Watermark Books and Cafe

"The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition" by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel (Belknap Harvard, ISBN 9780674057920, $35.00) 

At a cursory look, it’s nothing more than a lovely coffee table book. But a closer inspection proves that this book isn’t what it seems... 

Was it the cover, a Caravaggio portrait of Narcissus pining after his reflection, that gave it away, or was it the firmament-blue inscription of the author’s name that drew me to the book? I’m afraid that it was neither—rather, it was the small print beneath the title reading, “An Annotated, Uncensored Edition,” that drove me into a fit of book-buying passion. I mean, I’m a Renaissance woman and wild about Wilde, but come on! This edition of Dorian Gray has all the juicy bits of the text restored! 

It’s a story as famous and as sensational as its author: a young man so enchanted with the idea of preserving his own beauty that it brings about his destruction. Denounced at its first printing as a moral abomination, Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was pruned and revised by its author to appease the moralists of the Victorian age. Editor Nicholas Frankel has taken up Wilde’s only novel like an art restorer to a tarnished painting, peeling back the layers to discover the raw beauty of the original portrait.  

Of all the material excised from the manuscript, the themes of homosexuality are the most obvious restoration in the text. To the modern reader, homoeroticism isn’t nearly as offensive as it was to the Victorians, whose judgment kept Wilde from publishing Dorian Gray in its entirety. Alongside the novel’s text are the annotations, which provide the reader with valuable insight into the world through which Wilde strutted with his aesthetic grace.  

The volume is also peppered with photographs of Wilde and his contemporaries, Victorian caricatures, and illustrations from previous publications of Dorian Gray. It is almost eerie to see, next to descriptions of the character Dorian, photos of Lord Alfred Douglas (a.k.a. Bosie), Wilde’s corrupt young lover who eventually broke the writer’s heart and spirit (it was Bosie’s father who brought suit against Wilde and eventually had him imprisoned for “homosexual offences,” at his son’s insistence). 

At once a tribute to the Aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century and a proto-psychological analysis of crime, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition is a tome that any literary fiend will devour…that is, if it doesn’t do the devouring itself. It is a Wilde book, after all. 

Review by Cat Connolly =^..^=