Early critical reaction to The Picture of Dorian Gray ‘was almost unanimously hysterical’, Isobel Murray’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition tells us.1 Why? The story would seem to be excessively moralistic – a parable, no less (what shall it profit a man if he keep his good looks and lose his soul?). The homosexual hints are deeply buried beneath Dorian’s conventional heterosexual villainies (the seduction of Sibyl Vane, the debauching of society wives, the ruining of young girls, the inhaling of opium). There were enough sops to the straight, late-Victorian world to have kept even Mr Pecksniff happy, one would have thought.

A key to the disturbing quality of The Picture of Dorian Gray can be found in the first paragraph of the novel:

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

This is the setting to Dorian’s fateful meeting with his evil angel, Lord Henry Wotton, at the studio of his friend, the artist Basil Hallward, for whom he is sitting. The first point to note is the initial emphasis on scent. The chapter continues in the same olfactory vein, with references to Lord Henry’s ‘innumerable cigarettes’, and the ‘honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum’. These opening sentences fairly reek. The overload of smell references is compounded when we discover that the garden in which the scene is set is actually in central London, which ‘roars dimly’ in the background, generating its own characteristic repertoire of summer pongs.

Smells are something that the Anglo-Saxon novel is notably deficient in and uneasy about. The whole of Hemingway’s fiction does not contain a single smell, as Norman Mailer once reckoned (Mailer liked a good stench in his own narratives). For most novelists in English – particularly in the nineteenth century – smells are indelicate. England has left it to its ‘dirty’ continental neighbours, particularly the French, to cultivate the arts of the nose in its perfume and wine industry (in which the French bibber is as attentive to aroma as taste). The two greatest novels devoted to the power of smell – Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours and Patrick Süsskind’s Perfume – could never have been written in England, and in translation have never been popular among English readers. Isobel Murray confirms that contemporary English critics condemned The Picture of Dorian Gray nose-first. ‘Typical of the general outrage’, she tells us, ‘was an unsigned review in the Daily Chronicle, which condemned the novel on all counts, and chiefly as “a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction”’.

The Anglo-Saxon terror of smell is one likely reason why Wilde’s novel triggered visceral alarm. Another is the ‘unnaturalness’ of the horticultural references in the first paragraph and elsewhere. In southern Britain, lilac blossoms and is odoriferous in rainy April, thorn in May (‘May’ is the common countryside name for it), and roses bloom in blazing mid-June (when, as we are repeatedly told by Wilde, this first chapter is set). It is not inconceivable that the flowers, blooms, and blossoms which Wilde describes (lilac, rose, laburnum, thorn) might just coincide on the branch in mid-June – but not in the full odoriferousness about which the first chapter is so eloquent and which so gratifies Lord Henry.

It is wrong that the smell of blown roses and lilac coincide and that their coincidence should be repeatedly mentioned throughout the opening scene of the novel. Sequence has been replaced by a puzzling synchronicity. It is subliminally worrying. Roses, we instinctively feel, should follow thorn and thorn should follow lilacs, they should not all merge in this sensory riot, this nasal orgasm. So too, age should follow youth. But Wilde’s hero is, at one and the same time, a beautiful boy (the same object that Hallward worships in the first scene), a mature man of the world (cultivated, a member of clubs, a brilliant conversationalist at dinner tables), and a withered old man (a senility recorded in the portrait secreted in his attic). The Picture of Dorian Gray fantasizes a world where middle-aged hedonists can be forever boys, equated in a timeless plane composed half out of lust, half out of the wish-fulfilling visions of the fairy story.

This denial of sequence also operates in the larger frame of the story’s chronology. It is clear that the first scene and the narrative up to the death of Sibyl take place in the 1890s. There are unmistakeable cultural references locating the action in this period. For instance: the cult of Wagner and Schumann; the young dandies’ taste for ‘vermouth and orange bitters’ (Chapter 6); the ‘Yellow Book’ that Dorian meaningfully glances at (Ch. 10); the fashion for marrying American heiresses; the ‘seventeen photographs’ of Dorian in different poses which Lord Henry has acquired; the repeated references to the writings of Walter Pater with which the young men first became acquainted at Oxford. The annotations to the Oxford World’s Classic edition clearly indicate the time of the narrative’s early action as coinciding with the period of Wilde’s writing the novel, 1888–90. Looking back through literary history, we recognize it as the brief and soon-to-be curtailed golden age of aestheticism, a florescence that Wilde’s own disgrace would extinguish five years later.

There are, additionally, precise chronological markers, putting the action in the late 1880s-to-1890 period. In Chapter 9 Hallward desperately tries to persuade Dorian to alter his increasingly dissipated ways. And he asks for the portrait back as he means to exhibit it, giving as his reason, ‘Georges Petit is going to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in the Rue de Sèze, which will open the first week in October’. Petit’s gallery (which is clearly well established at this point in the narrative) was set up in 1882, in the Rue de Sèze. This must, logically, be happening at some later point in the 1880s. A little later in the novel, in Chapter 10, Dorian comes across a work of literature which will change his life:

This novel is, unmistakably, Huysmans’ À Rebours, which was first published in 1884.

Not to labour the point, the early chapters of The Picture of Dorian Gray are clearly signalled to take place in 1889–90 or, at most, a couple of years earlier. To place the action much earlier than that would be a gross misreading of the novel. How, then, do we make sense of the encounter ‘eighteen years later’ (as we are told) between Dorian and Sibyl’s vindictive sailor-brother, Tom? Dorian escapes the knife meant for his breast only by showing his still-young face. He cannot be the 40-year-old man Tom is looking for, possessing as he does the unblemished features of someone half that age. Dorian’s quick-thinking ruse is plausible, and makes an effective coup de théâtre. But, if we calculate, the last chapters of the novel must – given the passage of eighteen years – take place in 1903–5 at the earliest. After, that is to say, the death of Queen Victoria, the disgrace and death of Oscar Wilde, and the anathematization of the aestheticism of which Dorian is the flower. It is also a decade-and-a-half after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891.

Clearly the last chapters of Wilde’s novel are not visionary glimpses of the future. The season has changed (it is murky midwinter, opposed to the high midsummer of the first chapter) but the date has not. It is still, we apprehend, 1889–90. Sequence has again been abolished. It is – as with the out-of-order flowers in the first paragraph – very disturbing. And this disturbance, I suggest, working seismically beneath the surface of what is, in most respects, a hyper-moralistic narrative, provokes those shudders which early critics and readers felt, and their invincible suspicion that there was something very unsettling indeed about The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Notes

1. p. vii. See Karl Beckson (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (London, 1970), 67–86, for a representative selection of reviews of Dorian Gray. Beckson summarizes the novel’s extraordinarily hostile reception on 7–12.