"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” wrote Oscar Wilde in the preface to the 1891 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
Of course, even as Wilde wrote these words, he knew that the critics
did not agree with his assessment. In fact, the entire preface is a
protest; a response to the backlash created by the original publication
of his now-classic novel. By the time he wrote the above in 1891, The Picture of Dorian Gray had existed in three forms: the original typescript, commissioned by and submitted to J.M. Stoddart, the editor at Lippincott’s, the edited 1890 version published in the magazine (which had also published Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, earlier that year), and the re-edited and expanded 1891 version, published by Ward, Lock and Company.
That sounds reasonable enough on its face—there can’t be many
novelists whose manuscripts were accepted for publication without their
editors making any changes, and as I’ve noted before,
substantial edits can accompany the leap from magazine publication to
book for a variety of reasons. But it seems that most of the changes
between these three versions were attempts to make the book more “moral”
(that is, less gay) and that they were at least partially enacted, like
Wilde’s preface, as a response to the critics, and also as a bulwark
against prosecution of Wilde for homosexuality, which was a real danger
at the time. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/a-close-reading-of-the-originally-censored-passages-of-the-picture-of-dorian-gray/
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