Punch Magazine: "Our Booking-Office."

This is the nicest that Punch has been (and will ever be) to Oscar Wilde; not only is he spared from being in the cartoon, but The Picture of Dorian Gray is given a thorough, mixed but still very negative review, albeit as snarky as Punch always is. But it could have been worse for Wilde. The review states the following:

"Mr. WILDE has preferred the sensuous and hyperdecorative manner of 'Mademoiselle DE MAUPIN,' and without GAUTIER'S power, has spoilt a promising conception by clumsy unideal treatment. His 'decoration' (upon which he plumes himself) is indeed 'laid on with a trowel.' The luxuriously elaborate details of his 'artistic hedonism' are too suggestive of South Kensington Museum and æsthetic Encyclopædias. A truer art would have avoided both the glittering conceits, which bedeck the body of the story, and the unsavoury suggestiveness which lurks in its spirit. Poisonous!"

The "unsavory suggestiveness" mentioned here is the suggestion that in order to purge himself of his sins, Dorian must kill the soul of himself inside the painting and die in the real world, effectively "purif[ying] his soul by suicide..." Nevertheless, even in the 1890s, Wilde is still being dogged down for his use of Aestheticism, and allowing the eyes of the narrator to receive pleasure at every corner of the book. Will he ever be able to revel in the beauty of nature and the beauty of desire, and the naturalness of desire? For example, Basil's and Lord Henry's desires to be around the youthful, beautiful Dorian, because he is a marvel and very attractive to them. 

 

Source:

"Our Booking-Office." Punch Magazine, Vol. 99, 19 Jul. 1890, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11919/11919-h/11919-h.htm.

Associated Place(s)

Event date:

19 Jul 1890