On August 30, 1889, Philadelphia publisher Joseph M. Stoddart, managing editor of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, invited a few guests to dinner at the Langham Hotel in London. Among them were two promising young writers: Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. Doyle recounts the events of what he calls "a golden evening" in his autobiographical Memories and Adventures (1924). Stoddart was considering an English publication of Lippincott's with a British editor and British contributors. As a result of that evening, Doyle contributed to Lippincott's his second Sherlock Holmes story, "The Sign of Four." Wilde published his first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the magazine's July 1890 issue.
Initial response to Wilde's novel was negative if not abusive. The St. James Gazette of June 20, 1890, refers to the "garbage of the French Décadents" and the "prosy rigmaroles" of the story. The Daily Chronicle of June 30 calls it a "poisonous book." The Scots Observer of July 5 asks, "Why go grubbing in muck-heaps?"
Wilde responded to the criticism of his work with numerous letters to editors and added a preface to the book version that came out in the spring of 1891. He also extensively revised Lippincott's version, adding six new chapters (3, 5, 15, 16, 17, and 18), softening the homoerotic references, and dividing Chapter 13 of the original text into Chapters 19 and 20 of the book. Contrary to the reviews' charge that the novel was immoral, Wilde was concerned that the novel was too moral, that it was didactic in its portrayal of the wages of sin.
