The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

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Gut reaction: I wonder if I’m being hypnotised.

Do I need to snap out of it, quickly, before something happens?

After two weeks of highly energetic openings (Atonement and Mrs Dalloway), it’s nice to pause and take a breath. But I’m almost getting sleepy (not bored); there’s tiny piece of my brain resisting, and wondering why.

Close Reading

My initial reaction is how extraordinarily sensual the opening is. I’m cursed with a fairly poor sense of smell, but struck by ‘the rich odour’, the ‘heavy scent’, and the ‘delicate perfume’ combining to create a heady cocktail. (Margaret Atwood also played with the receptors in my nose back in August.) It isn’t just the synonyms for smell – actually, I’m going to point at the very different connotations of those three adjectives. If this is a cocktail, the measures aren’t equal, and in my reading, even subconsciously, I spend much of the first sentence imagining what it might taste (smell) like. The rest of the sentence? Similarly, I’m establishing that colour palette, and enjoying that breath of ‘light summer wind’.

Slowing down, noticing smell, colour, movement, temperature, perhaps touch? It’s as mindful a first sentence as you could ever wish for.

But.

Before we get carried away, we’re not in the garden. We’re in the studio, With Lord Wotton.

Several things interest me here, and some of them introduce tensions – perhaps tensions which Wilde didn’t anticipate – which are the source of that unease I suggested in my gut reaction.

The divan sounds suitably rich and exotic with its ‘Persian saddle-bags’, and Wotton’s horizontal attitude sounds as relaxed and languorous as I am beginning to feel. The thing is, Wotton is inside, not wallowing in the sensual overload we were offered. He’s an observer, not a participant, and from this position he can only ‘just catch’ part of the garden.

Outside, it continues to be fabulous, idyllic – all colour, life, movement, with ‘honey’ repeated to emphasise the syrupy, mellifluous experience. Come to think of it, no wonder Wotton is lying down: it’s positively soporific, yawn!

But why isn’t he out there? Why is his view imperfect? Why isn’t he participating in the way we’re being invited to?

We’re told the door is open. So is he indoors because he wants to be, or because he can’t go outside.

I feel like I’m dancing on eggshells a little here – this is a cold reading, after all, setting aside what I know about the book, treating it as the first read – but I am going to talk briefly about the ‘studio’. I think I’m entitled to, given the title of the book and how explicitly Wilde foregrounds the indoor location before giving us the glory of the garden. In my reading, a studio will broadly define as somewhere art (in the broader sense) is created. And I’m a fan of the arts. But one of the tensions in here has to be an almost subliminal sense that art and nature are competing. Wotton’s presence inside, in this close reading, and remembering we only have 100 words to look at, could suggest which he prefers. If that’s a stretch – get in touch and say so!

This leaves me with one final tension: the cigarettes.

It’s a great opportunity to open this up just a little into things I discuss with my A-Level students. The first is to distinguish between authorial intention and reader response. There’s no way Wilde could have predicted, in 1890, what 2026 attitudes to cigarettes might be. It also satisfyingly introduces the importance of context, and the idea that different people will interpret what they read differently (I think I’ve mentioned the intellectual kitbag before).

Students reading? I hope you’ll see that I’m talking about Assessment Objectives 1, 3, and 5 …

To the smoking then – the ‘innumerable’ cigarettes. We’re given Wotton’s title, and I think on the whole they act as further signifiers of his life of leisure and luxury. So far, so late-Victorian era. But I can’t ignore a few more modern thoughts. Completely setting aside my attitude to smoking, I am going to remark that the smell has to be impacting, competing with, that potent floral cocktail. Not unlike my thoughts on the potential jolt as art and nature collide?

As I’ve never been a smoker, I don’t want to make too much of it, but what’s all that nicotine doing to Wotton’s perceptions? Stimulating? Soothing? I mean, it’s a far cry from Sherlock’s ‘7% solution’¹, or the scourge of the opium dens, but he must be getting something from all those cigarettes?

If my last point definitely needs filing under ‘unintended consequences’, I’ll finish with something a little less out there. Hopefully. I’ve talked about sensory overload in this piece, distrusting that sense of overwhelm and what as a reader I might be being asked to do without fully understanding.

Back to that adjective, ‘innumerable’, then: all I’m going to leave you with is the suggestion that all that smoke in the air isn’t going to help me, help us, see with perfect clarity through the haze …

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References and Further Reading

1. The Sign of the Four (1890), by Arthur Conan Doyle. FUN FACT: this was first published in the same year as Dorian Gray ↩︎