The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel about a mysterious portrait of a young man, where the painted figure ages, while the youth himself lives on unblemished.

I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray at school. Now on this re-read I’ve somehow reached my sixties. Inevitably there have been changes in your reviewer. It’s difficult to remember what I thought about the book as a teen. Maybe it was a matter of taking youth for granted. Now, having to be mindful of pulling a muscle while stretching in the mornings, the issues explored in The Picture of Dorian Gray seem more pertinent.

We start out with the straight-forward idea that the passage of time is a journey taking us from a golden age towards a fallen state. Dorian begins the book young and beautiful, feeling that time will only dull his charms. Meanwhile in society at large, there’s a sense that after living through long centuries when they knew what was what, people are entering a darker and more uncertain era. Religion is not the force it was, slipping away along with the moral code it once supported, replaced by the cynicism of Lord Henry, and of Dorian himself who blithely makes his selfish way through life without consequence.

But in a sort of equal and opposite reaction, there are aspects of the book that portray the past as a backward time out of which we are slowly emerging. Take the character of Lord Fermor, for example, a retired diplomat who grumbles that these days one has to sit vulgar examinations to be accepted into the diplomatic service, rather than relying on the tried and tested method of noble birth and smart-set contacts. It’s hard not to see progress rather than deterioration in moving on from the heyday of a dinosaur like Lord Fermor.

“Whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us,” says Fermor’s nephew, Lord Henry.

In the end, there is no real sense of youth’s passing as an irrevocable loss. The book grows away from decay, towards development. Dorian eventually comes to see his gilded youth as “a green, an unripe time”. Now maybe we feel that the secret of staying young is to allow ourselves to grow older, to change, to move into new phases of life. Youth, after all, is about the new, not the old.

I’m glad I re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray at this point in my life.