Oxford University Press is near to
publishing a new book: ‘Dorian Gray in the Twenty-First Century’ (Richard Kaye, ed.). At this time, the chapter written by Simon Stern is available online. It’s entitled 'The Trial of Dorian Gray'.Abstract
Wilde’s three trials in 1895 served,
in effect, as an obscenity prosecution of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91).
Though the novel was not formally charged with obscenity, Dorian Gray’s first
reviewers suggested that it was obscene, and the book remained unavailable in England
for nearly two decades after Wilde’s trials. The novel's relation to Wilde's
trials thus raises a number of questions about the use of fiction as legal
evidence and about the ways in which a criminal prosecution might be taken to
reveal the meaning of the defendant's writings. This essay discusses the late
Victorian campaign against obscene literature and the victims of that campaign;
the reviews of the original version of Dorian Gray (in Lippincott's Magazine,
1890); the oblique manner in which the innuendo about its obscenity functioned
during Wilde's three trials (1895); Wilde's own ironic engagement, at several
key points in the novel, with the conception of influence at work in the legal
test governing the evaluation of obscenity (R. v. Hicklin, 1868); the relation
of the painting itself, and of the notorious French novel that Dorian borrows
from Lord Henry, to that conception of influence; and Wilde's reenactment of
his ironic perspective at the narrative level.
The Chapter is avaliable here.
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