The original magazine publication, 1890.
Title page of the first edition, 1891.
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3 thoughts on “The Picture of Dorian Gray I”
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A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray was finally published on June 20, 1890 in the July edition of Lippencott’s…. It was an immediate sensation.
A substantially revised and expanded edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published by Ward, Lock and Bowden in April 1891. For this edition, Wilde revised the content of the novel’s existing chapters, divided the final chapter into two chapters, and created six entirely new additional chapters. Whereas the original edition of the novel contains 13 chapters, the revised edition of the novel contains 20 chapters.
My wife and I saw a theatre production of An Ideal Husband once.
Why was it called The Picture… and not The Portrait? Couldn’t Picture be taken to mean a photographic picture instead of a painting?
PS the 1945 film adaptation is probably the best other version of it
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037988/
http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsn-z/pictureofdoriangray1945.htm
As you can see, I was just writing about the film above.
According to Ellmann there are changes made in the later publication of the story; broad hints of artist Basil Hallward’s homosexual nature were removed, for instance. Wilde was a poet first; given his attention to words and their sound, I’d imagine he thought “Picture” had more resonance than “Portrait”.