The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in the July 1890 issue
of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine,
which circulated in both Britain and the United States. Both the American and
British editions of the magazine ran the entirety of Wilde’s novel—originally
approximately 50,000 words or 98 pages long—as the selling feature of the issue
(Bristow, “Introduction” xii-xiii). The reviews for this first edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray were mixed,
and while there were positive reviews, there were also many who found Wilde’s
novel indecent or “corrupt” (Bristow xviii). Wilde responded to several of
these negative reviews, some of which are supplied in the Appendices of this
edition, to defend his novel against their accusations (Bristow xlviii).
As Michael Patrick Gillespie
suggests, Wilde may not only have been aware that his novel would cause such
negative reactions, but perhaps he counted on it (Gillespie 349). At any rate,
the British press’s harshly negative responses to The Picture of Dorian Gray should not be too surprising if one
considers two incidents still fresh in the public’s mind when the novel was
first published in Lippincott’s Magazine (Gillespie
348-9). The first was Wilde’s essay “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” which was published
in Blackwell’s Edinburgh Magazine in
1889; “the essay offers an elegant and deliberately transparent defense of an
old theory that Shakespeare’s sonnets were dedicated to and written for a young
actor, Willie Hughes” (Gillespie 348), and the biggest criticism that Wilde got
for the essay was because it “implied that England’s greatest poet was gay and,
what was worse, had plenty of company among the world’s geniuses” (349). The
second, and surely the important in this case, was the “Cleveland Street
Affair”—also referred to as the “West End Scandals”—of late-1889/early-1890, a
few months after “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” was published. This scandal
featured a brothel where upper-class men, some of whom were part of the
government, paid young male workers at the post office for sexual favours
(Bristow xlviii). The trials and coverage of this scandal ran for months in the
press, into March of 1890, only about two months before The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Magazine. It is not hard to
see how, following these two incidents, the British public and press were still
hypersensitive to the possibility of homosexual undertones in The Picture of Dorian Gray when it came
out, and why critics latched onto the novel as a story of immorality.
I say “immorality” and not
“homosexuality” because the word “homosexual
did not enter the English language until 1892” (Frankel 7), and was not used as
a noun until 1912. That said, homosexual behaviour was seen by the Victorians
as unclean, repugnant, and deviant (Frankel 7). It is not hard to see that the
root of this view of homosexuality stemmed from Christianity, the dominant
religion in England, and Europe in general, for hundreds of years, as
Christianity named sodomy a sin. However, it was not until five years before
the publication of The Picture of Dorian
Gray that Britain made homosexual acts illegal as well as sinful, with the
institution of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (7). Victorian Britain,
far more than many other countries at the time, abhorred and were disgusted by
the idea of homosexuality; indeed “Britain stood out at the turn of the 20th
century as the only country in Western Europe that criminalized all male
homosexual acts with draconian penalties” (Adut 214).
The second version of the novel
had been expanded to approximately 78,000 words and was 20 chapters long plus
the new preface, where the 1890 edition had comprised of only 13 chapters, and
was printed by Ward, Lock & Co., who were also the British issuers of Lippincott’s Magazine (Bristow xix). Likely at least in part because
of the negative reviews from the British press regarding Wilde’s novel, George
Lock, senior partner of Ward, Lock & Co., encouraged Wilde to “bring the
story to a much plainer moral conclusion” (Bristow xx). This second edition had
yet more negative reviews from the British press, and sales were certainly less
than Wilde must have hoped for (Bristow lviii). Furthermore, The Picture of Dorian Gray would, in
1895, be used in Wilde’s own gross indecency trials against him, not only the
1891 text, but the 1890 as well. In the end, Wilde was found guilty and
subjected to the full punishment stated by the laws in the Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1885: two years in prison with hard labour (Frankel 14-15).
This scandal seemingly ruined his reputation for a long time, as well as his
physical and mental health, and in 1900 Oscar Wilde died poor in a cheap hotel
room in Paris (1). Just as Dorian Gray
had helped to make him an iconic figure, it also played a part in his disgrace.
Although far fewer scholars
discuss or deal with the 1890 text of The
Picture of Dorian Gray, I think it is very important to note and
acknowledge the changes that were made between the novel’s first iteration in Lippincott’s Magazine, and the revised
and expanded version that was published as a single volume by Ward, Lock &
Co. in 1890. Joseph Bristow argues in his introduction to the Oxford University
Press The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
edition, in which he presents both the 1890 and 1891 texts in their entirety,
these two texts are so vastly different that they can and should be treated as
separate entities (Bristow xxxi). Bristow disagrees with Lawler—the first to
produce an edition that presents both texts—who argued that the 1891 was the
superior, finished text, which “expresses the author’s final intention for his
work” (Lawler 128), and that the 1890 text is “the preliminary to a full-length
work that needed more space and time to reach its full promise (Bristow xxxi).
I agree with Bristow that these two texts are of equal importance, and that the
1890 text should not be ignored simply because it is shorter and seemingly
unfinished. As such, in this edition, I have selected two excerpts from each
text—Chapters 7 and 13 from 1890, and the matching chapters from 1891: Chapters
9 and 19/20—and present them side-by-side on the same page, so that the two
texts can be easily compared. In addition, I have carefully annotated the
various changes, additions, and omissions between the two texts in order to
make it easier to understand their differences.
This digital edition presents, as
I explained briefly above, two sets of excerpts with the matching chapters from
both the 1890 and 1891 texts presented side by side. Along with these two
excerpts, this introduction, and the Note on the Text, this edition features a
carefully compiled list of the differences between the two texts, available by
hovering over the annotation numbers in the texts themselves, as well as on a
separate page. I have also included certain cultural and historical definitions
in annotations, some of which link to images for further context and examples.
Finally, I have also included some selected reviews of both the 1890 Lippincott’s Magazine edition of Dorian Gray, as well as for the expanded
1891 text.
Although this is not the first
edition to publish the 1890 and 1891 texts together in one place (Both Joseph
Bristow in Volume 3 of Oxford UP’s Complete
Works of Oscar Wilde set and Donald L. Lawler’s Norton Critical Editions,
for example), my edition is a bit different. The purpose of this edition is to
make it easy to look closely at the differences in the two versions of the
text. As such, selections from the 1890 and 1891 texts are shown side-by-side
for easy comparison, along with the annotations to point out specific
differences throughout the text. There is plenty of evidence in the literary
criticism, supported in part by the numerous negative reviews that both
editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray
received, that the additions and revisions made to the text for the 1891 book
edition were at least in part to lessen the obviousness of the homosexual
relationships between Basil Hallward, Dorian Gray, and Lord Henry Wotton; in
putting together this edition, some of the subtle changes that I found between
the two texts further helped to support this idea. For example, in the scene
where Basil confesses his reasons for originally not wanting to exhibit Dorian’s
portrait—Chapter VII in 1890, and Chapter IX in 1891—where the 1890 text used
Basil’s name, the 1891 text frequently replaces his name simply with “the
painter;” this clearly helps to deemphasise Basil’s humanity, while putting the
emphasis on his role as an artist, which is also evident in the type of
confession that he makes to Dorian. The confession featured in 1890 could be
much more easily read as a confession of romantic love, whereas the one
featured in the 1891 text is twisted to read more like the obsession of an
artist for his muse; in other words, a more socially acceptable obsession for
one man to have for another to the eyes of a Victorian audience. Another very
interesting shift in the text seems to work to take away some of Basil’s agency
in the same scene: he uses “cannot” instead of “must not,” for example, and
seems far less sure of himself in the 1891 text. These are just a couple of the
ways in which subtle word or phrase changes in the text have affected the
overall feeling and meaning of the text, a full list of changes is available in
the “Notes” section linked in the top bar, and are highlighted by orange text
in the texts themselves.
