Oscar Wilde’s story of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book was roundly criticized and badly reviewed by the British press, who were not only disgusted but offended. In fact, Britain’s biggest bookseller went so far as to remove the offending issue from its bookstalls, citing the fact that Wilde’s story had “been characterized by the press as a filthy one.” Here’s one review, from London’s Daily Chronicle:ĭulness and dirt are the chief features of Lippincott’s this month: The element that is unclean, though undeniably amusing, is furnished by Mr. But it was quickly clear that Stoddart had not gone far enough. Editorial practices were rather different than they are today, and Wilde had no idea about any of the changes until he read his own, less-explicit, piece in the magazine. Still, according to Nicholas Frankel’s introduction to his uncensored version, Stoddart only cut about 500 words from Wilde’s typescript. Stoddart also deleted many passages that smacked of decadence more generally. But some of Stoddart’s deletions bear on promiscuous or illicit heterosexuality too-Stoddart deleted references to Dorian’s female lovers as his “mistresses,” for instance-suggesting that Stoddart was worried about the novel’s influence on women as well as men. Much of the material that Stoddart cut makes the homoerotic nature of Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian Gray more vivid and explicit than either of the two subsequent published versions, or else it accentuates elements of homosexuality in Dorian Gray’s own make-up. The vast majority of Stoddart’s deletions were acts of censorship, bearing on sexual matters of both a homosexual and a heterosexual nature. When Wilde’s typescript of the novel arrived on Stoddart’s desk, he quickly determined that it contained “a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to,” as he explained to Craige Lippincott, while assuring his employer that The Picture of Dorian Gray would “not go into the Magazine unless it is proper that it shall.” He further guaranteed Lippincott that he would edit the novel to “make it acceptable to the most fastidious taste.” But it seems that most of the changes between these three versions were attempts to make the book more “moral” (that is, less gay) and that they were at least partially enacted, like Wilde’s preface, as a response to the critics, and also as a bulwark against prosecution of Wilde for homosexuality, which was a real danger at the time.Īccording to Nicholas Frankel, editor of The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition: That sounds reasonable enough on its face-there can’t be many novelists whose manuscripts were accepted for publication without their editors making any changes, and as I’ve noted before, substantial edits can accompany the leap from magazine publication to book for a variety of reasons. Stoddart, the editor at Lippincott’s, the edited 1890 version published in the magazine (which had also published Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, earlier that year), and the re-edited and expanded 1891 version, published by Ward, Lock and Company. By the time he wrote the above in 1891, The Picture of Dorian Gray had existed in three forms: the original typescript, commissioned by and submitted to J.M. In fact, the entire preface is a protest a response to the backlash created by the original publication of his now-classic novel. Of course, even as Wilde wrote these words, he knew that the critics did not agree with his assessment. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” wrote Oscar Wilde in the preface to the 1891 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Books are well written, or badly written.
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