92. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

At the beginning of 1892, stories were appearing in the London press claiming that Dorian Gray, the hero of Wilde’s notorious book, was modelled on a real person, a minor poet named John Gray. They said that John Gray was a protégé of Wilde’s, a person under his ‘protection’. Wilde acted to scotch the rumours. In late February 1892 he wrote in a letter to the Daily Telegraph:

Allow me to state that my acquaintance with Mr John Gray is, I regret to say, extremely recent, and that I sought it because he had already a perfected mode of expression both in prose and verse. All artists in this vulgar age need protection certainly. Perhaps they have always needed it. But the nineteenth-century artist finds it not in Prince, or Pope, or patron, but in high indifference of temper, in the pleasure of the creation of beautiful things, and the long contemplation of them in disdain of what in life is common and ignoble, and in such felicitous sense of humour as enables one to see how vain and foolish is all popular opinion, and popular judgment, upon the wonderful things of art. These qualities Mr John Gray possesses in a marked degree. He needs no other protection, nor, indeed, would he accept it.
I remain, sir, your obedient servant,
Oscar Wilde.

Wilde had published The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Magazine in June 1890, and therefore, since his acquaintance with John Gray had been ‘extremely recent’, John Gray could not have anything to do with ‘Dorian’ Gray.

This though was false.

John Gray was born into a poor family in Islington in 1866. At a young age he began work in a forge at the Woolwich Arsenal, later becoming a boy clerk in the offices there. In 1882 he took a civil service examination and qualified as a clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank. In 1887 he rose still further by passing the matriculation examination for London University, maintaining himself by continuing in his work as a clerk. He then transferred to the postal department of the Foreign Office. This was a remarkable vaulting of class barriers by the standards of the time, and around 1887 he vaulted still higher by making the acquaintance of some of the figures in the circle of Wilde: Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and others. John’s good looks, it seems, were much appreciated. Early photographs show a young man of some beauty: a very white, smooth skin; a strong, rounded nose and chin; delicate, well-formed lips; and short, dark curling hair.

Gray and Wilde began to be seen together increasingly at parties, dinners, the theatre, galleries, the opera, and at the Café Royal. Gray was now writing his own poetry, much of it in the ‘decadent’ style of the 1890s. There is no doubt that by 1890 Wilde was referring to John as ‘Dorian’. Several lines of evidence support this. Ernest Dowson wrote in a letter of November 1890 (after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in its magazine form in June that year, but before the appearance of the book in April 1891): ‘Thursday at Horne’s was very entertaining: [...] “Dorian” Gray [read] some very beautiful and obscure versicles in the latest manner of French Symbolism.’ The writer Lionel Johnson, shortly after meeting John in the early 1890s, wrote: ‘I have made great friends with the original of Dorian: one John Gray, a youth in the Temple, aged thirty, with the face of fifteen.’ Arthur Symons recalled that he had been introduced by Wilde to ‘the future Dorian Gray’ at some point around the end of 1890. And John Gray himself signed one surviving letter to Oscar, of January 1891, ‘Yours ever, Dorian.’ So when Wilde wrote in the Daily Telegraph in 1892 that his friendship with John Gray was of ‘extremely recent’ origin, this was not the truth. He had known him for several years. It is likely that the lie was an attempt by Wilde to protect Gray, in his position at the Foreign Office, from the scandal that was already attaching to Wilde and would eventually break over his head in March 1895.

Why ‘Dorian’ though? Almost certainly it was a reference to the ‘Greek love’ (the Dorian Greeks were a tribe that descended into the Greek peninsula around 1000 BC) of Plato’s Symposium and other works. It is a phrase which appears frequently in the literature of the period. In the 1890s there were a number of competing words for homosexuality. The word ‘homosexual’ had been invented, along with ‘heterosexual’, by the Hungarian-German writer Károly Mária Kertbeny in around 1868, but had failed to catch on. Instead there were other terms: ‘Uranian’ was common for male homosexuals, in reference to the god Uranus, who had given birth to Aphrodite without intervention from any woman (Aphrodite had stepped from the foam produced when his testicles were cut off and thrown into the sea). Others favoured ‘unisexual’ (for example the writer Marc André Raffalovich, a life-long close friend of Gray, who wrote a treatise on homosexuality) or ‘invert’ (‘inversion’ was a neutral term with no pejorative connotations, used by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, among others). ‘Dorian’ was merely one more way, perhaps more coded than others, to signify ‘homosexual’.

Whether Wilde and Gray were ever lovers is not known. The friendship however did not long survive the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gray was displaced by Alfred Douglas (to whom he bore a physical similarity) in 1892, and Gray broke with Wilde completely in 1893.

Gray went on to publish numerous other collections of poetry, critical works and other books, but his later life — almost his whole life, considering how young he was when he mixed with the Wilde circle — was in notable contrast to his ‘decadent’ youth. He resigned his position at the Foreign Office in 1897 and in 1898 enrolled at the Scots College seminary in Rome, where he trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood. From 1901 until his death in 1934 he was, not Dorian Gray, nor John Gray, but ‘Father Gray’.

Consulted:
McCormack, Jerusha Hull: The Man Who Was Dorian Gray (2000)
Ellis, Havelock: Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol I, Sexual Inversion (1897)