The Picture of Dorian Gray was censored before anyone read it
The Picture of Dorian Gray underwent significant censorship before its publication. An editor removed around five hundred words from the manuscript to avoid controversy, focusing on the implications of the characters' relationships. Despite these edits, the book still faced public backlash, leading Wilde to further revise the text for its 1891 edition, making it longer and more conventional.
- ▪The original manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray was edited by J. M. Stoddart before publication.
- ▪Stoddart's cuts focused on the character Basil Hallward's feelings for Dorian, removing explicit references to their relationship.
- ▪The magazine version received harsh criticism, with some calling for Wilde's prosecution despite the edits.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Picture of Dorian Gray is about a man who keeps his real self in a locked room and shows the world a clean face. The strange part is what happened to the book itself. Before a single reader saw it, an editor went through the manuscript and quietly cut the parts he found dangerous. The cut version was attacked anyway. Wilde then rebuilt the book into something longer and more defended, softening some of the same material a second time, by his own hand. Five years later the prosecution in a London courtroom held the novel up and read from it to help destroy the man who wrote it. The book about a hidden self was hidden, edited, and then used as the instrument it had warned about. The version almost everyone has read is a text shaped, at three separate layers, by the fear it describes.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Storica.
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