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 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