How does Wilde use language and imagery to set the scene in the first two paragraphs of Chapter One of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray?'

The setting Wilde describes is a decadent paradise, formed of a mixture of the beauty of nature and the beauty of man-made objects, the relative merits of which he will interrogate throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray. The reader is presented with a sensual overload; sights, sounds and particularly smells are described in great detail, beginning in the very first sentence, when the ‘rich odour of the roses’ is complemented by both ‘the heavy scent of the lilac’ and ‘the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn’. The synonyms ‘odour’, ‘scent’ and ‘perfume’ are far more evocative than ‘smell’ and help form the decadent register the narrator adopts.

It is significant that the reader first glimpses Lord Henry smoking on a ‘divan of Persian saddle bags’, for this image epitomises his nature as a pleasure-seeking dandy, and gives him an air of exoticism. As an aesthete, Lord Henry is also a great admirer of beauty and a keen observer of life generally; thus, it is significant that it he is introduced to the reader in the act of observing the beauty of the garden. It is from his perspective that the reader sees the beauty of the garden, and the assonant language matches the beauty of the scene; alliterative ‘b’ sounds and then ‘f’ sounds dominate the languorous description: ‘Honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across…’ A subtle sibilance that words such as ‘blossoms’, ‘tremulous’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘shadows’ introduce is heightened in the next sentence (‘The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering’), contributing to the ‘oppressive stillness’ Wilde describes. Thus, in spite of the beautiful setting, a sense of ennui, which will be a dominant mood of the book, is immediately introduced.

The description of ‘the dim roar of London’ as ‘distant’,  conveys the isolation of the three main characters from the urban life of the city. Detached from London and teeming with life, Basil's garden seems almost its own world, and given that it will become the scene of Dorian’s temptation, leading to his eventual fall, is perhaps comparable with the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis.