A Clock With No Numbers
Full spoilers ahead, the ending included, for Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. There is a murder and a death by suicide in the story, and I keep both gentle, with nothing graphic.
Here is my question. A young man wishes that his portrait would grow old in his place. When does the portrait actually start to change? I read all twenty chapters and logged every change in the painting, with the chapter and the word count. The wish comes about eleven percent into the book. The first change comes at about forty.
Which Dorian Gray This Is
The text is Project Gutenberg ebook one seventy-four. It opens with Wilde’s Preface, and then it runs twenty chapters. The story first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July eighteen ninety. In April eighteen ninety-one it came out as a book, revised and expanded with new chapters. Wikipedia and rare-book dealers’ catalogues both say so, and Wikipedia gives the book twenty chapters.
Our text has the Preface and twenty chapters, which matches that book version, so that is the one I summarize. I match it by structure, and I am not claiming more than that.
Now the counting. I counted words in the twenty chapters only, leaving out the Preface, the headings and the Gutenberg license. That gives seventy-nine thousand, three hundred and eight words. Every position in this video is measured against that number.
Chapter Two: The Wish
Chapter One is a studio full of roses. The painter, Basil Hallward, has finished a full-length portrait of a young man named Dorian Gray, and he will not exhibit it. He says he put too much of himself into it. In the third paragraph the narrator drops a warning. Basil will one day disappear, and London will gossip about it.
In Chapter Two, Basil’s friend Lord Henry Wotton talks to Dorian in the garden while Basil paints. He tells Dorian that youth is the one thing worth having, and that he should be always searching for new sensations. The word youth appears thirty-seven times in the whole book. Fourteen of them are in this one chapter.
Then the portrait is finished. Dorian sees it, understands it will stay young while he grows old, and cries that he would give his soul to swap places. That is the wish, at about word nine thousand. And nothing happens. He even snatches a knife from Basil, who is ready to slash the canvas, crying that it would be murder.
Chapters Three to Seven: Sibyl and the First Change
In Chapter Three Lord Henry learns that Dorian is an orphan, raised by a cold grandfather, Lord Kelso, after his father was killed in a duel. Henry decides to shape him, and Dorian chooses a walk with Henry over a visit to Basil. A month later Dorian says he is in love with an actress named Sibyl Vane, who plays Shakespeare in a shabby theatre. A telegram says they are engaged.
In Chapter Five we meet her family. Her sixteen-year-old brother James is about to sail for Australia, and he swears that if the man who loves her ever wrongs her, he will kill him. He does not know the man’s name, because Sibyl only calls him Prince Charming.
A note on the theatre manager. The text describes him with antisemitic stereotypes. I will not repeat them, and in this summary he is just the manager.
In Chapter Seven Dorian brings his friends to see Sibyl play Juliet, and she acts terribly. She says that love has shown her the stage is false. Dorian tells her that she has killed his love, and he walks out. At dawn, at home, he sees a touch of cruelty in the portrait’s mouth. That is the first change, about twenty-two thousand words after the wish.
Chapters Eight to Eleven: The Locked Room
The next afternoon Lord Henry arrives with news. Sibyl is dead, found in her dressing room. The inquest says death by misadventure, and Dorian believes she took her own life. He says he has murdered her, and then he lets Lord Henry talk him into treating it like a play. He decides that the portrait can carry the shame while he stays young.
Basil visits and confesses how much he adored Dorian. He also plans to show the portrait in Paris in October, so Dorian forbids him to look at it. In Chapter Ten Dorian has a frame-maker carry it to the old schoolroom at the top of the house, wraps it in a purple-and-gold cloth, and keeps the only key.
That same day Dorian asks Lord Henry for something to read, and Lord Henry sends a yellow book. In Chapter Eleven the narrator says Dorian had been poisoned by a book. Years pass. He collects perfumes, jewels and tapestries, and he climbs to the room with a mirror to compare his young face with the aging one on the canvas.
Chapters Twelve to Fourteen: The Night of November Ninth
It is November ninth, the eve of Dorian’s thirty-eighth birthday. In the fog he meets Basil, who is leaving for Paris. Basil repeats the rumors about him. He names young men whose lives went wrong after they befriended Dorian, and he says he would have to see Dorian’s soul to know the truth. Dorian says he will show him, and takes him upstairs, to the old schoolroom that his grandfather built for him as a boy.
Basil sees the portrait. He is horrified, and he begs Dorian to pray. Dorian is seized by hatred, and he kills him. The book does not linger, and neither will I. Dorian locks the room and hides Basil’s coat and bag. At twenty minutes to two he checks his watch. At ten past two he lets himself back in, so that his valet thinks he has just come home.
Next morning he sends for Alan Campbell, a scientist and a former friend. Campbell refuses, until Dorian writes a note whose contents the book never tells us. By evening the room is empty, with only a smell of acid left. And on the portrait’s hand there is now a wet red stain.
Lord Henry’s Lines, and What Followed
Here is a ledger of Lord Henry’s words and what came next. In my reading, he is the book’s real tempter. And in this text he never sees the changed portrait.
In Chapter Two he says to be always searching for new sensations, and Chapter Eleven is years of exactly that. In Chapter Eight he says the girl never really lived, so she never really died, and that evening Dorian goes to the opera.
In Chapter Ten he sends the yellow book. Later Dorian tells him that he was poisoned with a book once. In Chapter Nineteen Dorian says he murdered Basil, and Lord Henry laughs that he is posing for a character that does not suit him.
Chapters Fifteen to Eighteen: The Hunt
Now the clock goes quiet. In Chapters Fifteen to Eighteen, the words picture and portrait are never used. That is four chapters and eleven thousand, four hundred and sixty-three words. Across the whole book the two words appear one hundred and twenty-five times.
At dinner at Lady Narborough’s Dorian can hardly eat. At home he burns Basil’s coat and bag, then slips off to the docks, dressed plainly. There a man pins him against a wall with a gun. He is James Vane, who has hunted the man he calls Prince Charming for years, because his sister died eighteen years ago. Dorian says to look at his face, and James sees a boy of about twenty, so he lets him go.
A week later Dorian faints at Selby Royal, because he has seen James’s face at a window. Then at a shooting party a man in the thicket is killed by a stray shot. It is James. Dorian rides home in tears, because he thinks he is safe.
Chapters Nineteen and Twenty: The Last Look
Dorian tells Lord Henry he is going to be good, and that he spared a village girl named Hetty, and left her as innocent as he found her. Lord Henry mocks it. We also learn that Alan Campbell has died, and that Basil is still missing.
In Chapter Twenty Dorian goes up to see whether the portrait has improved. It has not. The eyes look cunning, the mouth has a hypocrite’s curved wrinkle, and the red stain on the hand is larger. He decides the portrait is the last evidence, and he stabs it with the knife that killed Basil.
There is a terrible cry. The servants break in through a window. On the wall hangs the portrait, young and beautiful as Basil first painted it. On the floor lies a withered, wrinkled dead man, and they know him only by his rings.
The Whole Clock
Here are the looks I logged. The perfect canvas in Chapter Two. The cruel mouth in Seven. The aging face in Eleven. The horrible face Basil sees in Thirteen. The red stain in Fourteen. The cunning eyes in Twenty.
And here is the whole clock, from the wish to the knife. The wish is at eleven percent. The first change is at forty. The murder is at seventy-one. And the knife comes on the last page, at about ninety-nine point six percent.
In my reading, the portrait is Dorian’s ledger. As long as he can look at it, he never has to look at himself. Even his one good deed shows up in the canvas as a new kind of lie. That is my opinion, so check it against your own.
If the clock helped, subscribe, and tap like. And tell me in the comments when you think the portrait first changed. Every summary is at book explained dot com.
