(martyr and wanderer), and left England for ever. He died in poverty in Paris in November 1900.
And yet today Wildeâs plays have never been more popular with audiences all over the world, and the book you are holding is one of the best-selling titles in the Penguin Classics series.
If Dorian Gray
does have a âmoralâ we can perhaps find it in its final paragraph: the work of art, which has been subjected to hostile moral readings, shamed obscurity, and finally physical harm, remains intact in all its beauty and wonder.
NOTES
1 Wildeâs
Poems
were published at his own expense by David Bogue; these he reissued with a few corrections the following year. They were not a critical success, being considered pale imitations or wanton plagiarisms of Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Arnold and Swinburne. As
Punch
put it, âThe Poet is Wilde,/But the poetryâs tameâ. Wildeâs first play,
Vera; or, The Nihilists
, was produced by Marie Prescott, who also played the title role, in August 1883 at the Union Square Theater in New York. It played there for only eight days, but later toured.
2 Similarly, in an editorial note in response to Wildeâs defence of his novel in that paper, the
St Jamesâs Gazette
for 27 June 1890 asserted that this book âconstantly hints, and not obscurely, at disgusting sins and abominable crimesâ; reproduced in Stuart Mason (Christopher Millard),
Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A record of the discussion which followed the publication of âDorian Grayâ
(London, 1907; revised 1912), 46. All subsequent references to contemporary reviews are taken from this source.
3 For material from the trials, see Hyde,
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
(1948). Wilde addresses the subject of art and morality in response to the critics of
Dorian Gray
in his âPreface to Dorian Grayâ (published in the
Fortnightly Review
of March 1891 and reproduced in this edition), in âThe Critic as Artistâ and in âThe Soul of Man Under Socialismâ, both published in 1891.
4 See Richard Ellmannâs excellent biography,
Oscar Wilde
(1987), 304. Although Wilde might have been having fun at his editorâs expense here.
5 Hyde,
Trials
, 38. The fact that Wilde assents to the designation âEnglish gentlemanâ here is significant; Wilde the Irishman and wordsmith clearly had his fingers crossed behind his back.
6 Ellmann, 261.
7 Wildeâs conflation of âculture and corruptionâ, and the association between art and crime, was very much in line with the views of a number of contemporary thinkers and could even be considered âcommonsensicalâ at the time. For a start, a broad section of the middle classes would not be surprised to see the aristocracy and the so-called âcriminal classesâ, the idle rich and the underclass, put on a par. Arnold Whiteâs comments on âThe Sterilisation of the Unfitâ (1886) provide a typical, albeit extreme, articulation of this understanding, describing the two worlds which Dorian inhabits: âAs luxury and success corrupt the West End, the East is corrupted by want and failureâ¦. Comfort-worship in the West leads to extravagant prudence. Comfort-worship in theEast leads to despair and its consequencesâ (from
The Problems of a Great City)
. White speaks on behalf of the âtrustworthy, energetic element of the population â those who long to rise and do not choose to sinkâ, a class almost wholly unrepresented in Wildeâs novel. Furthermore, the artist was also considered by some influential writers to have many points of resemblance with both criminals and the insane. In the year that
Dorian Gray
was first published, Henry Havelock Ellisâs âscientificâ study,
The Criminal
(1890), asserted that âThe vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and emotional factâ¦. They share this character with a large proportion of artists and literary
David Sherman & Dan Cragg
Frances and Richard Lockridge