ABSTRACT
The story exists in two forms. The first was published in the American journal Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890; the next year an expanded version came out in London as a book, after the publication of maxims as the ‘Preface’ in the Fortnightly Review in March 1891. Wilde called it ‘my first long story’, formally linking it with the short stories he had written for journals during 1887. It displays both the precision required of the short-story form, and the discursiveness permitted by length. Many of the themes entertained earlier recur: the relationship between the artist and his model (‘The Model Millionaire’); the relationship between art and morality, or, put differently, between form and content (‘The Sphinx without a Secret’); the question of influence, criminal propensity, and determinism (‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’); the relationship between empiricism and the occult (‘The Canterville Ghost’). Characteristic of the perspectival reversals which Wilde deployed in the tales of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, he presents in The Picture of Dorian Gray a story which begins to be about the relationship between an artist and his model, and turns into a story about the relationship between art and its model.
