A more wild Picture of Dorian Gray

A new edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray has been published. I guess we can think of it as the writer's cut, so to speak, and while it won't replace the accepted version, it will be a boon to scholars. Apparently the book was cleaned up quite a bit by Wilde's original editor on its first publication in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, but even that wasn't quite good enough for its Victorian audience. 'The public outcry which followed the novel's appearance – "it is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents – a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction," wrote the Daily Chronicle – forced Wilde to revise the novel still further before it appeared in book form in 1891.' More...