[I read this 1890 novel in four sections, writing about each one before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
23 June 2026
Chapters 1-4
I read this a long time ago, and one of the big things I remember about it is its heady atmosphere of luxuriance and sensuality. And Lord Henry’s studiously witty epigrams, like a compendium of Wildean greatest hits. We can recite along to his see-sawing paradoxes after a few words—‘There is only one thing worse than…’—and it’s great fun. Except, fairly soon, it’s clear that Lord Henry uses them as conversation-stoppers. His take on the world seems wry, ironic. But he’s also very determined. It’s clear almost from the start that Dorian Gray has no chance against his persuasive, even seductive insistence on the now, the duty to live life before it’s too late. He makes it sound as though there isn’t a day to waste.
Wilde’s reputation is based mainly on his plays. This is his only novel, and it’s written in scenes that consist mainly of conversations. Wilde rarely indicates his characters’ states of mind beyond what we hear them say to others. I’m pretty sure that so far, the only character whose head we get inside is Lord Henry. We really start to get the measure of his pleasure-driven mindset—I think I’m using ‘pleasure’ as a euphemism—in Chapter 4. Dorian, an innocent when Lord Henry starts on him, is quick to decide that, yes, living for the pleasure of the moment is the thing. But he’s still an innocent, believing his own infatuation with a young actress to be the purest form of true love. Lord Henry, while letting Dorian believe he’s simply charmed by this, will soon set him straight. True love? He’s told us almost from the start what he thinks of that: ‘you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life.’
A few details. I suppose everybody knows the story—‘I bet he’s got a portrait in the attic,’ we might say jokingly—but I’ll pretend I don’t. It’s interesting that the man talking to the artist at the opening of the first chapter isn’t Dorian himself, but Lord Henry Wotton. He and Basil Hallward, the artist, are friends, and Lord Henry speaks as though everything in life is a kind of joke. He is satirical about Victorian society, and makes cynical-sounding pronouncements on matters of high morality and principle. I called his epigrams Wildean, as in clever but light-hearted. Some are but most, we begin to realise, are definitely not. They conceal a genuinely cynical mindset, but his charming delivery of them wrong-foots his listeners. By the end of Chapter 4, we begin to see what a corrupting influence he is going to have on Dorian. That young actress won’t have a chance with Lord Henry’s carefully groomed protégé.
But there are other things going on. Basil is very different from Lord Henry, and sincerely passionate—no other word will do—about his art. It’s this passion, and his high talk of how he has put his whole soul into the portrait of Dorian, that will become the set-up for the fantastical element of the story. It goes deep. ‘I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t see him every day. Of course sometimes it is only for a few minutes. But a few minutes with somebody one worships mean a great deal.’ And he would never, ever dream of selling it. During the trial that led to Wilde’s ruin later in the decade, quotations from this novel were used to discredit his ‘effeminate’ sexuality. In Chapter 4, Dorian wants to convince Lord Henry of the depth of his love for Sybil Vane—now there’s a name to conjure with—and he adds to the many praises he has sung to her extraordinary voice. How does he put it? ‘Your voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget.’ That’s how deeply Lord Henry has poor Dorian in his thrall.
Dorian has met Sybil in a dive of a theatre in the East End. He’s familiar with that part of London because he had spent time there, performing the kind of good works Lord Henry is so wittily dismissive of, regarding them as a typically English vice. Dorian is dismissive of it now, a month after meeting Lord Henry., because his passions have been diverted. In Dorian’s eyes—we’ve only had his version of her so far, breathlessly described (over several pages) to Lord Henry, her portrayal of Shakespearian heroines is utterly compelling. It’s another nod to how strangely alienating—as in, outside normal human existence—great art has to be. We can imagine Basil Hallward understanding Dorian perfectly when he tells Lord Henry how it is her acting that makes Sybil so far beyond flesh-and-blood humanity. ‘I have seen her in every age and in every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. … One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. … They are quite obvious. But an actress! How different an actress is!’
He is shocked by Lord Henry’s suggestion that there might be a physical aspect to this passion: ‘“What are your actual relations with Sibyl Vane?” Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes. “Harry! Sibyl Vane is sacred!”’ You can imagine how seriously Lord Henry takes these protestations. This is when Wilde lets us observe the workings of Lord Henry’s mind, as he muses on the conversation afterwards. ‘He was conscious – and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his brown agate eyes – that it was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray’s soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her.’ He seems to think he’s debating with himself, but he’s made his mind up about Dorian.
‘Yes, he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him—had already, indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own.’ And later, ‘It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results.’ Dorian, his laboratory rat, is already learning. During the conversation, Lord Henry must have been pleased by his growing narcissism. ‘I am a little jealous of the picture for being a whole month younger than I am, [but] I must admit that I delight in it…’
…but Wilde doesn’t tell us what Lord Henry thinks about the telegram he reads when he gets home at the end of Chapter 4. Dorian is engaged to be married to Sybil.
Chapters 5-8
I suppose Sibyl Vane never stood a chance—she’s dead the night after that mutual declaration of love. But no, it wasn’t Dorian who murdered her, not literally. Sibyl takes her own life after Dorian, mortified by the banality of her performance—and with Basil and Lord Henry in the audience!—tells her she has destroyed his love for her. And he doesn’t let her down gently: ‘you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect … You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. … The world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.’ One thing you can say for our Dorian—he’s certainly a quick learner.
When it first appeared, The Picture of Dorian Gray was a novella, published in a magazine. I wonder if there’s actually enough substance in it for a full-length novel. Dorian’s sociopathic level of cruelty appears in Chapter 7—there’s some setting-up to do in Chapters 5 and 6 to get Basil and Lord Henry to the theatre—and, although he appears to feel genuine remorse next day it’s short-lived. It’s the picture that makes him feel bad. He is terribly disturbed by the change he sees in it—yes, this is when it starts—and wonders whether he can fix the new cruelty in its expression by behaving honourably to Sibyl. He’ll never know, because by the time he’s writing a genuine-sounding letter to her to arrange a meeting, she’s already dead. I’ll come back to that, and the sincerity or otherwise of his remorse. And to the resolution he has made before the end of Chapter 8—the same day—to embrace the power the magical picture is giving to him.
The reason I wonder about Wilde’s novel-length presentation of his moral fable is this. Half-way through—that’s where we are by the end of Chapter 8—Dorian has made his decision, and he’s going to do whatever he likes. Comparisons we might have been making with that other great fable of temptation, the Faust legend, become ever more apt. Of his own free will Dorian, like Faust, has chosen the path of hedonism. He’s decided the picture gives him licence to behave however he likes, because his ‘sins’—a word freely used in the novel, often by Lord Henry—will be undetectable in him. His young, fresh-faced, open look of innocence will be not only his protection from suspicion, but his weapon. Fine. But where can Wilde go with this, for the remaining half of the novel? Marlowe, for instance, had great difficulty squeezing any drama (or entertainment) from Dr Faustus’ 24 years of naughtiness. Will Wilde do any better?
I’ll rewind…. Last time, I’d left Dorian with his wide-eyed proclamation to Lord Henry of his love for Sibyl, then the news of his engagement. When they meet next day, Lord Henry sees there’s nothing he can do. Of course, he thinks Sibyl can be nothing special, her ‘genius’ only apparent through the eyes of love. Basil, while feeling bruised about being the last to know of the engagement, always speaks up for Dorian. He has spoken of ‘worshipping’ him, and he isn’t going to give up his infatuation any time soon. And, for whatever different reasons they might have, both he and Lord Henry take up Dorian’s invitation for them to see her act.
I hadn’t mentioned the revolting portrayal of an East End theatre that Dorian had presented to Lord Henry. Not to be outdone, the narrative takes over from where he left off, with the greasy Jewish owner given no credit for bringing Shakespeare, his own private passion, to the unwashed masses: ‘the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands…. The youths in the gallery … talked to each other across the theatre and shared their oranges with the tawdry girls who sat beside them. Some women were laughing in the pit. Their voices were horribly shrill and discordant.’
The locals go—and we don’t only have Dorian’s word for it now—because they are entranced by Sibyl. Except, as I’ve said, this night is different. She dances gracefully and looks beautiful at Capulet’s feast… but then she opens her mouth. ‘Her words … were spoken in a thoroughly artificial manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. It was wrong in colour. It took away all the life from the verse. It made the passion unreal. Dorian Gray grew pale as he watched her. He was puzzled and anxious. Neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. She seemed to them to be absolutely incompetent. They were horribly disappointed.’
The abrupt, unadorned sentences are a far cry from the usual manner of these gents’ perception of their fin-d-siècle world, full of scented exotica, lovingly conveyed through long paragraphs of sensuous description. No, this is the gritty reality of a dreadful let-down, and Dorian isn’t going to forgive her for it. The reader has already guessed what has caused the change in her before she has tried to explain to him. ‘Dorian, Dorian—before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true.’ She goes on for a whole page, before making her final plea. ‘Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. You have made me see that.’ His next words are his definitive answer. ‘You have killed my love.’
This is the essence of Dorian’s irredeemable nature. He has no interest in the reality of a beautiful, intuitive flesh-and-blood woman. He wants her wearing the masks made for her by Shakespeare, the great artist, not the mundane reality of what anybody else would recognise as true love. He knows, because his mentor has convinced him, that even if there is such a thing as real love, it never lasts. It’s over. He has put up no struggle whatsoever, speaking to her with utter contempt. Dorian has made his choice, and we feel that in this scene he has revealed all there is inside him. It means that if at any time we’re tempted to blame Lord Henry for everything, we should beware. In tempting Dorian in the ways of self-centred pleasure, he was pushing at an open door.
If anything, this is confirmed by the next chapter, in which Dorian is stunned into the semblance of remorse by what he sees in the portrait. ‘It had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane. It was not too late to make reparation for that. She could still be his wife. His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life.’ He has already locked himself away, telling his valet to admit nobody, and now he will do the right thing. He will write to Sibyl and tell her he’s a changed man.
But what kind of a story would that be for Wilde’s eager readers? None at all. The emotions in the letter, sounding genuine enough, last (literally) no longer than his ignorance of her suicide. True, when Lord Henry tells him the awful details, he calls himself a murderer. But, as Lord Henry blandly lets him know, that’s just silly. It takes maybe a couple of pages for him to persuade Dorian that the only important thing he must do is extricate himself from any blame. Any scandal could ruin his name, so the only option is to behave as though nothing has happened.
So he does. Maybe he pretends to himself, at first, that he would have made a real effort to undo his own cruel behaviour. But that lasts almost no time at all. Perhaps two minutes later, he is musing on his own feelings. ‘Harry, why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to? I don’t think I am heartless. Do you?’ Of course, the ever-reassuring Lord Henry soothes him: ‘You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian.’ It’s the folly of youth, that’s all. Except we witnessed exactly how heartlessly cruel his rejection of Sibyl had been. And by the end of the chapter he has accepted Lord Henry’s invitation to the opera—a great soprano is to appear—and is ready to go.
But before that, Wilde gives himself a few pages to establish the parameters of his thought experiment. He shows us Dorian musing on whether he might pray for the restoration of the status quo. Could he change his prayer to stay young, and bring the picture back to its former self? Why not live his life growing older like everybody else? You can guess how long that thought lasts. He pretends to feel a pang for his poor old alter ego, having to go through the ravages of time and bad behaviour on his behalf. But what can he do? ‘If the picture was to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too closely into it?’ The reality is a kind of glee. ‘For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. And when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer. … What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.’
He’s shown himself to be monstrous, and now he has his secret weapon.
Chapters 9-13
Any surprises? Well, no, because Wilde has made sure there’s nowhere for Dorian to go but into the deepest pit imaginable. By the end of Chapter 13, now in his late thirties, he’s murdered poor old Basil for daring to persuade him to show the picture. Not that it was really that way around, of course—Dorian wanted him to see it, only deciding then that not even the man who painted it, and was once his best friend, can be trusted with such dreadful secret knowledge. It’s a big part of Dorian’s development by now that he is suspicious of everybody—and that tendency he had from the beginning to blame others for everything is now a fixed mindset. There are people in London who have terrible things to say about him, but he is happy to draw attention to their own imperfections. I’m sure that Wilde sees it as a part of his own brief to confirm that in the late nineteenth century nobody is by any means blameless… but that’s not Dorian’s motive. He’s deflecting attention from his own sins—that word again—and happily relying on what I called his secret weapon.
There’s a wonderful paragraph in Chapter 11 in which Wilde deftly recalibrates some of the blame for Dorian’s easy passage through a life of dissolution. ‘Society – civilised society, at least – is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.’ If it has the ring of Lord Henry about it, well, so it should. It’s one of his.
But I should go back to the day after the dreadful news about Sibyl. Chapter 9 opens with Dorian relaxing over breakfast after his night at the opera when Basil arrives. For some time Basil has represented the voice of common humanity, and he expects to find the Dorian he thought he once knew. He’s full of regret that he hadn’t heard sooner, and explains he had decided not to follow Dorian to where he must have gone. Sibyl had lived with her mother, and he had assumed Dorian must have gone there to give some comfort. Obviously he didn’t believe for a moment the nonsense about Dorian having gone to the opera—but he hadn’t been present to hear his resolution to live for his own pleasure. Over the course of a page or two, Dorian entirely disabuses him. It’s as brutal as his disabuse of Sibyl two nights before—‘Stop, Basil! I won’t hear it! You must not tell me about things. What is done is done. What is past is past’—and Basil is as shocked as we would expect.
His shock doesn’t lessen when he realises that Dorian is determined not to take any interest in the consequences of his actions…. But the conversation doesn’t end with Basil refusing to have anything to do with him from now on. Far from it, in fact—he doesn’t have it in himself to condemn his young friend. You can’t condemn the boy you worshipped, and who looks just the same as he ever did. Basil’s ‘worship’ of Dorian is what has been called part of the novel’s thinly-disguised homoeroticism—publishers had insisted that more explicit references to Basil’s love be removed—and this is what allows him to be the first of many who are more willing to believe their eyes, and Dorian’s boyish charm, than their suspicions.
‘The painter felt strangely moved. The lad was infinitely dear to him, and his personality had been the great turning point in his art. He could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more. After all, his indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away.’ This is Basil’s fatal flaw, quite literally. He can never believe that someone so beautiful could be beyond redemption—before Dorian murders him in Chapter 13 he tries to get him to pray for forgiveness—and Dorian, being Dorian, blames the murder on Basil’s own foolishness.
As in the first chapter, in which he has tried to explain to Lord Henry how much of his own soul he has put into his portrait of Dorian, Basil feels the need to confess to Dorian how utterly essential he is to his art. He has never painted anything so perfect since—Wilde clearly wants us to believe he never will—and he bares his own soul to Dorian now. He had already asked him if he’d noticed anything unusual in the portrait, and it’s only after a moment of panic that Dorian realises he can’t mean anything dangerous, and replies that he has. Basil simply means it represented the essence of Dorian, a kind of perfection in his eyes. He shares what he calls a secret after Dorian makes it a condition of sharing one of his own—he means the secret of the portrait—which, as things turn out, he doesn’t need to keep.
‘Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me, you were still present in my art….’ Dorian isn’t at all impressed. He had taken it all for granted anyway—but he’s safe. Basil doesn’t ask him to share his own secret, and he decides it’s time to make sure the portrait will be completely hidden from now on. He has it moved into his now unused schoolroom at the top of the house.
Dorian is feeling a little jaded after a heavy day of watching somebody else dragging it upstairs, and glances at a book Lord Henry has sent to cheer him up. It’s a French novel, unnamed but almost certainly À rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. He becomes so riveted by it he’s late for dinner, and soon it becomes his guidebook for life. ‘For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it.’ It seems to consist of aestheticism taken to extremes, and in Chapter 11 we see where Dorian goes with it. His lifestyle sounds close to that of the hero of the book, as Wikipedia describes it.
It doesn’t make for an interesting read. In maybe 20 reference-filled pages we’re assailed by lists of Dorian’s ever-shifting aesthetic fixations, from fashion to jewellery, from exorbitantly rich embroidery to stones and minerals endowed with seemingly mystical powers. Great connoisseurs of the past, rulers of their own empires—sometimes literally—are cited as exemplars as Dorian spends maybe a year on one niche of vertu or another. The problem is that the constraints of publishing, even at the Aesthetic cutting edge, forbade any detail at all about what we might consider truly sinful. Instead, all we get are the rumours of what low dives Dorian has been seen leaving, what dreadful company he keeps. Wilde, looking across the Channel at what could be published in France at the time, must have wished he could have detailed far more shocking exploits than a compulsive collecting habit.
All we get are the rumours of what happens out of sight, both of polite society and the hapless reader. Whatever, he uses the boyish, charming looks that will never alter to dare anyone in society to believe the slanders that come his way. Of course, he hadn’t needed it to get away with his first crime against any notion of humanity. Nobody can connect him to the ‘Prince Charming’—Sibyl’s only name for him—who brought about her suicide. So, as we’ve seen, it’s as though it had nothing to do with him. None of the crimes he commits ever will be connected to him, not in any way that matters. He decides his reputation among a particular stratum of the moralising establishment is of no consequence. He lives for the gratification of all his desires, no more.
By the end of this chapter, Dorian has developed a compulsive need to compare his own unchanging looks with those of the portrait. In fact, the only real evidence for the evil deeds we never see is the picture itself. True, at the start of his campaign of aesthetic self-absorption we are there to witness his callousness with Sibyl and Basil. But Wilde doesn’t keep it up. There’s nothing to match the near-sociopathy of those episodes in all these chapters, only Dorian’s gleefully slippery dodging of any accusations that might stick. And even those are somewhat blandly described. We hear, for instance, of how Lord Henry’s sister is no longer accepted in Society following too much time spent in Dorian’s company. And there are clubs that blackball him, arbiters of upper-class respectability who won’t have him at any of their gatherings. That’s as far as it goes—and does Dorian look bothered? Does he look even slightly abashed?
OK, Oscar, we get it. He can do what he likes, he can get away with it, and… and what? At the age of 38 he doesn’t know. That’s where we are in Chapter 12, and that’s when he fails to avoid Basil outside his house one night. He had called on Dorian to bid goodbye before going to going to Paris for ‘at least’ six months. (Save that plot detail for later.) But he also has something urgent to tell Dorian and, in the house now, he does so. It’s about Dorian’s reputation, based on what must be slanders with no foundation in truth. Dorian is unimpressed, and relieved that Basil hadn’t meant anything really serious. Basil is as shocked by the rumours as he had been all those years ago by Dorian’s callousness… and meanwhile, Dorian is a little bit tired of his wide-eyed faith in him. It’s time to disabuse him all over again…
…which he tries to do. ‘I don’t wish to know anything about them. I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.’ But Basil just doesn’t get it. ‘Your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever read. I told him that it was absurd,—that I knew you thoroughly, and that you were incapable of anything of the kind.’ This is when he tries to get Dorian to pray for his eternal soul—as direct a reference to Dr Faustus as there is anywhere in the book—but, of course, Dorian can’t pray for something he sold years ago. Almost in desperation, having heard Basil confess to the worship of Dorian that affected his art irrevocably, Dorian tells him he has kept a ‘diary’ upstairs. It’s time to reveal all.
Poor Basil. The uncovering of the portrait is the most stridently Gothic episode so far, a Hammer horror moment of shocked revulsion. ‘An exclamation of horror broke from the painter’s lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray’s own face that he was looking at!’ Basil is utterly stricken, but Dorian feels as much sympathy as you would expect. He seems more interested in the fact that all the changes are from within the portrait, not somehow added on. It is as though Basil had painted it in this form in the first place.
They talk about this, but Basil doesn’t even try to hide his revulsion at what Dorian has become. When Dorian dismisses his suggestion that they pray, it’s too much even for Basil. ‘Hush! Don’t say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My God! Don’t you see that accursed thing leering at us?’ Dorian has had enough of this, ‘and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him.’ He picks up a knife he notices, that he’d been using a few days before. ‘He rushed at him and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man’s head down on the table and stabbing again and again. There was a stifled groan and the horrible sound of someone choking with blood. Three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively, waving grotesque, stiff-fingered hands in the air. He stabbed him twice more, but the man did not move. Something began to trickle on the floor.’
Almost immediately afterwards, Dorian feels some regret, even pitying his friend for now being no more than an ugly ‘thing’ grotesquely half-sprawled on the table. But remorse? No. Instead, he needs to fake an alibi—he pretends to have locked himself out, so that his servant can confirm he was out—and then he finds a name in his address book. He’s already told his servant to wake him earlier than usual—but now he needs some shut-eye.
Chapters 14-20—to the end
When Wilde first published The Picture of Dorian Gray in a magazine it was much shorter, maybe only two thirds the length of the final novel. Most of the additional material comes after the dreadful murder and the steps Dorian takes to hide it—and it doesn’t strike me as adding a great deal. I’ll come back to that. In both versions, in the chapter following the murder, he blackmails a young man who had once been close to him, but now despises him. He is Alan Campbell, whose address he had looked up before going to bed, and he tells Dorian from the start he won’t help him. Three pages of gentle persuasion come to nothing. ‘There is no good in prolonging this scene. I refuse absolutely to do anything in the matter. It is insane of you to ask me.’
A look of pity comes into Dorian’s face—he seems to get a self-congratulatory kick out of feeling pity, especially in the middle of some atrocity—and he shows the poor man he has no choice. He writes something on a piece of paper, ‘and pushed it across the table. Having done this, he got up, and went over to the window. Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and opened it. As he read it, his face became ghastly pale….’ We don’t know what Dorian wrote, but clearly it would have ruined Campbell if it became public. And by the end of the day, Campbell has used his knowledge of science to break down and burn every particle of Basil Hallward’s body. Dorian had pretended it would be no worse than any dissection, but Campbell looks broken by the time Dorian returns to let him out. Later—the next, final chapter in the original version, not quite so soon in the novel—Alan Campbell has unaccountably committed suicide. Just as unaccountably—an author can play these games if he likes—he doesn’t mention anything about the body or Dorian.
In the shorter version, the next chapter opens with Dorian talking to Lord Henry. The little mishap concerning Basil has made him wonder if there might be a better way for him to behave. Lord Henry, of course, is appalled. Dorian has just returned from a restorative visit to the countryside, and is telling Lord Henry that he has turned over a new leaf. There was an innocent young girl at the inn, besotted by him and ripe for the picking—and he didn’t seduce her! He’s a fool to expect any support from Lord Henry, of course, just as he’s a fool (or worse) for thinking it’s going to be so easy. We, and no doubt Lord Henry, can see this as just another self-indulgent fad. Nothing has altered in the arrogant, self-centred way he thinks and speaks. Alan Campbell had chosen to take his own life, and all Dorian cares about is that he remained silent. Dorian must know why he shot himself, but chooses not to think about it. ‘He [Dorian] was perfectly safe there.’
And, in case we were wondering—‘Nor, indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. Basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. The murder had been simply the madness of a moment.’ Good old Dorian. He goes to the portrait, and is shocked—the reader isn’t, of course—to see that it seems to give him no credit for his rural good deed. In fact, there’s much more blood on both his hands than there had been immediately following the murder.
Naturally, he thinks this is grotesquely unfair. Clearly, there’s no point in him changing his ways… so what’s he going to do? Isn’t it obvious? The picture has ruined his life, so—and he wonders why he hadn’t thought of it before—he needs to destroy it before it destroys him. Silly Dorian. ‘He looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. He seized it, and stabbed the canvas with it, ripping the thing right up from top to bottom.
There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke, and crept out of their rooms.’
And if you know anything about this story, you know the horrific denouement. ‘When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was.’
This is the original, shorter version, and I’m not going to write much about the chapters Wilde added in the published novel. For a start, there are a lot of other ways in which the later version differs, including that toning-down I’ve already mentioned of the homoerotic content. (Even the original version had been published with many changes, made without Wilde’s knowledge. Modern readers can read the uncensored version of this.) In the final novel, Wilde also attempts to create a more complete social personality for Dorian in the chapters added later. We see him at soirees, at a gathering at his own country house—and also follow him as he tries, and fails, to conquer his opium habit. Along the way we meet other, younger men he’s led astray, at least one of whom is another to commit suicide. Wilde also wants Dorian to experience some real fear in his life, which is why he added Sibyl’s brother James to his list of characters in Chapter 5. I hadn’t mentioned him because we hear nothing more of him after that—he had gone to sea on the day of Sibyl’s dreadful performance—and now Wilde engineers a chance meeting. A woman in a low dive calls Dorian ‘Prince Charming’, and a rough sailor overhears…
The ensuing plotline is pure melodrama. Dorian only saves himself, when James Vane is about to shoot him, by drawing his attention to his own youthful appearance. He couldn’t possibly be the man who destroyed Sibyl’s life nearly two decades earlier. But Dorian’s acquaintance in the bar tells him that this is Dorian’s famous selling-point—he never seems to get any older. So James, it seems, starts to pursue him. Dorian thinks he sees him through his window once, then starts to imagine him outside even when he isn’t. Then an accidental death during a shoot at his country house spooks him dreadfully. ‘Dorian Gray was lying on a sofa, with terror in every tingling fibre of his body. Life had suddenly become too hideous a burden for him to bear. The dreadful death of the unlucky beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal, had seemed to him to pre-figure death for himself also.’ What he doesn’t know—but the reader can guess—is that the ‘beater’ is his pursuer, James Vane. And when Dorian discovers who he is, he is full of remorse.
Only kidding, obviously. He thinks his torment is over, not understanding that Wilde has that final terrible denouement, written for the earlier version the previous year, ready and waiting for him. The scene with Lord Henry, in which he congratulates himself on his good deed, comes before that, and the rest is… well, we know.
