ONCE, OSCAR WILDE WAS shocking. How sweetly innocent. Now we have David Cameron in bed with Nick Clegg, and in front of the children.
By ALISON FLOOD [The Guardian] – Revised after it was condemned in the British press over 130 years ago as “vulgar”, “unclean”, “poisonous” and “discreditable”, an uncensored version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray has finally been published.
Wilde’s editor JM Stoddart had already deleted a host of “objectionable” text from the novel before it made its first appearance in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in June 1890, cutting out material which made more explicit the homoerotic nature of artist Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian Gray and which accentuated elements of homosexuality in Gray himself.
Deciding that the novel as it stood contained “a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to”, and assuring his employer Craige Lippincott that he would make the book “acceptable to the most fastidious taste”, Stoddart also removed references to Gray’s female lovers as his “mistresses”. He went on to cut “many passages that smacked of decadence more generally,” said Nicholas Frankel, editor of the new edition…
Continued at The Guardian | Lippincott text of ‘Dorian Gray’ | Review of the Lippincott version in the St. James’s Gazette, by anonymous (but Samuel Jeyes, editor of the Standard) | Wilde’s published protest, along with additional correspondence | More Chronicle & Notices.
