Spooky Time

Not His Fault! Real People in History Who Twisted Fiction’s Dorian Gray

Don’t blame him. They made him do it!

Betsy Denson
Smorgasbord of History
6 min readSep 25, 2024

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A man and his vices
Image by Canva

At the risk of spoiling a 130-year-old book, suffice it to say that the fictional Dorian Gray does a bad thing. OK, he does many bad things.

Dorian doesn’t fault himself for his evil. He blames other people. Oh, and he was “poisoned by a book”— which he bought nine copies of so that he might never be without it or the deviants in its pages. Alert the book banners.

The corrupting tome is a fictional creation of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s author Oscar Wilde but it is based on a real book written by a Frenchman. C’est toujours le français.

Penguin Publishing describes Against Nature (A Rebours) by Joris-Karl Huysmans this way:

Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes, and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences.

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Betsy Denson
Smorgasbord of History

Always looking for the interesting. Incurably curious. Write a new book in my head once a month. Hopefully one will cross the finish line before I'm 80.