Oscar Wilde's only novel was quietly censored before anyone read it
Before The Picture of Dorian Gray reached readers in July 1890, its American editor cut roughly 500 words without telling Oscar Wilde, fearing the homoerotic passages would offend. The uncut typescript sat at UCLA, known mainly to specialists, until an annotated edition finally restored the missing lines in 2011.
The idea came from a joke. In December 1887 Wilde sat for a Canadian painter, Frances Richards, in South Kensington, and afterwards remarked that it was a pity the picture would stay young while he aged, and that he wished it worked the other way round. He realised at once that the reversal would make a good plot.
The commission arrived in 1889, when J. M. Stoddart of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine came to London hunting for novellas. At a dinner at the Langham Hotel on 30 August he signed up Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle together; Doyle delivered The Sign of the Four within months, while Wilde's manuscript turned up on 7 April 1890. Stoddart admired it but worried that an innocent woman would object to parts of it, so he removed references to desire between men, to a fictional decadent book, and to Sibyl Vane and Hetty Merton as mistresses.
The plot follows a beautiful young man painted by the besotted artist Basil Hallward. Lord Henry Wotton persuades Dorian that beauty and pleasure are all that matter, and Dorian wishes the portrait would grow old in his place. It does. After he cruelly drops the actress Sibyl Vane, the canvas acquires a sneer, and it keeps recording each new vice while his face stays unlined.
For the 1891 book edition Wilde kept Stoddart's cuts, made more of his own, and grew the story from thirteen chapters to twenty, adding Sibyl's brother James and a preface of epigrams that became a manifesto for art for art's sake. Basil's speech shifted from worshipping Dorian to depending on him as a source of artistic charm. Wilde later denied at his 1895 trials that critics had forced the revisions, conceding only one passage changed after letters from Walter Pater. Largely neglected until the 1980s, the novel now sits on The Guardian's list of the 100 best English-language novels.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
