Uncensored manuscripts of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

"He can only write about illegitimate nobles and telegrafiperverse," wrote a critic of Oscar Wilde for The Scots Observer in July 1890, reacting to the first publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott's magazine.

This was one of "hundreds of critical notes on Oscar's work," Wildet's nephew, Merlin Holland, told The Times.

Oscar Wilde had to review his "aesthetic" work once again, removing the erotic passages between homosexuals. In the new book, rich in his manuscripts, will be found unfiltered the lines expressing pure and unadulterated love, which the author was forced to remove, so that the work could return to the literary success it later proved to be. .

"It is so evident that I adored you with much more feeling than an ordinary man would adore his fellow," says the painter Basil Dorian to Gray, in one of the writings published in the press of the time, but which after it was removed from the final novel. "I have never loved a woman. I guess I never had the time… I just know that I adore you madly, deeply, absurdly.”

These sentences led Lippincott's readers to consider the work as: “a disgusting and sodomite novel. "(For these sentences Oscar Wilde was put in prison on the charge of being homosexual).

The book with Wilde's original manuscripts, which Holland himself published, calls it: "The Unsaid of Dorian Gray", meaning here that Wilde was obliged to remove from his work those things that society was not yet aware of. ready to read them.

"He relied on the universal right of an artist to create and say whatever he wants," Holland says of his grandfather. "He had the right to create the characters he wanted to create." /Konica/