The Picture of Dorian Gray, read as five moments
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The Picture of Dorian Gray ends with a portrait and a corpse trading places: the picture turns young again, and the man who stayed young for years is found aged and dead beside it.
Read against a five-moment grid for a writing day (capture, the session, the turn to structure, revision, output), this is the clearest case here of a revision that exists in three texts rather than two, a magazine version cut by its editor before any reader saw it and a book Wilde had planned to enlarge before the first review came in.
Capture
The premise arrives as a single bargain: a portrait will age and carry the marks of every choice its subject makes, while its subject stays outwardly young forever. In the magazine text of 1890, everything else is a consequence of that one wish, generated without needing a second idea to set it in motion. The book of 1891 adds a second one.
The session
The years in which Dorian pursues what the book calls experience are mostly suggested rather than shown scene by scene. The novel is well known for its reluctance to specify exactly what he does during those years, preferring implication over accumulation.
Set against a book like Madame Bovary, which lingers in scene after scene, the middle stretch here is compressed almost to a gesture.
The turn to structure
In the 1890 text, everything follows directly from the opening bargain and there's no hidden architecture waiting to be discovered partway through: everything after the wish is consequence, laid out along a single line rather than turning on a midpoint reveal. The 1891 book runs a second line beside it. Sibyl's brother, James Vane, swears in chapter 5, a quarter of the way in and before Dorian has done anything, to "kill him like a dog" if the man wrongs her, and hunts Dorian through chapters 16 to 18; four of the six added chapters carry him.
Revision
The novel was first published as a shorter text in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890, and was criticized on release as immoral. Wilde then expanded it for book publication in 1891, adding six chapters and a preface defending art from moral judgment.
The record does not say the readers drove it. Weeks before the magazine text came out, Wilde told a publisher he was "going to add two additional chapters" for the book. In court in 1895, asked whether the novel had been modified a good deal after the reviews, he answered no: "Additions were made." Critics have read the 1891 changes as an answer to the reviews all the same, and two things support them: the preface came after the criticism, and Basil's avowal of a "romance of feeling", printed in 1890, is gone from the book. The third text is the earliest: before any reader, the magazine's editor had cut about five hundred words from Wilde's typescript without his knowledge, restored in a 2011 edition.
Output
The preface added for the 1891 edition became, in practice, the book's public face: a short, aphoristic defense of art that now arrives before a single line of the story itself. A piece written last, after the criticism, ends up framing everything the reader encounters before the plot even starts.
The novel's own ending performs a version of revision as plot. Dorian stabs the portrait that has carried the visible weight of his choices for years, and the damage transfers instantly: he is found dead, aged and disfigured, while the painting reverts to the youthful image it started as.
The book that was itself cut, enlarged and prefaced ends with an image being forcibly revised back into its original one, at the cost of the man it had been protecting.
Revision does double duty in this novel, expanding what the story shows and defending what it's allowed to mean, while the stretch that would usually carry a book's session, the accumulated, scene-by-scene texture of years passing, is the part this one shows the least interest in showing.
Wilde's preface doesn't apologize for a single line the critics disliked. In about 380 words of epigrams that never name the book, it says what it has to say about art in general: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." A second pass spent stating a position rather than only fixing one.