The Bar

The Bar, the collective term for the professional body of barristers in England and Wales, appears in The Picture of Dorian Gray as a marker of conventional professional ambition and, later, as a social institution whose membership standards reflect the gap between Dorian Gray's birth and his moral standing.

Basil Hallward's Abandoned Legal Career

Basil Hallward's father destined him for the army, but Hallward insisted on going to Oxford instead. After Oxford, his father made him enter his name at the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court that qualify a person to practice as a barrister. Hallward's compliance was half-hearted: before he had eaten half a dozen of the required dinners at the Inn, he gave up the Bar entirely and announced his intention of becoming a painter. This abrupt abandonment of a secure, respectable profession for the uncertain life of an artist marks Hallward as someone who, from the start, chose personal vocation over social expectation. Lord Henry Wotton later uses Hallward's own history to illustrate a paradox about artists: "The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves." Hallward, having surrendered the Bar for his art, exemplifies the type who pours all charm into his work and leaves nothing for life but "prejudices, his principles, and his common sense."

The Bar as a Social Gate

Dorian Gray, by birth and social position, was fully entitled to become a member of a West End club, yet he was blackballed. The specific club is not named, but the incident places him in the same social milieu as the Bar and its associated institutions. The blackballing is one of several public slights that accumulate after he passes his twenty-fifth year, alongside the Duke of Berwick and another gentleman leaving the smoking-room of the Carlton Club in a marked manner when Dorian entered. These rejections by the institutions of the upper class—clubs that function as the social equivalent of the Bar's professional gatekeeping—demonstrate that his reputation had become so infamous that even his wealth and title could not secure him entry. The Bar itself never appears as a direct actor in the plot, but it stands for the world of conventional respectability that Dorian, despite his eternal youth and beauty, is progressively shut out from.

The Inquest as a Legal Ritual

The only direct legal proceeding in the novel is the inquest into Sibyl Vane's death, held at the Bell Tavern on Hoxton Road before Mr. Danby, the District Coroner. A verdict of death by misadventure was returned. Dorian Gray reads this account in the St. James's Gazette, where Lord Henry had marked the paragraph with a red pencil. Dorian is annoyed that Lord Henry sent him the paper, fearing that his servant Victor might read it and begin to suspect something. The inquest, a routine function of the legal system, is treated by Dorian as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a moral reckoning. He feels no guilt: "What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl Vane's death? There was nothing to fear. Dorian Gray had not killed her." The legal system, like the Bar, is a structure of the social world that Dorian manipulates or ignores, never submitting to its judgment.