Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is just the kind of book that made Victorian England shudder. This decadent masterpiece is anything but a vehicle for the propagation of bourgeois morality. We have in Wilde the esthete par excellence, a disciple of Walter Pater, a dandy who in his personal life seems to have put into practice Pater's silent injunction to "burn with that hard, gem-like flame" in the experience of art and, no doubt, other things. How could Wilde's book, given its affinities with the decadent manifestos of the age - the symbolist poetry of Stèphane Mallarmé, Huysmans's À Rebours (Against Nature), the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, The Yellow Book and so on - serve as cultural criticism in all its parts? severe, and perhaps more acute, than those of Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold? I suggest that Wilde accomplishes this task by having his characters enact the philosophy with which he himself was almost synonymous and, in the same gesture, by linking this very philosophy with the logic of capitalist exploitation that underlies England's aristocratic facade of Dorian. In Wilde's time, the aristocracy could do little more than serve the capital-owning class as a kind of enhanced mirror image of its own behavior. The worst tendencies of Wilde's wealthy characters are none other than the selfishness, isolation, exploitation and brutality that led the most perspicuous Victorians to condemn capital. In Wilde's aristocracy, we see rich, idle, decadent characters reveal from the perspective of their armchair and their clubroom the worst flaws of the system on which they are parasites. They are the disguised lookalikes, the insignificant others, of the British industrial class. Having become refined and idle, Wilde's aristocrats are free to express... in the middle of paper... their selfishness. Since Dorian is never much more than an empty vessel, largely filled, or determined, by the values ​​of the culture in which Wilde immersed him, it does not follow that his behavior and punishment also indict the culture that infects him. did it produce? At the end of Wilde's novel, the artist Basil is dead, killed by Dorian, but this need not imply that Wilde considers art useless. Dorian's transgressions are those of an entire class, which in turn represents an entire economic order, an order that, of course, is not limited to the aristocracy. Ultimately, Wilde's novel concerns a sphere wide enough to understand and criticize both the elegant circles within which Dorian and Lord Harry move, and the grimy contours of Manchester. When all is said and done, The Picture of Dorian Gray is still with us to expose the "sins" of Victorian Britain.