The Picture of Dorian Gray
A Faustian tale of youth, beauty, and moral corruption in Victorian London. Young Dorian Gray sells his soul so that his portrait will age while he remains forever young — with devastating consequences.
Wilde wrote the best dialogue of the nineteenth century and then put it in a novel, which is an odd fit for a single narrator: Lord Henry's epigrams are performances delivered at people, and they need an audience in the room to land. Here Basil, Henry and Dorian are three separate voices in conversation, and the first four chapters — essentially a play about a portrait — sound like what they are. The moral horror of the second half works better for it too, because Dorian's voice stays young while everything he says gets worse.
The voices that carry it
Lord Henry Wotton talks more than anyone else in the book and never once seems to be trying. Sibyl Vane, in her few scenes, is cast deliberately sincere — the one person in the novel with no irony at all.
Chapter one plays without an account. Start listening to The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Voice cast
8 characters plus the narrator, each with their own voice. All the voices of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
- Dorian Gray — An extraordinarily beautiful young aristocrat of about twenty when the story opens. Naïve and impressionable at first, he is slowly corrupted by Lord Henry's philosophy of pleasure. His portrait bears the weight of every sin while he retains his youth and looks indefinitely.
- Lord Henry Wotton — A brilliant, languid aristocrat in his mid-thirties who becomes Dorian's Mephistophelean guide. He speaks entirely in paradoxes and epigrams, values sensation over morality, and takes idle pleasure in watching Dorian's corruption from a safe distance.
- Basil Hallward — The talented painter who creates the fateful portrait of Dorian. Sincere, earnest, and deeply moral — he idealises Dorian and sees the good in him that no one else can. He is the novel's moral conscience and ultimately pays for it.
- Sibyl Vane — A seventeen-year-old actress of genius who performs Shakespeare at a cheap East End theatre. Dorian falls obsessively in love with her art; she falls genuinely in love with him. When she abandons her art for real emotion, Dorian abandons her — and she dies shortly after.
- James Vane — Sibyl's rough, protective brother — a sailor about to ship out for Australia when the story opens. Working-class, blunt, deeply suspicious of Dorian from the start. He spends years hunting Dorian to avenge Sibyl's death, dying in a hunting accident before he can act.
- Alan Campbell — A former close friend of Dorian's — a scientist and amateur chemist. Their friendship cooled mysteriously years before. Dorian blackmails him into dissolving Basil Hallward's body. Performs the act in cold horrified silence and dies by suicide not long after.
- Lady Narborough — A sharp-tongued, witty society hostess who adores Lord Henry's company. She appears at dinner parties and provides the sparkling surface of the upper-class world Dorian inhabits — a foil to the darkness beneath.
- Mrs. Vane — Sibyl and James's mother — a faded, vain actress who still thinks in theatrical gestures. Absorbed in her own performance of maternal grief, she cares more about appearances than about her children's welfare.
Chapters
- Chapter I
- Chapter II
- Chapter III
- Chapter IV
- Chapter V
- Chapter VI
- Chapter VII
- Chapter VIII
- Chapter IX
- Chapter X
- Chapter XI
- Chapter XII
- Chapter XIII
- Chapter XIV
- Chapter XV
- Chapter XVI
- Chapter XVII
- Chapter XVIII
- Chapter XIX
- Chapter XX
About this recording
Is The Picture of Dorian Gray a horror novel?
It is filed here as psychological drama. There is one supernatural premise and a genuinely frightening final chapter, but most of the book is drawing-room conversation and moral decline rather than horror.
Which version of the text is this?
The standard published novel in twenty chapters, as revised and expanded from the shorter magazine version, sourced from a proofread public-domain edition.