The Picture of Dorian Gray, Explored: A Portrait That Ages, a Man Who Doesn't and Wilde's Only Novel

Dorian Gray's portrait changes because of a wish: after the hedonist Lord Henry Wotton warns him that his beauty will fade, the young Dorian wishes that the painting would grow old instead of him, and the wish comes true. From then on Dorian stays young and handsome while the portrait ages and records every one of his sins. That is the central idea of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's only novel, first published as a novella in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890 and as a longer book in April 1891. It is part philosophical fable, part Gothic horror story and part comedy of manners, and it is now one of the most widely read Gothic novels in English. This guide describes the whole plot, including the ending.

Wilde and the making of the book

Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin in 1854 and died in 1900, was an Irish author, poet and playwright and a key figure in the Aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century. The novel began with a dinner. In August 1889, J. M. Stoddart, an editor from Lippincott's, dined in London with Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle and commissioned stories from both; Doyle delivered The Sign of the Four, and Wilde delivered his manuscript of Dorian Gray the following April.

Stoddart admired the story but feared it was indecent, so he cut around five hundred words before publication without telling Wilde, including passages hinting at homosexual desire. For the 1891 book, Wilde expanded the text from thirteen to twenty chapters, added Sibyl Vane's brother James, toned down some of the homoerotic references and wrote the famous preface. An "uncensored" edition based on the original typescript appeared in 2011.

The preface and the first line

The preface is a string of witty, provocative sayings about art, written partly in reply to critics, and it became famous in its own right as a manifesto for "art for art's sake". It ends with the line "All art is quite useless." The story proper opens in a painter's studio with a sentence full of scent and colour: "The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses." Before anything dark happens, Wilde lets us enjoy beauty, which is exactly the trap the novel is about.

The story in brief (spoilers)

In Victorian London the artist Basil Hallward is painting a portrait of Dorian Gray, a wealthy and extremely handsome young man who has become his muse. Basil's friend Lord Henry, who believes that beauty is the only thing worth pursuing, talks to Dorian about youth and pleasure, and Dorian wishes that the picture would age instead of him.

Under Lord Henry's influence Dorian sets out to explore every sensation. He falls for Sibyl Vane, a young actress who plays Shakespeare in a shabby theatre, and proposes to her. When he brings his friends to see her as Juliet, she acts badly, because real love has made pretending seem empty. Dorian cruelly rejects her. At home he notices a new line of cruelty around the mouth in the portrait. Ashamed, he decides to make amends, but the next morning Lord Henry tells him that Sibyl has taken her own life. Dorian talks himself out of guilt, hides the painting, and for eighteen years tries every vice, guided by a "poisonous" French novel that Lord Henry has given him.

One night Basil comes to ask about the rumours surrounding Dorian. Dorian shows him the portrait, now so hideous that Basil recognises it only by his signature, and when Basil begs him to pray, Dorian stabs him to death. He then blackmails a chemist, Alan Campbell, into destroying the body; Campbell later takes his own life. In an opium den, Sibyl's brother James, who has sought revenge for years, finally finds him, but Dorian's unchanged young face convinces James that he has the wrong man. James keeps hunting him until he is accidentally shot during a hunting party.

Dorian tells Lord Henry he will live a good life, and spares a young country girl he had planned to run away with. But when he looks at the picture, it is uglier than ever: his good deed came from vanity and the wish to be free of consequences, not from real remorse. In a rage he stabs the canvas with the knife he used on Basil. His servants hear a cry, break in and find a withered old man with a knife in his heart, recognisable only by his rings, lying beside a portrait that is once again beautiful.

Three men and one painting

Dorian begins innocent and becomes a study in selfishness. Basil Hallward is the moral heart of the book, an artist who loves Dorian and whose finest work is the portrait. Lord Henry is the novel's great talker, a dandy whose epigrams are irresistible: he advises that "the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." Yet he seems to treat his own philosophy as an experiment and shows total indifference to its consequences. Readers have long noticed echoes of the Faust legend, though Dorian makes no deal with a devil; if there is a tempter in the book, it is Lord Henry's charm.

Themes: beauty, vanity and a double life

The novel asks what happens when appearance is separated from conscience. Dorian's face stays perfect, so society believes in him; his real self is locked in an upstairs room. Scholars point to themes of vanity and egotism, the influence of others, and the hypocrisy of a Victorian elite that cared about surfaces. The book's homoerotic undercurrents, especially in Basil's feelings for Dorian, challenged the strict social norms of the time, and its few female characters, such as Sibyl, show how harshly that world judged women. The mysterious "poisonous" book, which Wilde never names, is generally linked to Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel À rebours.

Scandal, trials and later fame

Even after Stoddart's cuts, the 1890 version shocked British reviewers. One said that it would taint every young mind that came in contact with it, another asked why Wilde had to go "grubbing in muck-heaps", and the bookseller WHSmith withdrew the July issue of Lippincott's from its railway bookstalls. Wilde defended his book and the independence of art in letters to the press.

The novel later became tied to Wilde's own downfall. At his 1895 trials, it was called a "perverted novel", and passages from the magazine version were read out during cross-examination; the association further damaged the book's reputation. That year Wilde was convicted of gross indecency. For decades afterwards the novel was largely ignored by critics, and only from about the 1980s was it widely reassessed as a masterpiece. The Guardian has listed it among the 100 best novels written in English, and it has been filmed many times, most famously in 1945, when Angela Lansbury was nominated for an Academy Award as Sibyl Vane.

Learn with Dorian Gray: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
a Dorian Gray	someone who never seems to age	He's sixty but looks thirty: a real Dorian Gray.
to lead a double life	to hide a second, secret life	Dorian led a double life for eighteen years.
to yield to temptation	to do something you know you shouldn't	I yielded to temptation and ordered dessert.
a skeleton in the closet	a shameful secret	The portrait was his skeleton in the closet.
beauty is only skin deep	looks don't show character	The novel proves that beauty is only skin deep.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a character with a secret, using "lead a double life" and "yield to temptation".