Publisher's Synopsis
The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after its publication, literature had-in the words of biographer Richard Ellmann-";a different look."; Yet the Dorian Gray that Victorians never knew was even more daring than the novel the British press condemned as ";vulgar,"; ";unclean,"; ";poisonous,"; ";discreditable,"; and ";a sham."; Now, more than 120 years after Wilde handed it over to his publisher, J. B. Lippincott & Company, Wilde's uncensored typescript is published for the first time, in an annotated, extensively illustrated edition.The novel's first editor, J. M. Stoddart, excised material-especially homosexual content-he thought would offend his readers' sensibilities. When Wilde enlarged the novel for the 1891 edition, he responded to his critics by fur.
