Read The Picture of Dorian Gray by email.
A bargain about a portrait, and the bill that comes due.
A young man of extraordinary beauty wishes that his portrait would grow old in his place — and the wish takes. Wilde's only novel: glittering wit, slow corruption, and a locked room where the canvas keeps the score.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Five months from now, you will have read Wilde.
138 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1891
- Installments
- 138
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 78,918
- Reading time
- 5 hours 29 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 9 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 5 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 2 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read The Picture of Dorian Gray?
Wilde wrote exactly one novel, and it opens with a wish nobody would refuse: let the portrait age, and let me stay as I am. What follows is a Faust story with no devil required — only Lord Henry Wotton, whose paradoxes drop into Dorian's ear one summer afternoon and never stop working. Line for line it is the most quotable novel in English; whole conversations run on epigrams that have escaped the book and entered the language.
It was serial fiction from the start — the novel first appeared complete in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890, and Wilde's revised 1891 book edition kept the magazine pace: short chapters, single scenes, a curtain line at the end of nearly every one. The chapters break naturally into daily installments of a few minutes each, and the book's long central rhythm — years passing while a face in a locked room does the aging — is built for a slow read.
Under the wit sits one of the great moral engines in fiction. Every cruelty Dorian commits lands somewhere he can lock away and visit; the novel simply keeps the account open, entry by entry, until it must be settled. The ending is one page long and among the most famous in literature — and if you only know the premise, the way Wilde gets there will still surprise you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read The Picture of Dorian Gray?
About five hours straight through (78,918 words). By email, it's 138 daily installments of two to three minutes — about four and a half months, or faster at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Is this the 1890 or the 1891 version?
The 1891 book edition — Wilde's own revised and expanded text, with the six added chapters, the James Vane subplot, and the Preface. It's the version Wilde put his name behind, in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition.
What is the Preface?
Installment 1 is Wilde's famous preface: twenty-odd aphorisms on art and criticism, written in answer to the reviewers of the 1890 magazine version and ending on the line “All art is quite useless.” The novel itself begins with installment 2, in Basil Hallward's studio.
Do I need any background to enjoy it?
None. It's a story told in drawing rooms and theatres: a painter, a tempter, a beautiful young man, and one impossible portrait. Everything you need is in the first three installments.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
No. Each recap covers only the previous installment — what becomes of the portrait, of Sibyl Vane, and of the thing in the locked schoolroom stays unspoken until the page where Wilde reveals it.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.