Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, first in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, then in a revised and expanded book version the following year. Dorian Gray, a young man of extraordinary beauty, sits for a portrait by the painter Basil Hallward. Under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, a witty aristocrat who believes that yielding to temptation is the only cure for it, Dorian makes a wish that the portrait age in his place while he retains his youth. The wish is granted. Over the following decades, Dorian pursues pleasures that damage others, watches the portrait grow corrupted in the locked room where he keeps it, and hides behind a face that registers none of the moral history accumulating in the painting.
The novel's relationship to aestheticism, the philosophical position that art has no moral function and exists for its own sake, is deliberately paradoxical. Wilde's preface insists that "there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book," yet the plot functions as a sustained moral fable in which the suppression of aesthetic into pure hedonism destroys both Dorian and several of the people around him. Lord Henry is the vehicle for Wilde's most quotable aphorisms, but he is also responsible, at a causal remove, for most of the novel's damage, and his immunity from consequences is not celebrated so much as noted, as a feature of his particular form of privilege.
The novel's central conceit, that a person can externalize the consequences of their choices into an object while their visible self remains untouched, has obvious resonance in an age of carefully managed public images. The portrait does what Dorian's curated social persona cannot do: it accumulates evidence. The horror of the final scene, when he tries to destroy the evidence and destroys himself instead, is not an arbitrary gothic ending. It follows from the novel's central logic: the portrait is not a separate object but a displaced part of Dorian himself, and the self that has been displacing its own decay cannot survive contact with what it has accumulated.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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