Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Moral Picture, and Wilde’s Fall

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the novel Oscar Wilde published first in a magazine and then, revised, in April 1891. Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett read it as a decadent fable that denies it has a moral, and as a gothic one that cannot work without one. The portrait stays the record of what Dorian does. The man stays young. Five years on, the book was used against Wilde at his trial. Syrett loves the language and does not care for the characters. Sandbrook had never read it. One of them gives it 5. The other gives it 7.5. A chat message from their producer, Nicole, says Dominic has let himself down.

Key ideas

1. A prim young man, then two lives, then a book people stopped speaking to them about. The episode opens on the trial. The book was used against Wilde when he was tried for gross indecency. It was treated as proof of his homosexuality, and it played a key part in the fall and the imprisonment that destroyed the reputation and the life. The story behind the book is as good as the book. Syrett was not always a devotee. She loved the plays because they were funny, and this rereading was hypnotic. She loves the language. She does not care for the characters. She knows Sandbrook was not a fan, to the horror of Nicole, who loves the book. He had never read it. They had done Wilde’s trials on The Rest Is History. He had mixed views, and he said he would save them for the second half. One of them thinks the hour may win the other over. The other is suggestible, has raised a score before, and does not like to disappoint people.

Sandbrook asks her for the life and then tells it. Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. The father, Sir William Wilde, was an ear and eye surgeon and a writer on folklore. The mother is Lady Jane Wilde, devoted to him and he to her. Syrett adds that the mother was a poet and a journalist, and wrote patriotic Irish verse as Speranza. The hosts take Trinity College Dublin, then Oxford and classics, and the idealised male friendships in the novel, and a late-Victorian habit of revering the Greeks. The hosts take the aesthetic movement at Oxford, the young man who was still proper, with no whiff of scandal, then Chelsea, poetry, reviews, and lectures in the United States and Paris. People know him as a gay icon, and the marriage may surprise them. The marriage, as the hosts tell it: 1884, Constance Lloyd, an Irish writer, not a happy marriage, and two sons, Cyril and Vivien. In 1886 he meets Robbie Ross, a younger man, overtly gay for the time, who seduces him and opens a side Wilde had kept locked. He enjoys it physically, emotionally, and as danger. He called the double life feasting with panthers. One side is the night. The other is the Victorian husband and father. The hosts map that onto Dorian, a dual nature and a walking paradox, and onto the idea that the affair with a younger man lifts Wilde into the Greek ideal. The speech in the mid-1890s, celebrated now and infamous then, praises nobility, grace, and beauty in the love of an older man for a younger one, the Greeks, the Iliad. The name for it is pederasty. The telling returns it to Shakespeare. The sonnets, here, are between men, and Wilde treated that as a noble tradition. Still publishing: The Happy Prince in 1888, fairy tales for the sons, then Dorian Gray in 1891, received with outrage. Constance said that once it was published, people stopped talking to them. The homoerotic undertone, and the time, made it so. The 1890s, as the hosts tell them, are respectability, the idealised family, and social hierarchy, a conversation they had on The Woman in White, and an anxious decade: Jack the Ripper, Dracula a few years later, national decline, degeneracy, eugenics, crime, and the New Woman. A reform in the mid-1880s widened what the law punished, from sodomy to the vaguer offence of gross indecency between men. Cleveland Street follows, in the same stretch. Telegraph boys were banned from having money. One was found with cash. The money came from a brothel. There was a raid, and rich patrons. Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the Prince of Wales, fled to the continent. An early review tied the book to people who would use that brothel or work in it. Wilde was by then reckless: seen by waiters in hotels with young men, kissing openly, more affairs, among them an 18-year-old in 1892. Then 1891, Lord Alfred Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry’s son, Bosie, twenty. The film in mind has Stephen Fry as Wilde and Jude Law as Bosie. Bosie sought Wilde out because he admired Dorian Gray. The descriptions made him sound like Dorian. The book was already written, so he was not the model. He was more experienced than Wilde, and had been since school. Together they took up rent boys. The exploitative question is on the table: Wilde was richer, older, and these boys needed money. Queensberry is old-fashioned, powerful, furious, and threatens exposure. Wilde keeps going. The plays are a success. One of them names Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband, and asks which the other was in. The other played Mrs Cheveley.

2. Two texts, a dinner, a preface, and a picture that moralises anyway. The hosts say Wilde said there was much of himself in the book, and that critics take Basil, Lord Henry, and Dorian as aspects of him, with other people’s traits mixed in. John Gray, a young poet in the circle, was pretty, the flirtation was real, and he signed some letters to Wilde as Dorian. Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey comes in as a left-field source, gothic and witty, with a similar tragic heroine. The origin they both like is the sitting. In December 1887 a Canadian painter, Francis Richards, a woman staying with friends in South Kensington, painted him. He looked at the portrait and said, in jest, that it was tragic the portrait would never grow older and he would. If it were the other way round, that would be a story. The result was Dorian Gray. There is more to the book than that premise. It is a nice origin story, and it can sit beside another. The dinner is the hosts’ account. Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine commissioned Wilde at the table. That account dates the first publication to 1889. A later account says Wilde delivered the story in 1890. The expanded book is April 1891. The editor is J. M. Stoddart. The third guest is a politician they agree to forget. The other guest is Arthur Conan Doyle. One of them teases that the other would be intimidated by Wilde and would love to sit beside Doyle. The other would not be intimidated, and might find Wilde tiresome. The hosts go on to a serious man under the manner, with home rule for Ireland as the example, and to the novel itself having a heart. Sandbrook asks if she would go to the dinner. She would. The commission, Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Doyle’s The Sign of Four, is the hosts’ account.

The road to that text is the hosts’ account. The Portrait of Mr. W. H. is the Shakespeare story that is not this novel. The homoerotic theme becomes more explicit, 1889 for that story, 1890 for the delivery, and the editor thinks the tale racy and cuts about 500 words, or maybe more, without telling Wilde. The cut took homoerotic passages and references to Dorian’s female lovers, because the editor feared female readers. The story still caused an outcry. Morbid, unhealthy, dangerous. The Daily Chronicle is a poisonous tale, spawned by French decadent writing and heavy with moral and spiritual decay. One line is that a review has never been like that. Another is that this is what they said about the first podcast. The hosts joke that they would have killed for the line. The Scots Observer refers back to Cleveland Street. The hosts give the notice: ‘This is the kind of book that is written for outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.’ The notice does not use the word, and every reader was meant to understand a book for gay men, and therefore a bad book. That is the context for Constance saying no one would speak to them. In April 1891, because of the outrage, Wilde published a revised and expanded edition. He toned the homoeroticism down further, split the last chapter in two, and wrote six new chapters. Sibyl’s story was enlarged. James Vane, her brother, was added, to stand outside Dorian’s immorality and to put class in the book. That gives the book a critic. It is not only a book about homoeroticism. It was still controversial. So many of the books they cover were hated at the time. That is what pushing against respectability looks like. This one belongs to a movement, the decadents. Decadence is what the Daily Chronicle called French decadence: late nineteenth-century France, introspective, hedonistic, self-obsessed, art for art’s sake, pleasure, heady and a little morbid. The totem is the book Lord Henry gives Dorian, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, translated as Against Nature, 1884. They also call it the yellow book, and a poisonous French novel. A passage has a person hardly able to tell a medieval saint’s ecstasy from a modern sinner’s confession, and the odour of incense clings to the pages and troubles the brain. The Marquis de Sade is heard in that. Anyone who goes looking is warned that nothing happens. A man sits in a Paris apartment, smoking, reading, thinking about beauty, and refusing bourgeois reality. The premise has its appeal. It is escapism carried to the end, which is what books are for. That is the link to art for art’s sake. The preface is the 1891 addition. Artists should make the thing for its beauty, not for fame, money, reviews, or a moral. Critics should not interpret it. That is what the two of them are doing. The book then cannot be immoral. It is a beautiful object. The preface is read: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’ It sounds like common sense now. It was shocking then. The argument came from French writers who refused art a moral job. Wilde’s plays mock earnest bourgeois people.

It is not only decadent. It is one of the last classic gothic horrors, and they talked about Dracula in a Rest Is History miniseries. Same anxieties: degeneracy, the respectable city poisoned, a dark invasion. Masculinity is in it. So are the New Woman and the fear of homosexuality. Portraits do this work in The Castle of Otranto and in Poe’s The Oval Portrait. Doubling: Dorian and the picture, as Jonathan Harker and Dracula, and as Jekyll and Hyde, which they will come to. The public face and the private appetite. London is gas, the Ripper in the air, prostitutes outside the house, opium dens. One of them asks whether this is a comment on imperial decline, as in Dracula. The reply is that the empire is at its height, and that the anxiety is about what the height means for the soul, and whether the respectable outside hides a corrupt inside. The opening, before the break, is the hosts’ reading. A studio filled with the rich odour of roses, then lilac and the pink flowering thorn through the door. The hosts love that heady 1890s air. Lord Henry Wotton lounges on a sofa, smokes, and delivers observations. Basil Hallward is at the painting. One of them says everyone thinks Basil is boring. The reply likes him, and calls him the only good man in the book. Sandbrook agrees that Basil is the only decent character, and he tells the love and the 1891 toning. Basil loves Dorian. In the 1891 text the love was toned down, from romantic love to an artist obsessed with a subject. The hosts read what the first version had Basil say. ‘I have never loved a woman.’ And: ‘I worship Dorian with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend.’ It is moving. The first reviewers thought the disguise was too thin. This is the purest love in the book. Other people love the looks and ignore the wickedness. Basil thinks Dorian is good, because he cannot believe the subject of his masterpiece could be evil. There is a satisfying scene, when Basil tells Dorian what people are saying. Good and evil are written on the face, and Basil especially thinks so. Basil cannot believe the beauty is evil, because he does not know the secret. Lord Henry, in the same stretch, is very Bosie and very Jude Law. The cynic who wants to corrupt Dorian. Basil asks him not to. Henry says something clever and does it anyway. The hosts speak as a fan of Lord Henry, for the wit, the company at lunch, the manner, and the bad boy, and the hypocrisy is in the same breath. Henry never does what he coaxes Dorian to do, taunts him with the claim that Dorian will never be as bad as he is, and is the devil’s accomplice rather than the devil. Entertaining at first, then annoying, because he will not give a straight answer. The joke is the man who answers a question about the time of a flight with another epigram. The flippancy connects to the trial. Wilde was witty in the box, and the flippancy cost him. It did not help. Sandbrook calls the break. What follows is Dorian himself, a secret, Faust, and the fall.

3. The wish is vanity, and the picture is the moral the preface denies. Syrett’s reading, which Sandbrook identifies, is Dorian’s wish. He will grow old and dreadful. The picture will stay as it is on this day in June. If it were the other way, he would give everything. There is nothing he would not give. Sandbrook welcomes the listener back, and says he will never hear her ordinary voice the same way. The hosts find Dorian unlikeable. One of them sets him out as rich, young, beautiful, orphaned, raised by a nasty grandfather, and said to be sweet, with no evidence except that Basil and Henry idealise him. The boy becomes vain, selfish, entitled, and cruel. Some critics hear the name Dorian as a Greek code for love between men. The same one finds him loathsome, and asks if the other is more in favour of Dorian. The reply would not want him as a friend or a boyfriend, would have had a crush on him at university, and thinks that before the spiral he would have been fun. The hedonist darkens. Self-love mixes with self-loathing. Then he is merely mean. The same speech reaches the first love, the actress Sibyl Vane, and cannot forgive him for her. He falls for the parts, not the woman. Tonight Imogen, tomorrow Juliet. Lord Henry asks when she is Sibyl. Dorian wants an icon, not a body. The hosts say that is what everyone in the book does. Basil wanted purity. Henry wanted corruption. Dorian hunts beauty, art, and books because he cannot find a meaning in people. Sibyl acts badly on purpose. He casts her off, and tells her she has killed his love. She later takes her own life. The return home: the painting wears a sneer. Each cruelty will show on it. He will stay young. The hosts say the popular memory keeps only half of the bargain, the ageing, and misses the moral half. For all the talk of art for art’s sake, the book would be incomprehensible without the moral dimension. Bad behaviour, corrupted paint, a real sense of right and wrong. The hosts call that ironic, because the hour has just said art should not have a moral message. The painting is literally moralising. It is the moral message in paint. Sandbrook takes the bargain. It is a throwaway in chapter two. Dorian has seen the portrait. He would give everything to stay young and have the picture grow old. He would give his soul for that. No devil is in the room. Syrett answers that Lord Henry holds up the sign and does not jump.

The Faust material is the background they share. A German scholar sells his soul for knowledge and pleasure. Behind him they place a historical magician, suspected of fraud, somewhere in the decades 1480 to 1540. A German chapbook of 1587 gives a contract of twenty-four years with Mephistopheles. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has the man understand the cost too late, and be dragged to hell. Goethe’s bargain is the more philosophical one, for the Romantics and then for a late-nineteenth-century public who would have known the shape. The difference they draw: Faustus wants knowledge, treasure, and power. Dorian’s motive is conceit. He is in love with his own beauty and wants to keep it. Henry’s lines, passed between them as readings: beauty is the wonder of wonders, and only shallow people do not judge by appearances. ‘The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’ The gods have been good, and what they give they soon take away. Dorian has only a few years in which really to live. Youth is brief. That is what he wants to freeze.

One of them says that even after he has frozen it, the life is empty, which is why he hunts plays, books, music, and objects, trying to find in life the heroes he has met in books. The other recalls the Northern Lights episode, and the tears at the end of the Philip Pullman trilogy, because the person addressed did not want to leave the world. The hosts call the wish to escape the relatable side of a monstrous character, and they call the collecting cold as well. The hosts love the opulence of the writing. Sandbrook says Nicole worships Henry and wants more of the epigrams. In that turn Henry tells Dorian to live the life that is in him, to let nothing be lost, and to search for new sensations. The vices are nocturnal: drink, smoke, drugs, the corruption of the young. The hosts read the message as this: be careful what you wish for, and mind your vanity. It is almost a book ahead of its time. Self-worth and putting yourself first have never been more revered. A public profile and a private one. A perfect exterior, beauty products, influence. One of them adds the manicured image, forever young. The other says everyone has a portrait of their life now. The hosts say it is a moral book because Wilde believes you have a soul and should not sell it. Dorian has sold his. The late-Victorian idea, as the hosts tell it, is that immorality is written on the body as well as on the soul, and that the two are one. This is literal in the novel, and it ties to the psychoanalysis they talked about on the Baskervilles episode and on The Woman in White. A new dualism, Freud, two identities, the hidden thing showing on the outside. The soul here is an object. The 1945 film shows the original portrait beside what Dorian becomes. Ivan Albright painted the corrupted one. The remorse in that account is not a clean conscience. Dorian mourns the ugliness of the picture. He does not feel for Sibyl or for the people he has ruined. He cannot stand his own ugliness. The hosts saw the painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and found it shocking, visceral, and not realist. The double life is the idea Wilde is known for, respectability by day and corruption by night, ‘the terrible pleasure of a double life’. The Importance of Being Earnest is the comic version. Wilde had Constance and the children, and he had the other life. The 1890s, a few years from Freud, are fascinated by what is repressed and still surfaces. Dracula has it. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886, four years before this book, has it as plot. One is the monster and one is the man. The same split is in London, the West End sofa and the East End alley. The endings are striking, and the spoiler is flagged. Dorian is so miserable that he stabs the painting. The servants find a shrivelled old man with a knife in his chest, and the painting young and perfect. Hyde kills himself and is found in Jekyll’s clothes. The night side is also the lower class. Something of Wilde in that. Jekyll and Hyde is not a camp book. This one is. The homoerotic heat was dialled down between the magazine text and 1891. Basil’s hand on an arm or a shoulder was cut. It is still obvious: the tenderness, the young men who meet Dorian and are destroyed and leave society, and the three kings and their favourites. Richard II’s jewelled coat, the favourites of James I, Edward II’s gift to Piers Gaveston. Parma violets, which they attach to Sappho, and the green carnation as a signal between men. The hosts think Wilde poured himself in. The double life, the moral struggle, the speech in defence of his desires, and the likelihood that a man raised as Wilde was raised, prim when young, did not live without a fight inside. The morality and the anxiety about sex are the period’s, and they are also his. The episode raises the question whether the living death, the empty guilty life, can be read as the homosexuality itself being the sin the book punishes.

4. The life repeats the book, and Wilde stays hard to sum up. The book was already a favourite before the trials. Nicole loves it. A friend of one of them called it his favourite book, and it later turned out to be the only book he had ever read. The hosts love the writing: lavish, funny, heady, a bath of scent, and also the hedonism, the parties, and the flings. The deeper hook is the warning against vanity in an age that has never had so much. The moral core is the hollowness of the obsession with image. Wilde has his cake and eats it. The reader is invited to enjoy the hedonism, and is told that Henry is wrong. Lord Henry is plain wrong, because Dorian pursues beauty and vanity above all and is destroyed by it. Dorian is unhappy, and the other reason the book lasts is Wilde himself. Flamboyance, the lines, the imprisonment. Five years between the first version and the fall. A gay icon, or a martyr. Queensberry meant to wreck the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest with rotten vegetables. He was kept out, and left a card at Wilde’s club, a misspelt accusation of sodomy. Wilde, egged on by Ross and by Bosie, sued for libel. Foolish, given how open he had been. He denied it. The defence brought the young men. Queensberry’s team, led by Carson, who had known Wilde at university in Dublin and who became a unionist politician, did the job. The case collapsed. Because it was now public, and because Wilde was close to Liberals, the government prosecuted under the recent statute. Two trials. The first did not agree. He was flippant in the box. He was convicted. Bosie went to France. One of them thinks Bosie is a terrible person. The reply is that he pushed the case and promised the fees. The next is that he let Wilde go. The next is that he left Wilde in the lurch.

The echoes of the novel run on, as the hosts tell them. Two years’ hard labour, the maximum. People said an example was being made, and the hosts think that, to some degree, one was. Constance took the children to Europe. Wilde was not allowed to see the boys. Reading Gaol, the health gone, a long dark night of the soul, release, bankruptcy, France. He sees Bosie again. The relationship is toxic. Constance’s money depended on his staying away from Bosie. He could not. One of them says ‘I think’ the line is from Matthew Sturgis’s biography: at the end Wilde was spending more money on rent boys than on rent. Death in 1900, in a cheap Paris hotel, probably meningitis. They did the moral question on The Rest Is History. One of them says Wilde is a victim and a martyr, and also morally ambiguous, because the men were much poorer and much younger. There is always a power difference. The question is whether it is exploitation. The reply is that listeners can decide, and that the speaker really does not know what to think. The next is pity: Wilde was well liked, including in prison, lovable, and really foolish. Sandbrook notices that he has talked more about the man than about the book, and that this gives his view away. Syrett says she suggested that the mark be a witticism. The mark does not come out as one. One of them is fascinated by the story, by Wilde’s story, and by the idea of the book, and gives it 5. The reading came straight after The Hunger Games. That speaker was bored of Lord Henry, sick of the lush prose, and says Nicole will never speak to that speaker again. Romantasy is blamed for the ruin. The other gives 7.5. A later turn remarks on the half points. The half is defended as nuance rather than indecision. The hosts’ reasons for the 7.5 are the opulence and the flamboyant prose, straightforward and rich and able to say a great deal, then Dorian’s swings between devilry and self-obsessed remorse, which stayed in the mind, and a message found convincing without a claim that Wilde intended a sermon: fight your vanity. The characters were not liked. A book needs someone to root for. That is the deduction. On the chat, Nicole writes that Dominic has let himself down.

Context

The story a stranger needs. Basil Hallward paints Dorian Gray and is infatuated with him. Lord Henry Wotton, a witty cynic, takes the young man up and teaches him that beauty and pleasure are the point, and that youth is short. Dorian wishes to stay as he is and to let the portrait age. He loves an actress, Sibyl Vane, for the heroines she plays, rejects her when she acts badly, and drives her to suicide. The portrait sneers. From then on it records his cruelty and his age, and he remains beautiful. He gives himself to sensation, objects, opium, and the ruin of other people, especially young men. Respectable London drops him. Basil confronts him. A brother of Sibyl’s is added, in the 1891 text, as a threat from outside that world. Dorian stabs the painting. The servants find an old man dead, and the painting young again.

How the book sits. A gothic story in a decadent manner. The preface says a book cannot be moral or immoral, only well or badly written. The plot says the opposite: the picture is the moral. Syrett loves the language and does not care for the characters. Sandbrook had never read the book. At the ranking he says he has talked more about Wilde than about the book. The picture is the moral the preface denies, as the hosts read it. The 1945 film and the Albright painting are there to show the soul as an object, not as a reading of the adaptation.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host