Cambridge

Cambridge is the university where Basil Hallward studied and where his friendship with Lord Henry Wotton began, and it is also the institution where Alan Campbell pursued his scientific training. The city serves as a background for formative intellectual and personal relationships that shape the novel's central conflicts.

Basil Hallward's Oxford and Cambridge Connections

Basil Hallward attended Oxford, where he developed the mannerism of tossing his head back in a way that made his friends laugh at him. It was at Oxford that he first met Lord Henry Wotton, beginning a friendship that would prove fateful when Lord Henry later met Dorian Gray in Basil's studio. Basil's father had destined him for the army, but Basil insisted on going to Oxford instead, demonstrating the independent nature that characterized him before he met Dorian Gray. After Oxford, his father made him enter his name at the Middle Temple, but before he had eaten half a dozen dinners he gave up the Bar and announced his intention of becoming a painter.

Alan Campbell's Scientific Training at Cambridge

Alan Campbell, the young chemist whom Dorian Gray later blackmails into disposing of Basil Hallward's body, spent a great deal of his time at Cambridge working in the Laboratory. He took a good class in the Natural Science tripos of his year, establishing the scientific credentials that would later make him useful to Dorian. His dominant intellectual passion was for science, and he continued to devote himself to the study of chemistry after leaving Cambridge, maintaining his own laboratory where he would shut himself up all day long, greatly to the annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions.

The City as a Background for Romance and Intellect

Cambridge, like Venice, is described as having kept the background for romance, with the narrator observing that background was everything, or almost everything. This characterization places Cambridge among those places that provide a setting conducive to the intellectual and emotional development of the novel's characters. The university's association with both scientific rigor and aesthetic sensibility mirrors the tension between the scientific and the romantic that runs through the novel, particularly in the character of Alan Campbell, who was an excellent musician as well as a chemist, playing both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. It was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together, along with that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished.