In Chapter XIII of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray the painter, Basil Hallward, is brutally murdered by the still innocent-looking Dorian Gray whose “gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art”¹ eighteen years earlier.

But Basil, creator as he was of Dorian’s parallel life, was a resourceful fellow, and he was not about to let the mere fact of a frenzied knife attack, fatal though it was, prevent him from conducting his own secondary existence.

And so it was that Basil Hallward reappeared in 1904 to write the preface to a new edition of the very book in which he had long since died.

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