The Picture of Dorian Gray

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.