The Picture of Dorian Gray August 1889, Stoddart dined with Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and T. P. Gill at the Langham Hotel, and commissioned novellas from each writer. Conan Doyle promptly submitted "The Sign of the Four" (1890) to Stoddart, but Wilde was more dilatory; Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel was published in the February 1890 edition of "Lippincott's Monthly Magazine", yet Stoddart did not receive Wilde's manuscript for "The Picture of Dorian Gray" until 7 April 1890, nine months after having commissioned the novel from him. The literary merits of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" impressed Stoddart, but, as an editor,
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