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(martyr and wanderer), and left England for ever. He died in poverty in Paris in November 1900.
    And yet today Wilde’s 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 ‘moral’ 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 Wilde’s
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, ‘The Poet is Wilde,/But the poetry’s tame’. Wilde’s 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 Wilde’s defence of his novel in that paper, the
St James’s Gazette
for 27 June 1890 asserted that this book ‘constantly hints, and not obscurely, at disgusting sins and abominable crimes’; reproduced in Stuart Mason (Christopher Millard),
Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A record of the discussion which followed the publication of ‘Dorian Gray’
(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 ‘Preface to Dorian Gray’ (published in the
Fortnightly Review
of March 1891 and reproduced in this edition), in ‘The Critic as Artist’ and in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, both published in 1891.
    4 See Richard Ellmann’s excellent biography,
Oscar Wilde
(1987), 304. Although Wilde might have been having fun at his editor’s expense here.
    5 Hyde,
Trials
, 38. The fact that Wilde assents to the designation ‘English gentleman’ here is significant; Wilde the Irishman and wordsmith clearly had his fingers crossed behind his back.
    6 Ellmann, 261.
    7 Wilde’s conflation of ‘culture and corruption’, 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 ‘commonsensical’ 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 ‘criminal classes’, the idle rich and the underclass, put on a par. Arnold White’s comments on ‘The Sterilisation of the Unfit’ (1886) provide a typical, albeit extreme, articulation of this understanding, describing the two worlds which Dorian inhabits: ‘As luxury and success corrupt the West End, the East is corrupted by want and failure…. Comfort-worship in the West leads to extravagant prudence. Comfort-worship in theEast leads to despair and its consequences’ (from
The Problems of a Great City)
. White speaks on behalf of the ‘trustworthy, energetic element of the population – those who long to rise and do not choose to sink’, a class almost wholly unrepresented in Wilde’s 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 Ellis’s ‘scientific’ study,
The Criminal
(1890), asserted that ‘The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and emotional fact…. They share this character with a large proportion of artists and literary