Editors in the Victorian period wielded enormous influence over the texts they published, often printing radically altered versions without the author’s permission. An outraged Thomas Hardy, for example, once threatened to withdraw his serial fiction Hearts Insurgent from the American magazine Harper‘s because of his more conservative editor’s emendations. Hardy would later reinsert many omitted or obscured details—such as clarifying that the orphans of the magazine version were really Jude’s illegitimate children—when he republished the novel as Jude the Obscure. Jude then shocked many reviewers, and a bishop declared that he had burned a copy.
The publication history of another controversial late Victorian novel, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, is marked, surprisingly enough, by increasing restraint. Also solicited by an American literary journal, this one called Lippincott‘s, Wilde’s text was deemed to contain several “objectionable” passages by its editor, J. M. Stoddart. His editorial team excised some five hundred words before printing the novel in 1890. After the novel’s appearance in the magazine, Wilde further amended provocative sections before republishing it as a book with Ward, Lock, and Company. Until now, editors have based their texts on either this 1891 “book version” or the earlier Lippincott‘s version. For Harvard University Press’ new “annotated, uncensored” edition of The Picture, editor Nicholas Frankel has turned back to the typescript that Wilde sent Stoddart in 1890, restoring the five hundred words found in the typescript but omitted from the later published versions.
Reintroducing these words, Frankel argues, makes The Picture “a more a daring and scandalous novel, more explicit in its content.” The key word here is “more”: even without the omissions, the book was decried in the press, as Frankel’s introduction vividly recounts. The restored passages do not drastically transform the novel (not, at least, as Hardy’s changes to Jude did), yet Frankel is right to observe that they would have heightened the risk that Wilde took in flouting the period’s familiar moral standards. The restorations reduce the ambiguity, for example, surrounding Dorian’s womanizing as well as the painter Basil Hallward’s homoerotic feelings for Dorian. The most intriguing restorations, in my view, speak to the power of what is hinted yet left unsaid. Lippincott‘s editors systematically eliminated references to a fictitious French novel titled Le Secret de Raoul, the reading of which profoundly affects Dorian. (In the magazine and book versions, the captivating book is left unnamed.) French fiction was then notorious for graphic depictions of vice. The removal of the foreign title and references to Dorian as “Raoul” betray an anxiety on the editors’ part about the danger of inviting the reader to engage with the text as if it had a secret, such a secret made all the more suggestive by its French flavor.
In an appendix, Frankel lists Stoddart’s emendations alongside Wilde’s in the 1891 book version, and one cannot but be struck by the greater degree of censorship that the author applied to his own work, particularly in reducing the homoeroticism of early chapters. That Wilde had good reason to revise extensively is shown in Frankel’s examination of the novel’s reception history. Frankel breaks the “code” of reviews of the Lippincott‘s edition that used the languages of filth, illness, and madness to condemn indirectly the novel’s treatment of sexuality. A review in The Scots Observer, for example, claimed that Wilde could “write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.” The reviewer was alluding to the “Cleveland Street Affair,” in which London police had broken up a male prostitution ring staffed by telegraph messengers and patronized by Lord Arthur Somerset, a member of the Prince of Wales’ inner circle.
The reviewers, however, were not the only ones speaking in code. Frankel also examines various references embedded in The Picture to the homosexual underground in which Wilde was increasingly active at the time of the novel’s composition. The name Dorian Gray, for example, is a double reference—referring to “Greek” or “Dorian” love, contemporary labels for the classical Greek practice of pederasty, and to a young man with whom Wilde was then seeking such a relationship, the poet John Gray. (Playing along, Gray would at one point sign a letter to Wilde, “Yours ever, Dorian.”)
The Lippincott’s version would trouble Wilde again a few years later. In 1895, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry (father of Wilde’s lover, Alfred Douglas) for libel. The libel trial pitted one of the best writers of the English language against one of the worst: Queensberry had left a card at Wilde’s club accusing him of being a “posing somdomite [sic].” Queensberry’s attorney, E. A. Carson, sought to defend his client against the libel charge by citing passages from The Picture as evidence that Queensberry’s claim was true. (Frankel’s notes alert the reader to the passages Carson cited.) Both Wilde and the judge at his later criminal trial argued that a work of imagination could not be used as evidence of the author’s real-life activities. Art, simply put, should not be confused with autobiographical fact.
In his correspondence, however, Wilde described The Picture as a reflection of his personality and sexual desires. He wrote of The Picture: “[the novel] contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” In the novel, Basil makes a similar claim regarding his portrait of Dorian: “I have put too much of myself into it.” One might be tempted to dismiss such expressions as spurious artist-speak (Lord Henry laughs at Basil’s comment), yet Frankel’s notes helpfully situate these remarks within the contemporary debate about portrait-painting. Along with prominent artists like Sargent and Whistler, Wilde the critic was reconceptualizing portraiture, declaring that the artist’s interpretation of the sitter was what finally mattered, not the accuracy of the representation. On this line, Wilde argued in his criticism that the “only portraits in which one believes” feature “very little of the sitter and a great deal of the artist.” Several portraits—by Whistler, Sargent, Millais, and others—frame Wilde’s text in this edition and thereby offer opportunities to consider this theory in practice.
Frankel also implicitly invites the reader to reflect on Wilde’s biography while reading the novel by placing photo-portraits of the author, his friends, influences, and enemies in the margins as well. The lavish portraits, moreover, affect how one comes to envision the canvas for which the novel is named, which one may then compare with frontispiece and movie-poster renderings of Dorian also collected here. Altogether, this exposure to the 1890s “renaissance” of portraiture—to Whistlers and Sargents and Napolean Sarony’s elegant photo-portraits of Wilde—provides a useful vantage for imaginatively engaging with the aesthetic world of the novel.
There is thus much to be appreciated in this handsome scholarly edition, even if the source text is not quite as revelatory as Frankel contends and the marginalia occasionally become unwieldy. (Many scholars will nonetheless envy the freedom the press has given the editor to dedicate as many as two pages of notes to a half-page of the novel.) On one point, however, Frankel’s portrait of the artist strikes me as wanting: his handling of Wilde’s relationship with Catholicism.
In their Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006), Mark Knight and Emma Mason challenge the reflexive skepticism among Wilde scholars on this issue. Knight and Mason argue, instead, that Catholicism—particularly its sacramentalism—answered Wilde’s imaginative and spiritual needs (albeit often in an unorthodox way) and, in turn, informed his artistic vision. Among the Aesthetes, Wilde was not unique in this attraction; several members of Wilde’s circle converted, including the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. As Frankel observes, the aforementioned John Gray was in the process of converting to Roman Catholicism while Wilde wrote the novel. He would later join the priesthood. Frankel’s introduction, however, suggests that Wilde’s deathbed conversion took place merely to ensure his burial on sacred ground, despite reasons to think the conversion sincere or, at least, debatable. Wilde had flirted with the idea of going over to Rome since his Oxford days. After his imprisonment, he visited the Vatican, attending masses and papal audiences. Shortly before his death, he told friend Robbie Ross—himself a Catholic—that he wished to convert. Meanwhile, Frankel’s marginal notes describe Basil Hallward’s last words—cries to Dorian to join him in repentance in a religious language he struggles to recall from his boyhood—as “pathetic” and signs of the “superficiality” of his faith. In Knight and Mason’s reading, by contrast, The Picture is suffused with the language of Catholic Christianity. This perspective helps us to listen with greater sophistication to the novel’s ongoing reflection on appropriate and inappropriate confessions and objects of worship, issues that Basil’s repentant last words quite meaningfully confront.
One can, in other words, productively acknowledge that a Christian ethical and sacramental vocabulary animates this work (in fact, much of Wilde’s oeuvre, particularly after the trials) without converting Wilde into a Victorian philistine. But if the introduction and notes are hesitant on this issue, obscuring one layer of the novel, Frankel remains an accomplished guide and this edition an elegant resource that enables us to admire all the more deeply the portrait and the artist.
Richard Gibson is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College.
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