The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray – Wilde Oscar (2012)

More than 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, this paperback presents the uncensored version of his novel for the first time. It restores all the material removed by the first editor, who panicked at the manuscript’s graphic homosexual content and edited it with a pencil until he considered it acceptable to the most fastidious taste. Wilde did not see the changes before the novel appeared in print, yet even the redacted version provoked public outrage, with the British press condemning it as vulgar, unclean, poisonous, discreditable and a sham. When Wilde later expanded the novel for book publication, he further toned down its supposedly immoral elements in response to his critics. Wilde famously said that the novel “contains much of me”: Basil Hallward was “what I think I am,” Lord Henry “what the world thinks me,” and Dorian “what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” His words look back to a Greek or Dorian Age while also imagining a more permissive future than the repressive Victorian era, suggesting that he would have preferred readers today to encounter the novel in its uncensored form.