The revised version evoked less negative response, possibly because most of the uproar about the work had faded. W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet and dramatist who would receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, had some reservations but called it a "wonderful book" in the United Ireland of September 26, 1891. Arthur Conan Doyle was supportive of Dorian Gray in a letter to Wilde. In his response, in April 1891, Wilde wrote, "I cannot understand how they can treat Dorian Gray as immoral. My difficulty was to keep the inherent moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect, and it seems to me that the moral is too obvious." Over the years, writers as diverse as James Joyce and Joyce Carol Oates have praised Wilde with some reservations. The Picture of Dorian Gray is now considered to be at least a pivotal work, if not a classic.
Sources from which Wilde drew for his novel include the Faust legend and the Narcissus myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Critics cite various sources for the changing portrait motif. One is that the writer sat for a painter named Basil Ward, who, after finishing the portrait, remarked that it would be delightful if Wilde could remain as he was while the picture aged; however, there is no historical indication that Wilde ever sat for a Basil Ward. Another version of this story links the concept of a portrait aging to a Canadian artist named Frances Richards.
Several critics have noted that the politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) anonymously published a book called Vivian Grey in the 1820s and that this novel anticipates Wilde's work. Several other nineteenth-century novels make use of a magic picture, or doppelganger (a ghostly double of a living person). Wilde's work is so creative, however, that these influences appear to be only coincidental.
