There is only one thing in the world worse than…

The line comes in the first chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The painter Basil Hallward contemplates his portrait of a beautiful young man; his friend Lord Henry Wotton calls it his best work, which must go to the Grosvenor gallery, not to the “too large and too vulgar” Academy. Basil refuses to send it anywhere. Lord Henry is amazed: painters do anything to gain a reputation, then seem to want to throw it away. Then comes the line. Basil answers that he cannot exhibit the picture because he has “put too much of myself into it”.

Wilde first published the novel in 1890 in an American magazine, Lippincott’s Monthly, and in book form, enlarged, in 1891. He later wrote in a letter that Basil was what he thought he was, Lord Henry what the world thought him, and Dorian what he would like to be.

The line took on a bitter irony in 1895, when Wilde’s trials made him the subject of a very different kind of talk.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 1 (Lord Henry), 1891

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work