The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Read Free Book Online

Seminar
, ed. Ellmann and Espey (1977).
    15 As Wilde claimed: ‘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.’ (Letter to Ralph Payne, 12 February 1894.)
    16 On these revisions, see Lawler, ‘Oscar Wilde’s First Manuscript of
The Picture of Dorian Gray’
(1972), 125–35; and Lawler,
An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde’s Revisions of ‘‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’’
(1988).
    17 As Wilde claimed, ‘Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds themhas brought them’ (Mason, 81).
    18 Eyries,
Tales of the Dead: The Ghost Stories of the Villa Diodati
, translated by Terry Hale (1992). ‘Family Portraits’ was read by Byron, the Shelleys and John Polidori during their famous residence at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, which resulted in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
and Polidori’s
The Vampire
. On the Villa Diodati and what it produced, see Frayling,
Nightmare: The Birth of Horror
(1996) and
Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula
(1992).
    19 Perhaps the most famous ‘revelatory’ portrait from nineteenth-century fiction is that described by Nathaniel Hawthorne in
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851), where the portrait of the original Pyncheon reveals a moral and physicalresemblance between its subject and his descendant Judge Jaffrey, allowing the narrative to reflect on hereditary transmission and to warn against repeating the past. A more recent model for Wilde was Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret
(1862), where a hidden portrait allows George Talboys to discover the truth about the character of his wife who had faked her death and re-invented herself as the eponymous Lady of the title. Revelatory portraits also appear in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Ollala’ (1885), Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891), and slightly later in Conan Doyle’s
Hound of the Baskervilles
(1902). On ‘magic pictures’, see Kerry Powell, ‘Tom, Dick and Dorian Gray: Magic Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction’,
Philological Quarterly
62 (1982), 147–70; on the role of ‘revelatory’ portraits in Gothic fiction, see Mighall,
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction
(1999), Chapter 3.
    20 Maudsley,
Pathology of Mind
(1895), 48.J. F. Nisbet, a popularizer of scientific ideas, had made a similar observation in 1889 when he discussed the principle of ‘throwing back’: ‘Every good quality and every defect that may have existed in any of our forefathers since the reign of Queen Elizabeth is liable to be revived in ourselves The recurrence of physical character after the lapse of centuries is attested by portraits, but moral character of a normal kind… can scarcely be traced beyond the third generation’ (Nisbet,
Marriage and Heredity
(1889), 106–7).
    21 Henry Maudsley, the major British exponent of what was called ‘degeneration’ theory, published
Responsibility in Mental Disease
in 1874. Maudsley was a materialist who argued that criminals were largely a product of their hereditary makeup, or were (evolutionary) throwbacks to more primitive forms of humanity. These ideas, deriving from French ‘alienists’ of the mid-nineteenth century, came into prominence in its last decades. Maudsley published articles on ‘Heredity in Health and Disease’ in the
Fortnightly Review
(1886), the same journal in which a number of Wilde’s own essays appeared. Wilde himself was diagnosed as a formof‘degenerate’ when he appeared in Max Nordau’s great pantheon of the pathological,
Degeneration
(1892), which appeared in English in 1895 and helped provide a diagnostic sub-text to journalistic comment on Wilde’s case at the Old Bailey, despite the fact that Nordau had not even hinted at Wilde’s