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 another." The name of Dorian Gray's love interest, Sibyl Vane, may be a modified fusion of the title of Disraeli's best known novel ("Sybil") and Vivian Grey's love interest Violet Fane, who, like Sibyl Vane, dies tragically. There is also a scene in "Vivian Grey" in which the eyes in the portrait of a "beautiful being" move when its subject dies. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" originally was a novella submitted to "Lippincott's Monthly Magazine" for serial publication. In 1889, J. M. Stoddart, an editor for Lippincott, was in London to solicit novellas to publish in the magazine. On 30