Dorian grey is one of the dominating abk text, if you want to use that word, at the time and the decadent movement. Why did it make such a stir? It made such a stir because we have someone who appears to be living the life peter outlined in his book on the renaissance. Dorian is a complex and multiform individual. In wild's term, he's a drug addect hes a murderer. He's also the most charming and beautiful man in london. A what the book explores is dandyism in two forms. We have lord henry whotton, who talks the talk, and dorian grey, who is many shades of grey,
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. After burning brightly, the movement soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.
The illustration above, by Beardsley, is from the cover of the first edition of The Yellow Book in April 1894.
With
Neil Sammells
Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University
Kate Hext
Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter
And
Alex Murray
Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast
Producer: Simon Tillotson