Overview
A beautiful young man's wish to remain eternally youthful is granted while his portrait ages and decays to reflect the corruption of his soul.
Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray first in magazine form in 1890, and then as a book, with substantial revisions and new chapters, in 1891. The novel — about a young man whose portrait ages and corrupts while he remains unchanged — was immediately controversial, and passages from it were later used against Wilde in his 1895 trial. He wrote no more novels, though his drama and essays continued.
Key Ideas
The Corruption of Beauty
Beauty without conscience becomes a weapon.
The Inescapability of Conscience
The portrait records every sin regardless of outward appearance.
Art and Morality
Wilde provocatively questions whether art should serve moral purposes.
Who should read this
Readers who want a short Gothic novel with philosophical depth. Wilde's wit is at its most concentrated in the dialogue between Lord Henry, Basil, and Dorian, and the book's three-part structure — temptation, corruption, confrontation — is tighter than most Victorian novels. Accessible for first-time readers of late-Victorian fiction.
Who might skip it
Skip if you want a novel that develops its characters psychologically; Wilde is more interested in aesthetic and moral positions than in the interior life, and Dorian himself is curiously flat by design. Skip also if you dislike novels that are partly puzzles of ideas dressed in narrative clothing.
The verdict
One of the strangest and most durable novels of the late Victorian period. Wilde is a novelist second and an aphorist first, and the book reads sometimes like a play with description added. But the moral framework is rigorous, and the ending is one of the best in Victorian fiction. Read alongside Wilde's essays, particularly The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
If you liked this
De Profundis for Wilde's great prison letter. The Importance of Being Earnest for his best play.