This edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray is based upon the typescript, with emendations in Wilde’s own hand, that the author submitted for publication to the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in late March or early April 1890, roughly eleven weeks before the novel was first published in the magazine’s July number.1 This version differs markedly from the one that Lippincott eventually published, as well as from all succeeding published editions: it represents the novel as Wilde envisioned it in the spring of 1890, unaltered and uncensored by its first editor, Lippincott’s Joseph Marshall Stoddart, and it gives us a more daring and scandalous version of Wilde’s novel than either of the two subsequent published versions.2 Most modern editions of Dorian Gray reprint the expanded version of the novel, published in book form by Ward, Lock, and Company in April 1891, into which Wilde incorporated numerous revisions shortly after the novel’s appearance in Lippincott’s. But Wilde’s revisions for the book version were greatly influenced by the hostile reviews in the British press that had greeted the novel the previous year, as well as by his publisher’s and his own anxieties about possible obscenity charges. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, on which this paperback edition is based, marked the first time Wilde’s typescript was published, more than 120 years after the author submitted it for publication.
Scholars have long recognized the importance of the earlier Lippincott’s version of the novel, which had been commissioned by J. M. Stoddart, the magazine’s editor. Joseph Bristow, the novel’s most recent editor, maintains that the Lippincott’s version constitutes an entirely separate work from the longer version of 1891, pitched (as it was) toward a different readership and possessing distinct merits from the later version. Elizabeth Lorang has recently argued that Dorian Gray owes its profound cultural impact, in Wilde’s own day at least, to the fact that it first appeared in magazine form.3 The best of the many recent editions of Wilde’s novel—the Norton Critical Edition, first edited by Donald F. Lawler in 1988 (a second edition was published in 2007, newly edited by Michael Patrick Gillespie, preserving most of Lawler’s careful textual work), and Joseph Bristow’s 2005 Oxford University Press edition for the multivolume Complete Works of Oscar Wilde—reprint the shorter, thirteen-chapter Lippincott’s version alongside the longer, twenty-chapter book version in recognition of this important difference.
When Wilde’s novel appeared in Lippincott’s in the summer of 1890, it was subjected to a torrent of abuse in the British press, chiefly on account of its latent or not-so-latent homoeroticism. British reviewers were virtually unanimous in condemning Wilde for what one termed “writing stuff that were better unwritten.”4 Two leading magazines, the St. James’s Gazette and the Scots Observer, hinted in their review pages that Wilde should be prosecuted for what he had written. As a consequence, Britain’s largest bookseller, W. H. Smith & Son, took the unusual step of pulling the July number of Lippincott’s from its railway bookstalls. Although some scholars have argued that the twenty-chapter version of 1891 represents the greater artistic achievement, most now accept that when Wilde revised and expanded the novel, many of the changes he made were, in the words of one eminent Wilde scholar, “dictated by expediency and not by artistic considerations.”5 Wilde—already leading a secret double life—had reason to be fearful. Five years later, at the height of his fame, he would be imprisoned for two years’ hard labor after being convicted of “gross indecency.” During the course of Wilde’s disastrous libel suit against Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, it was the more salacious thirteen-chapter Lippincott’s version that was used so damagingly against him in the courtroom. As Queensberry’s attorney, Edward Carson, brandished the pages of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, he took “great pains” to specify differences between the Lippincott’s version and the subsequent twenty-chapter version, referring repeatedly to the latter as “the purged edition” because of the greater frankness with which the Lippincott’s version treated sexual matters.6
If Edward Carson had possessed Wilde’s typescript, he undoubtedly would have made effective use of it in the courtroom, for it is even more explicit in its sexual allusions and references than the version published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Lippincott’s had a well-deserved reputation for publishing stories in the so-called Erotic School of American fiction.7 But even at the relatively liberal magazine, the story immediately raised concerns. Upon receipt of the typescript in Philadelphia, Stoddart consulted with colleagues and a number of close associates to determine whether, and if so in what form, the novel could be published, before himself making or overseeing a number of significant emendations to Wilde’s text, including the excision of material he feared was too graphic for the magazine’s readership. But not all the changes Stoddart oversaw can be fairly described as censorship. First, not surprisingly, Stoddart or his associates altered Wilde’s punctuation, capitalization, and spelling to conform to American usage and the magazine’s house style. Second, and more significant, as Stoddart and his associates worked their way through the typescript, they struck nearly 500 words from Wilde’s novel. They deleted a number of phrases or sentences, for instance, that make clearer and more vivid the homoerotic nature of the painter Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian Gray. In Chapter VII, Stoddart or one of his associates struck Hallward’s description of his portrait of Dorian as a kind of lovemaking: “There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion.” In the same chapter, he deleted Dorian’s concluding reflection on Hallward: there was “something infinitely tragic in a romance that was at once so passionate and sterile.” Similarly, Stoddart or one of his associates removed references to Dorian’s female lovers, Sybil Vane and Hetty Merton, as his “mistresses.” A more detailed consideration of the changes overseen by Stoddart will follow; for the moment it is important to recognize that, insofar as the more substantial of those changes are concerned at least, the process of “purging” had begun even before the novel saw the light of day.
That Stoddart or his associates made alterations to Wilde’s text prior to publication has long been evident to the handful of scholars who have scrutinized the prepublication typescript. Wilde’s hand is distinct from those of at least two others who emended the typescript upon receipt in Philadelphia (that one of these hands was Stoddart’s can be inferred from comparisons with known examples of his handwriting, as Joseph Bristow has argued), and at least two previous scholars have given detailed consideration to the nature of the changes overseen by Stoddart.8 It is a curious fact in the history of the novel that Wilde’s typescript remained unpublished until 2011, when Harvard University Press first published it, given the general recognition among Wilde scholars that the Lippincott’s version was bowdlerized. In the Introduction to his 2005 edition of the novel for Oxford University Press, for example, Joseph Bristow writes that “Stoddart’s emendations make it plain that certain kinds of . . . references to sexual passion were unacceptable to Lippincott’s Magazine,” and he acknowledges Stoddart’s “unwillingness to permit explicit references to Dorian Gray’s illicit relations with women.”9 Moreover, in a note to his 1988 Norton Critical Edition (the first modern edition to reprint, in its entirety, the Lippincott’s text for an English-speaking readership), Donald Lawler describes Stoddart’s changes as a “series of bowdlerizations.”10 In the prefatory note to her 1974 Oxford English Novels edition of the book, Isobel Murray writes that “Stoddart far exceeded his brief in making changes for the Lippincott version after Wilde had passed the manuscript”; and in their recent fine study of Wilde’s writing practices, Oscar Wilde’s Profession, Josephine Guy and Ian Small write that “often Stoddart appears to be ‘censoring’ the text, on occasion striking out Wilde’s later thoughts and corrections.”11
No evidence survives to suggest that before publication Wilde saw, let alone approved, the changes Stoddart and his associates had made. As Guy and Small write, “we can be fairly certain that Stoddart did not consult Wilde about these revisions.”12 Indeed, it would have been highly unusual for Wilde to have been granted such an opportunity, since it was not then customary for American magazine editors to provide British authors with proofs. As N. N. Feltes argues, late-Victorian magazine editors on both sides of the Atlantic typically assumed a privileged position over authors as far as the production of the text itself was concerned; and as John Espey speculates, “the American system of editing gave the publisher far more authority than in England or on the Continent.”13 Even well-established fiction writers were forced to accept what Thomas Hardy called “the necessities of magazine publication”: and from the editor’s viewpoint, “control of the actual production . . . for a magazine or weekly newspaper did not need to be negotiated; it was a given.”14 In the months leading up to the novel’s publication, then, Wilde had neither the authority nor the opportunity to challenge the alterations made to his novel by its first editor. There exists little warrant for Joseph Bristow’s assertion that “all of the editorial emendations to the typescript have Wilde’s authority, since no evidence exists to suggest that Wilde refused to accede to any of the changes.”15 The Lippincott’s version represents what one relatively liberal-minded editor and his associates thought was permissible in 1890. Those parts of the novel that were expunged or altered from the version that Wilde actually submitted provide an interesting window onto what was, or was not, acceptable in English-language fiction in the run-up to the novel’s earliest publication.
Some scholars have argued that Wilde’s incorporation of many of Stoddart’s alterations into the later, enlarged version of the novel amounts to a belated acceptance or endorsement of them. This line of argument, however, overlooks two crucial facts. First, it is almost certain that after Wilde submitted his typescript to Lippincott’s in late March 1890 he never again had possession of the prepublication materials. The typescript—to which Wilde had added some 3,000 words of new material in his own hand before sending it to Stoddart, and on the top sheet of which Stoddart at some point had lightly inscribed, “This is the original copy of Dorian Gray. J. M. Stoddart”—remained in Stoddart’s possession until long after Wilde’s death: a fact that says a lot about the relations between authors and magazine editors at the time.16 Stoddart or one of his associates possessed as well the holograph fair-copy manuscript that, earlier in 1890, Wilde had submitted to Miss Dickens’s Typewriting Service, in the Strand, as “copy” for the production of the typescript.17 We know this because the holograph manuscript—which has survived to this day and is now housed at the Morgan Library in New York City—is stamped with the seal of Lippincott’s London agent. Furthermore, in a letter to his London agent dated June 2, 1890, just eighteen days before the novel’s publication, Stoddart wrote that he expected the arrival of the holograph manuscript “in the next shipment.”18 Perhaps most compellingly, when Stoddart was planning in 1906 to issue a new edition of the novel, he intended to base it on this manuscript, which was then in the possession of Stoddart’s friend Ferdinand I. Haber (and which Haber referred to, in his correspondence with Stoddart, as “our manuscript”).19 All scholars agree, moreover, that far from using a prepublication text as a copy-text for the 1891 edition, Wilde relied upon printed sheets or “offprints” from the Lippincott’s text, which he revised and supplemented by hand, in one or two cases reversing changes that Stoddart or one of his associates had made to the original typescript.
But there is a second, more important reason that Wilde’s later incorporation of Stoddart’s more substantive changes does not suggest that he endorsed them. It has everything to do with the circumstances under which Wilde revised the novel for publication in book form in 1891. The furor surrounding the Lippincott’s text upon its publication in 1890 meant that, even if Wilde had had recourse to the original wording in his typescript, he was in no position when it came time to revise the novel to restore Stoddart’s substantive changes: to do so would have risked precisely the kind of legal and public scrutiny that would prove disastrous in 1895. As already indicated, Britain’s largest bookseller, W. H. Smith & Son, removed all copies of the July number of Lippincott’s from its bookstalls days after its publication. In a letter to Ward, Lock, and Company (the magazine’s British distributor as well as, later, the book publisher for Dorian Gray), the retailer explained that it felt compelled to do so because the story had “been characterized by the press as a filthy one.”20 More significantly, Ward, Lock, and Company wrote to Wilde on the same day stating that “this is a serious matter to us. If you are in the City during the next day or two, we should be glad if you could give us a call.”21 If Ward, Lock, and Company already had misgivings about the story in its shorter form, it is likely that, in the meeting that followed, the company’s officers made painfully clear to Wilde that they would publish his novel only if he muted its most sexually explicit elements.22 (Ward, Lock, and Company was not the only book publisher to express qualms about Wilde’s novel. Macmillan and Company had earlier declined it because it contained offensive material.)
The threat of legal prosecution, hinted at in reviews of the novel, was more real than perhaps modern readers appreciate. In 1890, in the wake of the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889–1890, segments of the British media, the police, and the political establishment were already inflamed at what they perceived as the government’s failure to prosecute “gross indecency” among the wealthy (male homosexuality was seen as an aristocratic vice that corrupted lower-class youths). Lingering resentments about the ways in which the Cleveland Street case was prosecuted would affect Wilde’s own prosecution and sentencing in 1895. Though barely five years old in 1890, the National Vigilance Association, founded “for the enforcement and improvement of the laws for the repression of criminal vice and public immorality,” had recently succeeded in having Emile Zola’s English publisher Henry Vizetelly prosecuted—twice—for obscenity. As a result, Vizetelly spent three months in jail in 1889 and was fined a total of £300, while a number of Zola’s most important works remained unpublished in Britain for many years. It is worth recalling as well the fate of such Modernist classics as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Radcliffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, both of which fell foul of American courts in the 1920s and which remained essentially unpublishable in Britain for many years.
Given, then, the public outrage that greeted the novel when it appeared in Lippincott’s, and given, too, the anxieties of Ward, Lock, and Company, it is entirely understandable that Wilde would not have felt at liberty, as he revised the novel for book publication, to restore controversial material that had already been expunged by Stoddart. Indeed, going one step further than his editor, Wilde now removed additional homosexual allusions that had been left uncensored. He also heightened Dorian’s monstrosity in the moments before his fateful, final encounter with the portrait, to bring the story to a more appropriate moral conclusion.23 In an atmosphere of heightened paranoia, Wilde and his publishers were unwilling to risk prosecution. The potential repercussions were simply too great.
Stoddart received Wilde’s typescript in Philadelphia on April 7, 1890, nearly eight months after commissioning it, having been told as early as March 20 that it would be sent to him directly.24 Stoddart’s determination that the story needed substantial editorial intervention seems to have been immediate. “I am not yet able to report thoroughly on the Oscar Wilde story,” he wrote to his employer Craige Lippincott in a recently discovered letter, dated April 10, 1890. “I read it and consider it a very powerful story, but it has certain faults which will undoubtedly have to be fixed before we can publish it. Mr. Walsh read it last night and is somewhat of the same opinion, and I now propose to have Miss Annie Wharton read it carefully. You may rest assured that it will not go into the Magazine unless it is proper that it shall, although in its present condition there are a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to. But I will go beyond this and make it acceptable to the most fastidious taste.”25
Over the ensuing twelve days, Stoddart consulted a number of his closest literary associates about the story in an effort to determine the exact form in which it should, or could, be published. Those consulted included J. B. Lippincott—along with Craige Lippincott, a joint-partner in the firm; Anne Wharton, a regular contributor to the magazine and later the author of several books on American colonial life as well as a glowing, perceptive review of Dorian Gray that appeared in the September 1890 number of Lippincott’s; Henry Collins Walsh, a regular book reviewer for the magazine who was also the editor of H. F. Cary’s translations of Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso and, with his liberal-minded brother William S. Walsh (Stoddart’s predecessor as editor of Lippincott’s), publisher of American Notes and Queries; and Melville Philips, another regular book reviewer for Lippincott’s and sometime literary editor of the Philadelphia Press.26 Arguably this circle included some of the most liberal figures in American publishing. “We have finally concluded to use the Oscar Wilde story,” Stoddart wrote to Craige Lippincott on April 22, “after it having been read and carefully considered by Mr. H. C. Walsh, Miss Wharton, Mr. J. B. Lippincott, Mr. Julian Shoemaker and later by Melville Philips, the latter [of] who[m] is practically to edit it by picking out any objectionable passages. The universal feeling is, by all who have read it, in favor of its publication.”27
Only on this date did Stoddart inform Wilde that the story was acceptable and would be published: “the manuscript of Dorian Gray was duly received . . . We will publish it in the July number which appears on June 20th. I beg to express my entire satisfaction with the story as it is in my judgment, and that of the several readers who have gone over it, one of the most powerful works of the time. . . . I expect for it a large sale and a most appreciative reading.”28 Stoddart’s letter mentions nothing about the concern with which the story had been met in Philadelphia, by himself and his circle of advisors; nor does it say anything about his plans to “pick out objectionable passages.” His caution may have had something to do with the fact that Stoddart, apparently, had failed to draw up a formal contract for the Lippincott’s story, his agreement with Wilde having been a verbal one.29 On the same date, Stoddart prepared a memorandum for Wilde’s signature, which assigned to Lippincott & Co. “my entire right” in the composition.30 A few days later, Stoddart announced to another dilatory author that “we can give you a few days more grace” because “we have filled the breach with an Oscar Wilde story which . . . reveals itself to be a remarkable production.”31
How or whether Melville Philips “picked out objectionable passages” from Wilde’s text, as Stoddart had indicated he would, cannot now be ascertained. The typescript bears both deletions and insertions in at least two hands other than Wilde’s own; and although some of the editorial insertions can be attributed to Stoddart personally with a high degree of certainty, others (such as the alteration of “Sybil” to “Sibyl,” of “curtsey” to “courtesy,” and of “leapt” to “leaped”) are in a hand that is neither Wilde’s nor Stoddart’s, so it remains entirely possible that Philips or some other individual besides Stoddart was responsible for editorial deletions, too.
Readers interested in seeing precisely which parts of Wilde’s text were found objectionable by its first editor and his associates should consult The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated Uncensored Edition (Harvard University Press, 2011), in which the changes made by Lippincott’s editors are clearly laid out and tabulated. But at this juncture, a fuller description of the editorial changes overseen by Stoddart—including those made to Wilde’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation—is in order. I refer to changes that clearly alter meaning—that is, changes to entire words, phrases, or larger units of text—as “substantive.” “Accidental” changes mean alterations to spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, which less clearly affect meaning.
The vast majority of the substantive changes introduced by Lippincott’s center on sexual matters. The deletion in Chapter VII of passages making more explicit and vivid the homoerotic nature of Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian Gray has already been mentioned. The same anxieties about explicit homosexual references motivate as well a number of alterations in Chapter X, where Basil laments the corruption of Dorian. Stoddart or one of his associates cuts, for example, the sentence: “It is quite sufficient to say of a young man that he goes to stay at Selby Royal, for people to sneer and titter.” In the same chapter, Stoddart alters the salacious question, “Why is it that every young man that you take up seems to come to grief, to go to the bad at once?” to the more ambiguous question, “Why is your friendship so fateful to young men?” In Chapter V, Stoddart or one of his associates cuts a sentence that gives an entirely different caste to Dorian’s night walking: “A man with curious eyes had suddenly peered into his face, and then dogged him with stealthy footsteps, passing and repassing him many times.”
Some of the most extensive editorial alterations, however, concern not references to homosexuality but rather passages related to promiscuous or illicit heterosexuality. I have already alluded to the elimination of three instances in which Wilde refers to Dorian’s female lovers, Sybil Vane and Hetty Merton, as his “mistresses.” By far the longest editorial deletion in this regard is a still shocking passage in Chapter XIII in which Lord Henry speculates on Hetty’s “happiness” had she become Dorian’s mistress: “Upon the other hand, had she become your mistress, she would have lived in the society of charming and cultured men. You would have educated her, taught her how to dress, how to talk, how to move. You would have made her perfect, and she would have been extremely happy. After a time, no doubt, you would have grown tired of her. She would have made a scene. You would have made a settlement. Then a new career would have begun for her.” That Stoddart or his associates deleted a total of nearly 120 words concerning Hetty Merton, including Dorian’s confession that “she promised to come with me to town. I had taken a house for her, and arranged everything,” suggests that Stoddart was as worried about reactions to the novel’s depictions of illicit heterosexual behavior as he was about its seeming endorsement of homosexuality.32 Anxieties about representations of illicit heterosexual desire also motivated the decision to delete from Chapter XIII Lord Henry’s insouciant comment that his estranged wife Victoria had been “desperately in love with [Dorian] at one time,” as well as Stoddart’s decision to eliminate from Chapter IX Wilde’s reference to the death (by suicide?) of those to whom Lady Elizabeth Devereux, Dorian’s distant ancestor, “granted her favours.” Similarly, Stoddart altered the blunt remark by Lord Henry in Chapter I—“I don’t suppose that ten per cent of the lower orders live with their wives”—to the prudishly out-of-character comment, “I don’t suppose that ten per cent of the lower orders live correctly.”
Stoddart also oversaw the elimination of anything that smacked generally of decadence. There were a number of changes made to Wilde’s descriptions in Chapter IX of Dorian’s extreme behavior as he pushes to the limit his immersion in a world of sensation and experience. Stoddart or one of his associates altered the phrase “till the people almost drove [Dorian] out in horror and had to be appeased with monstrous bribes” to the less incriminating “until he was driven away,” while deleting references to the “strange love that he inspired in women” and to “the sinful creatures who prowl the street at night [and who] cursed him as he passed by, seeing in him a corruption greater than their own.” Stoddart was especially concerned with taming descriptions of the yellow novel that is given by Lord Henry Wotton to Dorian and comes to exert such a powerful influence over Dorian’s life. To begin with, he eliminated all references to the novel’s title and author, Le Secret de Raoul, par Catulle Sarrazin [Raoul’s Secret, by Catulle Sarrazin], rightly sensing that these fictional names allude to some of the most scandalous works and figures of the French Decadent movement. Similarly, Stoddart muted a number of passages concerning the novel’s hero, Raoul, who serves as “a kind of prefiguring type of [Dorian].” He expunged, for example, Raoul’s imagined reincarnation as Caligula, who “had drank the love-philter of Caesonia, and worn the habit of Venus by night, and by day a false gilded beard.” Raoul’s specially made tapestries, “on which were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom Vice and Blood and Weariness had made monstrous or mad,” came in for harsh treatment. In addition to substituting “Lust” for “Vice,” Stoddart deleted Wilde’s specific mention of “Manfred, King of Apulia, who dressed always in green, and consorted only with courtezans and buffoons,” as well as the narrator’s explanation that Filippo, Duke of Milan (depicted on one tapestry), “slew his wife, and painted her lips with a scarlet poison, that her guilty lover might suck swift death from the dead thing that he fondled.”
Although previous editors disagree about whether Wilde or Stoddart made the last of these deletions, the pencil line running through the phrase is identical to that with which other words and phrases in the novel were censored, indicating that it was Stoddart or one of his associates who made it. Less certainty, however, surrounds three sentences omitted from the Lippincott’s text that concern Dorian’s discovery of “wonderful stories . . . about jewels.” Two of the sentences—“It was a pearl that Julius Caesar had given to Servilia, when he loved her. Their child had been Brutus.”—conclude a longer section added to the typescript by Wilde, in his own hand, before it was submitted to Lippincott’s. These and the sentence that begins the next paragraph in the typescript—“The young priest of the Sun, who while yet a boy had been slain for his sins, liked to walk in jeweled shoes on dust of gold and silver.”—were left unaltered by Stoddart and his associates in the typescript (as were Wilde’s other references to the effeminate Elagabalus, the “young priest of the Sun”); however, they do not appear in the Lippincott’s text (or in any later published text). Whether this was due to a typesetting error or because Stoddart or another editor excised them in the proofreading stage cannot now be determined. At any rate, these changes—if they were changes and not typesetting errors—were not alterations that Wilde ever had the opportunity to correct. They are restored here.
Although less dramatic than the edits I have been describing so far, some of the changes Stoddart oversaw to Wilde’s punctuation, spelling, and capitalization transform the reading experience and alter meaning no less pervasively. Taken individually, such alterations may appear minor or “accidental,” but their cumulative effect, on style and mood, can be profound. For instance, Stoddart or one of his associates inserted numerous dashes into Wilde’s dialogue, often where Wilde was content with a comma. The result is speech that appears more disjointed and impulsive. These dashes were inserted not because Wilde’s punctuation is in any way deficient but rather because Lippincott’s wished to make the story’s dialogue more sensational. A good example is the re-punctuation of Sybil Vane’s whispered remark, in Chapter V, “Take me away, Dorian. Take me away with you,” as “Take me away, Dorian—take me away with you.” Here the dash changes the tone from wistful to imploring and desperate. With similar results, Stoddart or one of his associates changed Dorian’s estimation of Basil Hallward’s superiority to Lord Henry, in Chapter VII, from “‘You are not stronger. You are too much afraid of life. But you are better,’” to “‘You are not stronger,—you are too much afraid of life,—but you are better.’” Stoddart’s alteration of Dorian’s comment to the frame-maker Ashton, from “I will certainly drop in and look at the frame, though I don’t go in much for religious art,” to “I will certainly drop in and look at the frame—though I don’t go in much for religious art,” achieves a similar effect. In nearly all these instances, Stoddart can hardly be faulted as an editor because Wilde himself had punctuated much of his dialogue with dashes in order to make his character’s speech and interior thought appear more dramatic. Nonetheless, Stoddart was at best exaggerating Wilde’s own preferred punctuation style and at worst distorting it to make Dorian Gray more consistent with the reputation of Lippincott’s for sensational, impulse-driven fiction.
Stoddart or one of his associates made significant alterations to Wilde’s spelling, too. The replacement of British spellings of common words such as “colour,” “odour,” “rumour,” “sympathise,” and “realise” (but not “theatre”), and so on, with their American equivalents (“color,” “odor,” “rumor,” “sympathize,” “realize”) is understandable given the primary American readership of the magazine (and in a few instances, it must be admitted, Wilde was inconsistent about British and American spelling). Americanizing British spellings remains a common practice today among American publishers. In one or two instances, Stoddart or one of his associates corrected obvious spelling errors that were made by Wilde or introduced into the typescript by Miss Dickens’s Typewriting Service, the agency to whom the production of the typescript had been entrusted in London. Less understandable, however, is the twitchiness of Stoddart or one of his associates about such words as “ribands,” “curtsey,” “reverie,” “spoilt,” “leapt,” and “syphons” (rendered as “ribbons,” “courtesy,” “revery,” “spoiled,” “leaped,” and “siphons”), all of which had precedent in American English; while the alteration of “clenched” to the more antiquated “clinched” (p. 118 and p. 142 below) arguably produces an entirely new set of associations.
Three of the spelling changes made by the magazine’s officers deserve special comment. First, in altering “sphynxes” to “sphinxes,” Stoddart or one of his associates changed the spelling that Wilde preferred at this point in his career (it was not until much later, in a late draft of his poem “The Sphinx,” that he adopted the more modern spelling). Second, the alteration of “idyll” to “idyl” must have struck Wilde as arbitrary, because he took the trouble to reverse this change of spelling when he used offprints or unbound sheets of the Lippincott’s text to prepare the novel for book publication. Finally, the often-noted alteration, by Stoddart or one of his associates, of Wilde’s “Sybil” to “Sibyl,” a nod to the name’s derivation from the Greek sibylla, connoting “prophetess” or “oracle,” obscures a number of interesting associations. As John Espey has observed, “Sybil” was a common name and spelling in England at this time (Lord Alfred Douglas’s mother was born Sybil Montgomery). In “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” we encounter another of Wilde’s fictional Sybils, Sybil Merton, who “was . . . a symbol of all that is good and noble.” It must be noted, too, that “Sybil” is the spelling found in Melmoth the Wanderer, the 1820 Gothic novel by Wilde’s great-uncle Charles Maturin, which served as an inspiration for Wilde’s novel and which features a demonic portrait and a bargain for eternal youth.
In an effort to correct spelling or usage, Stoddart or his colleagues sometimes made substitutions that changed meanings and associations of which they were probably unaware. The alteration of “jessamine” to “jasmine,” for instance, effaces a spelling that has a long and distinguished tradition in English literature, from Spenser and Milton to Blake to Wilde’s own contemporaries and beyond. Not too much should be made of the alteration in Chapter VI of Dorian’s memorialization of Sybil (from “a wonderful tragic figure to whom Love had been a great reality” to “a wonderful tragic figure to show Love had been a great reality”), since, absent any editorial markings on the typescript, the change must be attributed to a typesetter’s misreading of Wilde’s handwriting. However, the typesetter’s mistake has been allowed to stand in all editions of Dorian Gray before this one, and its reversal is long overdue.33 Similarly, another typesetter’s misreading—“I won’t hear it!” rather than “I won’t bear it!” (p. 138)—has been reprinted in all previous editions of the novel.
That Stoddart frequently lower-cased words capitalized by Wilde in the typescript (“Club,” “King,” “Queen,” and so on) deserves comment. In a few instances, these changes will strike readers as defensible, and it is certainly true that Wilde was not always consistent in this matter (varying occasionally between “theatre” and “Theatre,” or “art” and “Art,” for example). But some of the decisions made by Stoddart or his associates seem arbitrary. When revising the typescript, Wilde had changed “genius,” “beauty,” and “nocturne” to the upper case: Stoddart leaves the first two intact, but reverses “Nocturne” to lower case. This is a debatable case at best. The same cannot be said of the lower-casing of “Hedonism,” which, as the annotations to the present edition show, is designed through its uppercasing to contrast with the term “Cyrenaicism” in the writings of Walter Pater (Wilde uppercased the word once again when preparing the book edition). It is true that there is something antiquated, even self-conscious, about Wilde’s predilection—common among eighteenth-century writers—to capitalize seemingly common nouns such as “Hospitals,” “Bishop,” and “Costume Ball.” But this was Wilde’s preference, and readers interested in what is distinctive about his writing will want to know about it.
In Chapter IX of the typescript, the unusual capitalization of names of various precious stones and ecclesiastical vestments (“Diamond,” “Hyacinth,” “Hydropicus,” “Selenite,” “Morse,” “Corporals,” and “Sudaria”) suggests what Wilde in the same chapter calls the “mystic offices” of these things (see p. 171). That is to say, in employing capitalization here, Wilde wishes to transform, at least on the page, common or material objects into spiritual, mystic, or symbolic entities possessed of a power that belies everyday experience. Put another way: the upper case indicates how such objects “quickened [Dorian’s] imagination” (p. 171). Except for a small handful of cases where Wilde himself was inconsistent, these, as well as all of his original capitalizations, have been retained in the present edition.
Decisions about such matters as punctuation, spelling, and capitalization are inevitably somewhat subjective, and a number of the changes Stoddart or his associates made in these respects may be defended as improvements.34 But many of Stoddart’s “accidental” changes were arbitrary or driven by commercial considerations, while others had unforeseen and unfortunate consequences, as I have shown. As importantly, Wilde stated categorically to one hostile reviewer that “in prose at any rate, correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that occur in Dorian Gray are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the artistic value of the theory in question” (Complete Letters, pp. 429–430). For these reasons, this edition presents Dorian Gray as Wilde submitted it to Lippincott’s, stripped of all “accidental” changes that can be attributed with certainty to Stoddart or his associates.
The present restoration of matter excised by Stoddart and colleagues gives us a more scandalous and daring novel than either of its two subsequent published versions. By presenting the typescript Wilde submitted for publication, this edition presents Dorian Gray as its author envisioned it in 1890, before commercial, social, and legal pressures motivated a number of changes to Wilde’s text, including the excision of graphic homosexual content. Wilde once said that Dorian Gray “contains much of me in it”; that Basil Hallward is “what I think I am” but “Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Wilde’s comment suggests a backward glance to a Greek or “Dorian” Age, but also a forward-looking one to a more permissive time. The appearance of Wilde’s novel in its uncensored form, 120 years after its submission to Lippincott’s, is reason for celebration.