It would be easy to place blame for Wilde’s downfall firmly in the lap of the unenlightened masses of Victorian England, for their insistence in dictating essentially what happens in one’s bedroom. To do so, however, would absolve Wilde of any responsibility in the matter and to absolve him would be problematic and irresponsible; his actions simply cannot be discounted. Furthermore, as with most circumstances, the narrative is far more complicated and convoluted than a relatively simple trial for gross indecency. In order to comprehend both Dorian Gray’s and Oscar Wilde’s respective falls from grace, one has to understand how the two are intertwined and virtually inseparable from the other. In fact, a revisit to Wilde’s assertion that books have no effect on readers seems to show that even Wilde did not believe his own official statement on the matter; confidentially, he informed a young Graham Robertson that “the book was not written for you, and I hope you will not read it” (Ellman 288). In a sense, though, Wilde was right about books not having any effect: books are simply objects. What they contain in the form of ideas and concepts and thoughts, however, is potentially far more dangerous. And that is partially why Jeyes was unable to make note of the moral; he saw just a book filled with dirty words and dirty thoughts and dirty actions, but he apparently failed to put them together into the ideas they created. Had he done so, his reaction might have been altogether different. But for Wilde, ideas were essentially life, itself. And like Dorian Gray, Wilde, himself, fell enthralled by not one, but two separate books in his lifetime. The first was Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which Wilde called a “book which has had such a strange influence over my life” and repeatedly referred to it as his “golden book” (Ellman 46). As mentioned previously, it was this book that formed Lord Henry’s views that so affected Dorian Gray, and while it has been stated that Pater corresponds to Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, I submit that it is a misnomer to do so, just as it is to fully relate Basil Hallward to the chaste and self-denying John Ruskin. Wilde, himself, stated that he had “three separate and distinct souls”, the first two as souls in opposition and the third to reflect on them (Ellman 133-134); representations of all three of Wilde’s souls are, therefore, mirrored in The Picture of Dorian Gray. According to Wilde, “’Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be in other ages, perhaps’” (Ellman 301). The struggle for Wilde was to balance each contrasting view within himself, a feat he knew was a losing battle that played out within the pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s three souls, then, are seen quite clearly with Basil on one side of the chasm, Dorian on the other, and Lord Henry left to analyze them both.

Certainly, Lord Henry’s views did draw from Pater, but it is Dorian who so unequivocally implements those views. Lord Henry is merely the catalyst to Dorian’s downfall; he is the instigator and the spectator (Ellman 300). Indeed, Lord Henry muses the following after exposing Dorian to new thoughts and ideas on their first meeting:

Lord Henry watched [Dorian], with his sad smile. He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing. He felt intensely interested. He was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen, which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he wondered whether Dorian Gray was passing through the same experience. He had merely shot an arrow into the air. Had it hit the mark? (Wilde, Norton TPoDG 187)

If Wilde was correct that the world thought of him as Lord Henry-as both an instigator and spectator-it is because of Wilde’s own actions and insistence in bringing forth new ideas-good, bad, or indifferent-to the forefront. Indeed, he was a known celebrity cum aesthete well before his writing made any impact, being parodied in productions such as The Grasshopper, Where’s the Cat?, The Colonel and, probably the most well-known, Patience by Gilbert and Sullivan (Ellman 128-129), not to mention in Punch by George du Maurier (Ellman 130). Wilde, as part of the “personalities of Tite Street”, was literally the “talk of London” (Ellman 128), and the “standard-bearer of aestheticism” (Ellman 129). It was his celebrity status that precipitated his lecture tour throughout the United States where he was to address aesthetics and “was to be paraded as a figure in English society and not only as a writer” (Ellman 145), using a successful run of Patience in New York to bolster his lectures and, in turn, use Wilde’s lectures to generate continued interest in Patience (Ellman 144). As fate would have it, Wilde’s expressions were immediately disseminated, both in America and reported back to England, in classic misconstrued fashion by the newspapers (Ellman 151), which only further bolstered his reputation, both the good and the bad. It is a fair statement to say, I think, that the vast majority of artistically inclined people are prone to insecurity, and it is doubtful that Wilde was any different: he reveled in the attention which, in turn, served to validate his life-at least in his own eyes. Indeed, upon hearing that Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience caricatured him, he wrote to George Grossmith, the actor portraying Bunthorne, to inquire about reserving a box for opening night (Ellman 129). There were three ways in which Wilde could contend with his public skewering: get angry, ignore it altogether, or use it as leverage to continue his public elevation. Wilde was intelligent enough to recognize that any publicity was good publicity and chose to good-naturedly continue his ascent (Ellman 131). What Wilde was to discover, as have many celebrities after him, the higher one rises the further one has to fall; a fickle public adores a spectacular fall just as much, if not more so, as it does a meteoric rise.