The Picture Of Dorian Gray
by Wilde, Oscar
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" is a classic novel by Oscar Wilde, first published in 1890. It tells the story of a young, handsome man named Dorian Gray, who becomes the subject of a portrait painted by an artist named Basil Hallward. Dorian is introduced to the pleasures of life by his friend, Lord Henry Wotton, who encourages him to pursue beauty and pleasure above all else.
Dorian becomes obsessed with his own youth and beauty, and he wishes that his portrait would age instead of him. His wish is granted, and he remains youthful while his portrait shows the physical and moral decay of his life. As Dorian becomes increasingly depraved, his portrait becomes more and more grotesque, reflecting the ugliness of his soul.
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" is a haunting and thought-provoking novel that explores themes of beauty, morality, and the corrupting influence of society. It remains one of Oscar Wilde's most famous works and is widely regarded as a LGBTQ+ masterpiece of English literature.
First edition identification
Ward, Lock published a First UK Edition, First Printing hardcover in 1891, London. The edition is characterized by vellum backed boards.
Charles Carrington published a First Illustrated Edition, First Printing in 1908, Paris. Finely bound by the Chelsea Bindery in purple morocco, spine lettered and decorated in gilt, raised bands, marbled endpapers, and gilt edges.
John Lane Bodley Head & Dodd Mead published a First Illustrated Edition Thus, First Printing in 1925, US. The edition is bound in cloth boards with 12 full page engravings by Henry Keen.
Brentano’s published a First US Edition, First Printing in 1906, New York.
The World Publishing Co., published a Towers-Books-Edition, First Printing in 1944.
Heritage Press published a First Edition Thus, First Printing hardcover in 1957, New York.
Other Collectible or Notable Editions
The Folio Society published a Limited Edition, First Printing hardcover in 2009, London. Introduction by Simon Callow. Illustrations by Emma Chichester Clark. Cloth blocked with a design by Will Spring.
Amaranthine Books published a Limited Edition, First Edition thus in 2022. It is bound in sparkling green cloth, featuring a hand painted peacock feather with acrylic paint, as well as gold foil stamping and embossing. This edition was created in a limited set of 260 copies.
Reviews
Review this book!
Within months of each other appeared two sensational first English novels: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. The first was by Irishman Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 - 1900); the second by Anglo-Indian Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936). Both appeared in the same Philadelphia magazine in 1890. Both were then in 1891 quickly reworked, enlarged and issued as books. Both novels are about London painters, paintings, art and theories of art. Both have been made into excellent feature films. Both novels end tragically for their heroes, respectively pleasure-seeking Dorian Gray and war scenes painter Dick Heldar. *** Oscar Wilde preached that life imitates art, Rudyard Kipling the opposite. For Kipling (who grew up in artistic circles on both his mother's and his father's side) a good painter looked carefully at a scene then painted his memory of it better than what he had actually seen. Much traveled painter Dick Heldar notes that during his months in London he heard more admittedly competent painters talking at parties about painting than he ever saw evidence that they actually worked with canvases. That would have been the fashionable world of Oscar Wilde and his fanatic imitatators. It is, in a nutshell, instructive to read and compare THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and THE LIGHT THAT FAILED. *** Dorian Gray is 20 at novel's beginning and 38 or older when on Wilde's novel's last page he is found in his locked childhood nursery deformed, hideous and dead, a knife in his heart and with his famous picture once again that of a beautiful, innocent 20-year old, looming in judgment above him. Gray's ten years older Ch. 19) friend Lord Henry Wotton very early on convinces a still innocent Dorian that his youth and beauty are his greatest assets. An agitated Dorian then wishes or prays that his body might remain young while a just completed adoring portrait would both age and display his moral developments -- instead of Dorian himself. Over time the picture and its changes for the worse became Dorian's conscience. *** Dorian got his wish. Despite sporadic, perhaps merely hypocritical efforts to be good, Dorian Gray does heartless deeds. He callously rebuffs Sybil Vane, a young, good, innocent actress who loves him and who then takes poison. Dorian Gray murders his onetime friend and admirer the painter Basil Hallward who created the picture that is Dorian's conscience. Over an 18 year period, Gray alienates most of the ostensbily correct, decent upper class people in London. His friends are always the worse for being his friends. *** At times throughout the novel's 20 chapters, a reader feels as if half the text is non-narrative, given over to philosophizing about morality and art, to discussing aesthetic theories and to giving hints at literary sources behind the decadent nihilism preached by Dorian Gray and his mentor Lord Henry Wotton. This didactic dimension of the novel is well summarized when Dorian Gray tells Lord Henry: "You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram" (Ch. 18). ***THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY is good read. The narrative is undemanding, gothic, realistic, and moves forward, posed tableau following tableau with increasing speed. The didactic half, with its digressions into architecture, decadent French literature, tapestries and priestly vestments and far more demands close attention. The last ten chapters are shorter than the first ten and the pace of the narrative accordingly accelerates. This is above all a novel of conscience, religion, morals and the life of artists. It abounds in epigrams, smart sayings and repartee. -OOO-
Available Copies

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Modern Library, Boni and Liveright, Brodzky, 1919-1925)
by Oscar WIlde
- Condition
- Used
- Published
- 1919-1925
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Malden, Massachusetts, USA
- Item Price
-
$175.00
Show Details
![The Picture of Dorian Gray [Modern Library 1]](https://d3525k1ryd2155.cloudfront.net/h/919/041/1406041919.0.m.jpg)
The Picture of Dorian Gray [Modern Library 1]
by Wilde, Oscar
- Condition
- Used - Good
- Jacket Condition
- Missing
- Published
- 1917
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
- Item Price
-
$125.00
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
- Condition
- Used - Very Good ++
- Jacket Condition
- Very Good
- Edition
- First Edition Thus 1st Printing
- Published
- 1925
- Binding
- Cloth
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Northampton, Northamptonshire, GBR
- Item Price
-
$902.93
Show Details

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
by Wilde, Oscar
- Condition
- Used - Fine in slipcase. Bookplate
- Edition
- No. 1004 of 1500 copies signed by Lucille Corcos
- Published
- 1957
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Paris, Tennessee, USA
- Item Price
-
$250.00
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900)
- Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, GBR
- Item Price
-
$2,902.28
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Original screenplay for the 1945 film)
by Oscar Wilde (novel); Albert Lewin (director, screenwriter); Hurd Hatfield, Angela Lansbury, Lowell Gilmore, Donna Reed, George Sanders (starring)
- Condition
- Used
- Published
- 1943
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
- Item Price
-
$5,500.00
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
- Condition
- New
- Published
- pp. 304
- Binding
- Hardback
- ISBN 10
- 0141442468
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Woodside, New York, USA
- Item Price
-
$14.68
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde (Vintage Classics)
by Wilde, Oscar
- Condition
- Used - Good
- Binding
- Paperback
- ISBN 10
- 0099511142
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
GORING BY SEA, West Sussex, GBR
- Item Price
-
$4.10
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Wilde, Oscar
- Condition
- Used - Poor
- Jacket Condition
- N/A
- Edition
- Reprint Edition
- Published
- 1918
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Albany, California, USA
- Item Price
-
$15.00
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Complete Short Stories; De Profundis; Poems; The Importance of Being Earnest & Other Plays (Treasury of World Masterpieces)
by Oscar Wilde
- Condition
- Used - Very Good+
- Published
- 1983
- ISBN 10
- 0706418824
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
WESTBANK, British Columbia, CAN
- Item Price
-
$29.95
Show Details

The Picture Of Dorian Gray - The Importance Of Being Earnest: Two Books in One Volume
by Oscar Wilde
- Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- No Dust Jacket
- Published
- 1986
- Binding
- ISBN 10
- 8440114176
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Newtown, New South Wales, AUS
- Item Price
-
$23.40
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Modern Library Classics)
by Wilde, Oscar
- Condition
- Used - Good
- ISBN 10
- 0375751513
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Frederick, Maryland, USA
- Item Price
-
$3.49
Show Details

The Picture Of Dorian Gray
by Wilde, Oscar
- Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- Good-
- Edition
- First Edition Thus
- Published
- 1944
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Salem, Oregon, USA
- Item Price
-
$148.95
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
- Condition
- Used - Very Good ++
- Edition
- New Edition
- Published
- 1905
- Binding
- Cloth
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Northampton, Northamptonshire, GBR
- Item Price
-
$773.94
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Wilde, Oscar
- Condition
- Used - Good
- Published
- 1962
- Binding
- Paperback
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Yucca Valley, California, USA
- Item Price
-
$7.95
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Penguin Classics)
by Oscar Wilde
- Condition
- Used; Good
- Binding
- Paperback
- ISBN 10
- 0141439572
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Milton Keynes , Buckinghamshire, GBR
- Item Price
-
$4.49
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar WIlde
- Condition
- Used - Good
- Edition
- Modern Library
- Published
- Circa 1919
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
MADISON, Wisconsin, USA
- Item Price
-
$120.00
Show Details

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
by Oscar Wilde
- Condition
- Used
- Edition
- First Edition Thus; First Printing
- Published
- 1957
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Pomona, New York, USA
- Item Price
-
$216.95
Show Details

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
by WILDE, OSCAR.
- Condition
- Used - Almost No Wear
- Jacket Condition
- No Dust Jacket
- Edition
- Limited Edition
- Published
- 1930
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Prairie Village, Kansas, USA
- Item Price
-
$250.00
Show Details

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Wilde, Oscar
- Condition
- Used
- Published
- 1991
- Binding
- Paperback
- ISBN 10
- 0192815539
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Seller
-
Winnipeg, Manitoba, CAN
- Item Price
-
$6.99