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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Large Print Edition)

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Large Print Edition)

Oscar Wilde

Hardcover

Series: Clearview Editions

HorrorClassic FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 1608888150
ISBN13: 9781608888153
Publisher: Clearview Editions
Published: Aug 29 2026
Pages: 498
Weight: 2.37
Height: 1.06 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray begins with an artist, a portrait, and a young man who has not yet understood the influence of his own beauty. Basil Hallward finds in Dorian a subject that transforms his painting. Lord Henry Wotton sees someone susceptible to a philosophy of sensation, self-cultivation, and the pursuit of pleasure. Their competing influences surround Dorian as he confronts a disturbing contrast: the portrait will remain young while he must grow older.

Dorian's wish reverses that relationship. His outward appearance seems untouched by the life he leads, while the hidden picture bears the marks of his conduct and the passage of time. The portrait becomes a private record that cannot be reconciled with the face he shows society. Wilde uses this fantastic premise to examine vanity, conscience, secrecy, and the wish to separate pleasure from consequence. The picture is both an object within the story and a means of making a divided life visible.

The actress Sibyl Vane brings Dorian's devotion to beauty into conflict with another person's hopes. He admires the characters she performs, but their relationship exposes the difference between loving an image and responding to a living person. Her brother James, the painter Basil, and Lord Henry each enter Dorian's life from a different position of affection, suspicion, or influence. Their encounters test the accounts he gives of himself and the assurances offered by his unchanged appearance.

The novel moves among studios, drawing rooms, theatres, gardens, private collections, and concealed rooms. Conversation and social performance alternate with episodes of fear and violence. Lord Henry's polished paradoxes can be alluring, provocative, or evasive; Basil's attachment to his art brings its own vulnerabilities. Dorian's experiments with books, music, jewels, fabrics, and other objects extend the argument about the cultivation of taste. Possession and sensation offer variety, but they do not free him from the picture's testimony.

Wilde's Preface introduces the book with concise statements about art, criticism, beauty, and moral judgment. The narrative that follows does not simply illustrate a single rule. It places competing ways of seeing beside one another and lets their implications emerge through speech, action, and concealment. Readers can attend to the brilliance of the dialogue while also considering what its speakers evade. The Gothic device of the portrait gives these questions a physical center that Dorian can hide but cannot escape.

This Clearview Editions volume presents the expanded book version with the Preface and all twenty chapters. The novel first appeared in a shorter magazine version in 1890; the expanded book edition followed in 1891. The source and edition note identifies Project Gutenberg Ebook No. 174. The historical wording and chapter order are retained, with publisher-created notes clearly separated from Wilde's text. This is an edition of the novel itself, without a newly added critical apparatus or a modernized retelling.

The casebound large-print edition uses 7 by 10 inch pages, 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next type, and 27-point line spacing. Ragged-right setting and line endings without automatic word division give the dialogue, descriptive passages, and longer reflections a spacious presentation. Contents and chapter divisions support a return to particular conversations and episodes. The design is intended for sustained reading of Wilde's language and the uneasy relationship between the beautiful surface and the record kept out of sight.

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