The Picture of Dorian Gray

It doesn't work that way.

I think a good example is that when I was maybe a senior in high school, I wrote a paper on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was mentioned in the homily this morning.

And I read a lot of his critical essays along with that and I made the argument, now I don't know if I was right or not because it's been a long time, I made the argument that his novel says the exact opposite of the view that he was professing in his critical essays.

So there is some sense in which sometimes somebody who's a true artist writes deeper than what they consciously say they believe.

Today's quote comes from Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer, poet, and playwright, famous for his wit, his sharp observations about human nature, and works including The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest.

He once said, No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

This particular quote comes from his 1895 play, An Ideal Husband.

Yeah.

And so with that, with The Picture of Dorian Gray, we're always talking a little bit about the masks we wear.

And so the artists were assigned the idea of how to tackle that within their own work to create a thematic element that should echo across all of the different pieces, which is really, really exciting, and I'm thrilled to see how those pieces come together for our audiences.

So the theme, Nick, is?

Yes.

Okay.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical fiction and gothic horror novel by Irish auth- author Oscar Wilde.

Yes.

It has been suggested that it was his late apprenticeship to an art that requires lifelong study, which rendered Wilde's prose so insincere, resembling more the conscious artifice of the modern French school than the restrained yet jewelled style of Pater, whom he claimed as his master in prose.

it was not till eighteen ninety that he published his first and only novel the picture of dorian gray with its strangeness of colour and its passionate suggestion flickering like lightning through the gloom of the subject the puritans and the philistines who scented veiled improprieties in its paradoxes were shocked but it delighted the connoisseur and the artist wearied as they were with the humdrum accounts of afternoon tea-parties and the love affairs of the curate that such a master of prose and scholarship as pater should have written in terms of commendation of dorian gray is sufficient to prove how free from offence the story really is in the original version of the story one passage struck pater as being indefinite and likely to suggest evil to evil minds this paragraph wilde elaborated but he refused to suppress a single sentence of what he had written no artist is consciously wrong he declared A similar incident is recorded as early as 1878.

Sherp, the professor of poetry at Oxford, suggested some improvements in Wilde's Newdigget Prize poem Ravenna.

Wilde listened to all the suggestions with courtesy, and even took notes of them, but he went away and had the poem printed without making a single alteration in it.

The picture of Dorian Gray first appeared on June 20, 1890, in Lippincott's monthly magazine for July.

It was published in America by the J.

B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia, simultaneously with the English edition of the magazine, issued by Messrs. Ward-Lock and Company.

a few weeks before the publication of his romance wilde wrote a letter to a publisher stating that his story would appear in lippincott's on the following twentieth of june and that after three months the copyright reverted to him the publication of dorian gray would create a sensation he wrote he was going to add two additional chapters and would the publishing house with whom he was corresponding care to consider it unfortunately the letter bears no indication of the house to which it was sent However, on the 1st of July in the following year, the picture of Dorian Gray was published in book form by Messrs. Ward-Lock and Company.

It was released in 2009.

It is directed by Oliver Parker, written by Toby Finlay, and it's based on the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, which I have read.

And let me tell you, unlike the Queen of the Damned, uh, review that we did, you can check that out on the podcast, it's- we did that a couple of weeks ago, where the book was very, very different to the actual movie.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is actually really, really, really similar to the movie.

They didn't change much, which I actually quite appreciated.

Anyway, if you have not seen Dorian Gray, it is about this.

[laughs]

Mind blown.

I would love to ask him about his wonderful novel.

I don't know if you ever read The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I have indeed.

Okay.