The Picture of Dorian Gray biography, "Oscar Wilde" (1989), the literary critic Richard Ellmann said that: Wilde does not name the book, but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost [was], Huysmans's "À rebours" ... to a correspondent, he wrote that he had played a 'fantastic variation' upon "À rebours", and someday must write it down. The references in "Dorian Gray" to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate. Some commentators have suggested that "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was influenced by the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's (anonymously published) first novel "Vivian Grey" (1826) as, "a kind of homage from one outsider to
The Picture of Dorian Gray theme in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1891) is aestheticism and its conceptual relation to living a double life. Throughout the story, the narrative presents aestheticism as an absurd abstraction, which disillusions more than it dignifies the concept of Beauty. Despite Dorian being a hedonist, when Basil accuses him of making a "by-word" of the name of Lord Henry's sister, Dorian curtly replies, "Take care, Basil. You go too far ..."; thus, in Victorian society, public image and social standing do matter to Dorian. Yet, Wilde highlights the protagonist's hedonism: Dorian enjoyed "keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life",