2

A Bad Case

‘The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.’

oscar wilde

Meanwhile Wilde’s plans for his Lippincott’s story had begun to shift. After toiling at ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ for several months, he abandoned the idea of sending it to the magazine. At 15,000 words it was far too short. Besides, a new and ‘better’ idea had occurred to him, for a tale about a mysterious portrait.1 The initial seed for the story had been sown a couple of years earlier when – in December 1887 – he had had his portrait painted by his friend, the Canadian artist Frances Richards, who was over in London and staying with the Ross family in Kensington. ‘When the sitting was over,’ Wilde recalled, ‘and I had looked at the portrait, I said in jest, “What a tragic thing it is. This portrait will never grow older and I shall. If only it was the other way!” The moment I had said this it occurred to me what a capital plot the idea would make for a story.’2

He had subsequently gone on to evolve a Poe-like tale of a handsome young man committed to a life of hedonistic dissipation who remains quite unmarked by either age or debauchery, while his portrait gradually accumulates all the terrible signs of both. It joined his repertoire of extemporized fables to be spun out among friends and dining companions. Now, though, he determined to write it down – or write it up.* To achieve the 35,000-plus words required, the story needed some amplification. Wilde told Stoddart he could have the work done by the end of March. He also asked if he could have ‘half the honorarium [£100] in advance’, as he needed money after his months of illness-enforced idleness.3

Fired now with enthusiasm for the project, Wilde set about expanding the plot, and infusing it with his current concerns – the literature of the French Decadents, the relations between art and life, the creative force of pederasty and the challenges of leading a ‘double life’. He created the figures of Dorian Gray, the vain young man who wishes that his portrait might age so that he will not; Basil Hallward, the artist who – infatuated with Dorian – creates the magical picture; and Lord Henry Wotton, the worldly advocate of a ‘New Hedonism’, who leads Dorian along a fatal path of self-fulfilment through self-indulgence: ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation,’ he tells Dorian, ‘is to yield to it.’

Dorian Gray’s name carried not only an echo of Disraeli’s first novel, Vivian Grey, but also a coded reference to the ‘Dorians’ of ancient Sparta, who were credited with introducing pederasty into Greek culture; while Dorian’s relationship with Hallward – framed as an intense romantic friendship – is also that of the ‘beloved’, who through his beauty inspires his pederastic ‘lover’ to create an artistic masterpiece. Drawing on the genealogy mapped out in Pater’s Renaissance and his own ‘Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, he characterized Basil’s feelings for Dorian as a ‘noble and intellectual’ love – ‘not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.’4

To provide a blueprint and a guide for his career of pleasure, Lord Henry lends Dorian a fatal book – a French novel written in a ‘curious jewelled style... without a plot, and with only one character, being indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own… loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.’ Although clearly inspired – as he privately admitted – by Huysmans’ À Rebours, Wilde dubbed it ‘Le Secret de Raoul’ by Catulle Sarrazin (in a rather congested allusion to the protagonist of Rachilde’s novel, Monsieur Vénus; to the Decadent author Catulle Mendès; and to Wilde’s friend Gabriel Sarrazin).5 And although Wilde’s vaguely sketched account of Dorian’s pleasures and crimes was a model of reticence by contemporary French standards, he was well aware that its hints of drug abuse, sexual predation and ‘unnatural’ vice went far beyond the accepted limits of the contemporary English novel. He was to sound a new note in the fiction of the day.

He devised a low-life subplot in which Dorian falls in love with a young East End actress called Sybil Vane, enraptured by her performances as Shakespeare’s romantic heroines, only to reject her when her all-too-real love for him undermines her artistic ability to simulate love convincingly in her acting. And he fashioned a climax in which Dorian, overcome with remorse after murdering Basil Hallward and marring the lives of countless others, finally attempts to obliterate the past by destroying the now-disfigured portrait, only to destroy himself.

The sometimes melodramatic aspects of the plot were countered by the sparkling play of epigrammatic wit among the three main characters, directed always by Lord Henry Wotton. Wilde’s enjoyment in writing these parts sometimes threatened to unbalance the whole. Indeed, the story, he confessed to one friend, ‘is rather like my own life – all conversation and no action. I can’t describe action: my people sit in chairs and chatter.’6 The chatter, though, enabled him to fix instances of his own spontaneous wit, and also to continue that successful blend of paradox and ideas that he had initiated with ‘The Decay of Lying’. Frank Harris considered the ‘first hundred pages’ of the story to be ‘the result of months and months of Oscar’s talk’, with Lord Henry being ‘peculiarly Oscar’s mouthpiece’.7

At almost 55,000 words, the story was his most sustained piece of writing to date. He had worked hard, even turning down luncheon engagements in his anxiety to meet his deadline.8 He did take some short cuts: the descriptions of precious stones and church vestments were copied almost verbatim from the ‘art handbooks’ of the South Kensington Museum.9 But then other avenues were explored with more thoroughness. He took the trouble to quiz a young scientist acquaintance about the best way for Dorian to dispose of Basil Hallward’s body. And, overall, his manuscript shows signs of meticulous care.10

Wilde had a finished typescript ready before the end of March. And although he might pretend to Bernard Berenson that he had knocked it off as a piece of magazine hack work, there is no doubt that he was proud and pleased at his creation. To another friend he described it, excitedly, as ‘my best piece of work’.11 As Basil Hallward had put much of himself into his portrait of Dorian, so Wilde had put much of himself into his story. As he later phrased it, ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.’12

Wilde dispatched the typescript to Philadelphia, and, after a wait of almost a month, received a letter from Stoddart expressing his ‘entire satisfaction with the story’ – which he judged ‘one of the most powerful works of the time’. It would appear in the July number of the magazine.13 The letter, though, concealed quite as much as it revealed. Stoddart, on first reading the manuscript, while impressed by the strength of the story, had been alarmed to note ‘a number of things which an innocent woman would take an exception to’. These ‘objectionable passages’ would, he told his employer, Craige Lippincott, ‘undoubtedly have to be fixed’ before the story could be published. And it was only after he had consulted with several of his literary associates (male and female) on how best to carry out this editorial task, that he wrote to Wilde accepting his story. In his letter, though, he made no mention of any of this; there would, after all, not be time to consult Wilde about changes to the text. Stoddart and one of his editors were already busy, excising over 500 words from the typescript. Some of the changes addressed – and toned down – the homoerotic nature of Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian; others removed the decadent details of the fatal French novel presented to Dorian by Lord Henry Wotton (its fanciful title and author were among the things obliterated); the largest number, though, related to Dorian’s promiscuous relations with women. All references to mistresses and prostitution were carefully removed.14

Back in London Wilde was unaware of these manoeuvres. His own excitement about the story was running on ahead. He was already looking beyond its imminent magazine life, and considering how to expand the tale for publication in book form, once the copyright reverted to him in September. He thought that two extra chapters should be sufficient; and the result would ‘make a sensation’. He approached at least two publishers in the hope that they would take it on. Macmillan & Co. was one of the firms. A ‘sensation’, however, was not what they wanted. Maurice Macmillan (the older brother of Wilde’s friend George) wrote back at once, regretting that the story was not for them – ‘We have done very little in the way of such strong situations; and I confess there is something in the power which Dorian Gray gets over the young nature scientist [whom he blackmails into helping him dispose of Basil Hallward’s body], and one or two other things, which is rather repelling.’ ‘I dare say,’ he added, ‘you do not mean it to be.’ And it seems that the other publishers were similarly wary. In the end Wilde came to an arrangement with Ward, Lock & Co., the firm that had recently taken on distribution of Lippincott’s Magazine in Britain.15

The excitement of making plans for Dorian Gray seems to have stimulated the pace of Wilde’s other literary productions. Building upon the success of ‘The Decay of Lying’ he produced a second, longer, ‘Dialogue’ for the Nineteenth Century: a discussion between the super-cultured ‘Gilbert’ and the rather earnest ‘Ernest’ on ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’. It was another celebration of Wilde’s amoral and inutile Aesthetic, and an inversion of established hierarchies.

Overturning Matthew Arnold’s resonant view, expressed in his famous 1864 essay ‘The Function of Criticism in the Present Time’, that the goal of criticism was ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’, Gilbert asserts that ‘the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not’. Criticism, he suggests, should be the purely subjective record of the critic’s impressions. ‘To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes.’ The critic does not seek to ‘explain a work of art’ but rather to respond to its beauty – to ‘deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike’. The work of the ‘critic’ is thus equal to that of the ‘creative artist’; indeed superior, since the critic is engaging with refined ‘art’ rather than unrefined ‘nature’. This – like much else in the dialogue – was well calculated to annoy Whistler.

To be fit for the task the critic must ‘intensify’ his own ‘individualism’ – not by limiting his sympathies, but expanding them. Wilde has Gilbert suggest that ‘Sin’ is one way to achieve this: ‘By its curiosity Sin increases the experiences of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type.’ But the critic must then adopt poses to express himself. ‘Man,’ Gilbert asserts, ‘is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth… What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.’ The ‘Dialogue’ was to be published in two parts, in the periodical’s July and September issues.

Added to his other recent essays, dialogues and stories – from ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ up to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ – it confirmed Wilde’s vision of himself as one of the thinkers of his age. He had, as he later declared, ‘made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art’, had ‘summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram’.16 His succession of publications had also confirmed his vision of himself as a purely literary figure. At last he felt able to abandon the mere ‘journalism’ of reviewing. The four book reviews that he contributed in early part of 1890 to the Speaker – a new weekly edited by his former Cassell’s colleague Wemyss Reid – would be his last.17 He had gained a place on a wider and more exalted stage.

By the third week in June the ‘July number’ of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine was on the London newsstands. Above its masthead ran the emblazoned legend: ‘This Number Contains a Complete Novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ By Oscar Wilde’. Wilde’s name was enough to ‘excite wide interest and curiosity’ in the venture. And the curiosity was repaid. The story created an immediate sensation.18 It was variously hailed and puffed as ‘one of the most brilliant and remarkable productions of the year’ – a story ‘full of strong and sustained interest’, ‘attractively written, with an easy dialogue and good character studies’.19 The plot was likened to Faust, the style to both Disraeli and Ouida. The ‘magic motive’ of the picture was compared to Poe and Hawthorne, and the essential idea to Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It was very soon ‘monopoliz[ing] the attention of Londoners that talk about books’.20 There was no denying that it was the literary sensation of the moment. For the first time in his career, it seemed, Wilde had matched his notoriety with a comparably notorious achievement.

Lady Wilde was characteristically enthusiastic, confessing that she had ‘nearly fainted at the last scene’. The story, she announced, was ‘the most wonderful piece of writing in all the fiction of the day’.21 Robbie Ross reported that ‘even in the precincts of the Savile’ there was ‘nothing but praise of Dorian Gray though of course it is said to be very dangerous’ (Ross had heard a clergyman tempering his admiration for the novel with the regret that, ‘some of the sentiments of Lord Henry [were] apt to lead people astray’). Eighty copies of the magazine had been sold in a single day from a Strand booksellers: ‘the usual sale being about 3 a week’.22

There were over 200 reviews – an extraordinary response to a novella published in an Anglo-American periodical. Not all, of course, were favourable. Wilde, it transpired, retained all his old ability to annoy the critics. One complained at his ‘uncertainty as to the use of “will” and “shall”’, another at ‘an amateurish lack of precision in the descriptive passages’.23 The Pall Mall Gazette, in a long critique, suggested that ‘Mr Oscar Wilde’s new novelette is compounded of three elements in equal proportion. It is one part Stevenson, one part Huysmans, one part Wilde.’ The distinctive Wildean strain (‘the genuine Oscar – the Oscar fin de siècle, whom we know’) was displayed in the ‘copious stream of paradox’ flowing through the dialogue. A generous selection of examples – both ‘ingenious’ and ‘trite’ – was provided (though it was left to the reader to judge which was which):

‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.’ – ‘I can believe anything provided it is incredible.’ – ‘A man can’t be too careful in his choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.’ – ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ – ‘The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.’ – ‘Sin is the only colour-element left in modern life.’ – ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ – ‘There are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society.’ – ‘A cigarette is the type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.’ – ‘Lord Henry was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.’ – ‘I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.’

As for the Stevensonian portion, the reviewer considered that although Wilde’s story could be ‘classed with Dr Jekyll as a moral tale… its morality [was] only skin deep’ – and not even logically coherent. The supposed moral served merely as ‘a conventional garment… to secure Mr. Wilde’s fantasy an entrance into decent Anglo-American society’. The ‘dominant element’ in Wilde’s literary ‘inspiration’ – it was claimed – was, rather, ‘the aesthetic paganism of the French “Decadents”’ in general, and of À Rebours in particular:

It is the picturesque not the ethical aspects of virtue and vice that interest Mr. Wilde. Purity has its artistic value, if only as a contrast to its opposite; corruption is scintillant, iridescent, full of alluring effects… From the very outset [the author] plunges us in a sickly atmosphere. The way in which Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward talk of, and to, Dorian Gray in the opening scene convinced us, for the moment, that the beautiful Dorian must be a woman in male attire. We were wrong; Dorian Gray with his ‘finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes and his crisp gold hair’ is of the same sex as his admirers; but that does not make their worship of him, and the forms of its expression, seem any the less nauseous. And the atmosphere does not freshen as the story proceeds. The very vagueness of Mr. Wilde’s allusions to his hero’s vices is exceedingly effective from the Baudelairian point of view. We are conscious of a penetrating poison in the air, yet cannot see clearly whence it proceeds.24

While some papers hailed the story’s ‘high spiritual import’, the gathering consensus chimed with the Pall Mall Gazette and the Savile Club membership in considering Wilde’s story somehow ‘morbid’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘dangerous’ and tinged with ‘poison’. The position was stated most emphatically in the St James’s Gazette, the Daily Chronicle and in W. E. Henley’s Scots Observer (where, ironically, Robbie Ross – after a single unhappy year at Cambridge – had taken a job). Each of them focused, in their differently coded ways, on the story’s undercurrents of ‘unnatural’ homosexual desire. They condemned the cloying relationships of the novel’s three main characters, the hedonistic creed proposed by Lord Henry Wotton, and the descriptions – vague though they might be – of Dorian’s depravities coupled with Wilde’s apparent enjoyment in writing about them.

‘Why go grubbing in muck heaps?’ demanded Charles Whibley, writing anonymously in the Scots Observer:

The world is fair, and the proportion of healthy-minded men and honest women to those that are foul, fallen or unnatural is great. Mr. Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten; and while ‘The Picture of Dorian Gary’… is ingenious, interesting, full of cleverness, and plainly the work of a man of letters, it is false art, for its interest is medico-legal; it is false to human nature – for its hero is a devil; it is false to morality – for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity.25

The Daily Chronicle called the story a ‘poisonous’ tale, ‘spawned by the leprous literature of the French Décadents… heavy with the odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction’; the St James’s Gazette wondered whether ‘The Treasury or the Vigilance Society will think it worth while to prosecute Mr. Oscar Wilde’ or his publishers, for producing such a ‘corrupt’ and offensive work; while the Scots Observer suggested that a story which ‘dealt with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing – in camera’ would appeal to ‘none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys’.26 The allusions to ‘telegraph boys’ and ‘outlawed noblemen’ to ‘medico-legal’ interests and the ‘Vigilance Committee’ all reflected, and encouraged, the sexual anxieties about ‘unnatural vice’ stirred up by the Cleveland Street Scandal.

With (and even without) the insinuations of the press, many of those who read the book detected its ‘dangerous’ subtext. Violet Martin thought it ‘the most daring beastliness ever’; while John Addington Symonds, to whom Wilde had sent a copy, suggested ‘If the British public will stand this, they can stand anything.’ Wilde could not have been surprised at such reactions. He had, after all, refused to let the innocent-minded Graham Robertson read the story, telling him, ‘this book was not written for you’.27 Pater declined to review the story on the grounds that it was ‘too dangerous’; he was, he told Wilde, concerned that the ‘veil of mystery’ surrounding Dorian’s ‘sins’ slipped in some places, revealing too clearly the sexual passion that Basil Hallward had for him. He may have been concerned, too, that Lord Henry’s call to for a ‘New Hedonism’ seemed to echo the ideas, and even the phrases, of his controversial ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, bending them to a new purpose. He himself had spent the intervening years seeking to qualify and mitigate his call to a life of seeking ‘experience’ for its own end. The hero of his own novel, Marius the Epicurean (published in 1885), advocated a more austere philosophy of life, very different from the ‘New Hedonism’ – an Epicureanism that recognized the importance of ‘the moral sense’ for the complete and ‘harmonious development of man’s entire organism’.28

In America there was general incomprehension about the furore. A New York Times editorial at the end of June reported that the story had ‘excited vastly more interest’ in Britain than it had in the States, ‘simply because, since last year’s exposure of what are euphemistically styled the West End [i.e. Cleveland Street] scandals Englishmen have been abnormally sensitive to the faintest suggestion of pruriency in the direction of friendships’. Any such ‘bestial suspicion’ was unlikely to have crossed the mind of ‘one American reader out of ten thousand’.29

Wilde professed to be delighted with the press attacks, on the grounds that, as the English public ‘takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral’, such reviews would ‘largely increase the sale of the magazine’. He only regretted that, having been paid outright for the piece, he would not be benefiting from this. To keep the subject alive he entered into a bantering correspondence with the three papers – adopting a variety of different defences. ‘I am quite incapable’, he told the St James’s Gazette, ‘of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate; and it is to the confusion between the two that we owe the appearance of Mrs. Grundy, that amusing old lady who represents the only original form of humour that the middle classes of this country have been able to produce.’30

To the editor of the Daily Chronicle he confessed (with a deployment of one of his favourite alliterations) that the book ‘is poisonous if you like; but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at’.31 In a further letter to the St James’s Gazette he ruefully admitted that – ‘alas’ – his story did indeed have a moral. ‘And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment… Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book?’32 He side-stepped Whibley’s ‘grossly unjust’ insinuations, with the line that, although it had proved necessary for ‘the dramatic development of the story’ to ‘surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption’ he had deliberately left the details to the imagination of each reader: ‘Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.’33†

Wilde’s cheerful assertion that the rumoured immorality of the story would be good for sales was not entirely borne out. Although things had begun well, on 10 July Ward, Lock & Co. received ‘an intimation from W. H. Smith and Son, that “[Wilde’s] story having been characterized in the press as a filthy one”, they are compelled to withdraw Lippincott’s Magazine from their bookstalls’. The publishers sought an immediate interview with Wilde, declaring that ‘this is a serious matter for us’.34 And it was. Over the previous two years the National Vigilance Society (a body established in 1885 ‘for the enforcement and improvement of the laws for the repression of criminal vice and public immorality’) had twice successfully prosecuted the English publisher Henry Vizetelly for distributing the novels of Emile Zola in translation. He had been fined a total of £300 and imprisoned for three months.

It was perhaps Ward, Lock & Co.’s anxieties that prompted Wilde’s visit to the offices of the St James’s Gazette, where he sought an interview with Samuel Jeyes, the journalist who had penned the original hostile review, and was fuelling the ongoing controversy. Jeyes (who had been at Oxford the year behind Wilde) proved implacable. Though Wilde exerted ‘all the resources of his persuasive manner and abounding wit’, Jeyes refused to be mollified. ‘What is the use of writing of, and hinting at, things you do not mean?’ he asked. ‘I assure you,’ replied Oscar earnestly, ‘I mean every word I have said, and everything at which I have hinted.’ ‘Then all I can say,’ answered Jeyes grimly, ‘is that if you do mean them, you are very likely to find yourself at Bow Street one of these days.’ Wilde greeted this with a ‘light laugh’.35

Jeyes’s comment, however, carried a warning. There were many who were ready to read the hints about Dorian’s ‘disgusting sins and abominable crimes’ as reflections of Wilde’s own interests and deeds. As Whibley had suggested, the story left it unclear whether the writer himself ‘does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity’. Certainly the American-born baritone David Bispham, who was on the fringe of Wilde’s circle, regarded the story as little short of a reckless ‘confession’.36 The extraordinary interest and attention generated by the tale may have given Wilde a greatly enhanced literary standing, but it also hastened the insidious process of undermining his personal reputation. And although there was considerable exaggeration in Constance’s comment that ‘since Oscar wrote “Dorian Gray” no one will speak to us’, the story’s publication undoubtedly marked a further darkening of Wilde’s reputation. From that summer, in London’s cultured circles, it became harder to ignore the ‘strange things’ being whispered about him.37

On the surface, though, all continued swimmingly. Wilde was in fine form at a party given by Louise Chandler Moulton on 21 July, falling into conversation with the forty-three-year-old poet Katharine Bradley. Together with her niece and life-partner, Edith Cooper, Bradley made up one half of a collaborative dyad that wrote and published under the name ‘Michael Field’. They talked of Pater’s prose, French ‘colour-words’, English philistinism and the genius of Jane Austen: Wilde suggested that ‘due to their imperfect education the only works we have had from women are works of genius’. Touching on celestial matters, Wilde sketched out his vision of heaven. He said that when he got there he ‘would like to find a number of volumes [bound] in vellum that he would be told were his’.38 It was a vision to be desired. Thus far – at the age of thirty-five – Wilde had still only produced two actual books, Poems and The Happy Prince. They offered meagre assurances of immortality, and he was anxious to augment the haul. And over the next sixteen months he would succeed in impressive fashion – not by writing a great deal more, but by repackaging between hard covers what he had already written.

Plans were already advancing with Ward, Lock & Co. for the expanded book version of Dorian Gray, though it was now thought that more than two additional chapters might be necessary to ‘counteract the damage’ of the 1s Lippincott version being so widely distributed. Carlos Blacker was dismayed at the news that Wilde’s ‘damned story’ would be making ‘a re-appearance… with additions but I fear no corrections’. ‘Have you ever known such abominable “Cussedness”?’, he remarked to the Duke of Newcastle. There was, however, some recognition that the moral message of the book might have to be emphasized and decadent details toned down.39‡

Although Wilde remained frustrated in his hopes of finding a publisher for a book version of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, he had more luck with his scheme for a volume of collected essays. In London that summer he met a young American publisher called Clarence McIlvaine, who was travelling together with two literary compatriots, Jonathan Sturges and Stuart Merrill. The twenty-four-year-old Bostonian was planning to establish a new Anglo-American publishing house, in partnership with the distinguished J. R. Osgood, and was in England looking for authors. Wilde set about wooing him and his two companions. ‘In spite of his glory and our obscurity,’ Merrill recalled, ‘he was charming to us without displaying the least pose or arrogance.’40 The charm had its effect: McIlvaine agreed to take on not only a collection of Wilde’s essays (including the two dialogues) but also a compendium of his four published short stories from Court and Society and the World, and a second volume of fairy tales. All three volumes would be scheduled for the following year.

The phenomenal stir caused by ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ encouraged other offers of work. Norman Forbes-Robertson, who was taking on the lease of the Globe Theatre at the end of the year with an aim of producing ‘good comedies well cast’, approached Wilde with a request for a play. Unfortunately, though, he was unable to offer any advance. ‘I am always in need of money,’ Wilde explained, ‘and have to work for certainties.’41 More satisfactory was an inquiry from George Alexander. The thirty-two-year-old actor was also launching himself into management, and also wanted a play from Wilde. He had reason to respect Wilde’s taste, since Wilde had written generously of his acting. And he had – as he put it – ‘long been persuaded’ that Wilde could write a good play. Reading Dorian Gray had confirmed his confidence in the author’s ‘dramatic faculty’. Alexander also wanted to gain some of the social cachet that he considered attached to Wilde’s name, in order to bring to his new theatre (the St James’s) ‘the smart society circles in which Wilde himself already moved’. As an immediate response Wilde appears to have offered him The Duchess of Padua, which was scheduled for its New York production early in following year. But Alexander’s vision was for a modern-dress ‘society play’. And he – unlike Norman Forbes-Robertson – did have the resources to pay an advance of £100: £50 due upfront, £50 due on delivery of the script. Wilde readily agreed.42

Proving the rule of three, Wilde also received, that summer, a letter soliciting his support for a new independent theatre society, modelled on the Théatre de l’Art in Paris, which aimed to mount plays ‘from the most prominent English men of letters’ (Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, Henry James) as well as ‘certain masterpieces of foreign uncoventionality’ (Ibsen’s Ghosts) – without the necessity of submitting the works to the lord chamberlain’s office. The club’s founders, two London-based Dutch writers, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and J. T. Grein, hoped that Wilde might have ‘a play of unconventional interest’ which he would be prepared to ‘lend… for production’. Wilde did not; but the inquiry was flattering, and it perhaps suggested to him, for the first time, the idea of attempting something in the line of ‘experimental’ drama.43

Any notion that the publication of Dorian Gray had led to the Wildes’ social ostracism was refuted by a summer holiday season spent staying with a succession of Scottish baronets ‘in the midst of purple heather and silver mist’. It was, Wilde confessed, ‘such a relief to me, Celt as I am, from the wearisome green of England. I only like green in art. This is one of my many heresies.’44

Back in London after this break, as part of his work on the forthcoming book version of Dorian Gray, Wilde asked Ricketts to make some designs for the volume’s cover and title page. It was a happy collaborative project, and would prove to be the first of many. It drew Wilde closer to the world of the Vale. He became a regular at the little Friday-night gatherings, sometimes bringing a friend with him to what he called ‘the one house in London where you will never be bored’.45 He came to know the select group of artists, craftsmen and writers that Ricketts and Shannon drew into their orbit. Among them was an extraordinarily handsome, rather solemn, young man called John Gray. A minor clerk in the civil service, and of modest origins, he had taught himself French and was devoting himself to literature. The first number of The Dial had contained an article by him on ‘Les Goncourts’ as well as a distinctly Wildean fairy story about ‘The Great Worm’. He also wrote verse. Wilde was impressed by the poetry (which borrowed from the Parisian Decadents) quite as much as by the man,with his quiet air of distinction and charming manners. Gray, like Ricketts, could tell him things he did not know.46

It was exciting for Wilde to discover that so many of the rising generation shared his fascination with contemporary French art and literature – ‘the one art now in Europe that is worth discussing,’ as he told another new literary acquaintance, the self-consciously avant-garde critic and poet Arthur Symons.47 John Gray’s own boyish good looks were, moreover, strangely suggestive of the central motif in Wilde’s novel. Indeed Wilde came to consider Gray to be almost the image of ‘Dorian’. ‘I didn’t find or see him until after I described him in my book,’ he later remarked: a wonderful confirmation of the idea that art inspires and directs nature. ‘This young man,’ he declared, ‘would never have existed if I hadn’t described Dorian.’48 The connection became a joke and a bond shared between them. Wilde would allude ‘laughingly to John Gray as his hero, “Dorian”’. And Gray even signed himself ‘Dorian’ in at least one letter to Wilde.49

The conceit was shared with Lionel Johnson and other members of the newly established ‘Rhymers Club’, an informal grouping of young poets, inaugurated by Yeats and some like-minded friends. Wilde – and Gray – occasionally attended the club’s meetings at the Century Guild headquarters on Fitzroy Street. And Johnson, together with his fellow Rhymer Ernest Dowson was soon referring to Gray as ‘“Dorian” Gray’, or ‘the original of Dorian’; while Johnson elaborated the point in his description of Gray as ‘a youth… aged thirty with the face of fifteen’. Gray was actually twenty-five; but the exaggeration enhanced the joke.50§Art and life were bound together.

* Willie Maxwell was one of the several young companions to whom Wilde had told the ‘portrait’ story – among numerous other tales. He later recalled how, at around this time, ‘I informed [Wilde] that I had taken an idea he had told us, and written a short story with it. For a few moments his face clouded, then it cleared, and he spoke with a mixture of approval and reproach. “Stealing my story was the act of gentleman, but not telling me you had stolen it was to ignore the claims of friendship.” And again a cloud descended, and he became really serious. “You mustn’t take a story that I told you of a man and a picture. No, absolutely, I want that for myself. I fully mean to write it, and I should be terribly upset if I were forestalled.”’

† When Wilde was quizzed by his friend Mrs Walter Palmer about the exact nature of Dorian’s sins, he replied ‘Really, you know, I couldn’t possibly tell about that at dinner. If you will come with me, alone, in to the conservatory, I will tell you all about it.’ After dinner he took her into the conservatory, they returned a few minutes later, Mrs Palmer ‘almost shrieking with laughter’. ‘What do you think this wretch told me?’ she announced. ‘I had asked him to tell me the wickedest thing Dorian Gray did in Whitechapel. And he bent over and whispered in my ear, “He ate peas with a knife!”’

‡ George Lock, one of the partners in the firm, wrote to Wilde suggesting, ‘Could you not make Dorian live longer with the face of the picture transformed to himself and depict the misery in which he ends his days by suicide or repents and becomes a better character? Lord Henry too goes off the scene very quickly. Could not he also live a little longer – and you could make an excellent contrast between the death of the two men. This is what has occurred to me. It is for you to decide if it is worth anything.’ Wilde decided that it was not.

§ Lionel Johnson, himself, was – despite an ever-increasing enthusiasm for whisky drinking – quite as youthful looking as John Gray. Indeed Wilde once remarked, ‘that any morning at eleven o’clock you might see him come out very drunk from the Café Royal, and hail the first passing perambulator’.