John Henry Gray was a British clergyman, poet, short story and novella writer, dramatist, critic, essayist and translator. His poetry collection Silverpoints is among the fundamental works of that era. He is regarded as the inspiration behind Oscar Wilde's protagonist Dorian Gray.
Background
John Henry Gray was born at 2 Vivian Road, Bethnal Green, a working-class suburb of London, United Kingdom, on 10 March 1866. His father John Gray was a carpenter and a dockyard worker. Hannah Gray was his mother. Gray was the first of nine children in the family.
Education
Gray was sent to a Wesleyan day school. He was later awarded a scholarship to the Roan Grammar School, where he was regarded as an excellent student. He taught himself Latin, French, and German. He also studied music, drawing, and painting. But he had to suspend his education.
Gray’s studious habits were again rewarded when, at the age of eighteen, he passed the examinations for the Civil Service. In 1887 he passed the University of London matriculation exams.
Career
At the age of fifteen, in order to support his family, Gray worked for a time as a metal-turner at the Woolwich Arsenal.
He was given a job in the General Post Office, but later earned a promotion to the Position of librarian in the Foreign Office. Gray’s work in the Foreign Office was not demanding, and he was able, for the first time, to devote much of his time to literature. He began to write numerous essays and poems, as well as to prepare translations of various French and German works.
Gray’s first collection, Silverpoints was published at a time when the Decadent movement in English letters was approaching its peak of notoriety: Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray had recently appeared, Beardsley’s drawings and illustrations had begun to attract notice in books and magazines, and many of the characteristic poets of the period—including Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson—were producing works whose shared traits formed what has come to be considered the fin-de-siecle style. Further identifying his collection with the Decadent sensibility, Gray included among his own poems several translations from the works of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, thus establishing an alliance with a recent school of French poets who were labelled by critics, or who labelled themselves, as Decadents.
Gray’s own poems in Silverpoints repeatedly display the influence of his French models: ingenious prosodic devices, perverse or openly pathological poetic themes, and an underlying Catholic worldview. Characteristic of the Decadent school, Gray’s poems in Silverpoints are of blatantly narrow interest, directed toward fellow initiates receptive to unusual nuances of aesthetic and spiritual experience.
After the publication of Silverpoints, Gray produced several other collections of verse throughout the 1890s. These volumes, the most prominent being Spiritual Poems, explicitly reflected Gray’s transition from fin-de-siecle aesthete to devout Christian. Gray wrote and published very little during the more than twenty years following his ordination as priest in 1901. In 1926 he published The Long Road, a reflective and autobiographical allegory.
A few years later, Gray began writing essays for Blackfriars, a monthly magazine of the Dominican order, and in 1931 he published Poems. In this last collection of poems, according to critics, Gray most clearly demonstrated his alertness to twentieth-century poetic trends and confirmed his development from a prototype of the 1890s Decadent to a modern artist with a mature and individual voice.
Gray’s last work of fiction, Park: A Fantastic Story, is considered his most important. Described by Brocard Sewell as “part science-fiction, part novel of ideas”, Park has as its protagonist a priest in his sixties who seems to be a fictional persona of Gray himself and shares many of his traits and habits. Critics have traced the origin of Park's storyline to Gray’s longstanding interest in and identification with black people and to his speculations on the conversion of black Africans to the Catholic Church. In addition, critics have found that Park reflects the influences of such earlier futuristic novels as William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895).
With the exception of Silverpoints, Park is the only work of Gray’s to receive significant critical favor. Bernard Bergonzi has called his The Turn of a Century: Essays on Victorian and Modern English Literature, a “curiously timeless work” which “deserves a niche in the history of modern English fiction.”
He spent the remainder of his life as a priest in Edinburgh, Scotland, and, as numerous reminiscences avow, was an exemplary cleric with a reputation for self-sacrifice in the service of the poor.
Religion
Gray had converted to Catholicism in 1890 and, as the 1896 publication of Spiritual Poems attests, became increasingly more devoted to a religious way of life.
Personality
At the beginning of his writing career, Gray liked to spend his free time mingling in the fashionable life of literary London, attending the theatrical premieres of all the season’s promising new works and frequenting the music halls—a favorite haunt of many of the literary figures of the fin de siecle.
Gray is regarded as the inspiration behind Oscar Wilde's fictional Dorian Gray. Although the exact date of Gray’s first meeting with Oscar Wilde is not known, and in spite of Wilde’s public assertions that he did not meet Gray until 1892, two years after Dorian Gray first appeared in serial form, scholars of this period believe that the two actually met in 1889 through their mutual acquaintance Gharles Ricketts, the publisher of the Dial and the designer of Gray’s Silverpoints. In evidence critics note that numerous documents dating from the period reveal that by 1891 Gray was known as “Dorian” throughout London literary circles. Moreover, although it can never be proved conclusively that Gray was the model for Wilde’s protagonist in Dorian Gray, critics cite many details in the novel—including the coincidence of Dorian’s surname, his youth, good looks, and initial innocence—that suggest a connection.
Moreover, it was in 1892 that Gray began writing The Person in Question. The thematic similarities between The Person in Question and Dorian Gray, the autobiographical tone of Gray’s story, and the fact that Gray suppressed it until long after his death, all suggest that Gray was indeed the prototype for Wilde’s decadent hero. Although Gray greatly admired Wilde and was at one time proud of their friendship, Wilde’s increasingly indiscreet behavior and his blatantly homosexual liaison with Lord Alfred Douglas appears to have alarmed Gray. As it became increasingly apparent that a scandal was imminent, Gray withdrew from Wilde’s circle. Moreover, critics believe that it may have been the spectacle of Wilde’s decline that precipitated in Gray a spiritual crisis that made him decide to alter his life.