Wilde’s Obscenity Effect: Influence and Immorality in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Wilde’s three trials in 1895 served, in effect, as an obscenity prosecution of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1). Though the novel was not formally charged with obscenity, Dorian Gray’s first reviewers suggested that it was obscene, and the book was not reprinted in Britain for nearly two decades after Wilde’s trials. The novel’s relation to Wilde’s trials thus raises a number of questions about the use of fiction as legal evidence and about the ways in which a criminal prosecution might be taken to reveal the meaning of the defendant’s writings. Simon Stern is a Professor of Law and English at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.