The picture of Dorian Grey

Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf Editions.

The Picture of Dorian Grey. Oscar Wilde.

Open

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 - November 30, 1900) was an Irish author.

In 1879 Wilde started to teach Aesthetic values in London. Later he lectured in the United States and in Canada where he was torn apart by the critics. At Oxford University, his behaviour cost him a ducking in the river Cherwell in addition to having his rooms trashed, but the cult spread among certain segments of society to such an extent that languishing attitudes, too-too costumes and aestheticism generally became a recognised pose.

Wilde was born in Dublin in Ireland to Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Wilde. Sir William Wilde, Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon, wrote books on archaeology and folklore. Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde was a prominent poet, worked as a translator, and wrote for the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s under the pen-name of Speranza.

After Portora Royal School (1864-1871), Wilde studied the classics at Trinity College, Dublin, with distinction (from 1871 to 1874) and Magdalen College, Oxford, (1874-1878). While at Magdalen College, Wilde won the Oxford Newdigate Prize in 1878 with his poem Ravenna.

While at Magdalen College, Wilde became particularly well known for his role in the aesthetic and decadent movements. He began wearing his hair long and openly scorning so-called "manly" sports, and began decorating his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objets d'art.

He was deeply impressed by the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater who taught about the central importance of art in life. Oscar Wilde soon became an advocate of Aestheticism and supported the movement's basic principle Art for Art's Sake (L'art pour l'art). The doctrine was coined by the philosopher Victor Cousin, promoted by Theophile Gautier and brought into prominence by James McNeill Whistler.
The Wasp, a San Francisco newspaper, published a cartoon ridiculing Wilde and Aestheticism, and Aestheticism was caricatured in Gilbert and Sullivan's mocking operetta Patience (1881).

The aesthetic movement represented by the school of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a permanent influence on English decorative art. As the leading aesthete, Oscar Wilde became one of the most prominent personalities of his day. Apart from the ridicule he encountered, his affected paradoxes and his witty sayings were quoted on all sides.

In 1882 he went on a lecture tour in the United States, afterwards returning to the United Kingdom where he worked as a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette in the years 1887-1889.

Afterwards he became the editor of Woman's World. During this time he published his most famous fairy tale The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). Three years later, his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was published. Critics often claimed that there existed parallels between Wilde's and the protagonist's life.

In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and he fathered two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886), who both later took the surname Holland. He had already published in 1881 a selection of his poems, which, however, attracted admiration in only a limited circle.The Happy Prince and Other Tales appeared in 1888, illustrated by Walter Crane and Jacob Hood. This volume of fairy tales was followed up later by a second collection, The House of Pomegranates (1892), acknowledged by the author to be "intended neither for the British child nor the British public."
ship having probably been with Robert Ross, who proved his most faithful friend. Wilde became intimate with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he always called "Bosie". Bosie's father, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensbury, publicly insulted Wilde with a misspelt note left at Wilde's club. The note read "Mr. Wilde posing as a Somdomite."

In much of his writings, and in his general attitude, there was to most people of his day an undertone of rather nasty suggestiveness which created prejudice against him. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) impressed the public more for this reason than for any supposed literary brilliance. Wilde contributed some feature articles to the art reviews, and in 1891 re-published three of them as a book called Intentions.
Wilde charged Queensbury with libel. The confrontation escalated and some believe Lord Alfred egged Wilde on to fight his father. After losing the libel suit Wilde was formally accused of "gross indecency", any homosexual act short of sodomy, which was a capital offence. He was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel on April 6, 1895.

Wilde's favourite genres were the society comedy and the play. From 1892 on, almost every year a new work of Oscar Wilde was published. His first real success with the larger public was as a dramatist with Lady Windermere's Fan at the St James's Theatre in 1892, followed by A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which became Wilde's masterpiece in which he satirised the upper-class. He was convicted on May 25, 1895 of gross indecency and sentenced to serve two years hard labor.