Dorian gray book how many pages

Canterbury Classics gives a new look to this controversial classic! The Picture of Dorian Gray is a familiar story of greed, sin, and arrogance.

A young man, infatuated with his own handsomeness and youth as depicted in a perfect portrait, makes a bargain he will come to regret. No one can save him from his appetite for pleasure and his awful fate--not the man who idolizes him, not the woman who loves him, and not even himself!

At first the subject of intense controversy, it has endured as a classic for years. This Canterbury Classics edition includes the beloved story as well as a special heat-burnished cover, foil stamping, and designed endpapers in an easy-to-carry package. A cautionary tale of innocence sacrificed for the sake of vice, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic whose lessons are still relevant today. About the Word Cloud Classics series: Classic works of literature with a clean, modern aesthetic!

He told me. He told me right out before everybody. It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name.

You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end? I met his father yesterday in St. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth?

What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with him? Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous. I know you and Harry are great friends. You used to be a friend of Lord Staveley. Staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with.

There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows anything about mine. With such blood as he has in his veins, how could his record be clean? You ask me about Henry Ashton and young Perth. Did I teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery?

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. England is bad enough I know, and English society is all wrong. That is the reason why I want you to be fine. You have not been fine. One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. Yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity.

You have filled them with a madness for pleasure. And it seems most of my reviews end up being mostly quotes from the book itself, but I figure this is what shaped and informed my reading, so I want to share it with all of you. What do you think of it all? That said, poor Sybil Vane! Poor James Vane! Poor Basil Hallward! Shit, even poor old Lord Henry Wotton! And Dorian! Oh Dorian! Lead the life you did and for what? That's all I am going to say about the book.

I don't think I shall read Against Nature, for fear of being seduced like Dorian. If you're tired of this review or just tired in general, stop now and come back later. I am going to include two more quotes from the book that truly fucked me up. So much I had to read them at least 3 times in a row. And then transcribe them here for you. The last section, thats the one that did it.

Here goes: "There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. All influence is immoral-immoral from the scientific point of view. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.

Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry and cloth the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals; the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us. And yet-" "And yet," continues Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice,"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream-I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.

But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.

The body sins once, and has done with its sins, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame-" "Stop! I don't know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it.

Don't speak. Let me think, or, rather, let me try not to think. And: "There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamored of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those who minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.

Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black, fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there.

Outside, there is the stirring of the birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleeper, and yet must needs call forth Sleep from her purple cave.

Veil after veil of thin, dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.

Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.

View all 35 comments. Mar 15, Stephen rated it it was amazing Shelves: easton-press , audiobook , horror-classic , literature , love-those-words , classics-european , rogues-and-scoundrels , classics , horror. This story read somewhat like a dark, corrupted Jane Austen in that the writing was snappy and pleasant on the ear, but the feeling it left you with was one of hopelessness and despair.

Despite the dark or more likely because of it this is one of the most engaging, compelling and lyrical pieces of literature I have read. The quality of the prose is nothing short masterful. I assume most people know the basic outline of the plot, but I will give you a few sentences on it. Basil Hallward is an artist who after painting a picture of Dorian Gray becomes obsessed with him because of his beauty the homosexual vs.

While this story is often mentioned among the classics of the Horror genre which I do have a problem with this is much more a study of the human monster than it is some boogeyman.

My favorite parts of the story were the extensive dialogues between the characters, usually Dorian and Lord Henry. They were wonderfully perverse and display a level of casual cruelty and vileness towards humanity that make it hard to breathe while reading. Oh, and Lord Henry reserves particular offense for the female of the species, to wit: My dear boy, no woman is a genius.

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

YES folks One of the most intriguing quotes I have seen from Oscar Wilde regarding this book is his comparison of himself to the three main characters. He said that he wrote the three main characters as reflections of himself. When I say evil, I don't mean just misguided or weak-minded, someone bamboozled by the clever lectures of Lord Henry.

I found Gray to be selfish, vain, inhumanly callous and sadistically cruel. Regardless, this is a towering piece of literature. Beautifully written and filled with memorable characters and a deeply moving story. A novel deserving of its status as a classic of English Literature.

For of audiobooks. I listened to the audio version of this read by Michael Page who has become one of my favorite narrators. His performance here was amazing. View all 78 comments. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. I would highly recommend first watching the movie Wilde , a film which takes the audience on a journey through the life of the tormented writer, from the beginnings of h "The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.

I would highly recommend first watching the movie Wilde , a film which takes the audience on a journey through the life of the tormented writer, from the beginnings of his fame to his later incarceration for "gross indecency" - a charge used to imprison individuals when it was impossible to prove sodomy.

Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour and died not long after being freed due to health problems gained during those two years. Looking at Wilde's story from a twenty-first century perspective, it is sad and horrifying to realise this man was indirectly sentenced to death for being gay. The "hard labour" prescribed was carried out in various ways but one of the most common was the treadmill: This machine made prisoners walk continuously uphill for hours on end and had many long-term effects on people's health.

Why do I think it's important to know this? Because, as Wilde claims, in every piece of art there is more of the artist than anything else. And I believe this is especially true of The Picture of Dorian Gray more than perhaps any other fictional work I've read. In this novel, Wilde explores the nature of sin, of morality and immorality.

The homoerotic undertones between Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton are, I think, the author's little expression of his own secret "sins" within his work. Rarely does a work of fiction so deeply seem to mirror elements of the author's life. The idolisation of Dorian Gray's youth and beauty, his tendency to be mean at random For me, there is no real question as to whether part of Dorian is meant to be Mr Wilde's lover.

I think if you familiarise yourself with Oscar Wilde, this becomes a very personal novel, much more than just a disturbing horror story where a man sells his soul.

But even without any additional information, I think this is a sad and haunting book that tells of the joyful naivete of youth and the sad wisdom of maturity. Blog Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube View all 34 comments. Feb 10, Paula rated it it was ok. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This book reminded me why I hate classics. Like Frankenstein, it starts out with a great premise: what if a portrait bore the brunt of age and sin, while the person remained in the flush of youth?

How would that person feel as they watched a constant reminder of their true nature develop? And like Frankenstein, it gets completely bogged down in uninteresting details and takes forever to get to the interesting bits. Seriously, in a page novel, the portrait doesn't even start to change until 10 This book reminded me why I hate classics.

Seriously, in a page novel, the portrait doesn't even start to change until pages in. And it's so damn flowery. Every time Lord Harry starts talking and believe me, he likes to talk he's so witty. Witty witty witty. Ahahaha, you're soooooooo worldly wise and charming.

And entirely cynical! You just have a quip for everything, don't you? Look, reader, look. See Harry. See Harry corrupt Dorian. Corrupt, Harry, corrupt! I actually ended up skimming most of the book. I really thought about stopping, but I hoped it would redeem itself by the end. It didn't. I should have just skipped to the last page. So to save you, dear reader, the same pain I went through, is the summary of Dorian Gray spoilers, of course : Dorian semi-consciously makes Faustian bargain to transfer all his sins and signs of age to his portrait.

He sins and feels guilty about it, but keeps doing it anyway. Surprise, it breaks the spell, and he is left ugly, old and dead while his portrait returns to its original form. The end. You can thank me later. View all comments. Facts that I know for sure: 1.

I got this edition because I'm a slave to the aesthetics and that's exactly the kind of motive the ghost of Oscar Wilde would approve of 2. View all 24 comments.

Oct 24, Ruby Granger rated it it was amazing. Lord Henry is a paradigmatic sophist and his epigrams are delightful partly because it's easy to forget that he is more rhetoric than truth. The connection between youthful appearance and character is also so fascinating, especially since Wilde is writing at the end of the century where physiognomy is an outdated science.

What does it mean to be young? And can innocence ever be restored? Wilde delves into the cartesian dualist debate, asking us to question where the self truly does reside and contradicting the popular Victorian idea of physiognomy. In his personal Fall and descent into sinfulness I saw similarities with H. Wells's 'The Invisible Man' where sin thrives simply because the individual cannot be held accountable.

Similarly, the debate about the value of art is intriguing and, after reading this, I recommend reading Poe's 'The Oval Mirror' because, again, there are definite similarities. View 2 comments. So I read all of Wilde's plays a couple of years ago but for some reason I never read this at the time.

This is probably the number one most requested book for me to read. So I read it. Are ya happy now!? ARE YA!? I really rather enjoyed this. Well, obviously.

It's by Oscar Wilde for fuck's sake. His prose is like spilled honey flowing across a wooden table and waterfalling onto the floor beneath. The viscous liquid So I read all of Wilde's plays a couple of years ago but for some reason I never read this at the time. The viscous liquid flowing slowly over the edge.

His plot, perfectly paced, moves slowly as we wade deeper and deeper into Dorian Gray's maniacal life. Over the edge we go as everything goes wrong, there's death, there's pain, there's long conversations about art. We hit the floor as we finish and we see nothing but sweetness amassing around us as we escape from Wilde's prose.

Putting the book down you see the light has hit the stream and it glows and it shines and it sparkles and you stand there mesmorised by what you're witnessing and you put the book back on your shelf and feel sorry for the book you read next. So, yeah, it's good. View all 11 comments. There was this book, written in such a beautiful way, using such colourful and flowery language and there were those three amazing characters that made me feel and wonder and question their lives and decisions!

It was an entirely new world for me and I was totally fascinated by it. So I read this book and I savoured every sentence, I devoured its wisdom and got lost in its pages! And I genuinely hope that many other people will read it as well.

If you prefer to stay innocent you better leave before my spoilers get to you and corrupt your soul! It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Dorian definitely is a charming character! Even at his worst he still seems to retain that innocent outlook at things. I mean he was corrupted and tainted by Lord Henry, and he ends up corrupting and tainting his friends but despite all of this he still wonders why they have become like that. What is even more intriguing is that Dorian actually wants to be good!

Do I want to be good? And even more important: Can I resist being bad? Will he do the right thing or is he going to give into his bad side? Is his bad side truly that bad? Is having a little fun with his friends and to indulge in pleasure wrong or is it just a part of being human? The fate of Dorian Gray makes you think and it involuntarily causes you to face your own demons and weaknesses. It ultimately causes you to acknowledge your own vices and fears.

In short: It makes you pause and forces you to ponder your own life-choices! And this is nothing but awesome! Or had his choice already been made? Yes, life had decided that for him — life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins — he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all. I want to use them, to enjoy them and to dominate them.

Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. How much I love that bastard! How much damage they did to his soul! Lord Henry is the kind of character you just got to love. Arrogant, intelligent, wise, self-confident, brutally honest and completely unapologetic about his inappropriate behaviour. Lord Henry is basically the embodiment of temptation and young and innocent Dorian wants to be seduced!

I swear he says the wisest things and vocalizes the most accurate statements regarding society! I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.

The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Well, at least not as much as Harry does! You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. He always breaks his own. I beg you not to go. And this is the key moment! The very first time Dorian Gray finds himself at a crossroads and choses the wrong path. You gotta love Oscar Wilde for the subtle intensity of this scene!

This kind of person particularly excels at embodying the normative values and virtues of his or her culture, those that are healthy, beneficial, and advantageous to the public good when imitated by a mass audience. Thus this newly professionalized critic, credentialed by careful study and dedication to truth and universal meaning, could help the public reap the humanizing benefits of fine art.

In contrast, Wilde acted not as a guide but as a seducer. Rather than provide stable meanings, he offered subjective ones. In short, he refused to accept that either he or the literature he discussed should be expected to set a good example. The entire tale is a recounting of the effects of artistic and especially literary influence. But that influence turns out to be anything but what a middle-class reader might expect. Again and again the story emphasizes its literary pretensions by showcasing literary taste of the utmost refinement.

But these objects and tastes turn out to be intransitive. Taste, the novel suggests, consists of continual refinement with no meaning or aim outside itself. By presenting literary taste as something much more like taste in decorative art than as part of moral and social development, Wilde was rejecting the criteria that most critics held dear. His responses often emphasize just how unwilling or uninterested he was in responding at all.

He denies, for example, that a book can be moral or immoral. And he also denies that he has any interest in even continuing the debate. Nevertheless, he continued to discourse with three prominent newspapers for several months after his novel was published. His responses often combine a plea to be left alone with a new provocation.

Wilde understands that this debate in the popular press is carried out before a mass audience. Here, he suggests that any newspaper attack will be self-defeating; by denouncing the book as immoral, the newspaper will only, in the end, advertise it. At other times, Wilde makes reference to the material ephemerality of the newspaper itself, using this against his critics. It should never be used. He argues that art is perverted from its true purpose when it attempts to be popular. Wilde launches into a diatribe against the whole of journalism that reiterates and extends the arguments he made in his defences of Dorian Gray.

Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. His individuality is intensified. It is as if in this moment Wilde recognizes that his critics have functioned as collaborators. His terms are those of self-discovery. And yet if we recall the tensions in celebrity culture and in publishing, we can conclude that without this text, Dorian Gray would not have emerged as an important event in the culture industry of the s.

Stoddart, like the reviewers with whom Wilde interacted in the periodical press, as a kind of collaborator. His censorship of the novel was to be expected. Stoddart did more than enable the publication, also playing an active role in commissioning the novel. Thus, to return to my metaphor of a triptych, I would argue that far from being a secondary or compromised version, the magazine version of the novel is central. The other texts, as we will soon see, find their meaning in relation to it.

This may seem a rather mundane or mercenary reason to expand a book. Courtesy of the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Donald L. Lawler claims that there was an unbroken line of development whereby Wilde made the moral less and less overt, a process that began in early manuscripts and ideas contained in at least two earlier stories and only reached its full culmination in the edition.

Thus for Lawler, the work we call The Picture of Dorian Gray does not represent separate acts or moments of re-creation and re-purposing; rather, it is one long act of creation that incorporates many diverse elements. Gillespie, like Lawler, sees in the revisions of Dorian Gray a process of evolution by which Wilde moves away from narrow, moralistic meanings and invites a more rich and diverse set of possible interpretations.

The aphoristic quality of the statements in the preface further removes them from the context of the controversy. Statements like this one present themselves as authoritative truisms that invite no response.

The effect is that the book in general and the preface in particular feel like pristine aesthetic objects, created expressly for this and no other purpose, when in fact we know they were created, at least partly, in response to the sense that the novel was too popular, too cheap, and too widely available. Similar to the attitude Wilde attempted to develop and maintain during his exchanges with newspapers, these details are partly defensive, partly provocative, even if their pose is one of aloofness.

Ingleby clearly sees it as worth nothing more than the new pages required to print it. The new material functions as filler, stuffing, or padding. But we should seriously question whether a sharp distinction between mere material and literary text is one that holds up to scrutiny—for us as readers as well as for Wilde as an author. Indeed, Wilde was deeply interested in maximizing the meanings that book decoration and design could bring to his works.

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