In brief
Basil Hallward, a painter, has made his masterpiece from a very beautiful young man. His friend Lord Henry Wotton meets the sitter, Dorian Gray, and in one afternoon’s talk teaches him that youth is the only thing worth having. Looking at the finished portrait, Dorian wishes aloud that the picture might grow old instead of him. It does. He falls in love with an actress, Sibyl Vane, drops her cruelly when she acts badly, and finds that the painted mouth has changed. She kills herself. He locks the picture away and lives for eighteen years as a beautiful, unaging and increasingly dreaded man of fashion, while the canvas upstairs records it all. He murders Basil, blackmails a chemist into destroying the body, is hunted by Sibyl’s brother, and at last takes a knife to the picture. The servants find an old, ruined man on the floor with a knife in his heart, and the portrait young again.
It is Wilde’s only novel, and it exists in three texts, which matters more here than for almost any other book of its age.
The argument
The book opens by forbidding what it then does. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” says the Preface, and “All art is quite useless.” Twenty chapters follow in which a wicked man’s every sin is recorded and he is destroyed by his own hand. It is about as strict a moral fable as the Victorians produced, and Wilde knew it. Writing to the St James’s Gazette in June 1890, he said: “Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‘Dorian Gray’”, and then, “Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.” He told the Daily Chronicle what the moral was: that “all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its punishment”.
Wilde’s account of it leaves out the sharper thing the novel does. Dorian is not ruined by pleasure. The pleasures are never specified, and the long eleventh chapter that stands for them is mostly a catalogue of perfumes, music, jewels and embroideries. He is ruined by what he does to people, and the pattern is set by Sibyl. He loved a girl who was Juliet and Rosalind; when real love makes her unable to act, he tells her: “Without your art, you are nothing” (ch. 7). He has taken Lord Henry’s philosophy to its conclusion and treated a human being as a work of art, to be dropped when it fails. Lord Henry’s comfort next day seals it: “The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died” (ch. 8).
The second turn is against the Preface’s neatest doctrine. “Art has no influence upon action,” Lord Henry tells Dorian near the end, and “As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that” (ch. 19). He says this to a man whose life has been steered by a yellow French novel, which he himself sent, and who “could not free himself from the influence of this book” for years (ch. 11). Lord Henry had already stated the truth in ch. 2: “to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.” So the novel’s wittiest speaker is also its least reliable, and its plot refutes the aphorisms that readers quote from it.
The shape of the book
The structure is a slow descent with a long gap in it. The first ten chapters cover a few weeks, from the sitting to the locking of the door. Then the catalogue chapter passes over years without an event, and ch. 12 opens on the eve of Dorian’s thirty-eighth birthday. From there the pace is that of a thriller: murder, the disposal of the body, the opium den and James Vane’s return, a shooting party at which Vane is killed by accident. In the final chapter Dorian decides to be good. He has spared a village girl, Hetty Merton, and he goes up to see whether the picture has improved. It has acquired “the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite”. He has to admit that “In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness”, and he attacks the evidence, the only thing left in the world that tells him the truth.
The voice
Wilde’s drawing-room talk made the book’s fame and supplies its charm and its trouble. “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it”; “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”; people who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing”. Nearly all of this belongs to Lord Henry, and it is meant to seduce, so the reader goes through Dorian’s experience in small: delight first, and suspicion later. Talking to Dorian, Lord Henry reflects, “was like playing upon an exquisite violin” (ch. 3).
Underneath runs a different writer, the Gothic moralist of the final pages, whose prose has the cadence of a sermon: “It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him” (ch. 20). Lord Henry can only half remember the verse: “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose—how does the quotation run?—his own soul?” (ch. 19). Basil tells Dorian plainly that “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face” (ch. 12), which the plot both denies and proves. Few novels contain two such incompatible styles, and the book’s tension lies in hearing which of them wins.
Three texts
The magazine text, 1890. J. M. Stoddart, the editor of the American Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, commissioned a story from Wilde and took it for the July 1890 issue. Fearing indecency, he cut about five hundred words before printing and without telling Wilde, including allusions to desire between men and references to Sibyl and Hetty as mistresses. This thirteen-chapter version is Project Gutenberg #4078.
The book, 1891. Ward, Lock published the revised novel in April 1891. Wilde kept Stoddart’s cuts, made his own and grew the text to twenty chapters. Chapters 3, 5 and 15 to 18 are new, the old last chapter became 19 and 20, and the Preface was added after appearing in the Fortnightly Review the month before. James Vane and his revenge, and the account of Dorian’s ancestry, came in here. This is the text of Project Gutenberg #174, used for every chapter link and quotation on this page unless stated.
The uncensored text, 2011. Wilde’s typescript survives at UCLA. Nicholas Frankel’s annotated edition from Harvard’s Belknap Press restores what Stoddart removed. It is the closest thing to what Wilde first submitted, and it is not free to read online.
Wilde’s revision did two things. It muted. Basil says in the 1891 text that Dorian is “the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses”; the 1890 text calls him “the one person that makes life absolutely lovely to me”. Basil’s great confession in 1890 runs: “I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman.” The 1891 version turns to: “I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you.” It also did the opposite of what Wilde promised. He told the Chronicle, “I think the moral too apparent. When the book is published in a volume I hope to correct this defect,” and then added a brother who swears revenge and a long chase to the grave. The 1890 text is quicker and braver. The 1891 text is the fuller novel, and it is Wilde’s own last word.
The people
Dorian Gray
Dorian Gray is the emptiest of the three principals, and has to be. He starts as a blank that the others write on, with a family history of a beautiful mother and a father killed in a duel (ch. 3) that he later comes to see as his inheritance. Wilde wrote in 1894 that “Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry, what the world thinks me; Dorian is what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.”
Lord Henry Wotton
Lord Henry is the tempter who never sins. He takes no risks, watches his experiment with scientific interest and is still dining out at the end. His wife has run off with a pianist, and that is the only cost anyone sees him pay. Wilde said he finds that “those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it”, but the reader must take that on trust.
Basil Hallward
Basil is the only person who loves Dorian without wanting to use him, and the only one who tells him the truth. Asked to see the picture at last, he prays and tells Dorian to pray, “Lead us not into temptation”; Dorian stabs him in the neck (ch. 13).
Sibyl and James Vane
Sibyl Vane is the book’s one real victim, seventeen and poor, and she dies because she has discovered that acting is false. James, her sailor brother, is Wilde’s 1891 addition, and his line “I shall kill him” (ch. 5) brings into a world of drawing rooms somebody who actually works for a living. Pater’s review singled him out for praise.
Alan Campbell and Adrian Singleton
Campbell and Singleton stand for the ruined friends behind Basil’s question, “Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?” (ch. 12). Campbell, a chemist, is blackmailed by a hold the book never names into destroying the body, and later shoots himself. Singleton turns up in the opium den (ch. 16). We are never told what Dorian did to either, which is the same strategy as the eleventh chapter.
How it was made
On 30 August 1889 Stoddart dined at the Langham Hotel in London with Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and T. P. Gill, looking for fiction for his magazine. Doyle produced The Sign of the Four, and Wilde the following spring produced Dorian Gray. The conceit, as he told the Chronicle, “is old in the history of literature”, a Faust bargain with no devil present. The aesthetic doctrine comes from Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which Wilde had revered since his student days, and the yellow book is, as he conceded in court, something close to Huysmans’s À rebours. Rumour linked Dorian to the poet John Gray, who distanced himself from it.
Readers and critics
The English reviews were savage. The Daily Chronicle called it “a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Décadents”. The Scots Observer, edited by W. E. Henley, hoped that if Wilde “can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring” the better, an allusion to the Cleveland Street scandal. W. H. Smith withdrew the issue from its station bookstalls. Wilde’s replies to all this were printed, and in Stuart Mason’s collection of the controversy they can still be read alongside the attacks. Pater, reviewing the book kindly in The Bookman, made the most serious objection: to lose the moral sense, he wrote, is “to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development.”
Then the argument became a legal one. At the 1895 libel trial against the Marquess of Queensberry, Edward Carson read from the magazine text and asked about its morals. Wilde answered that only “brutes and illiterates” would find it perverted. Within weeks he had been convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. The novel carried that shadow for decades. Serious criticism came late: Richard Ellmann still thought parts of it wooden and padded, while Joyce Carol Oates called it “one of the strongest and most haunting of English novels”, and since the 1980s it has been central to the study of Wilde and of gay writing in English.
Afterlives
A stage version reached the Vaudeville Theatre in London in 1913, and silent films followed. The best-known film is Albert Lewin’s of 1945, with Hurd Hatfield as an eerily blank Dorian, George Sanders as Lord Henry and Angela Lansbury, Oscar-nominated, as Sibyl; it was shot in black and white with Technicolor inserts of the portrait, the last one painted by Ivan Albright. Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray (2009) put Ben Barnes opposite Colin Firth. Will Self rewrote the story for the London of the AIDS years in Dorian, an Imitation (2002). Kip Williams’s stage version for Sydney Theatre Company, with one actor playing all twenty-six parts on stage and live video, won Sarah Snook an Olivier in 2024 and a Tony in 2025. The name itself has become shorthand for anyone who seems not to age.
How to read it
- Start with the 1891 book. Then read chapter VII of the 1890 text, which holds Basil’s confession, to hear what was lost.
- Do not skip chapter 11. It tests the patience by design, and Wilde is imitating the book that seduces his hero. Skim its lists if you must, but notice what they replace.
- Distrust the epigrams. Enjoy each one, then ask who is saying it, to whom, and what happens next.
- Read the Preface again at the end. “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” reads differently once you have seen the critics’ reactions and Wilde’s trial.
- For study, choose Frankel’s uncensored edition or the Norton Critical Edition, which print the variants and the controversy.
Read next
- Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (1884). The yellow book, or close to it: a novel with almost no plot and one character.
- Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). The source of Lord Henry’s creed, in a far more scrupulous form.
- Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin (1831). An earlier magic object that grants wishes and takes its price from the wisher’s life.
- Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The soul-selling Gothic novel by Wilde’s great-uncle, whose hero’s name he took in exile.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The same respectable double life, told from outside.
- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1905). His prison letter, in which Lord Henry’s philosophy is paid for in person.