The Picture of Dorian Gray

Basil Hallward has painted the best thing he will ever do, and he does not want to exhibit it. He is afraid he has put too much of himself into it. The subject is Dorian Gray: twenty years old, extravagantly beautiful, and until this afternoon entirely unaware of it.

Lord Henry Wotton makes him aware. In an hour of talk in a Mayfair garden he explains to Dorian exactly
what his face is worth, how briefly he will own it, and how much of a life is wasted on being good. Dorian
looks at the finished portrait and wishes idly that the canvas might take the years instead.

Over the next eighteen years Dorian works his way through London and through people, and his face
keeps its perfect blankness throughout. Only the picture, locked in the schoolroom at the top of the house, keeps an honest record of what he has become.

Wilde published it in 1890. Five years later, passages from it were read aloud in a courtroom as evidence
against him.