My recent article Basil Hallward showed how Charterhouse Press in the era of unauthorized publications added a preposterous preface to their 1904 edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

To summarize: their idea with this so-called “Artist’s Preface” was to pass off the novel’s fictional painter, Basil Hallward, as a real person who in 1884 had known Wilde and a Radiant Youth—a “Dorian” prototype—and this meeting was supposedly the origin of Wilde’s novel released six years later.

The problem with the preface, apart from its implausibility, was that it would be slightly more plausible had it been written by someone other than the fictitional Basil Hallward.