17. Oscar Wilde's Downfall: The Picture of Dorian Gray

How did the anxieties of late-Victorian Britain inspire Dorian Gray? Which real people lay behind the characters of Dorian Gray? What were the French Decadents, and how did they influence Wilde? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  An exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! It was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at. The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue. The noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiseled nostrils and from plastic throat.

• 3:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it was Dorian himself. It was some foul parody, some infamous ignoble satire. He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture. He knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. His own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? He turned and looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man. His mouth twitched, and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  What does this mean?

• 3:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  cried Hallward at last. His own voice sounded shrill and curious in his ears.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Years ago, when I was a boy, you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. One day, you introduced me to a friend of yours, who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment that, even now, I don't know whether I regret or not, I made a wish, perhaps you would call it a prayer.

• 4:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Gosh. Hello, everybody. So those were the dulcet tones of Dorian Gray. Welcome to the book club, because we are talking, of course, about Oscar Wilde's one and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. And this is the moment in the book that many of you will recognise or have heard of. It's the moment when Dorian reveals the truth about his terrible secret. So Dorian is preserving his beauty and his youth, but at the same time, his once-perfect portrait, painted by his friend Basil, Basil Hallward, is decaying and showing signs of the kind of moral ugliness that's tainted Dorian's character. So why has this happened and what are the implications? We'll talk about this later in the show.

• 5:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Just tabby, a little bit of context for everybody. Dorian Gray was published in Lippingcot's monthly magazine in 1890. There was then a backlash, wasn't there, which we'll talk about? Yeah. And a revised and expanded edition came out a year later. It's seen as one of the great masterpieces of Victorian decadent and Gothic literature. It's lots of stuff about the darkness of the human soul, lots of stuff about vanity, about beauty and pleasure and hedonism. But it's also seen as a critique of Victorian hypocrisy and Victorian attitudes to morality and beauty and so on. And here's the twist. This book was used against Oscar

• 5:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wilde when he was tried for gross indecency five years later. This was seen as proof of his homosexuality, and it played a key part in his fall and his eventual imprisonment, which basically destroyed his reputation and indeed his life. So get on to all this, because the story behind the book, in this case, I mean, as so often, is just as good, I think, as the book itself. But first of all, You're a big fan of this book, aren't you, the picture of Dorian Gray?

• 6:24Speaker 04

  I am, I am actually. I don't think I was always a massive fan. I loved Oscar Wilde's plays because I thought they were so funny. But Dorian Gray didn't massively enchant me or anything. This time, though, rereading it, I did find it pretty hypnotic almost. I love the language and the writing. I didn't massively care for any of the characters, though, but we will talk more about that in due course. But I know you, Dominic, were not a fan of this book at all, to the horror of our producer Nicole, who loves this book.

• 6:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, the truth is I'd never read it before we did this podcast, so that's a shocking revelation.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Philistine.

• 7:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Complete Philistine. So On the Rest is History, which we both work on, Tabby, we did a series about Oscar Wilde and the trials of Oscar Wilde and his fall from grace. And so I'm really interested in Wilde and the period of the book, the 1890s. But I'd actually never read the novel, to my great shame. So I was really interested to read it. Yeah, I have mixed views about it, and maybe I'll reveal in the second half exactly what I think about the book.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Maybe our discussion will win you over to the core.

• 7:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maybe. Well, that has happened before, you know. I have actually raised my score sometimes. Because I'm very suggestible, actually. And I don't like to disappoint people.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. So shall we give people a sense of the story before we talk about the context? So you've got this character who Tabby was playing so brilliantly there, this handsome, rich, young aristocrat. Dorian becomes the subject of a painting by his friend Basil Hallward. And Basil is completely infatuated with Dorian. He thinks Dorian is absolutely wonderful, so beautiful.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Pure innocence.

• 8:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  And yes, he loves all the purity and innocence of Dorian. And right at the beginning of the book, Basil's mate, who is this very witty, cynical, acerbic character called Lord Henry, who speaks entirely in witticisms and epigrams and stuff.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  He's a charming rake.

• 8:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Lord Henry sees Dorian, also falls for him, is infatuated with him, and basically says, oh, I'm going to take him under my wing and I'm going to give him the love of pleasure and beauty that I have. Anyway, in the course of this, Dorian, partly because he's already, you could say, become tainted by Lord Henry's kind of attentions. He sees his painting and he says, gosh, I wish I could stay young forever and the painting could age instead of me. Later on, he meets this beautiful actress and he falls in love with her, but then he treats her very badly and he casts her aside. We can talk about this a little bit more later. And then he goes home after he's cast her aside and he finds that his painting has changed because now the lips have this

• 9:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  kind of cruel twist. And basically, he realises that his wish has come true, that as he ages, the painting will grow old and ugly. And as he behaves in a morally depraved way, the painting will show the sort of physical taint of his corruption. But he himself will stay young and beautiful forever. And he says, oh, well, in that case, I'll just, you know, do what I like. And he gives his life over to hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure. And he collects beautiful things. He ruins people's lives. He takes up all these young men. He smokes opium. He does all these kinds of things. You know, rumours start to spread. The sort of respectable world of Victorian high society begins to

• 9:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  turn its back on him. Basil, his mate who painted the portrait but doesn't realise what's happening, starts to sort of worry about him. And the book sort of hurtles towards its exciting climax as Basil will end up confronting Dorian and seeing what's become of the painting. This is the scene that we began with. And the question is, you know, is Dorian doomed? Or will he get back the soul that he has kind of sold in order to to stay young and beautiful forever? So we'll, we'll get into all this story. And also, there's a bloke hunting him for revenge, which, you know, is a little subplot which we'll get into.

• 10:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  But we'll talk about the book itself in more detail later. Let's set the scene and talk, as we often do, about the author. So Oscar Wilde. Tabby, tell us about Oscar Wilde.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  I mean, Oscar Wilde, he's such a colourful character, isn't he? I mean, I feel like everyone has a version of Oscar Wilde that they think they know. So it's really interesting to dig into his life a bit more. So he's born Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Willis Wills Wilde. And he was born in Dublin on 16th of October, 1854, to his father, Sir William Wilde, who was a leading ear and eye surgeon and a very respected writer. And he would kind of write about folklore and mythology and stuff like that. And then his mother, who was called Lady Jane Francesca Wilde. And he was devoted to her throughout his life and she to him. And she was a successful poet and journalist. And she would write patriotic Irish verse under the pseudonym Spuranza,

• 11:24Speaker 04

  which I think is kind of interesting. So he's from, you know, a fairly kind of artistic background.

• 11:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  He then went on to attend Trinity in Dublin. And then he went to Oxford, where he studied classics. And I think that Dorian Gray is full of the influence of the classics. I think particularly in terms of its kind of idealised version of kind of male relationships and the beauty of that. But we'll get this platonic ideal.

• 11:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so common in late Victorian society.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Totally, yeah. They're revering the classics again.

• 11:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  But then it's while he's at Oxford, he starts getting into this kind of, this aesthetic movement that was rising at the time. But even so, he's still considered a very respectable figure at this time. He was actually notoriously kind of proper and quite prim at this point. There was not a whiff of scandal shadowing him. And then after he graduated, he moved to Chelsea, where he became a writer and wrote poetry. And he'd write reviews and he'd do lectures kind of across the world in the US and in Paris. And then, and this might surprise people who kind of know Wilde as principally kind of an icon, a gay icon. He married in 1884 a woman called Constance Lloyd, and she was an Irish writer.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't think theirs was would turn out to be a particularly happy marriage, but more on that later. And they had two sons, Cyril and Vivian. And then we kind of come to the turning point in his life. This is when scandal, the things for which he's most notorious begin. So in eighteen eighty six, he meets a seventy year old boy called Robbie Ross, and Robbie Ross is unusually for the time. He's kind of overtly gay and he essentially seduces Wilde. And introduces him to this whole other side of his nature that I suppose he'd sort of kept locked up all this time. And while actually he really enjoys it, he enjoys it physically, he enjoys it emotionally.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  But he also enjoys kind of the danger associated with living two distinct lives, you know, this nightlife of indulging his homosexuality and and living more hedonistically. And he called this, he actually, he called this feasting with Panthers. And then the other side of his personality, which is kind of the Victorian family man with his sons and his wife.

• 13:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  And you can see this massively in Dorian Gray, as we'll discuss, you know, this idea of a mercurial nature, existing as a walking paradox. Having a kind of complex identity. And he also believes that this side of him, this relationship with men and, you know, in this instance, a man younger than himself. It kind of elevates him. It it allows him to step into this classical world, you know, of, as I said earlier, this kind of platonic ideal of masculine relationships.

• 14:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and his trial in the mid eighteen nineties. He gave a very, very celebrated speech, celebrated now, but seen as infamous at the time, in which he basically says. You know, there's a great nobility and a and a grace and there's a sophistication and a nuance and a beauty. About relationships between men, an older man and a younger man. It's the relationship that you see in the Greeks and the Iliad and all of these kinds of.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's pederasty, which in ancient Greece, I mean, this was institutionalized, it was a part of society, is how a young man became. A proper man, really, with the help of an older man. But he also kind of saw it in Shakespeare, he thought that, you know, Shakespeare's sonnets had was sort of. Between men more than between Shakespeare and women and so it's, you know, a noble tradition, essentially, as you say. But even so, he's still publishing, he's still writing. So in eighteen eighty eight, he published The Happy Prince, which I believe was the title of the Rupert Everett movie about him, which came up a couple of years ago.

• 15:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  And he writes fairy tales and stuff like that for his two sons. And then he obviously publishes The Picture of Dorian Gray in eighteen ninety one. And this is received with with great outrage. Like his wife Constance said that once Dorian Gray was published, people stopped talking to them. And because of, because it's kind of quite overt homoerotic undertones.

• 15:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  But also the time.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And for the time in particular, this is very controversial.

• 15:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I suppose it's because it's, we're in late Victorian England. So eighteen ninety, eighteen ninety one, we talked about this a little bit in The Woman in White, didn't we, about the sort of

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 15:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  idea of respectability, the idealisation of the family, the idea of social hierarchy, all of these kinds of things. There's huge anxiety. I think it's a very anxious time, the late eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. It's actually the period of Jack the Ripper. It's the period that, you know, Dracula gets written a few years later. There's a lot of anxiety about national decline and degeneracy. Ideas about eugenics are coming in, a lot of anxiety about crime, about gender relations. So this is the age of what's called the new woman, a kind of proto feminism. So challenging the idea that there are rigid boundaries between male roles and female roles and so on. So there's all of this sort of swirling around.

• 16:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  We don't need to massively go into it, but you know, there's a, it's a febrile kind of intellectual and cultural environment. And specifically, when it comes to sexuality, there's been a change in the law. So to cut a very long and complicated story short, in eighteen eighty five, eighteen eighty six, there was a sort of reform of the laws. It was designed to protect women and girls because there'd been a great upsurge of anxiety about what was called the white slave trade. So basically prostitution and young girls being sold into prostitution. But when they passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act. There was an amendment that also criminalised gross indecency between two men.

• 17:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So previously, insofar as homosexuality was punishable by law, it was basically sodomy that was punished. But now, the category is much more vague and undefined, and it's gross indecency. And so there's a sort of atmosphere of moral panic, I suppose, about homosexuality. You know, the law has effectively been beefed up so you can catch more people. And just a few years after this law is passed, there was a huge scandal, and it's the perfect scandal already because it's a high society one, which means the newspapers love it, called the Cleveland Street scandal. So basically, what happened was messenger boys at a telegraph office were found, they were banned usually from having money.

• 17:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they were found with, one boy in particular was found with a lot of cash, basically, a lot of money. And people were worried that he was stealing, and he said, no, I'm not stealing, I basically earned it. And it turned out that he'd earned it in this brothel as a rent boy. And it turned out that other messenger boys had been making money as well. The brothel was raided, it was a big story, and it turned out that it was being patronised by some very rich and very well-connected people. Most infamously, the ekkery to the Prince of Wales, who was called Lord Arthur Somerset, who ended up fleeing to the continent to avoid prosecution. So that's the sort of context. There's a lot about that in the newspapers. And later on, there's one of the early reviews of the picture of Dorian Gray, mentioned,

• 18:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  effectively mentions this scandal and says, this is a book written for the kind of people who would go to this brothel or would work in it. And Wilde himself, although he's not swept up in this scandal, by the time this happens and by the time he writes Dorian Gray, he is becoming increasingly reckless and open, isn't he, in his own sexual life?

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he is. He's doing stuff like he's letting waiters and or butlers, whatever, see him in hotels when he's with young men. He is kissing people openly on the mouth. And he's also, you know, he's having more and more of these affairs, really. So there's Edward Shelley, who's eighteen, and they're having an affair in eighteen ninety-two, for instance. But then, in eighteen ninety-one, he meets kind of the love of his life, essentially, although it will become a very, very toxic relationship. And this is Lord Alfred Douglas, and he is the Marquess of Queensbury's son. And there'll be more to be said about him in due course. And he's nicknamed Bosie, and he's only twenty. And Jude Law plays him extremely well in the movie Wild, in which Stephen Fry plays Oscar Wilde. And he's actually a mega

• 19:40Speaker 04

  fan of Dorian Gray. So he seeks out a meeting with Wilde because, you know, he wants to talk to him about Dorian Gray and how much he admires his work. And I actually thought, when I was reading about him, that in the descriptions of him, he's incredibly beautiful, he's kind of quite dangerous, he's quite eccentric.

• 19:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, vain, very vain.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  He's very vain. I don't know, it reminded me of Dorian Gray, which is interesting.

• 20:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Definitely, definitely. Like, if you were casting a film with Dorian Gray, a young Jude Law would be perfect.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Ideal. But then, I mean, he wasn't the inspiration for Dorian Gray because the book was already written. But he's also, unlike Wilde, or I suppose increasingly, much more so than Wilde, rather, he's very experienced in terms of his kind of gay relationships. He's been having relationships with boys since school. So he and Wilde, then, together, start on a particularly controversial stage of Wilde's life. And this is when they start sleeping with rent boys from the eighteen nineties. So Bosie and Wilde together, their public recklessness is mounting. And the question is whether or not this is all quite exploitative from Wilde. You know, he's richer, he's more powerful, these boys are very young, and they need money. Anyway, word of this obviously reaches Bosie's father, the Marquess

• 20:51Speaker 04

  of Queensbury, old fashioned, powerful, wealthy. And he is furious. And he threatens to expose Wilde and cause a massive public scandal. Still, Wilde continues having sex and picking up very young boys, even by the standards of the day. And this is, you know, increasingly, you know, there's a whirl of scandal surrounding him. But professionally, he's having immense success still at this time, particularly with his plays.

• 21:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Lady Windermere's fan, a woman of no importance, an ideal husband. Now, which is the one you were in?

• 21:25Speaker 04

  An ideal husband. I played Mrs Cheebley. You should read the reviews. Brilliant.

• 21:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. What's the character?

• 21:32Speaker 04

  She's like the femme fatale. She's kind of the villain.

• 21:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, really?

• 21:35Speaker 04

  So she took me down to a tea, yeah. And I had these amazing costumes. I actually found them online the other day. Classic vanity.

• 21:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  You found, you Googled yourself and found the costumes?

• 21:43Speaker 04

  No, I found them on my old school website. My life's been one downhill slope since that starring role.

• 21:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  You should share these with people on social media, Tabby, I think.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  By all means, come looking. I look sensational.

• 21:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, this is a book about vanity, I suppose, so it's great that we've got you talking about it.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  I know, terrible.

• 22:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let's get into the novel then.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So we'll come back to Wilde and his life and how the novel and his life intersect more in the 1890s a bit later. Wilde said of Dorian Gray, didn't he, that there was much of me in it? And there are some critics who sort of say, well, the three main characters, so there's the painter Basil, the dispenser of amusing witticisms, Lord Henry, and beautiful, slightly sort of dandyish Dorian, that they're all aspects of Wilde's own character. But there are aspects of other people's characters, sort of friends of his and stuff, aren't there?

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there was some kind of loose real life influences for Dorian himself. So there's a man called John Gray, and he was a young poet. He was in Wilde's friendship group. He was famously pretty. He was called lovely, a lovely boyish youth. And he would, and he and Wilde were friends, and apparently they had quite a flirty relationship. And he would actually sign some of his letters to Wilde as Dorian. Then there was, this is definitely, I think, probably a little bit left field, but people say that the book as a whole was inspired by Benjamin Disraeli, so he was an excellent British prime minister. His debut novel, Vivian Gray, and because it has the same kind of Gothic themes, dandyism, it's very witty, and the tragic heroines of that book and Dorian Gray are very alike.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  And then there's a story that it was inspired by the fact that Wilde himself sat for a portrait by a Canadian artist called Francis Richards, and he wrote of this experience. "In December 1887, I gave a sitting to a Canadian artist who was staying with some friends of hers and mine in South Kensington." When the sitting was over and I had looked at the portrait, I said in jest, what a tragic thing it is. This portrait will never grow older and I shall. If it was only the other way. The moment I had said this, it occurred to me what a capital plot idea this would make for a story. The result is Dorian Gray. So he said that.

• 23:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  Outright, that that that inspired it. I I feel like I feel like there's quite a lot more going on in terms of the influences than that, but I suppose the the basic premise.

• 24:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's a nice, that's a nice origin story, I think. And actually, there's another nice origin story. It doesn't doesn't negate that one. They can both work. But basically, I mean, this is an amazing dinner party.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I love this.

• 24:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  The editor of Lippingcot's monthly magazine, where it was first published, is in eighteen eighty nine, J M Stoddart. He is, he's got three of his favourite people round for dinner, and one of them is a politician called T B Gill, who's everyone's forgotten about, so we don't need to talk about him. One of them is Oscar Wilde, and the other is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Where would that, where would that sit in your dream literary dinner parties? Because I don't think you'd enjoy sitting next to Oscar Wilde, because I think you'd be intimidated by his relentless witticisms. But I think you'd absolutely love sitting next to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 24:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'd love Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but I don't think I'd be intimidated by Oscar Wilde.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Do you think you'd find him a bit tiresome?

• 24:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  I probably might find him tiresome, but I think there's a seriousness to Wilde sometimes which is forgotten.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Definitely.

• 24:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wilde, beneath all the sort of flowery epigrams and the sort of witty, you know, I have nothing to declare to declare but my genius or whatever, all of that kind of stuff. He's a, he's a very smart.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  And can be quite a serious person.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  And he has views and opinions outside of kind of asceticism and art.

• 25:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, yeah. For example, he was, I think he was pro home rule for Ireland, for example. We could talk about politics.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  But I mean, Dorian Gray itself is a testament to the seriousness of Wilde. I mean, it's, it has a real heart and soul to it.

• 25:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Would you, would you go to such a dinner party, Tabby?

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Oh, I'd love to go to such a dinner party. I mean, I think we can probably throw, um, what's his name, that politician guy out there.

• 25:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, get rid.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  But the other ones, definitely. That'd be great.

• 25:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. So here's the amazing thing about this dinner party. Stoddart, the editor of the magazine, says, the reason I'm invited to you is I'd like to commission stories from you all. I mean, I can't even, I don't even know what happened to T P Gill's story or whether he ever wrote it, but. Conan Doyle and Wilde said, great, we'll do you a story. Wilde does The Picture of Dorian Gray. Conan Doyle is the sign of the four. A great Sherlock Conan story.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  I know, amazing.

• 25:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the fact that they're both published by this magazine as a result of this dinner, I think, is a lovely thing. Anyway.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, agreed.

• 26:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Wilde is already moving towards the themes of this book because he's done another story called The Portrait of Mr. W H, which is, it's about Shakespeare, the search for a character in Shakespeare's sonnets, isn't it? It's nothing to do with this.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  He loves Shakespeare, Wilde, doesn't he?

• 26:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  But it's the idea of kind of, the particular theme that's, I think, is the homoerotic theme, which is becoming increasingly explicit in Wilde's work, mirroring the increasing recklessness of his own life. Anyway, he does that in 1889. Then in 1890, he finally delivers the story that he'd promised this bloke Stoddart for his magazine. And this is the first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. And Stoddart gets the story, which is a lot shorter than the novel that we have now. And Stoddart thought, God, this is quite racy. And he took out, I think, about 500 words or so, or maybe more.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, without telling Wilde, actually, before publishing it.

• 27:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Without telling Wilde.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  Also, all the homoerotic stuff, all Dorian's female lovers or references to that because he thought it would shock female readers.

• 27:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  And even so, the story comes out and there's a great outcry. Like, a lot of the reviews say it's morbid, it's unhealthy, it's dangerous. So the Daily Chronicle, "It's a poisonous tale spawned by the leprous literature of the French Decadents, heavy with the odors of moral and spiritual putrefaction."

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Harsh. You don't want that to be a review of one of your books.

• 27:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, I've never had a review like that.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  That's what they said about our first podcast.

• 27:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, "Heavy with the odors of spiritual putrefaction." God, we'd have done anything for a review like that, wouldn't we, Toby?

• 27:44Speaker 04

  Oh, I would have killed for it.

• 27:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  The review that's very famous, so I mentioned the Cleveland Street scandal involving these Telegraph boys. In the Scots Observer, the reviewer says, "This is the kind of book that is written for outlawed noblemen and perverted Telegraph boys." In other words, it doesn't say so explicitly, but it's obvious to everybody who reads it, the bloke is saying it's a gay book written for gay people and therefore it is bad. And this is the context for what you mentioned before, which is Constance saying, "Oh, no one talks to us now because of Dorian Gray and it's, you know, Oscar has blotted his copybook and all this stuff."

• 28:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, so because of this outrage, because of these reactions, in April 1891, Oscar Wilde published a revised and expanded edition. So he toned down the existing chapters even more in the kind of homoeroticism. He divided the final chapter into two chapters and then he wrote six entirely new chapters. So for instance, the character Sybil that we mentioned when we were going through the plot, he expanded that kind of mini storyline a bit more. He introduces the character of James Vane, Sybil's brother, in order to kind of hold a mirror up to Dorian's immorality so that it's not so inside it, you're not kind of reveling in his immorality with him.

• 28:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you have a critic, as it were.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  You have a critic and to kind of introduce a class element to the book, i.e. it's not a book just about homoeroticism, it's also a book about far more things that are going on. Anyway, despite all this, it was, despite his toning this down, expanding, etc., it was still considered pretty controversial. It's interesting, so few of the great books that we do on this show, now considered to be great books, are well received in their own time. I'm consistently kind of struck by that.

• 29:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is it not that they're books that push the boundaries? They're books that run counter to respectability of them. That's what gives them their edge, it gives them the kind of grit and makes them interesting and they are challenging preconceptions. There are always a lot of people who are quite conservative and don't like them.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  And they're often, you know, part of some kind of what we would retrospectively call like some sort of a movement, whether that's modernism or realism, whatever it may be. This too fits into a sort of a certain category, a genre, isn't it? And or a literary movement, anyway. And we mentioned this earlier, these are the decadents, aren't they?

• 29:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. So the Daily Chronicle, when it said it was spawned by the leprous literature of French Decadents, or as it puts it, decadence. So basically, late 19th century France, it's very introspective, it's very hedonistic, it's very self-obsessed. There's a massive fixation on art for art's sake, which we'll come back to, and on pleasure. There's a sort of atmosphere that's very heady and a little bit perhaps unhealthy and morbid and all of this kind of thing. And actually, the book that is the, becomes the sort of the totem of the decadent movement, features in Dorian Gray. And it's a book by a French writer called Georges卡尔Huismontes. And the book is called Arrevoir, or it's

• 30:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  translated in English as Against Nature. And it was published in 1884. And in Dorian Gray, this is the book that Lord Henry gives to Dorian to corrupt him.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  The Yellow Book.

• 30:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Yellow Book. And they refer to it as a poisonous French novel. And to quote, you know, when Dorian is reading it, Wilde says, "One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual exorcises of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain."

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Very Marquis de Sade that somehow, you know.

• 31:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  A bit Marquis de Sade. But here's the thing, if people listening to this think, "Oh, I must seek out this dangerous and poisonous book",

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  I have a word of warning. It's actually quite boring, because it's basically, nothing happens. And it's the story of this bloke who just sits in his apartment all day in Paris, smoking, reading lots of old books, thinking about beauty and art. And it's the sort of, again, it's the sort of the introspection of it, the obsession with beauty, the obsession with the past, and the sort of, you know, the sort of Running of reality and the humdrum world. This is the spirit of the decadent movement. It's a rejection of bourgeois respectability and conformity and realism and all of this stuff.

• 32:03Speaker 04

  I kind of like it, like I quite like that premise, though. The idea, I mean, that's kind of what, it's an extreme version of what books are there for, you know? Saying goodbye to the world and diving into something totally different and grandiose and.

• 32:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's escapism, it's artistic escapism. Yeah, carried to the ultimate extreme, which is actually a nice link to this other idea, which is the idea of art for art's sake, which features a lot in Dorian Gray, doesn't it?

• 32:29Speaker 04

  It does, it's a massive, massive thing. I mean, I mentioned how Oscar Wilde had made all these changes to the final edition of Dorian Gray that was published in 1891. A big part of this is that he wrote a preface and the preface is essentially a defence of the aesthetic movement and thereby the book, the idea that it should be art for art's sake. I.e. there is no such thing as morality when it comes to art, books, you know, painting, whatever it may be. It ought to speak for itself. So artists and writers ought to create art, not for fame or fortune or for good reviews or because they have a moral message, but for the sake of the beauty of their products alone.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  And the critics shouldn't read books or look at art, you know, and seek to interpret them or analyse them or ironically, given what we're doing on this show, or read meaning into them. You know, they should let the beauty of whatever they are witnessing speak for itself. And thereby, Dorian Gray cannot be an immoral book because if there is no such thing as morality and immorality in the context of art, it's just a beautiful object, basically.

• 33:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's what the preface says, doesn't it? There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly-written, that is all. And that is, I mean, that might seem to a lot of listeners to that, well, that's just common sense, that's what I think. But that was a very novel and shocking idea in the late 19th century. It's an idea that, again, has come largely from France. The writers like Teofyl Gautier, who are saying, you know, arguing that there's, there's no mean, you know, that don't try to imbue art with a kind of moral purpose. It's actually more moral than that because. Art is beauty and you know, you should just appreciate it for what it is. And I think part of this is, you know, obviously, a lot of the people that are doing this are quite wealthy and well-connected.

• 34:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they are separating themselves from what they see as the sort of commercial, humdrum, vulgar tastes of the middle classes who think that art should have meaning and purpose. They're saying, oh, it doesn't need to have a purpose. It can just be itself.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  And Oscar Wilde's work, like the plays as well, are full of characters that are kind of mockeries of very earnest people, but also very bourgeois people.

• 34:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Characters have always got strong views on that. But it's not just a decadent book. It's also very obviously a Gothic book. And indeed, it's considered one of the last works of classic Gothic horror fiction. And we spoke about, in the mini-series that we did, The Rest Is History, we spoke about Dracula. This is around the same time and very similar in that they're both kind of dealing with the anxieties of the period. So, rising social degeneracy, urban decay, you know, the heart of respectable Victorian society kind of being polluted and corrupted. This idea of some kind of dark external invasion coming in and poisoning everything.

• 35:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  And worries about masculinity and stuff, right?

• 35:27Speaker 04

  And massive worries about, you spoke about the new woman, for instance, that's a big part of that.

• 35:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  The, the kind of fears surrounding homosexuality. And the other interesting thing is, is that a lot of Gothic novels feature this concept of the portrait. So, in sort of probably one of the most famous Gothic novels of all time, The Castle of Otranto, the kind of villain in that, Alfonso, steps down from a portrait. Ditto portraits featuring Edgar Allan Poe's novel, The Oval Portrait. And also likewise, this idea of obsession. And that also plays into this idea of doubling. Doubling's a big thing in Dorian Gray by virtue of the fact that Dorian is reflected in his portrait. He's kind of his doppelganger, his dark doppelganger.

• 36:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Rather like Jonathan Harker and Dracula are doppelgangers of each other.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Exactly like that. Um, as we'll get into Jackal and Hyde a bit more later, very like that too. And I think in a way, this reflects another thing that was kind of prominent in this period, which is the Victorian external sphere of kind of respectability versus the private sphere of wicked desires and forbidden pleasures.

• 36:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  So. Dorian Gray is full of all this and London is a massive feature of all of these Gothic novels as well. You know, you have the gas lamps. This is around the time of Jack the Ripper. That's kind of in the air. The prostitutes outside Dorian's house, the degeneracy of these kind of dens that he disappears to at night. The opium, you know, these opium dens. And I don't know, this could be sort of a commentary on the decline of empire. In the way that it actually was in Dracula as well.

• 37:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, the empire's at its height, but people are so anxious about what that means, what that means for the soul. Whether our, you know, and whether our sort of outward respectability is hiding this sort of inward corruption. The idea corruption is such an 1890s idea, I always think.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, that's the setting. We're coming towards the break, so let's get stuck into the book itself. And actually, just starting at the beginning, I mean, there are a few books where the tone is set more perfectly by the opening lines. So this is how the book begins. "The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses."

• 37:32Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 37:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  "And when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink flowering thorn." You know, that sort of heady, perfumed, scented atmosphere, which is very, very Oscar Wilde, very 1890s literature.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  I love it. I love that aesthetic. It's so heady.

• 37:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  So in this atmosphere, in this camp atmosphere, we meet two characters. Lord Henry Wotton, who's lounging on this divan. He's so tabby. He's lounging on this sofa and smoking constantly and just delivering what he considers to be immensely intelligent.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  It's probably because he's drunk.

• 38:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Observations on art and beauty and stuff.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there's another bloke called Basil who's working on his painting. We'll start with Basil. Unfortunately Basil is, everyone thinks Basil is terribly boring, don't they?

• 38:27Speaker 04

  Well, they do. I don't. I like Basil as a character. He's the only good man in the whole book.

• 38:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's the only decent character in the book. Agree completely, completely. So he's the guy who paints Dorian's portrait. And he basically, he loves Dorian, doesn't he? He's infatuated with him. He's completely obsessed.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  I think it's telling that in the 1891 edition, one of the things that they did to try and make it more socially acceptable is they hugely toned down the descriptions of Basil's love for Dorian and they made it less about.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  You know, romantic love and they made it more about an artist infatuated with his subject to try and make it more acceptable. But you are right, he's totally in love with Dorian. Perhaps, you know, in the sort of adoring way that Oscar Wilde might have been in love with Bosie.

• 39:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think he idealises Dorian and he sort of says to him, I want you to have a clean name and a fair record. I want you to get rid of the dreadful people you associate with. You have a wonderful influence, let it be for good, not evil. If someone said that to you, Tabby, what would you make of it?

• 39:28Speaker 04

  That's what people said to me before I joined Doorhanger.

• 39:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then you ended up on this show with Lord Henry Wootton.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Basil, you sang about the cuts. So in the first draft of the novel, Basil says explicitly, I have never loved a woman. And then he says, I worship Dorian with far more romance a feeling than a man usually gives to a friend.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  It's quite moving, really.

• 39:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, it is moving, but you can see why those first reviewers thought, come on, we know what's going on here. You know, you're not really even bothering to disguise it, which is fair enough. I mean, there's no reason why, to us, why he should disguise it.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  It's interesting because his is the purest form of love, really. Everyone else falls in love with Dorian for his looks and they kind of, you know, look the other way when it comes to his wickedness. But Basil really believes that Dorian is a good man too.

• 40:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he does.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Like he's a pure angel. And there's something to do there with, I think, the interesting relationship between the artist and his art, what he makes. It's as though Basil can't believe that the subject of this beautiful portrait, his great masterpiece, could be anything other than good. And there's quite a gratifying moment, I think, in the book. Actually, I mean, it leads to the sort of the climax of the book when Basil has a come to God moment with Dorian and tells him what everyone is saying of him and what he's become. And I find that quite satisfying.

• 40:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they both believe, don't they? I mean, Basil certainly believes that good and evil are written physically on your face.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he cannot believe that Dorian could be evil because he thinks that Dorian is so beautiful. You know, obviously Basil doesn't realise the terrible secret that lies at the heart of the book. And as for the other character, Lord Henry. I mean, he's very Bosie Douglas, he's very Jude Law.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 41:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's sitting around smoking and just coming out with stuff, but he's, he is a massive cynic, isn't he? He wants to corrupt Dorian. And Basil says at the beginning, please don't corrupt Dorian, Henry. And Henry says, oh, you know, he says some witticism and then promptly does corrupt him, doesn't he? And, and you're a big fan of Lord Henry, right?

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Look, I am, I am a big fan of his because I think he's genuinely witty and he'd be great company at a lunch party or something. And I like his kind of aesthetic, I like his bad boyness, but increasingly dawned on me that he's a massive hypocrite because he never actually does any of the things that he coaxes Dorian into doing. He'll kind of taunt him into doing terrible things by saying, well, of course, you know, you'll never be as bad as I am. But he never actually does anything bad. So it's not really that he's sort of the devil tempting Dorian down the path of depravity. He's more like the devil's accomplice because he's more of like a cynical observer. But I think I would found him quite entertaining at first, but I think after a while, when I was sort of

• 42:09Speaker 04

  trying to get a straight answer out of him, it would get a bit annoying, particularly if I had text or email or whatever. If you were kind of asking him, yeah, like, I don't know, what time, what time do you want to book your flight tomorrow? Aha, death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the 19th century that one can explain away. Yeah, all right. Get to the point, man. Speak in direct sentences. But actually, that, that actually reminded me a little bit of, because that's what people sort of thought about Oscar Wilde during his trial. He had these extraordinarily witty answers to everything.

• 42:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're right. It was flippant to the end. And the flippancy cost him.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Exactly. It didn't, it didn't help him at all.

• 42:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Exactly right. All right. Well, we've probably gone on too long, so we should take a break, Tabby. And when we come back, let's talk about Dorian Gray himself, so the man that Basil and Henry are discussing in this first scene in the book. So we'll talk about A Secret, we'll talk about what it owes to the legend of Faust. So this lies behind the story. And we'll talk about how this book ended up contributing to Oscar Wilde's spectacular and disastrous fall. So all of that is coming after the break.

• 43:13Speaker 02

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• 43:47Speaker 04

  How sad it is. I shall grow old and horrid and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day in June. If it was only the other way, if it was only I who were to be always young and the picture that were to grow old. For this, for this, I would give everything. Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give.

• 44:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back, everybody. What a moving performance that was. So that was Tabby giving us her Dorian Gray. And the amazing thing there is that Tabby said beforehand that she was going to put on

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Come on!

• 44:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  A posh accent in a stark contrast to her usual salt-of-the-earth voice. That will never think of you in the same light again, Tabby, now I've heard you do that voice.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Transformative.

• 44:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Totally transformative. Well,

• 44:39Speaker 04

  Speaking of.

• 44:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Speaking of which, very good, very well done. So, Dorian Gray, I have to say, I find him an extremely unlikable character.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's rich, he's young, he's incredibly good-looking. He was orphaned as a boy. He was raised by his grandfather, who was nasty to him. But we are told very sweet, very lovely, very innocent, very pure. We never see any evidence of this, actually. We're just sort of told it because Basil and Henry idealize him. The story of his trajectory in the book is he goes from being this supposedly innocent, lovely, beautiful boy to a still beautiful, but very vain and selfish and entitled and cruel man, doesn't he?

• 45:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I mean, I suppose there's a, there's a hint of his sexuality interesting in his name. Because Dorian is a very unusual name in the 19th century. And there are some critics who think, you know, Wilde chose it deliberately because that there are Greeks called Dorian's. And it's a reference to the Greeks and therefore a coded reference to the love between, you know, man and man, to homosexuality, which people associated with the Greeks and so on.

• 45:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you're probably a little bit more pro Dorian than I am, aren't you? Because I just find him loads of them.

• 45:55Speaker 04

  I'm pro him in the sense that I don't think I'd like him to be my close friend or kind of my boyfriend or anything. That I probably would have had a crush on him at university. But I think initially, before he really goes on this downward spiral of depravity, he would have been great fun in the beginning, I think. You know, he's very hedonistic, he kind of loves to go out. But as it gets darker and darker and he gets more and more unhappy. And his, his, his self-love and his hedonism is mixed up with self-loathing. And this kind of makes him a dark character, not this sunny flamboyant revelry worshiper. He becomes just mean and cruel.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  And there is a character to whom he is so cruel that I, I just can't forgive him for it. And this is his first love. This is an actress called Sybil Vane. And Dorian falls head over heels in love with her. But it is not her that he is actually in love with. He falls in love with the parts that she plays. So she plays Shakespeare's great heroines. So he says, tonight she is Imogen and tomorrow night she will be Juliet. And then Lord Henry witterly says, when is she Sybil Vane? And this is the point, Dorian doesn't want her to be a real flesh and blood, blood woman. He wants her to be an artistic icon, essentially.

• 47:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  But isn't that, that's what all the characters think about other characters, isn't it? That they all, that's what Basil did with Dorian at the beginning. Basil wanted Dorian to be perfect and pure and innocent. Henry wants him to be corrupted and hedonistic and whatnot.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  And I think part of the reason that Dorian is so corrupted and hedonistic and is so obsessed with beautiful things and fine art and wonderful books is because he's constantly seeking meaning because he can't find it in people. So he's looking for kind of a higher purpose, a higher vision of life and existence. But then upon seeing Sybil Vane act so badly one night, she does it intentionally. He casts her aside brutally and says to her, you've killed my love. What are you now, a third rate actress with a pretty face? And it is this cruelty that results in her, well, it's implied, killing herself.

• 48:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  If he'd have seen you as Mrs. Chievely, do you think he would have said the same to you?

• 48:09Speaker 04

  No, no, no, head over heels, he would have stuck. I just would have, I just would have kept up the Mrs. Chievely accent in my private life.

• 48:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, have you not done that? People can't hear the difference, Tabby, let's be honest.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  They, they can, they can.

• 48:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, she ends up taking her own life, doesn't she?

• 48:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and this is what sparks Dorian's realisation that he has made a deal with the devil, essentially. Because he goes home that night after having been so cruel to Sybil and looks at his painting and finds that it is changed, that it is now wearing kind of a horrible sneer on its face. And this is when we realise that every time Dorian does something cruel or dreadful or depraved, it will show on his painting, like a mirror of his soul, it'll show the wrongdoing, while he will remain forever young.

• 48:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, so this is an interesting thing because I think in the popular imagination, people always think

• 49:04Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 49:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  That the, that the picture grows old, but Dorian stays young and that's the bargain. But actually, there is an extra dimension to it, which is that As Dorian behaves badly, so the picture looks more cruel and corrupted. So there is actually, funny enough, for all the talk of art for art's sake, there is a deep moral sense in this book. There is a sort of, you know, the book would be incomprehensible without the moral dimension. There's definitely a sense of right and wrong. Dorian behaves in a bad way and the picture therefore looks corrupted.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  But it's kind of ironic because, you know, we spoke about the aesthetic movement and art for art's sake and how art shouldn't have a moral message.

• 49:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  But this painting is literally moralizing, you know?

• 49:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. It is the moral message in paint.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  His sins are writ large on its face. But the other thing is, I think, I think everyone who hasn't read Dorian Gray comes to it expecting the idea of a deal with the devil to be a bigger part of it. I think, I think I remember that. I think I imagine sort of a shadowy room with a young boy, you know, selling his soul to some dark power. That's not really, it's never, it's never that explicit in the book. He says it almost incidentally.

• 50:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he does. A throwaway remark. So it's in chapter two, they're talking about his portrait. He's seen his portrait. He says, "How sad it is. I shall grow old and horrible and dreadful, but this picture will remain always young. If only it were the other way. If it were I who was to be always young and the picture that was to grow old." And then he just says to his friends, "For that, for that I would give everything. Yes, there is nothing in the whole world that I would not give. I would give my soul for that." That's the deal with the devil as well. There is no devil there. And I mean, Lord Henry, who sort of, as you, I think you're dead right, Tabby, he's kind of pretending to be the devil and playing at it, but he's not Mephistopheles.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  He's holding up the sign, but he's not jumping in himself.

• 51:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, exactly. He's encouraging others to behave badly, but he never really behaves that badly himself. But obviously, the idea that lies behind this is the idea that you get from the legend of Faust, the Faustian bargain. Somebody who sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge or power or whatever it might be.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  This originates with the legend of Dr. Faustus, and he's a German scholar who sells his soul to the devil for infinite knowledge and worldly pleasures. That element is also in Dorian Gray, because over time, he accumulates these beautiful treasures from around the world in his house. And the legend is obviously very, very loosely based on a real person. This is a guy called Johann Georg Faust, who lived between 1480 and 1540, and he was a German itinerant alchemist, astrologer, and, sort of in inverted commas, I suppose, or they would have believed him to be, a magician. And during his own life, he was often denounced as something of a con man and a blasphemer, or someone who was a practitioner of black magic. This is, you know, remember, a very superstitious time.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  And then his exploits were first fictionalized in the Faustbuch in 1587, and this was an anonymous German book that depicted him as this tragic figure who signs a 24-year contract with the demon Mephistopheles. This is another word, basically, for the devil. And then Christopher Marlowe, kind of the famous Elizabethan playwright, picks up this idea, and then he writes it into his legendary play, Dr. Faustus, where the protagonist, a bit more like Dorian Gray here, realises the cost of his deal too late, and he is literally damned and dragged to hell. And then you get Goethe.

• 52:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then Goethe, for the romantics in Germany in the 18th century, does a sort of more philosophical version of the bargain, again, which, you know, popularises it for new audiences. So by the time you get to the late 19th century, the idea of Faust or Faustus would be familiar, really, to anybody, I would say, who's reading this book, you know, to a very educated public. They will be very aware of this idea of the bargain with the devil and so on. And- Dorian does the bargain. It's interesting. The difference between him and Faustus, or Faust, is Faustus wants knowledge and he's greedy for knowledge, for treasures, for power,

• 53:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  for all of these kinds of things. Dorian is not greedy for those things. What he's doing the bargain out of is really conceit. It's vanity, isn't it? He's in love with himself and he's in particular in love with his own beauty and he wants to preserve that.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  So, as you say, beauty is a big theme and so is decadence. Beauty and decadence, these are the motors of the novel. Because Dorian's realisation in chapter two, that he is incredibly beautiful and thanks to Lord Henry's instruction, it will get him far in life and it will, you know, give him almost power. But also that it is fleeting, you know, he will age and grow old. This is what turns him into this monster. And there's this moment where Lord Henry says to him, "People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial, but at least it is not so superficial as thought. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."

• 54:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's such a Henry thing to say.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  Such a Henryism. "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." So he's basically saying this kind of old wives' tale about, you know, beauty only being skin deep and it's about what's in the heart and stuff that really matters. Like, never mind all that. Beauty really is what matters in this world. It really is what gets you places.

• 54:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Henry then goes on to say, "Yes, Mr. Grey, the gods have been good to you, but what the gods give, they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which really to live." So the idea of it being transitory and impermanent.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, you know, youth and beauty are fleeting and all of this, so seize them now." That's what Dorian wants to do.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  It is, but even once he has achieved this, he will stay forever young and beautiful. He still feels like there's an emptiness to his life and I think that is why he searches for fulfilment through art, plays, books, music and beautiful things. And there's this moment when he talks about trying to find, sort of in life, the heroes that he reads about in books. Actually think is pretty insightful. I kind of get it. You know, as a child, you read because it's so much more exciting than life. And then as a teenager, I don't know, I would obsessively listen to music because it was kind of closer, maybe to what I felt than kind of the humdrum world beyond it. Do you ever get that sometimes now where you go to the theatre or you go to the cinema and you come out and it takes you like a while to readjust? So I kind of get what

• 55:46Speaker 04

  he means there, even though it's such a fantastical way of saying it.

• 55:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, you, yeah, completely you do. I mean, that's the joy, I mean, reading a book, surely, is a good example of that, you know. Remember when we did, what was it? Northern Lights, the Philip Pullman, and you said when you finished the trilogy, you were, you know, you cried because you wouldn't be able to read it again and you didn't want to come back out of that world.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  So lame.

• 56:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't think that's lame at all, though. I think you're being hard on yourself. I think that's what lots of people feel about great works of art.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  But Dorian is monstrous, but this is relatable, right?

• 56:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, this side of him, the fact that he wants to escape into another world. There's a yearning for something in Dorian, I think. But there's also a sort of slightly cold-blooded.

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Neillism.

• 56:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and the collecting mania, for example.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, the writing is so luscious here. It's just so opulent. Not just the things it describes, the writing. And so that's why I like, he talks about collecting all these beautiful things and it's a little bit like a drug or something. Like, he talks about how for a couple of days or so, he's infatuated by it and obsessed by it and then it fades away and he kind of has to find the next thing, which is why he eventually goes on to smoking opium. And that's another feature of the book is hedonism. Hedonism is a big thing.

• 57:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, well, again, Lord Henry, I mean, Nicole, our producer, absolutely worships this bloke. And she's like, please mention more of his immensely penetrating witticisms. And Henry's always saying to Dorian, "Live, live the wonderful life that is in you. Let nothing be lost, but always be searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing," and all this kind of thing. So Dorian's vices, they tend to be nocturnal. He goes out at night. He is obviously, you know, he's drinking, he's smoking, he's taking lots of drugs, he's, you know, corrupting loads of young people and all this kind of thing. Again, Tabby, I see in the notes, you've got loads more of this lovely writing that you like.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do think this is lovely writing. He says, Veil after veil of thin, dusky gauze is lifted and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.

• 57:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  You like that?

• 57:51Speaker 04

  I do.

• 57:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. And then, um, Henry again, ah, Dorian, how happy you are.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  You've got so hard on Henry.

• 57:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  What an exquisite life you have had, you have drunk deeply of everything, you have crushed the grapes against your palate. If someone said to me-

• 58:05Speaker 04

  You've definitely crushed the grapes against your palate.

• 58:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  How's the podcasting going? You've really crushed the grapes against your palate, haven't you?

• 58:10Speaker 04

  Well, that would be mad, look at us.

• 58:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's bonkers.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  But that's, but what, what Lord Henry is saying there, or what that little passage is saying is essentially that Lord Henry, looking from the outside, having never partaken himself, is like, look at you, you're beautiful, you've got beautiful things, you can have whatever you like, you've lived so well. But actually, it turns out that all this vanity and all this having and all this greed is pretty meaningless, which kind of makes me think that in some ways, kind of the central sort of message of Dorian Gray, you know, be careful what you wish for, mind your vanity. It's, it's almost slightly a book ahead of its time, kind of given the time that we, we live in now. The concept of self-worth and putting yourself first has never been more revered. Um, the idea that, of, of, of a very, of, of a clear distinction between your public

• 59:01Speaker 04

  profile and your private profile, uh, you know, the idea of having a perfect exterior, beauty products, influencers, things like that.

• 59:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Instagram, Instagram world, right? Where you, you manicure your image, you are forever young.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, we all have our, our portrait of, of life these days and so it's kind of a book ahead of its time in, in that sense, I think.

• 59:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you know who Dorian Gray reminds me of, Tabby?

• 59:26Speaker 04

  Who's that?

• 59:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Are you familiar with the work of Clovicular?

• 59:29Speaker 04

  Are you?

• 59:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  What, Braden, Braden Peters? You don't think I don't know about Braden Peters?

• 59:33Speaker 04

  You've been doing, you've been doing your homework because Nicole said that you didn't know who he was. Unbelievable. All right, tell me about Braden Peters.

• 59:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brayden Peters, you know, he's big looks maxing, he injects himself with steroids. He's a very controversial figure, actually, at the moment, because he's been in trouble with the law.

• 59:48Speaker 04

  He literally, his pursuit of beauty is such that he literally breaks the bones in his face in order to create a more beautiful, you know, perfect image. And he does stuff like takes meth, allegedly, because it makes him thinner. Like, it's beauty above anything, beauty at the cost of morality and ethics and being good. And that is so central to Dorian Gray.

• 1:00:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  He and I have a lot in common.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  Anyway, now, now to deeper subjects, let's talk about the soul.

• 1:00:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let's talk about the soul, come on. So, um, Dorian has sold his soul. I mean, again, this is the side of the book, do you know what, I probably am going to up my, up my mark as a, as a result of this conversation. This is the power that you have, amazing.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  I'm like Lord Henry.

• 1:00:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  To my Dorian, to my image of beauty.

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brilliant, that's the, that's the comparison everybody wanted.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  Keep up that skincare and you too could be young forever.

• 1:00:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, it is, it is a moral book in this sense. Wilde believes that you have a soul and you shouldn't sell it.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Dorian has sold it. And actually, interestingly, the book reflects a very late Victorian idea, which is that, you know, there is such a thing as immorality. And if you commit it, it is, you know, it is written not merely on your soul, but on your exterior, that the two things are kind of linked, that your soul and your body are part of one whole. And if you behave in a corrupt way, the corruption of your soul will be expressed physically in your face. That's right, isn't it?

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it absolutely, it definitely is. I mean, and, and this is, this is literal, I mean, in, in, in Dorian's face. So, obviously, at this time, there's kind of a rising trend in psychoanalysis. And I think we spoke about this in both The Hand of the Bastards and The Women in White.

• 1:01:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, we did, yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, the idea that you can betray things on the outside. It's, it's kind of a strange new form of dualism, it's kind of Freud. There are things going on underneath the surface that, you know. Betray themselves externally and therefore, you know, you can have two identities and whatever it may be. But this is very literal in Dorian's case. I mean, his soul is literally a physical object. And then what this called to mind is, so in the, in the 1945 movie of Dorian Gray, it's so brilliant, this actually, they have the original portrait of Dorian Gray, and then they have the picture that he becomes, and you can kind of see them side by side. And there's this artist called Ivan Albright, who did the second painting, who did the

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  painting as it would look after Dorian has lived this life of hedonism and cruelty, because it is so creepy and so grotesque. And this is the literal embodiment of Dorian's soul. You know, it brings to her mind another theme, which is conscience, because Dorian is increasingly dogged by his, his kind of destruction of his soul. And he feels a strange sense of remorse, and he wants his soul to be squeaky clean once more. But it's actually, it's actually not pure conscience. It's actually not, you know, pure remorse, because a lot of his remorse is bound up in the fact that he mourns the hideousness of his portrait. Again, it's kind of still linked to his vanity.

• 1:03:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's all his narcissism. It's all about himself. Yeah, he doesn't feel bad for Sybil, or for the various people that he's corrupted. He cannot contemplate his own ugliness, I guess. And actually, I'm so glad you mentioned that picture, because I remember when we went to the Art Institute of Chicago, which is an absolutely brilliant, brilliant gallery. Just how shocking it is. It's kind of really, really visceral, isn't it?

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:03:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  The ugliness of the picture.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  And it's not, it's not at all realist, which the original painting is, you know, it's quite literal. And then the second one, it's, oh, it's creepy. It's almost quite sort of Tim Burton-y.

• 1:03:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I can see why you'd say that. But actually, what the portraits do is they capture, well, the two, the idea of the two pictures in the film, but also the idea of the picture and then the reality of Dorian takes us back to what's probably wild, you know, the idea that he is best known for, apart from the witticisms. Well, it's the idea of the double life, isn't it? The idea of the respectability in the day and the corruption at night. Idea, as he puts it, the terrible pleasure of a double life. And actually, even in his more innocuous works, The Importance of Being Earnest.

• 1:04:07Speaker 04

  Love The Importance of Being Earnest.

• 1:04:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's two, you're leading two lives. And obviously, this appeals to Oscar Wilde because he is leading two lives. He has his life with Constance and he has his family life, but also that he has his life where he's interfering with seventeen year old waiters or whatever. And, you know, this is an idea that absolutely fascinates the late Victorians. Because they are becoming aware, you know, we're only a few years away from Freud. They're, we are becoming aware of this idea of the subconscious, of the human psyche, of things that are buried deep down that are, you know, you try to repress, but they are surfacing nonetheless. I mean, that idea, we've already mentioned Dracula, it's there in Dracula.

• 1:04:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  But it's obviously there in another book that anticipates Dorian Gray, written four years beforehand, and that is Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so that is by Robert Louis Stevenson, and it's kind of the Gothic horror book of that period. It was written in eighteen eighty six, so only four years before Dorian Gray. And it's the same concept, you know, the idea of duality and doubling. The sinful part of your nature, going on these rampages and killing sprees and acting in a immoral fashion. And then the side that you present to society, the side that like walks around in the light of day. So that is literally, so that is Hyde and Jekyll, Dido Dorian and his portrait.

• 1:05:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  One is the monster, one is the man.

• 1:05:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. You have the same sort of duality in the portrait of London, don't you? So you're sort of people smoking on divans in kind of the West End or something. And then at the other end, on the, in the East End, opium dens and prostitutes and smoke and alleys and all of that kind of thing. The idea of the duality is so important to the way the Victorians see themselves.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  I was also struck by how similar the endings are to Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray, so big spoiler here. Dorian Gray, eventually, he's so miserable, you know, living in this kind of state of sin as he does, he goes upstairs and he stabs the painting. But what his servants discover later when they find him is a shriveled old Dorian curled up on the ground with a knife in his chest and the painting young and perfect. And similarly in Jekyll and Hyde, Hyde commits suicide and is found dead on the floor wearing Jekyll's clothes. So there is like the duality all over again. And the other thing is that it introduces this slight element of kind of a class dichotomy, the idea that the side of Dorian that is going out and entering, you

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  know, opium dens or whatever it may be, is kind of debased, it's vulgar, it's of a different class to the aristocratic version of himself that he presents to society. Something of Oscar Wilde in that maybe.

• 1:06:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think so. Well, the big difference, I suppose, I mean, one big difference between Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Hyde is not a camp book by any means, whereas Dorian Gray, I mean, just by reading the first lines, the stuff about the scent of roses and the perfume and the headiness of it, there is, I mean, to 21st century eyes, there's something very camp about it. And the, obviously, running right through this book is the wild sexuality. And that was dialed down, that element, between 1819 and 1891. That bit that we already mentioned where Basil makes it very obvious that he is in love with Dorian, that he, that he's a physically attracted to him. There's also a moment that

• 1:07:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  was taken out where I think Basil lets his hand rest on Dorian's shoulder, or he strokes his arm or something like that, again, taken out. But it's still there, isn't it? It's still very, very obvious in the book.

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  Oh, I think it's, it's, yeah, I think it's so obvious. I think it's wonderfully camp, the whole book. You know, the way that Basil and Dorian speak to each other in this very affectionate, sort of very tender way, even the way that Lord Henry and Dorian speak to each other. The references to Dorian's dealings with young men, and it's never, it's never

• 1:08:13Speaker 04

  exactly stated what he's doing to them, but we find out that all these young men that have encountered with Dorian end up being destroyed in some way and kind of leaving society. And, you know, even references like this. So, says at one point, Richard II had a coat valued at thirty thousand marks, which was covered with rubies. The favourites of James I wore earrings of emerald set in filigrine. Edward II gave to Piers Gaverson a suit of red gold armour, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, that is, that's a reference in a very kind of beautiful, camp, exaggerated way to three English kings famed for kind of showering beautiful gifts on their, on their favourites.

• 1:08:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and their lovers.

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  And their lovers, and that's a similar relationship to Dorian and his relationships with Basil and Henry.

• 1:08:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, or the, the Palmer violets. Doesn't, um, one of them's wearing a big buttonhole of Palmer violets, and Palmer violets were associated with Sappho, the Greek poet, the kind of lesbian poet and whatnot.

• 1:09:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it became the carnation, what the carnation was, was it the green carnation?

• 1:09:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Green carnations, yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  So it was a way that gay men in, in, in sort of society at the time could identify each other. So Palmer violets were the same thing to lesbians. And, I mean, Oscar Wilde would be familiar with this reference because he's so familiar with the classics and someone like Sappho, I think in particular.

• 1:09:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, and I guess the idea, I mean, Wilde is obviously pouring himself into the book, isn't he? Because the idea of leading a double life, the idea of a moral struggle, you know, the, Wilde is somebody who, although he great, he makes this tremendous defence of his sexuality when he's on trial effectively, I think it would, it's hard to imagine that somebody who had grown up when and where he had, that somebody who had lived, who'd been so prim and proper as a young man, would not have had.

• 1:10:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, a degree of psychological struggle about his own life, I think. And I think that's, that definitely is there in the book. Because there is a morality there and a sort of moral core and an anxiety about sexuality. And I think an anxiety about corruption and stuff that you can trace back, not just to the context of the time, but to Wilde's own personal dramas.

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wonder if you could read Dorian Gray in a totally different light, if you interpreted, you know, what he calls his living death, the way that he lives his kind of empty guilt-ridden life is kind of his struggle with homosexuality, i.e. the sins that he commits being his homosexuality.

• 1:10:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, it's become a great touchstone, hasn't it, Dorian Gray? I mean, our producer Nicole loves it. There are lots of people who absolutely adore it.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  I have a friend who's always said that it's absolutely his favourite book he's ever read. And he kind of puts on a massive pedestal. It later turned out it was the only book he'd ever read, but nevertheless, nevertheless, people revere it.

• 1:11:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  If you're gonna, if you're gonna read just one book.

• 1:11:07Speaker 04

  Surely a call to thorns and roses. Make that your identity.

• 1:11:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Fury of the Vikings by Dominic Sandbrook, surely.

• 1:11:12Speaker 04

  Oh, only to be read in red trousers.

• 1:11:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, unbelievable from you. I don't wear red trousers. None of my fans wear red trousers. This is the tweed Calumny all over again.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  The great controversy of our times.

• 1:11:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Shocking from you. Okay, so the writing, you obviously love the writing, don't you? You find it very funny and witty and you think that's one reason it's endured?

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  And it's lavish and beautiful.

• 1:11:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's lush, I think, isn't it?

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  It's lush.

• 1:11:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's, I mean, you, I think you described it as luscious earlier on. And there is a sort of, there is a hiddenness to the writing. You know, it feels like you're sort of in a bath of Palmer violets or whatever.

• 1:11:48Speaker 04

  And then it's also kind of the sexiness of this message, isn't it? It's the hedonism, it's the elegance, it's the parties, it's the meaningless flings, there's all of that. But I mean, ironically, I think it's kind of maybe slightly the deeper message too. The, I mean, it's basically, it's the ultimate be careful what you wish for, particularly a time when we've never had so much, we've possibly never been so vain. I think it's an interesting book. You know, you can see why it would do the rounds on something like Booktop.

• 1:12:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because it's a book about the hollowness of the obsession with the image.

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:12:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Isn't it?

• 1:12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, that's the moral core that's, that Wild slightly has his cake and eats it in the book. Because on the one hand, you're invited to enjoy the hedonism and all of that kind of thing. But at the same time, clearly, the book is telling you, you know, there is more to life than public display than, there is more to life than beauty, actually. Lord Henry is wrong, he's plain wrong, because Dorian pursues beauty and vanity above all, and is destroyed by it.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  He's unhappy. Yeah. But then I think the other massive reason for the book's popularity is Oscar Wilde himself, you know? He's such a famous figure. He's considered something kind of a gay icon or martyr, possibly.

• 1:12:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, completely.

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  His flamboyance, his witticisms, his imprisonment.

• 1:13:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So there's only five years between the publication of the first version of Dorian Gray and Wilde's downfall. Basically, it was because of his relationship with Bosie. They were being pursued by Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, who, he wanted to disrupt the opening night of the importance of being earnest by throwing a bouquet of rotten vegetables at Wilde.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  When Wilde took his bow. And Queensbury wasn't able to do this, he wasn't allowed into the theatre. But he, he left a card at Wilde's club accusing him of being, and I quote, "opposing somnomite", so a misspelling.

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  Misspelled it, brilliant.

• 1:13:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  Good luck.

• 1:13:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Wilde, incredibly foolishly, egged on by his former lover Ross and his current lover Bosie, decided to sue the Marquess of Queensbury for libel. And this was incredibly self-destructive behaviour, given how he had behaved. You know, given that he had been so open and so flagrant with a succession of waiters, young boys, all of this kind of thing.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  He denied it all, didn't he?

• 1:14:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  He denied it all, yes, exactly.

• 1:14:11Speaker 04

  And they literally brought them all up, they had so many witnesses.

• 1:14:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Queensbury and his legal team, they did a mercilessly brilliant job, spearheaded by the future unionist politician Sir Edward Cass.

• 1:14:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Who'd known Wilde at university, they'd been kind of acquaintances back in Dublin. Anyway, they basically produced all of these young men. Wilde's case collapsed, obviously, and the trouble was because it had come out in open court now. And also because he was quite close to people in the government, in the sort of liberal, in the Liberal Party. The government felt they had no alternative, given it was so public, than to have him charged with indecent behaviour under this recent legislation. So then there are two trials, the first one, they don't produce a verdict. And Wilde was terrible in the witness box because he's doing his thing about he's being flippant, he's performing, he's making jokes, he's all this kind of thing.

• 1:15:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and basically, he ends up being convicted. Bosie flees off to France, I mean Bosie's a terrible, terrible human being.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  He is, he really, really is. And also he egged on Wilde to enter into all of that and said he'd pay his legal fees.

• 1:15:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know, and then, and then let him down.

• 1:15:25Speaker 04

  And then left him in the lurch.

• 1:15:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and this is the mad thing, isn't it, that.

• 1:15:28Speaker 04

  Shocking.

• 1:15:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's so many echoes of Dorian Gray in what happened to Oscar Wilde, so both in Wilde himself and in Bosie. Wilde is sentenced to two years of hard labour, the maximum penalty.

• 1:15:41Speaker 04

  There's talk that he's an example, people are making an example of him.

• 1:15:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think they are making examples to some, to some degree. Constance leaves him, she goes to Europe with her children.

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  He's not allowed to see his boys.

• 1:15:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, Wilde had a terrible time in Reading jail, his health collapsed. He has this sort of long, dark night of the soul, he's eventually released, he is a broken man, he's bankrupt. He flees to France, he sees Bosie again, they have this incredibly toxic relationship.

• 1:16:07Speaker 04

  And Constance says that she will only give him kind of his stipend, whatever.

• 1:16:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Speaker 04

  If he stays away from Bosie and he just can't resist.

• 1:16:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a line in, I think it's Matthew Sturgis's book, biography of Wilde and talk about the trials, where he says at the end of his life, he was spending more money on rent boys than on rent. And that basically tells you what happened to him. And he ends up dying, probably meningitis, in 1900 in a cheap Paris hotel.

• 1:16:35Speaker 04

  It's tragic.

• 1:16:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the thing with Wilde that's complicated, I mean, we did go into this when we did on the rest is history, is

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is simultaneously a victim and a martyr on one hand, but on the other hand, you know, he's a morally ambiguous figure because he is associating with a much poorer, much younger men. So there's always a power dynamic and it's

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, is it exploitative?

• 1:17:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is it exploitative or not? I mean, I think listeners can dig into it and make up their own minds about it. I, to be totally honest, this isn't something I often say, I really don't know what I think. I find it hard to make up my mind about him.

• 1:17:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know what you mean. I can't help but really, really pity him for what happened to him later in his life. And he was well-liked wherever he went, and I think he behaved pretty well in terms of, you know, when he was in prison, he was well-liked. I think he was very lovable. I think he was really foolish.

• 1:17:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  The fact that I've spoken so much about Wilde and possibly not so much about the book, perhaps tells its own story. So I think we're going to rank this in, shall we rank it, this is giving away my views, Tabby, in exhaustingly persistent witticisms out of 10, which you did suggest, to be fair.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  I did suggest that. Give your mark in witticism.

• 1:17:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm not capable. I'm too, I'm too prosaic a person.

• 1:17:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm too drab, exactly. It is a, I can't remember, I was going to attempt a witticism.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  It is a truth universally acknowledged.

• 1:18:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know, I know.

• 1:18:02Speaker 04

  That a witticism out of 10, oh god, I'm boring myself.

• 1:18:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, okay, I think the story is fascinating, absolutely fascinating, the story behind the book and the story of Wilde. And actually, I love the idea of the book, but I'm going to give it five. I've gone, I've gone really low. And the reason for that is actually when I was reading it. So I read it madly after I read The Hunger Games.

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh. Well, anything, anything would pale by comparison.

• 1:18:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like I put down The Hunger Games one minute and picked up Dorian Gray and I found myself pining for the world of, what is it called? Panem? Whatever. In The Hunger, just because I became very bored of Lord Henry going on about his witticisms. I sort of thought, come on, the point's been made. I didn't enjoy it. I'm, I'm a bit sick of that kind of very lush, heady prose.

• 1:18:52Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:18:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dare I say? Can I say this? I felt like I've slightly grown out of it.

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:18:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I don't have much patience with it. And I just thought, come on, it's no Sarah J. Mass.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, I think our time reading romanticy has ruined you for everything else.

• 1:19:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  It has done. It has done. So I'm gonna give it five and I know Nicole will never speak to me again. What about you?

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  I'm gonna give it a 7.5.

• 1:19:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Always the point fives with you.

• 1:19:14Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 1:19:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Some people would say it's nuanced. Other people would say it's evasive.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  Some would say it's indecisive. An indecisive rating is never as indecisive as it may seem. Okay. So I'm gonna do a 7.5 because I like that opulence. I like that kind of flamboyant prose. And yet it's also quite straightforward. And yet it's rich and it conveys a great deal. I find it actually very funny, even though after a while Lord Henry did slightly get on my nerves.

• 1:19:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  I found Dorian's oscillations between kind of devilry and sort of self-obsessed remorse kind of fascinating and, and they clung in my head quite a lot. I think that the kind of central message is quite convincing, I suppose. Not that it has like an intentional message, but I like that kind of idea that everyone should try to fight their vanities and their egos a little bit. But I didn't like any of the characters very much. Which you need in a book, I think. I think you need to root for somebody. So yeah, 7.5 from me.

• 1:20:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, so what have we got coming up? So we actually have a really funny book coming out next week.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  We do.

• 1:20:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  One of my absolute tip top favourites, a book that I've loved ever since I've read it, and that is P G Wodehouse's The Code of the Wustas. And I'm looking forward, given that we've heard Tabby's superb Dorian Gray. Are you gonna give us Bertie or Jeeves or a little bit of both?

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, people can find out when we, um, when we release the episode, but we, we're gonna cast each other, aren't we? We're gonna spend the whole episode in character.

• 1:20:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  So we've got, um, Code of the Wustas, then Louise Amay Allcott's book, Little Women, which I'm reading right now. We have George R R Martin, Game of Thrones. Uh, we have The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham. We have The Leopard by Tomasi Dilema Dusa, The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buckan, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, and Cersei by Madeline Miller, all to come. And some of those are the results of suggestions by you, the listeners. So please keep the suggestions coming. Brilliant. And I see on the chat, Nicole has written, Dominic's let himself down, which is which is sad. So on that depressing note, uh,

• 1:21:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm, I'm about to go and inspect my portrait upstairs and

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  Next week I'll be joined by a new presenter of the book club.

• 1:21:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. What a way to crash out.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  A way to go.

• 1:21:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Okay. Bye bye, everybody.

• 1:21:41Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorised by any candidate or candidate's committee.