Gray, John
Entry updated 25 November 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1866-1934) UK poet and translator of French Symbolist verse, best known as a member of London's decadent-aesthetic movement of the 1890s, when he was associated with Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) and Oscar Wilde and is a possible candidate for the title character of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (July 1890 Lippincott's Monthly; exp 1891). In Gray's one gently humorous Scientific Romance, Park: A Fantastic Story (1932), Catholic priest Father Mungo Park dreams of a Timeslip visit to a future Utopian Britain now colonized by Black African Catholics, while the descendants of the former white population are primitive degenerates living Underground, perhaps in echo of H G Wells's Morlocks. A similar racial reversal scenario (see Race in SF) features in Evelyn Waugh's short story "Out of Depth: An Experiment begun in Shaftesbury Avenue and Ended in Time" (December 1933 Harper's Bazaar). [DRL]
John Gray
born London: 2 March 1866
died Edinburgh, Scotland: 14 June 1934
works (highly selected)
- Park: A Fantastic Story (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932) [limited edition of 250 copies: hb/]
links
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