The beautiful young Dorian Gray is portrayed by a painter friend. A mutual friend, Lord Henry Wotton, tempts Dorian to express that it would be better for the portrait to age instead of him. In the style of a Faustian pact, the story unfolds: Dorian's existence increasingly becomes a double life with a brilliant, unchanging facade and his true self hidden in a painting that he conceals from the world. It is the old story of the fall from grace in all its variations, retold in the guise of the 19th century, not without the violence characteristic of the Gothic novel. As the only available German edition of the novel after the first edition, this one also contains numerous passages that had fallen victim to censorship by Wilde and his American editors before the first publication, as they touched too explicitly on the theme of physical love.