Location, Location, Location (Dorian Gray)

[MadgeUK]

POSSIBLE SPOILERS HERE.
The novel talks of 'this grey monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins'. This expresses the ambivalent relationship Victorians had with their capital. The idea of the city gripped the 19C imagination, and London was the biggest and most powerful city on earth. Dorian's London is, above all, full of gothic images and because of the Thames and of pollution from factories, London was a foggy city which Monet frequently painted. The fog added to its sense of mystery and of 'sin' lurking around every corner:-

http://www.monetalia.com/paintings/mo...

Most of the locations are still there and I have already mentioned Oscar Wilde's own home in Chelsea, upon which Euston Road is based:-

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuillet...


Sibyl's theatre was in the East End of London - the poorest part, where boats docked and discharged both cargo and people from all over the world. The theatre was likely to be the Theatre Royal or Borough Theatre in Stratford East. Here are some good images of the exotic interiors, and Victorian postcards of the street as Sybil/Wilde might have seen it:-

http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Stratfor...

Covent Garden is much changed today and is now an upmarket shopping area - the fruit market has moved. Here is a photo as it would have been in Wilde's day, again another seedy area, full of shady characters:-

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/HC3...

And here is a photo showing Covent Garden Opera House in Victorian times. For those of you who know London, this street leads down to Trafalgar Square:-

http://www.coventgardenjournal.com/wp...

This is rather a nice print of a children's Pantomime party at the Covent Garden Opera House in 1871:-

http://wholesale-prints.net/MBB0871/M...

Grosvenor Square, a prestigious Victorian address with a lovely little park, is where the American Embassy in London now is but this is how it used to look:-

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil...

American Embassy today:-

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/1...

Bluegate Fields, where Sybil lives, was a notorious slum where there would be 'the coarse brawl, the loathsome den*, the crude violence':-

http://www.colombaantonietti.com/publ...

It was so notorious that Gustav Dore made a woodcut of policemen looking for criminals there:-

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...

*The East End was also famous for its Opium Dens:-

http://vichist.blogspot.com/2009/03/o...

[Jon]

wow really interesting stuff Madge, im a Londoner living in Sydney and love all the old photos

[MadgeUK]

Glad you enjoyed them Jon:).

[The Book Whisperer (aka Boof)]

Madge, what a fantastic post (yet again!). I love looking at the links and seeing images in relation to the books we reads.

Great stuff!

[MadgeUK]

Thanks Boof - I enjoy doing them:). It makes my insomniac nights bearable.

[Audrey]

I love seeing the illustrations and pictures. The John Coulthart site is fantastic. Thanks for posting them!

[PaNdORa (gökçe)]

I just start reading Dorian Gray I heard that Oscar Wild is homosexual and from the two chapter ,I realized his sexual identity has a great influence on his novel

[MadgeUK]

Oscar Wilde was a celebrated English homosexual who went to prison because of his homosexuality. Does the introduction to your book give you a brief biography? If not, here is one:-

http://www.biographyonline.net/poets/...

What is it in the first two chapters which gave you a clue to his sexuality?