Le Portrait de Dorian Gray

This translation was published four years after the first English-language edition of the revised text.

By 1889, Oscar Wilde had tried his hand at poetry, theater, the tale, the short story, journalism and criticism, but never the novel. It was precisely that year that the American publisher J. M. Stoddart, seeking British writers for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, met Wilde at a dinner. The opportunity was ideal, and Wilde promised him The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he had just begun to sketch out. The text was delivered on time and appeared in the July 1890 issue; buoyed by its success and the scandal it provoked — this fantastic tale, in the line of the Decadent movement and of La Peau de chagrin, was immediately denounced for alleged immorality — it was published in book form the following year, expanded by six chapters.

Even before its translation in 1895, the fame of the author and his now-inseparable character had reached France. As early as 1891, Stéphane Mallarmé, who had opened the doors of his famous Tuesday gatherings to Wilde, sent him this note: “I am finishing the book, one of the few that can truly move, since its storm is made from an essential reverie and the strangest perfumes of the soul.” A fitting tribute; had not Wilde himself, years earlier, as a critic, declared that “whoever wished to move us today through a work of fiction would be forced either to create for us an entirely new setting, or to reveal to us the soul of man in its most intimate workings”?

The copy held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France bears, on the wrapper, a “2nd edition” statement, and copies without this printing are very rare.

From the library of Charles Hayoit, with bookplate.