Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd CBE (born in 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic. He’s noted for maybe two things: 1) his abiding interest in the history of London and in writers based in London, and 2) his astonishing, daunting productivity. He’s written no fewer than 18 novels and and 45 non-fiction books, 6 of them about Dickens, others about Shakespeare, Blake and Chaucer, and three or four books about London and the Thames.

Anyway, back in 1983 Ackroyd’s second novel was titled ‘The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde’, a fictional diary attributed to Wilde’s last year, 1900. Ackroyd is famous for the research he does into his subjects and so it made sense when Penguin commissioned him, off the back of his novel, to write the introduction to the 1985 Penguin Classic edition of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

It’s only nine pages long but it’s so packed with ideas and insights that they’re worth itemising and sharing.

Real-life models

The painter Basil Hallward and the lolling aesthete Lord Henry Wotton are possibly based on a painter Wilde knew at Oxford, Frank Miles, who introduced him to the homosexual aesthete Lord Ronald Gower. Wilde himself  made the typically pithy claim that:

‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.’

Critical reception

Some reviewers were scandalised by Dorian. Ackroyd quotes one reviewer, Charles Whibley in the Scots Observer, saying ‘Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten’, the ‘again’ referring to Wilde’s essay The Portrait of Mr W.H. which describes Shakespeare’s admiration of a handsome boy actor. He goes on to strongly imply Wilde’s homosexuality when he wrote ‘he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys’ which was a reference to the 1889 Cleveland Street scandal, when a homosexual brothel was uncovered in Cleveland Street, largely staffed by young telegraph boys earning a bit on the side.

Rewriting Dorian

The accusations unnerved Wilde and between its publication in Lippincott’s magazine in July 1890, and the book publication in 1891, he added no fewer than new chapters of a much more conventional Victorian nature (chapters 3, 5, 15, 16, 17, 18).

Is Dorian an unconscious confession?

The book is based on the character’s double life and some critics believe it represented not just an image of Wilde’s own secret homosexuality, but a deep-seated need for confession. An entry-level Freudian interpretation would suggest that Wilde wanted to be found out and, possibly, punished.

Robert Ross introduces Wilde to gay sex

Ackroyd describes Wilde’s education and early years as conventional, marked only by his flamboyant posing as London’s leading aesthete. He married an eligible woman (Constance Lloyd) in 1884 and quickly had two children in 1885 and 1886. According to Ackroyd it was in 1886 that Wilde met young Robert Ross who pursued and seduced him, introducing him to homosexual practices and helping him to become part of a ‘Uranian’ circle in London.

Wilde’s experience of being snubbed

By five years later rumours circulated about him and he was snubbed in some circles and this is, of course, the kind of snubs Dorian Gray is described, by Basil Hallward in his long speech, as experiencing in the novel. In other words, Basil’s description incorporates types of social ostracism which reflected Wilde’s own experiences.

Wilde’s superstitiousness

Wilde was an intensely superstitious man who visited palmists and fortune tellers (the subject of his brilliant short story, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime). Which helps account for the sense of predestined doom which hangs over the novel right from the start.

‘There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows… Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are — my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks — we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.’

The theme is repeated again and again. A hundred pages, once he has realised that the picture will absorb his sins:

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

Ackroyd points out that one of Wilde’s references to the novel in the long letter he wrote in prison which came to be titled De Profundis, is precisely about this sense of dark destiny.

Doom that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray.

On their second meeting in July 1891 Wilde gave a copy of the novel to the young man he had fallen in love with, Lord Alfred Douglas, handsome and impetuous, as if prefigured by Dorian.

Dorian crystallises Wilde’s reputation

According to Ackroyd Dorian was a success and crystallised Wilde’s reputation. Previously he was known, if at all, for his moralising fairy stories and his clever essays. Ackroyd cites Philippe Julian who wrote that after the publication of Gray: ‘the name of Wilde became a synonym for all that was most unhealthy.’

Wilde’s sustained attacks on the English

Throughout his writings Wilde continually criticises and baits English society (so much so that I’ve devoted a whole blog post to it). For example, if Dorian leads a double life which echoes Wilde’s own concealed homosexuality, he also symbolises the sexual hypocrisy which foreigners (especially the French) saw as a fundamental aspect of English society.

‘I know how people chatter in England. The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander. In this country, it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.’

National traits

In its indebtedness to the mood or French decadence and its reference to a ‘poisonous’ book clearly based on the famous decadent novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Still, it’s not really true to claim it, as Arthur Ransome did, ‘the first French novel to be written in the English language.’ Not least because, as Ackroyd suggests, the book’s wit is Irish and its melodrama is very English. Talking of melodrama…

Wilde’s vulgarity and sentimentality

As Ackroyd pithily puts it, ‘There was always a streak of vulgarity in Wilde’s imagination…and he was rarely able to refrain from taking a readily available convention to excessive lengths’. Thus the storyline involving Sibyl Vane, and then the attempted revenge of her brother James, has more in common with the melodrama of Victorian popular novelist Hall Caine than the studied objectivity of Flaubert. Wilde routinely mocked Victorian melodrama and sentimentality but both infect this book.

Learning how to synthesise plot and epigrams

Wilde’s essays had overflowed with showy epigrams. Ackroyd suggests that it was in Dorian Gray that Wilde learned how to integrate the witty repartee and shiny epigrams into a dramatic storyline. He suggests that Gray amounted to a kind of breakthrough which allowed him to embark on the four social comedy plays which made him famous.

Personally, I’m not so sure. Having just read Wilde’s major essays I can vouch for the way the epigrams are well integrated into them and already occur at ‘dramatic’ points in the argument. Also, of course, half the important essays were already dialogues, a format he used to dramatise the flow of his argument – so he was already well on the road to drama before Gray.

And lastly, the storylines and epigrams are not well integrated into the first couple of plays, particularly A Woman of No Importance where the storyline and pages and pages of epigrams are plonked next to each other and not integrated at all.

Epigram versus tragedy

But having introduced the idea of a tension between the shiny epigrams and the tragic storyline, Ackroyd uses it to make a deeper point, which is the way the epigrams stand for and epitomise the ideology of Individualism which he promoted in all his works – while the tragic storyline undermines and unmasks that worldview.

Wilde clearly loves the world of drawling dandies and clever repartee and yet the entire thrust of the novel is to reveal it as shallow and inadequate to the tragic depths of life. As Ackroyd puts it:

In his fiction, he raised up a world in his own image and then condemned it for its emptiness and follies. (Introduction p.xiv)

Despair

It’s not only the experiences of living a double life and of being snubbed that Wilde recycled from his own life. Ackroyd says that Wilde’s correspondence is surprisingly full of expressions of exhaustion and despair, of being burned out. He could hold a table enthralled in fascination at his brilliant wit and captivate an audience with his elaborate pose as a dandy and an aesthete, wittily promoting the need of art for art’s sake. And yet his letters show that he was also capable of deep depression, when all his achievements seemed like dust.

The novel acts out this almost manic-depressive alternation, with its contrasts between the drawing room and dinner party banter whenever Lord Henry is onstage, and the profound gloom which envelops the final third of the novel, after Basil’s murder.

Is Dorian an emblem of imperial despair?

And Ackroyd goes on to extrapolate the tragic end of Gray onto British culture as a whole, suggesting that it epitomises a certain kind of emptiness many found in English society at the very peak of its power and pomp. He relates it to the harrowing emptiness which dominates Joseph Conrad’s early novels, and which, despite all his bluster, also underlies Kipling – the worry that the whole vast effort is pointless, a nagging sense of the futility of life.

Although Wilde was to have four more years of cultural fame and celebrity, Ackroyd suggests that the novel can be taken as a symbol of the sterility and emptiness which dominated not just his private moods, but the values of British imperial society as it reached the height of its pomp (generally taken to be the empire-wide celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897).

Personally, I demur. Plenty of Gothic tales about futility and despair were written in other eras, i.e. there’s nothing unique about stories of decline and fall to the end of the nineteenth century. I would suggest that we associate the era with fictions of doubt and even despair is because they were so well written.

That it wasn’t an era of particular decadence, but that the literature of decadence was just so pithy and powerful – and this has more to do with the rise of short, focused genre fiction (detective fiction, ghost stories, fairy stories – all three of which Wilde had tried) than with a particular worldview.

And the rise of short, punchy genre fiction has more to do with new printing and marketing techniques, the growth of the reading public, the proliferation of magazines catering to different tastes, than with some culture-wide sense of doom.

Class indictment

Far more pertinent, I think, is the idea the novel is an indictment of the English ruling class. To Keir Hardie and other activists of the trade union and socialist movements, to socialists and promoters of all the campaigns for a better society, Wilde’s book must have seemed (as it was intended to be) an expression of supreme aristocratic arrogance. Sure, Dorian gets his come-uppance, but the instigator of the whole thing, Lord Henry Wotton, doesn’t, and the sense you get is of an irredeemably arrogant class cocooned in its privilege and luxury.

That would be the case from the Left. But from the Right, for true-blue Imperialists would have been just as offended. What did someone like Kipling make of it, the man who devoted the first 10 years of his career to lauding the men who built and maintained the British Empire at such high personal cost?

You can imagine all kinds of Brits, from right-wing imperialists to left-wing socialists joining in condemnation of the irresponsible frivolity of the parasite class which Wilde depicts in all his essays, this novel and the four plays.

130 years later, more and more books are being written about the rapacity and greed of the British Empire, its looting treasure from four continents, its brutal wars against native peoples, its inbuilt racism and so on. Reading Dorian makes you wonder whether this was what all that effort and exploitation was for? For posing layabouts like Lord Henry and spoilt young men like Dorian to fritter their riches away on worthless lives?

Or is this to fall into Wilde’s trap? Is thinking like this to adopt the dull, vulgar, philistine mindset which he devoted his life to combating, as he argued for the freedom of the mind-spirit-imagination against the killjoys, busybodies and philistines who are always, in every generation. trying to guilt trip us about ‘poverty’ and ‘politics’ and ‘duty’ and so on?

Does it work?

Yes. It may be melodramatic in conception but it is brilliant in execution. Wilde knew that it was a classic in his own lifetime and it’s been treated as one ever since.

Thoughts

Intelligent introduction, isn’t it? Ackroyd is full of interesting ideas and insights. Unlike many scholarly introducers, Ackroyd flatters the reader’s intelligence and talks up to us. I’ve read a lot of rubbish introductions. This is an excellent one.

Related reviews

• Oscar Wilde reviews
• Fiction of the 1890s
• Oscar Wilde online