A beautiful young man wishes his portrait would age in his place, and it does, one secret at a time.
A short, sharp Victorian classic whose first chapters are almost all talk and whose plot arrives late: the portrait does not change until about forty percent in. The speeches are witty, and the murder and the chase in the second half are tense. Four out of five (draft). Content note: murder, suicide, drug use, and antisemitic stereotypes in how one minor character is described.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray summary, chapter by chapter: when the portrait first changes, every look at it, and Lord Henry's lines against what followed, counted from Gutenberg ebook 174. Full spoilers.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel by Oscar Wilde about a young man named Dorian Gray, his portrait, and the friend whose talk of youth and pleasure shapes his life. We read Project Gutenberg ebook #174, which opens with Wilde’s Preface and runs twenty chapters; that matches the expanded book version of 1891 reported by Wikipedia and rare-book dealers.
Below you’ll find a full summary built as a portrait clock: when the painting changes, how far into the book each change comes, and Lord Henry’s lines against what followed. Full spoilers throughout, with murder and suicide handled without graphic detail.
A short, sharp Victorian classic whose first chapters are almost all talk and whose plot arrives late: the portrait does not change until about forty percent in. The speeches are witty, and the murder and the chase in the second half are tense. Four out of five (draft). Content note: murder, suicide, drug use, and antisemitic stereotypes in how one minor character is described. Read it if: you want a classic that is short and quotable; you like gothic stories about secrets and double lives; you enjoy long conversations full of epigrams. Skip it if: you want a fast plot from page one: the early chapters are mostly talk; stereotyped descriptions of a minor character would put you off; you dislike books where the moral is left to the reader.
The Picture of Dorian Gray summary, chapter by chapter: when the portrait first changes, every look at it, and Lord Henry's lines against what followed, counted from Gutenberg ebook 174. Full spoilers. Summary: The Picture of Dorian Gray →
Oscar Wilde's novel follows Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man whose portrait, painted by Basil Hallward, ages and shows his cruelty while he himself stays young. Lord Henry Wotton's talk of youth and pleasure pushes him toward a life of secret sin that ends in a murder and the destruction of the portrait.
Project Gutenberg ebook 174, which opens with Wilde's Preface and runs twenty chapters. Wikipedia and rare-book dealers' catalogues report that the story first ran in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890 and appeared in April 1891 as a revised, expanded book, which Wikipedia gives twenty chapters. Our text matches that book version by structure.
In Chapter Seven, at dawn after Dorian cruelly rejects the actress Sibyl Vane, he sees a touch of cruelty in the painted mouth. By our count that is about 22,000 words after his wish in Chapter Two, roughly 40 percent of the 79,308 words in the twenty chapters.
Dorian decides the portrait is the last evidence of his crimes and stabs it with the knife that killed Basil. There is a cry, and the servants who break in find the portrait young and beautiful again and a withered, wrinkled dead man on the floor, whom they recognise only by his rings.
Sibyl Vane's younger brother, a sailor who swears to kill the man who wrongs her. In Chapter Sixteen he corners Dorian at the docks, but Dorian's boyish face convinces him that Dorian is too young to be the man. In Chapter Eighteen James is killed by a stray shot at a shooting party.
Twenty chapters plus the Preface. By our count the twenty chapters contain 79,308 words, leaving out the Preface, headings and the Project Gutenberg license.
