The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Penguin Classics paperback
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde, 1890
- Edition
- Edition The Picture of Dorian Gray
- ISBN
- ISBN 9780141439570
- Form
- Form Novel
The book itself, by post, in our packaging.
Posting to
Postage £3.50, tracked, 2 to 4 working days.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
In the parcel
The book, the Penguin Classics edition, in a rigid mailer.
An ex libris stamp pressed into the title page, the Daily Canon mark, with a line for your name.
A bookmark embossed with the mark, made for us by Mount Street Printers in London.
A postcard of the book’s own sky, the painted scene the app opens on.
Packed in London in one evening and posted tracked. UK postage is in the price; elsewhere by zone at checkout.
If you like this, try
Faust (Part I)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe's original bargain: youth and experience at the price of the soul.
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Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
Mann's Aschenbach chases the same beauty and pays with his life instead of a portrait.
£1.99
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
Wilde wrote the comedy to Dorian's tragedy: the same society, but this time the masks are the point.
£1.99
About the book
A single sentence can ruin a life, and Wilde proves it. Lord Henry Wotton lays out his glittering creed in a Chelsea garden, that youth is the only thing worth having and beauty the only truth, and a beautiful young man who has never owned a thought of his own takes every word as gospel. Dorian stands before his finished portrait and wishes that the picture might grow old in his place, and the picture obliges. He moves through decades of pleasure, betrayal, and worse without a line on his face, while the canvas locked in the attic curdles into something monstrous, the one honest record of his soul. The genius is that Lord Henry, who commits no sin himself, is the most corrupting presence in every room; his epigrams are the pleasure of the book and its slow poison, the same wit Wilde performed in drawing rooms and here puts quietly on trial. Beauty without consequence sounds like the finest of bargains, right up until you climb to the attic and see what it has cost.