it is no indication of independence of character, but rather from a purely anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal recklessness and hysterical longing to make a sensation, justified by no exalted aim; nor is it from a strong desire for beauty, but from a malevolent mania for contradiction (p. 319).

  As dandies—who pay fastidious attention to wardrobe and often outrageously luxurious appointments and accessories—both Wilde and Dorian Gray stand in a long line of exemplars extending from early-nineteenth-century British gambler and flaneur Beau Brummell to French author Jules Barbey d’Au revilly (who wrote the book on the subject, On Dandyism, in 1844) to well into the present day. Such fashion plates historically have been japed at, not only in the popular press, which has tended to mock such displays even as it grants them space in its pages, but in such novel-length satires as Robert Hitchens’s anonymously published attack on Wilde, The Green Carnation (1894). Such attention to dress at the time may have been seen as effeminate (or at least aristocratic, which often connoted the same thing), but recent critics such as Alan Sinfield have argued that such effeminacy would not necessarily have telegraphed male homosexuality, as it would do in succeeding decades. During the late Victorian period, a conception of the homosexual as being a person who perhaps shared similar behavioral traits with other homosexuals (as opposed to being simply any man who had sex with other men) was in only its initial stages of formation. Many contemporary heterosexual readers of Dorian Gray may not have noticed the hints Wilde drops about homosexuality in the novel, suggestions that have appeared to twentieth-century readers as clear homosexual markers, and its gay subtext may well have remained submerged unless readers brought their own insights to it. The novel was seen as immoral on several counts, not always sexual ones, and it was left to Wilde’s forthcoming criminal trials to make the connections plain.

  At the time of Dorian Gray’s setting, in spring 1884, Wilde was preparing for his upcoming marriage on May 29 to Constance Lloyd, to whom he had become engaged the previous November. Their house on London’s Tite Street, expensively decorated in a new Aesthetic fashion, sent the couple instantly into debt, and by November 1886 the pair had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. It is believed that around this time a young Oxford student, Robert Ross, seduced Wilde into having homosexual sex for the first time. Wilde’s attraction to the idea of living a secret life, which such indulgence necessitated, coupled with the disturbing alteration of Constance’s postpartum body, have been cited ostensibly as reasons for Wilde’s decision to begin to indulge in his previously unexplored homosexuality. In 1885 the Criminal Law Amendment Act had been passed; its Labouchère Amendment prohibited consensual adult homosexual (effectively male-only) intercourse and procuration, whether in public or private. Other aspects of the Act included raising the age of consent to sixteen from thirteen, in an effort to legislate protection for children. Regardless of this new law, which widened the scope of punishable homosexual offenses at the same time as it lessened their penalties (thereby making such acts more likely to be prosecuted), Wilde became a member of London’s homosexual underworld. He consorted with and bestowed often-precious gifts upon Oxford students, who largely were fans of his or aspiring writers themselves, and also, in a concession to Lord Alfred Douglas’s tastes, on working-class youths who moon-lighted as homosexual hustlers and often, as a result of the Amendment Act’s long reach, part-time blackmailers.

  Perhaps the most salient episode of Wilde’s life involved his three infamous court trials in spring 1895. They captivated the London press, much of which was only too happy to see Wilde, of whom it had long been jealously suspicious, debased and finally punished for his alleged crimes and for daring to live outside Victorian social convention. The first trial, in early April 1895, involved the author’s libel suit against his lover Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury (before the trials, he was most famous for formulating the Queensbury rules of boxing). Angry over Wilde’s alleged influence upon his son, Queensbury accused Wilde in a note of being a “posing somdomite” (sic). Queensbury’s defense attorney even presented The Picture of Dorian Gray as an immoral, perverted book and as one of the fifteen pleas for justification of his client’s claim (although the justice at Wilde’s next trial chose not to rule Dorian Gray as evidence of Wilde’s crimes). Thus the novel took on yet another role: involuntary accomplice to Wilde’s accuser. The libel suit was not resolved in Wilde’s favor, and during the proceedings Queensbury’s defense provided enough potential evidence of homosexuality to have Wilde tried under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Friends and associates urged Wilde to flee the country, as other homosexuals on the verge of being outed had done, but whether from stubbornness of his position or in denial of his vulnerability, he remained in London and was arrested on April 5, 1895.