ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author provides three examples, one focused on a particular word, another on Lord Henry’s private life, which receives little critical attention. The third on Oscar Wilde’s enormous debt to a novel that, in a sense. He openly plagiarised – which one might say of his debt to the Conclusion in Walter Pater’s 1868 book The Renaissance with its insistence that it’s ‘not the fruit of experience, but experience itself’ that is crucial and its instruction ‘to burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy’ for ‘success in life’. In the novel’s opening pages, where he establishes the triangular network between Henry, Basil and Dorian, Wilde is at pains to set up a kind of eroticised force-field and it’s as if energised by a single word, ‘fascinate’. Edward Carson, in Wilde’s first trial, certainly used the novel to advance his case that it was advocating ‘improper feeling’ and ‘unnatural vice’.
