Are there two versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Oscar Wilde’s novella The Picture of Dorian Gray was one of my favorite books as a young adolescent. I loved Wilde’s clever use of language, of course, but also the science fiction aspect of the story and most of all its vague sense of a forbidden (and very adult) evil which was never quite stated but was clearly driving the plot. I knew Oscar Wilde was gay and spent two years in prison doing hard labor, so I figured that the evil in question must have something to do with persecution of his sexual preference, and that it was just expressed in a code which I didn’t understand.

Little did I know that I was reading a censored version of this work. Wilde first published The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890 and it met with swift, stern condemnation. The Daily Chronicle denounced it as “a poisonous book…heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction” and “a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents” while the Scots Observer opined that it was “false to morality” because the author failed to sufficiently denounce the title character’s preference for “a course of unnatural iniquity” over “a life of cleanliness, health, and sanity.” As a result, when Dorian Gray was published as a book Wilde’s editors cut out quite a bit which made explicit what was only implied in the text I had read. So explicit, in fact, that portions of the 1890 version of Dorian Gray were cited as evidence against Wilde in his 1895 trial for indecency.

There’s no longer any need to content yourself with guessing at what Wilde meant or what his first readers found so upsetting. Instead, you need only acquire a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition is printed in an almost square format (9.4″ by 8.9″) which accommodates the many annotations appearing in the outer columns of each page while Wilde’s text occupies the center columns. A textual introduction discusses the different editions of Dorian Gray while the general introduction reviews Wilde’s life and work and places it cultural context. Most importantly, this edition gives us a chance to read Wilde’s text in a form as close as possible to the way he meant it to appear.

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,0, University of Paderborn (Institut für Angelistik und Amerikanistik), course: A survey of British Queer Fiction, language: English, abstract: Since I was always interested in 'famous' writers such as Shakespeare etc., I decided to write about Oscar Wilde´s 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', for he is one of the best known writers and the title 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is nearly known by everyone. In this essay I will compare the two different versions of his novel, the censored version from 1891 and the uncensored version from 1890 in terms of the theme of homosexuality. I will try to show that there are big differences between these two versions and that they are significant enough to be even noticed by our generation which is fairly open about the topic of homosexuality. In order to do so I will first give a short account about homosexuality in England in the 19th century in the first chapter of the main part and then in the second and third chapter I will compare directly two chapters of the novel and show the changes that are made and analyse their effect on the mood of the scene and therefore on the novel. Lastly I will show that also the adding of a chapter changes a lot of the intention of the novel. After that I will, of course, draw a conclusion. To be able to draw my own conclusion I will only use a few sources about homosexuality in England for the first chapter of the main part such as Jeffrey Weeks 'Sex, Politics & Society', but for the comparison I will only use the Norton Critical Edition of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and my own interpretations and analyses of the scenes. As I said my thesis is, that there are significant changes between the two versions, which may not change the intention of the book completely to the sophisticated reader, but which make the intentions a lot clearer and more obvious even to the unsophisticated reader.

In an essay on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in this week’s New Yorker, I compare the various versions of the story. Here is a list of them:

1. A presumably lost first draft of the tale. Donald Lawler posited the existence of such a draft in “An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde’s Revisions of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ ” (Garland, 1988).

2. An autograph manuscript of the tale, with extensive revisions. This is the manuscript that resides at the Morgan Library. You can see a reproduction of one page at the Morgan site. (See also the Morgan’s digitized version of a remarkable bound volume of Wilde letters and manuscripts.)

3. A typescript, with further revisions and additions, which Wilde submitted to Lippincott’s magazine in 1890. This is the version that was published this year by Harvard University Press—a beautifully illustrated edition, with annotations and supplementary essays by Nicholas Frankel.

4. The Lippincott’s publication, containing small but telling cuts and emendations that Wilde probably did not know of and approve. You can read this version in the Norton Critical Edition of “Dorian Gray” and also in Volume 3 of Oxford University Press’s “Complete Works of Oscar Wilde.”

5. The greatly expanded book publication of 1891. This is the version that most people read in their high-school English classes. It, too, is included in the Norton and Oxford editions__.

There’s also the Marvel Comics adaptation of the story, seen above. Around twenty movie versions of “Dorian Gray” have been released to date, beginning with Axel Strøm’s “Dorian Grays Portraet,” in 1910. By common consent, the best of the lot is the 1945 film with Hurd Hatfield as Gray and George Sanders as Lord Henry. Lowell Liebermann’s opera “The Picture of Dorian Gray” had its premiere at l’Opéra de Monte-Carlo in 1996. Dorian figures in Alan Moore’s comic-book series “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” and in the film of that title he appears as a swishy sort of villain, handy with a rapier.

How many versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray are there?

Are there different versions of Picture of Dorian Gray?

Which version of Dorian GREY should I read?

Is it the picture or portrait of Dorian Gray?