ABSTRACT
The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine , a journal that blurred the traditional boundaries separating ‘magazine’ from ‘book’ by promising a full novel in every issue. Was this offer, many readers might well have wondered, simply too good to be true? Indeed, in addition to Wilde’s novel, the July issue of Lippincott’s came replete with a how-to guide to palm reading, an article promoting the work of a charlatan scientist, and advertisements for anti-aging tonics. In other words, then, Chapter Two argues, both the boundary-defying form and the pseudoscientific content of the magazine in which Dorian Gray reached its public spoke of deception – a quality that seems to have influenced several of Dorian Gray ’s famously hostile first reviews.
