Alan Campbell's Blackmail

             In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian’s old associate, Alan Campbell, was called to “clean up” the mess which was Basil Hallward’s death. We know little of Alan Campbell, other than he no longer associates Dorian due to the former seeking to salvage whatever reputation he had left. He was also a chemist and it was this talent that Dorian called on to hide Basil’s death and to remove evidence.

            Alan of course refused to do as his former acquaintance requested, stating “I entirely decline to be mixed up in your life. Keep your horrible secrets to yourself.” In the end, Dorian sought to blackmail him in order to get the chemist to comply. The audience never finds out exactly what Dorian had blackmailed him with, but it made him become “…ghastly pale, and he fell back in his chair. A horrible sense of sickness came over him. He felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.” The secret that Alan Campbell kept was horrible to his character and would have ruined him. He did whatever it took for Dorian Gray to keep it a secret. Though his secret is never revealed, we are made aware of how important it was that this secret was to never have been revealed. In the end, “Alan Campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know.”

            Wilde had written Alan Campbell’s blackmail in possible reference to what became known as the “blackmailer’s charter” in response to the Labouchere Amendment. The Labouchere Amendment in 1885 was a law that made “gross indecency”, or homosexuality, a criminal act punishable by time in prison. Because of this law, many male prostitute sought to blackmail their male customers into paying them money to keep their identities hidden from society. This certainly ties in with Alan Campbell and the secret that he so desperately tries to keep.