The Picture of Dorian Gray edition of the novel; nonetheless, by June 1891, Wilde was defending "The Picture of Dorian Gray" against accusations that it was a bad book. In the essay "The Artist as Critic", Oscar Wilde said that: In the 19th century, the critical reception of the novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890) was poor. The book critic of "The Irish Times" said, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was "first published to some scandal." Such book reviews achieved for the novel a "certain notoriety for being 'mawkish and nauseous', 'unclean', 'effeminate' and 'contaminating'." Such moralistic scandal arose from the novel's homoeroticism, which
The Picture of Dorian Gray by attending a high-society party only twenty-four hours after committing a murder. Moral duplicity and self-indulgence are evident in Dorian's patronage of London's opium dens. Wilde conflates the images of the upper-class man and lower-class man in Dorian Gray, a gentleman slumming for strong entertainment in the poor parts of London town. Lord Henry philosophically had earlier said to him that: "Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. ... I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations"—implying that Dorian is two men, a refined aesthete and a coarse