The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition

The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after its publication, literature had--in the words of biographer Richard Ellmann--a different look. Yet the Dorian Gray that Victorians never knew was even more daring than the novel the British press condemned as vulgar, unclean, poisonous, discreditable, and a sham. Now, more than 120 years after Wilde handed it over to his publisher, J. B. Lippincott & Company, Wilde's uncensored typescript is published for the first time, in an annotated, extensively illustrated edition. The novel's first editor, J. M. Stoddart, excised material--especially homosexual content--he thought would offend his readers' sensibilities. When Wilde enlarged the novel for the 1891 edition, he responded to his critics by further toning down its immoral elements. The differences between the text Wilde submitted to Lippincott and published versions of the novel have until now been evident to only the handful of scholars who have examined Wilde's typescript.