The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

'If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything!'

Spellbound before his own portrait, suddenly made aware of his sublime beauty, Dorian Gray utters a fateful wish. In exchange for eternal youth he gives his soul, to be corrupted by the malign influence of his mentor, the aesthete and hedonist Lord Henry Wotton. The story of Dorian's sordid degeneration was met with moral outrage by contemporary critics who, dazzled perhaps by Wilde's brilliant style, may have confused the author with his creation, Lord Henry, to whom even Dorian protests, 'You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.'

Encouraged by Lord Henry to substitute pleasure for goodness and art for reality, Dorian tries to watch impassively as he brings misery and death to those that loved him. But the picture is watching him, and, made hideous by the marks of sin, it confronts Dorian with the reflection of his fall from grace, the silent bearer of what is in effect a devastating moral judgement.

This edition is based on Oscar Wilde's revised and expanded text, with his provocative Preface.