Chapter Text
In the complete manuscript of Lord Henry Warren’s memoir, Chapter 13—which covers his return to England following Wilde’s death and the subsequent decade—is untitled and fragmentary. It suggests that having expiated the shades of his “imperial” period, he could find very little to say about the years following his return from exile in 1901. It may be argued that Warren self-consciously fictionalizes and mythologizes himself in a Wildean pastiche, but we cannot know how much influence Wilde’s novel exerted on Warren’s imagination in his final years.
Warren died suddenly of a heart attack in the autumn of 1912, and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery in London. The case of Basil Holland’s disappearance remains unsolved to this day. Several of his works hang in the National Portrait Gallery and at the Tate Gallery. Both men remain overshadowed by their fictional counterparts. Outside of academia, few will recognize the names of Warren and Holland, but nearly everyone knows Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward. A peculiar sort of afterlife, where fiction, legend, and truth continue to obscure one another in turn.
We are aware that the Warren manuscript, far from clarifying matters, in many cases obscures them further. Was “Dorian Gray” a single individual, or a composite of more than one? He lies at the center of the mystery, a paradox himself: so keenly observed in Wilde’s novel, and so curiously absent from any kind of historical record. Both he and his portrait remain elusive and unknowable, and they are almost invariably a disappointment when rendered in any visual medium. He is a kind of historical gravitational singularity, made visible only by bending of the light of words of others. The more poetic amongst us may say this is for the best; to bound such a person in the mundane details of a birth date, an address, a photograph, would be to destroy the enchantment of an enigma. Thus Dorian Gray joins the wit and the painter in the strange immortality of literature, which is one of the few true means of immortality, and the only place where a man may remain young and beautiful forever.
—The Editors