Wilde's own life
Wilde wrote in an 1894 letter:[23]
[The Picture of Dorian Gray] contains much of me in it — Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry, what the world thinks me; Dorian is what I would like to be — in other ages, perhaps.[7][24]
Hallward is supposed to have been formed after painter Charles Haslewood Shannon.[25] Scholars generally accept that Lord Henry is partly inspired by Wilde's friend Lord Ronald Gower.[25][26] It was purported that Wilde's inspiration for Dorian Gray was the poet John Gray,[25] but Gray distanced himself from the rumour.[27] Some believe that Wilde used Robert de Montesquiou in creating Dorian Gray.[28]
Faust
Wilde is purported to have said, "in every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust."[29][30] In both the legend of Faust and in The Picture of Dorian Gray a temptation (ageless beauty) is placed before the protagonist, which he indulges. In each story, the protagonist entices a beautiful woman to love him, and then destroys her life. In the preface to the novel, Wilde said that the notion behind the tale is "old in the history of literature", but was a thematic subject to which he had "given a new form".[31]
Unlike the academic Faust, the gentleman Dorian makes no deal with the Devil, who is represented by the cynical hedonist Lord Henry, who presents the temptation that will corrupt the virtue and innocence that Dorian possesses at the start of the story. Throughout, Lord Henry appears unaware of the effect of his actions upon the young man; and so frivolously advises Dorian, that "the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing."[32] As such, the devilish Lord Henry is "leading Dorian into an unholy pact, by manipulating his innocence and insecurity."[33]
Shakespeare
In the preface, Wilde speaks of the sub-human Caliban character from The Tempest. In chapter seven, when he goes to look for Sibyl but is instead met by her manager, he writes: "He felt as if he had come to look for Miranda and had been met by Caliban".
When Dorian tells Lord Henry about his new love Sibyl Vane, he mentions the Shakespeare plays in which she has acted, and refers to her by the name of the heroine of each play. In the 1891 version, Dorian describes his portrait by quoting Hamlet,[note 1] in which the eponymous character impels his potential suitor (Ophelia) to madness and possibly suicide, and Ophelia's brother (Laertes) to swear mortal revenge.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
The anonymous "poisonous French novel" that leads Dorian to his fall is a thematic variant of À rebours (1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans. In the biography Oscar Wilde (1989), the literary critic Richard Ellmann said:
Wilde does not name the book, but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost [was], Huysmans's À rebours ... to a correspondent, he wrote that he had played a "fantastic variation" upon À rebours, and someday must write it down. The references in Dorian Gray to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate.[35]
Possible Disraeli influence
Some commentators have suggested that The Picture of Dorian Gray was influenced by the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's (anonymously published) first novel Vivian Grey (1826) as, "a kind of homage from one outsider to another."[36] The name of Dorian Gray's love interest, Sibyl Vane, may be a modified fusion of the title of Disraeli's best known novel (Sybil) and Vivian Grey's love interest Violet Fane, who, like Sibyl Vane, dies tragically.[37][38] There is also a scene in Vivian Grey in which the eyes in the portrait of a "beautiful being" move when its subject dies.[39]
