Reading Order
The Picture of Dorian Gray Reading Order
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde is the only novel by one of the greatest wits in the English language — a Gothic fable of art, beauty, corruption, and the Faustian bargain, wrapped in the most brilliant surface prose of the Victorian era. Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man in fin-de-siècle London, sits for a portrait by the painter Basil Hallward and makes a wish: that the portrait will age and bear the marks of his sins while he remains forever young and beautiful. The wish comes true; Dorian descends into increasingly corrupt pleasures while the portrait in his locked attic grows more hideous; and the novel ends in murder and a grotesque reversal that restores justice with the logic of a fairy tale. Wilde published the novel first in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890, then revised it for book publication in 1891, adding new chapters and toning down some of the more explicit homoerotic content that had scandalized reviewers (the original magazine version was even more explicit about the nature of Lord Henry Wotton's influence over Dorian). The novel's three central characters — the aesthete Lord Henry, who corrupts Dorian with his witty nihilism; the earnest painter Basil, who loves Dorian with a devotion the novel barely disguises; and Dorian himself — were identified by Wilde in a letter as three versions of himself: Basil as he saw himself, Lord Henry as the world saw him, and Dorian as he would have liked to be. The novel was used against Wilde at his 1895 trials for gross indecency, and its relationship to Wilde's life and death gives it a biographical weight that the best Gothic fiction rarely carries.
Where to start
The Picture of Dorian Gray — read the 1891 book version rather than the 1890 magazine version (the book is longer and more fully realized).
Complete The Picture of Dorian Gray Book List
- 1Buy
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde·1890·The novel — Dorian's Faustian bargain, Lord Henry's wit, and the portrait in the attic. - 2Buy
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
Oscar Wilde·1895·Wilde's masterpiece plays — The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan. - 3Buy
De Profundis
Oscar Wilde·1905·Wilde's letter from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas — his most personal and directly autobiographical writing. - 4Buy
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson·1886·Stevenson's Gothic fable of divided self — the nearest Victorian parallel to Dorian Gray's premise. - 5Buy
Melmoth the Wanderer
Charles Maturin·1820·The Gothic ancestor Wilde identified: Melmoth, who sells his soul for an extended life — Wilde took the name after prison. - 6Buy
Against Nature
Joris-Karl Huysmans·1884·The French Decadent novel that Lord Henry gives Dorian and that corrupts him — the book within the book. - 7Buy
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald·1925·Fitzgerald's American Dorian — a beautiful man whose surface conceals corruption, and whose dream cannot be sustained. - 8Buy
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov·1955·Nabokov's novel of self-serving aestheticism — a narrator who uses beautiful prose to conceal moral horror, the Wildean mode taken to its limit.
The Picture of Dorian Gray — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Picture of Dorian Gray about?
The Picture of Dorian Gray follows Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man in 1890s London, who sits for a portrait by the artist Basil Hallward and wishes that the portrait, not he, will bear the marks of age and sin. The wish is granted; corrupted by the witty nihilism of Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian descends into pleasure and cruelty while remaining outwardly young and beautiful, and the portrait in his locked attic grows progressively more hideous. The novel ends with Dorian's murder of Basil, his failed attempt to start over, and his stabbing of the portrait — which kills him and restores the portrait to its original beauty while leaving Dorian's body old and withered.
What is Lord Henry Wotton's role in The Picture of Dorian Gray?
Lord Henry Wotton is the novel's tempter — a brilliant, witty, utterly amoral aristocrat whose epigrams about the importance of beauty and youth corrupt Dorian's essentially innocent nature. Wilde modeled Lord Henry on the kind of Decadent aesthete that his own public persona embodied, and the character has been read as a self-portrait of sorts: Lord Henry preaches the doctrines of aestheticism without practicing them (he remains a spectator, watching Dorian's corruption with amusement), while Dorian acts on them and is destroyed. Lord Henry's epigrams — 'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it'; 'To define is to limit' — are among the most quotable in Victorian fiction.
Is The Picture of Dorian Gray a gay novel?
The Picture of Dorian Gray is suffused with homoerotic feeling that Wilde had to partially disguise in the published version. Basil Hallward's devotion to Dorian, the language he uses to describe his feeling ('I worship you'), the intensity of Lord Henry's interest in Dorian — all of these reflect the patterns of male aesthetic devotion and desire that characterized the circles Wilde moved in. When the novel was used against Wilde at his 1895 trials, he was asked to explain passages that were read as evidence of his homosexuality. The novel is not, in any explicit sense, a gay novel — but it is a novel about a culture of male aesthetic devotion that both reflected and occluded same-sex desire, and its relationship to Wilde's own life and conviction gives it a biographical weight that makes it impossible to read purely as a fable.
What is the significance of the portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray?
The portrait functions in the novel as Dorian's conscience — the visible record of the moral corruption that his beautiful face conceals. As Dorian commits increasingly serious crimes (cruelty to the actress Sibyl Vane, the murder of Basil Hallward, involvement in the death of the man he sends to destroy the portrait), the portrait grows more hideous, while Dorian remains outwardly young and beautiful. The portrait is also Basil's love for Dorian made visible — it is a painting produced by a man who 'worshipped' his subject — and the corruption of the portrait is therefore also the corruption of that worship. When Dorian finally stabs the portrait, attempting to destroy the evidence of his guilt, the reversal that follows (the portrait restored, Dorian dead and hideous) is the Gothic logic of the fable asserting itself against the aesthete's attempt to escape consequence.
What should I read after The Picture of Dorian Gray?
After The Picture of Dorian Gray, the most natural next step is Wilde's plays — particularly The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, which deploy his wit in a purely comic register. De Profundis, his letter from prison, provides the biographical counterpart to the novel's themes of beauty and corruption. For the Gothic tradition the novel belongs to, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is the closest parallel, and Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is the ancestor Wilde acknowledged. For the French Decadent tradition that influenced the novel, Huysmans's Against Nature is the book Lord Henry gives Dorian — reading it reveals the intellectual world Wilde was engaging.
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