Good news, everyone! Now you can corrupt your mind with Oscar Wilde’s uncensored, filthy, and sexy version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Oscar Wilde was a controversial figure when he was alive, and he’s become prolific in the century since his death. One of his best-known works is The Picture of Dorian Gray, which has been adapted several times since it was first published, but many people don’t know how the novel was censored after it first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. As a result, the full version of the book’s never been published … Until now, that is.
It turns out that Wilde’s editor, J.M. Stoddart, cut a substantial amount of “objectionable” content (read: homoeroticism) from the book, as well as “a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to.” However, Harvard University Press has announced that it’s publishing the complete novel, including everything that Stoddart removed.
Speaking to the Guardian, editor Nicholas Frankel (who’s an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University) explained why now was the perfect time for an uncensored version of Dorian Gray: “the time is ripe for the publication of Wilde’s novel in its uncensored form … It is the version of the novel that Wilde, I believe, would want us to be reading in the 21st century … I’m bringing it out of the closet a little more.”
Dorian Gray‘s arguably one of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, so the fact that readers will finally get to read the version that Wilde originally intended them to is pretty dang cool. Hey, anything that was decried as “vulgar,” “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “discreditable” has to be good.
