The Picture Of Dorian Gray (31 page)

8
‘Tannhauser’, and seeing… a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul
: An opera by Richard Wagner from 1844. The theme of the poet Tannhauser, who spends a year with Venus but fails to be granted absolution for his sins from Pope Urban IV, was popular with artists and poets of the late nineteenth century, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley.

9
He discovered wondeful stories, also, about jewels… Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful
: Wilde added these historico-mystical descriptions (and those detailing his interest in ecclesiastical vestments) in manuscript to the typescript he submitted to
Lippincott’s
in 1890.

10
dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields
: South of Whitechapel, and close to Shadwell, this area had a reputation for vice and criminality throughout most of the nineteenth century. It was also known for its opium dens, and we later learn that Dorian makes occasional trips to the docks to visit such establishments. Originally Wilde had been no more specific than referring to ‘dreadful places near the docks’, but altered this in the typescript, as he did the lines stating that Dorian would stay in one of these places ‘day after day, till they almost drove him out in horror, and had to be appeased with monstrous bribes’. However, by the time Wilde was writing, Blue Gate Fields had effectively ceased to exist, having been recently cleared away by urban regeneration policies. Like the cabbie who later gets lost taking Dorian to such establishments far from his usual beat, Wilde had but a vague knowledge of this side of the capital. He was probably relying on sensationalist accounts of the few dens in this area that had gone into popular circulation through the papers and works such as Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
(1870) (see note
2
to chapter XVI below). On the fascinating history of opium dens in this area, see Matthew Sweet,
Inventing the Victorians,
pp. 86–102.

11
I think not
: This is the only place in the book where the narrator ventures an opinion directly.

12
He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country house…
: Wilde’s principal model for this passage, and Dorian’s musing on the role of heredity in determining his life, is Huysmans’s
A Rebours
, which opens in a similar gallery, and refers to the ‘freak of heredity’ which linked Des Esseintes with a ‘distant ancestor [a] court favourite’. Thomas Hardy made similar use
of ancestral portraits in
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, also published in 1891. The importance of Dorian’s ancestral portraits and the various contexts which inform Wilde’s use of them is discussed in the Introduction.

13
Prince Regent… Mrs Fitzherbert
: In 1785 George, Prince of Wales (later George IV) married the Catholic Mrs Fitzherbert, but the marriage was later declared invalid.

14
wonderful novel
: ‘dangerous novel’ in 1890.

15
Tiberius… Caligula… Domitian
: A roll-call of debauched and decadent Roman emperors.

16
Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book
: Wilde cancelled the phrase ‘and by a picture’ in the typescript.

1
the eve of his own thirty-eighth birthday
: In the 1890 edition the date given is 7 November, and his thirty-second birthday. In the later version Wilde gives the events of Dorian’s life a longer duration in which to develop.

2
Victoria
: A major London railway terminus (in fact, at the time two stations in one), serving Brighton and the South Coast, and also Chatham and Dover, allowing access to the English Channel and thence to France.

3
the most dreadful things are being said against you in London
: In the 1890 edition this had been followed by the line, ‘– things that I could hardly repeat to you’, cancelled in 1891.

4
If a wretched man has a vice…. There was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated
: Wilde gave this idea a comic twist in his short story ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, where the eponymous character has his palm read by the ‘cheiromantist’ Mr Podgers, who discovers there the signs of a murderer: ‘How mad and monstrous it all seemed! Could it be that written on his hand, in characters that he could not read himself, but that another could decipher, was some fearful secret of sin, some blood-red sign of crime?’ In desperation Savile murders Podgers, fulfilling his own prophecy. See the section ‘Visible Vices’ in the Introduction for the significance of this belief at the time Wilde wrote his novel.

5
Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?
: Wilde had originally written ‘Why is it that every young man that you take up, seems to come to grief, to go to the bad at once?’, but his editor changed this in the typescript.

6
You ask me why…
: The details of these various scandals were added in 1891. Originally Dorian refused to answer these allegations, allowing the nature of the rumours to remain in mystery or ambiguity.

7
What about your country house, and the life that is led there?
: Wilde had originally followed this line with ‘It is quite sufficient to say of a young man that he goes to stay at Selby Royal, for people to sneer and titter’, but his editor cancelled it in the typescript.

8
always a staunch friend to you
: ‘devoted to you’ in 1890.

9
bad, and corrupt, and shameful
: ‘infamous’ in 1890.

1
you met me, flattered me
: ‘devoted yourself to me’ in 1890; the word ‘ideal’ later in this passage was ‘romance’ in 1890.

2
This is the face of a satyr
: In Greek mythology a satyr was a woodland demi-god, associated with lechery and usually represented in grotesque form. Hamlet refers to his uncle Claudius as having the face of a satyr when he contrasts him with his own father, whom he compares with Hyperion, the sun
(Hamlet
, I, ii).

3
bull’s-eye
: A lantern with a thick disc of glass, resembling the ‘bull’s-eye’ at the centre of an archery target.

4
Blue Book
: A society directory.

1
he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward
: This idea, which effectively indicates the onset of Dorian’s psychological decline, had earlier been used by Wilde in his study of the poisoner Wainewright, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’. He remarks how ‘M. Zola, in one of his novels
[His Masterpiece]
, tells of a young man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance to the victim.’

2
those lovely stanzas upon Venice
:

To see, her bosom covered o’er
With pearls, her body suave,
The Adriatic Venus soar
On sound’s chromatic wave.

The domes that on the water dwell
Pursue the melody
In clear drawn cadences, and swell
Like breasts of love that sigh.

My chains around a pillar cast
I land before a fair
And rosy-pale facade at last,
Upon a marble stair.

(Taken from
The Works of Theophile Gautier
, trans. Agnes Lee, 1903) (Ackroyd)

3
Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde…‘monstre charmant’
: A large pink granite obelisk from Luxor in Egypt, counterparts of which are found in London and New York, is set in the centre of the Place de la Concorde at the foot of the Champs-Elysees in Paris. The
monstre charmant
(‘sweet monster’) is a statue of a hermaphrodite found in the Louvre, not far from the similarly displaced obelisk.

4
Natural Science Tripos
: The undergraduate degree at Cambridge, so called because it is made up of three parts. Cambridge has for some time been associated with science – both Newton and Darwin were at Cambridge – while Oxford has traditionally attracted and cultivated artists. Wilde was an Oxonian.

5
Rubinstein
: Artur Rubinstein (1829–94), Russian pianist and composer.

(Wilde added this and the next two chapters in 1891.)

1
chaud-froid
: Cold jellied meats.

2
her hair turned quite gold from grief
: A line Wilde liked so much he re-used it in
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895). Mrs Erlynne, the ‘pushing nobody’ who appears at this gathering in
Dorian Gray
, pushes her way into Wilde’s comedy
Lady Windermere’s Fan
(1892), to play quite an important role.

3
trop de zèle… Trop d’audace
: Too zealous; too audacious/impudent.

4
fin de siècle
: The phrase simply means ‘end of the century’, but carries a weight of connotations about a state of mind (weariness, cynicism and a supposed laxity of morals or standards), and a sense of foreboding; hence it being coupled with
in du globe
, ‘end of the world’, here. The phrase, and the sensibility associated with it, were beginning to enter the popular consciousness at around this time, with commentators attempting to make connections between various social and artistic phenomena, suggesting that these things heralded an impending collapse in standards. Principal among these was the physician and polemicist Max Nordau, whose
Degeneration (Entartung
, 1892; English translation, 1895) diagnosed the fashionable classes of Europe as being held in the grip
offin-de-siècle
hysteria, manifested in their taste for morbid art,
Wilde’s included. Here Nordau sums up the
fin-de-siècle
condition to which Wilde alludes: ‘One epoch in history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is announcing its approach. There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with to-day. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that is worth an effort to up-hold them’ (5–6).

5
Debrett
: A directory providing details of the lineage of the British and Irish aristocracy.

6
Inside was a green paste waxy in lustre
: The substance here is presumably opium. Opium was widely used for a number of ailments at this time, usually in the liquid form of laudanum, and we already know that Lord Henry smokes opium-tainted cigarettes. However, raw opium, which would be waxy, would either be dark brown (from Smyrna) or reddish brown (from Constantinople or Egypt). A greenish substance is more likely hashish; so perhaps Dorian decides this will not give him the oblivion he seeks, and resolves to visit an opium den.

1
Once the man lost his way, and had to drive back half a mile
: Wilde is employing a common trope for depicting the approach to a low-life neighbourhood, that it is
terra incognita
, unknown territory. Given that Dorian is in pursuit of opium it is appropriate to quote Thomas de Quincey, whose
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(1821) provides an early-nineteenth-century representation of this idea; describing how in his midnight rambles in the poorer districts he often ‘came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost believe, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these
terrae incognitae
, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.’ While De Quincey is probably depicting St Giles or Seven Dials, near his Oxford Street lodgings in the West End of London, Wilde is clearly alluding to these associations (poverty, opium and a baffling topography) for Dorian’s trip east.

2
He stopped, and gave a peculiar knock
: Dorian visits an opium den somewhere near the docks, between Shadwell and Limehouse (areas associated with these establishments). The most famous fictional account of an opium den was provided by Dickens in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, where the eponymous character, like Dorian, lives a double life of outward respectability and
clandestine indulgence in opium. Dickens visited a den which he claimed was near Shadwell, and so was probably Blue Gate Fields, where Dorian himself keeps a room (see note
10
to Chapter XI, above). Arthur Conan Doyle published the Sherlock Holmes case of ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, which has two characters who lead double lives between respectable suburbia and East London opium dens, in 1891, a few months after the publication of Wilde’s revised novel.

1
Tartuffe
: A character typifying hypocrisy, from Moliere’s play
The Hypocrite.

2
the survival of the pushing… It is a malady
: This exchange exemplifies the polarities that were drawn at the end of the nineteenth century, between ‘getting on’, and the attitude cultivated by self-consciously avant-garde artists. Again, Max Nordau’s
Degeneration
provides the best testimony to this opposition. Here the principles of ‘social Darwinism’, the application of evolutionary laws to social phenomena in order to explain why the ‘fittest’ (bourgeois) citizens would triumph, was celebrated, and the ‘diseased’ tendencies of unconventional art were stigmatized. For Nordau such aesthetic ‘degenerates’ as Nietzsche, Wagner, Zola, Huysmans, Ibsen, Baudelaire and Wilde ‘must succumb… They can neither adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization, nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against the healthy.’ For Nordau, conventional art was healthy, and unconventional art – and therefore its practitioners – were unhealthy, and would fail in the struggle for existence. Lord Henry typifies the ‘Decadent’ celebration of disease in opposition to the values which Nordau champions.