100 Fun Facts About The Picture of Dorian Gray

In which city does Dorian Gray lead his double life of drawing rooms and opium dens?

London. Dorian keeps a grand town house, yet slips away in disguise and under a false name to a seedy tavern near the docks, a secret his unchanging face helps him keep.

What does Dorian Gray say he would give if only the portrait could grow old in his place?

His soul. 'I would give my soul for that!' he cries, jealous that the picture will stay young while he ages; no pact is signed, yet from then on the canvas takes every mark of time and sin.

Which artist paints the portrait of Dorian Gray?

Basil Hallward. He gives the finished picture to Dorian instead of exhibiting it, and years later pays with his life for seeing what it has become.

Lord Henry calls the portrait's sitter a young Adonis and then which other beautiful youth of Greek myth?

Narcissus. Dorian lives up to it: he once kisses, or pretends to kiss, the painted lips of his own portrait, 'in boyish mockery' of the youth who fell in love with his reflection.

Sibyl Vane, the young woman Dorian Gray falls for and then casts aside, works as what?

An actress. She plays Juliet and Rosalind in a shabby backstreet theatre, and falling for Dorian ruins her art: once she knows real love, she can no longer fake it on stage.

By what pet name does Sibyl Vane refer to Dorian, the only clue her brother later has to his identity?

Prince Charming. It is all Sibyl ever tells her family about him, so years later her brother finds his man only when a woman in an opium den shouts the nickname after him.

How does Dorian talk James Vane out of shooting him outside the opium den?

He shows him his young face. Sibyl died eighteen years earlier, so a man who looks barely twenty cannot be her lover; Vane lets him go, then learns from a woman nearby that Dorian never ages.

How does James Vane, stalking Dorian for revenge, meet his end?

Accidentally shot during a shooting party. Hiding in a thicket on Dorian's country estate, he is hit when a guest fires at a hare, and Dorian weeps with relief on seeing whose body it is.

After the murder, Dorian blackmails which former friend into using chemistry to destroy the body?

Alan Campbell. He refuses until Dorian slides a folded note across the table; he then dissolves the body with acid, and later shoots himself without ever telling the secret.

How does the novel end for Dorian Gray?

He stabs the portrait and dies. Servants find a withered old man with a knife in his heart, known only by his rings, while the painting above him is young and beautiful again.

In which room of his house does Dorian Gray lock the portrait away?

The old schoolroom. His grandfather built it at the top of the house to keep a grandson he hated at a distance; Dorian has the picture carried up, locks the door and pockets the key.

Which real book is the 'poisonous' French novel Lord Henry sends Dorian usually taken to be?

À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Wilde never names it, and told one admirer the book 'does not exist; it is a fancy of mine merely', yet its hero's hunt for strange sensations is the life Dorian copies for years.

The shorter first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in July 1890 in which Philadelphia monthly?

Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. It printed the whole story in a single issue; British reviewers called it unclean and poisonous, and Wilde revised and enlarged it into the book that followed.

The 1889 Langham Hotel dinner that commissioned Wilde's novel also produced which Sherlock Holmes book?

The Sign of the Four. Conan Doyle, still a working doctor, recalled giving his patients a day's rest to meet the American editor; he called it 'a golden evening', and both he and Wilde left promising a book.

What did editor J. M. Stoddart do to Wilde's typescript before its 1890 magazine debut?

Censored it. Stoddart toned down the painter's feelings for Dorian and cut every mention of Dorian's lovers as his 'mistresses'; a 2011 edition restored the typescript.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, what proves to the painter that the hideous portrait is his own work?

His own signature. Holding a candle to the canvas, he finds his name in the corner in long vermilion letters; he begs Dorian to pray with him and is killed minutes later.

Which word completes the last line of Wilde's preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 'All art is quite …'?

Useless. Wilde meant it as praise: a work of art exists only to be admired, so 'the only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely'.

Wilde's famous preface, a manifesto for art for art's sake, is written as a series of what?

Epigrams. Wilde printed them in a magazine a month before the book as his answer to reviewers who had called the story immoral: 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.'

Wilde said the idea for Dorian Gray struck him in 1887 while doing what?

Sitting for a painter. Looking at the Canadian artist Frances Richards's finished portrait of him, he joked, 'This portrait will never grow older and I shall.'

Where is the painter of the portrait about to travel on the night Dorian kills him?

Paris. He was catching the midnight train for six months abroad, so he is not missed for months, and Dorian has time to make the body disappear.

After the scandalised reviews of 1890, which British bookseller would not sell the magazine issue carrying Dorian Gray?

WHSmith. Its refusal did not bury the story: the following April Ward Lock, the magazine's own British publisher, brought it out as a longer book.

Whose defence lawyer read Dorian Gray aloud in court in 1895 and suggested it was a 'perverted' novel?

The Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde had sued him for libel, so it was the defence, led by Wilde's Trinity College contemporary Edward Carson, that put the book on trial; Wilde said only 'brutes and illiterates' could read it so.

Which critic, 'the only critic of the century whose opinion I set high', led Wilde to alter one passage of Dorian Gray?

Walter Pater. Wilde told the court he had not revised the book to please the newspapers; only private letters from the Oxford critic persuaded him that one passage was 'liable to misconstruction'.

How does Lord Henry finish his line in Dorian Gray, 'Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of …'?

Nothing. Lord Henry says it after bargaining for hours over a piece of old brocade, and Wilde reused the line in Lady Windermere's Fan as the definition of a cynic.

Some critics see an influence on Dorian Gray in Vivian Grey, an 1826 novel by which future British prime minister?

Benjamin Disraeli. His first novel tells of a beautiful youth warned he would die the moment his portrait was taken, and its doomed heroine Violet Fane may echo in the name Sibyl Vane.

Lord Henry teases that the village girl Dorian has just given up may end up like which Shakespeare heroine?

Ophelia. Told that Dorian has spared the girl, Lord Henry mocks his 'great renunciation' and asks how he knows she is not floating at that moment in a mill-pond with water-lilies round her.

Which Wilde story, written just before Dorian Gray, is about the supposed muse of Shakespeare's sonnets?

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Its theory is that the sonnets were written for a boy actor called Willie Hughes, and the only proof offered, a painting of him, turns out to be a forgery.

Readers who take The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Faust story cast Lord Henry as which figure?

The Devil. Yet no pact is ever signed: Lord Henry only talks, advising that 'the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it', and Dorian does the rest himself.

The 1945 MGM film of The Picture of Dorian Gray won its only Academy Award in which category?

Black-and-white cinematography. Harry Stradling won it, although four scenes are not black and white at all: each time the portrait is revealed, the screen turns to colour.

The 1945 film of Dorian Gray shows the portrait in brief colour inserts shot in which process?

Three-strip Technicolor. The film jumps to colour only four times, each to reveal the painting, and two artists supplied it: Henrique Medina the handsome youth, Ivan Albright the ruin.

Who played Lord Henry in the 1945 film of Dorian Gray, opposite Hurd Hatfield in the title role?

George Sanders. His Lord Henry warns Dorian against wishing aloud in front of an Egyptian cat statue said to grant wishes, the film's own way of sealing the bargain.

Which museum acquired the decayed portrait Ivan Albright painted for the 1945 film of Dorian Gray?

Art Institute of Chicago. When it was shown there in 1945, the Chicago Tribune reported the museum having 'a heck of a time handling the crowds', and in 1977 Albright gave it the canvas himself.

In the 2009 film Dorian Gray, who played Lord Henry opposite Ben Barnes?

Colin Firth. The film invents a daughter for his Lord Henry, Emily, whom the unaged Dorian courts a generation later, so Lord Henry spends the last act trying to save her from his own pupil.

Reeve Carney played Dorian Gray in which Showtime series that also featured Frankenstein and Dracula characters?

Penny Dreadful. The title comes from the cheap, lurid serial stories sold for a penny a part in Victorian Britain; John Logan's series stirs Dorian in with other borrowed Gothic figures.

In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), which member of the League kills Dorian Gray by showing him his portrait?

Mina Harker. A vampire in this film and Dorian's former lover, she is as hard to kill as he is, so their duel ends only when she makes him look at his own painting.

The Dorian Awards, named with a nod to Wilde's Dorian Gray, were launched in 2010 to honour the year's best in what?

Film and television. The voters are a society of LGBTQ entertainment critics, founded as the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association; in 2023 they added a wing for Broadway and Off-Broadway shows.

Which gift from Lord Henry does Dorian Gray crush under his heel in the novel's last chapter?

A carved mirror. For years it has shown him an unmarked face; now, loathing the beauty he bargained for, he flings it to the floor and grinds it into silver splinters.

What is Sibyl Vane's brother James going away to become?

A sailor. Sixteen and about to ship out for Australia, he swears that if his sister's gentleman wrongs her he will 'track him down, and kill him like a dog'.

Months before Dorian Gray appeared, Wilde reviewed a translation of Chuang Tzu, a sage of which Eastern philosophy?

Taoism. Wilde's review relished the sage's 'great creed of Inaction' and joked that honest ratepayers who laughed at his picture 'would tremble' if they really knew who he was.

After sparing the village girl Hetty, what does Dorian Gray find when he checks his portrait for improvement?

A look of cunning hypocrisy. The good deed was vanity too: he gave Hetty up to feel virtuous and to taste a new sensation, and the picture records exactly that.

Which uncle of Lord Henry tells him the story of Dorian Gray's parents?

Fermor. The old bachelor recalls that Dorian's mother, a famous beauty, ran off with a penniless young officer, and that her father was said to have paid a bully to kill him in a duel months later.

After Wilde's death, the rights to Dorian Gray were bought by Charles Carrington, a publisher best known for what?

Literary erotica. Carrington, an English bookseller working across the Channel, bought the rights from Wilde's old publisher for a small sum, and also brought out pirated editions of his other works.

What is the first change Dorian Gray sees in his portrait after rejecting Sibyl?

Cruelty in the mouth. He notices it at dawn, hours after telling her he never wants to see her again; frightened, he writes to beg her forgiveness, only to learn that she is already dead.

How does Sibyl Vane die on the night Dorian Gray abandons her?

She swallows poison. She is found dead on the floor, and Lord Henry's first advice to Dorian is to keep his name out of the inquest and come to the opera that evening.

What does Lord Henry tell Dorian Gray 'our century wants', with Dorian as its visible symbol?

A new Hedonism. He tells Dorian that youth is the one thing worth having and to waste none of it on duty; minutes later Dorian is wishing that the portrait could grow old in his place.

Wilde's preface to Dorian Gray likens the dislike of realism to which Shakespeare character raging at his own reflection?

Caliban. Wilde has it both ways: the age hates realism like Caliban seeing his face in a glass, and hates romanticism like Caliban not seeing it.

Who was Oscar-nominated for her supporting role as Sibyl Vane in the 1945 film of Dorian Gray?

Angela Lansbury. She won the Golden Globe for the part but lost the Oscar to Anne Revere, and her own mother, Moyna MacGill, appears in the same film as a duchess.

Lord Henry sends Dorian Gray a French novel bound in paper of which colour?

Yellow. Daring French novels were sold in yellow paper covers that warned buyers what was inside, the same notorious look that gave the 1890s magazine The Yellow Book its name.

How did Wilde answer the newspapers that called Dorian Gray 'vulgar' and 'unclean' in 1890?

Letters to editors. He wrote to paper after paper, insisting the story had 'a terrible moral' that the prurient would never find in it.

After trials in which Dorian Gray was quoted against him, Wilde was convicted in 1895 of what?

Gross indecency. The judge passed the heaviest sentence the law allowed, two years' hard labour, and said from the bench that it was 'totally inadequate'.

Which Australian star won an Olivier and a Tony playing all 26 roles in a staged Dorian Gray?

Sarah Snook performed opposite pre-recorded versions of herself projected around the stage. The show began in Sydney with another performer before its West End and Broadway runs.

Which horror legend, then a stage actor in Budapest, played Lord Henry in a 1918 silent Dorian Gray?

Bela Lugosi made the film under the stage name Arisztid Olt, more than a decade before Dracula turned him into a household face. He fled Hungary the following year.

Which star's last live-action film was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, with its immortal Dorian Gray?

Sean Connery played the hunter Allan Quatermain and then retired from cinema. Stuart Townsend's Dorian joins the League, then betrays it.

Which Shakespeare heroine does Sibyl Vane play so badly that a watching Dorian Gray abandons her?

Juliet was the part in which he had first seen her and fallen in love. This time she recited the balcony scene like a schoolgirl drilled by a second-rate elocution teacher.

How do the servants recognise the withered dead man found in Dorian Gray's locked room?

By his rings alone, because the face was too wrinkled and loathsome to know. On the wall above him hung the painting, as young and beautiful as the day it was finished.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is widely regarded as a classic of which genre?

Gothic fiction supplied the haunted object, the locked upper room and the hidden double life. Wilde dressed those horrors in drawing-room wit.

After trials in which Dorian Gray was used against him, Wilde wrote a famous ballad about which prison?

Reading Gaol gave the poem its title, though the first edition hid his notorious name. It was signed C.3.3., the number of his cell.

A 2021 British film starring Fionn Whitehead recasts Dorian Gray as what kind of celebrity?

A social media influencer in a world fixated on selfies and streaming is the update. Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley and Russell Tovey joined the cast.

What distinction does The Picture of Dorian Gray hold among the many works of Oscar Wilde?

His only novel began as a thirteen-chapter magazine story and grew to twenty chapters for the book. He never wrote another.

In the garden scene of Dorian Gray, what does Lord Henry call 'the one thing worth having'?

Youth, he warns the boy, will be gone within a few years, and nothing afterwards can make up for it. The speech frightens Dorian into making his fatal wish.

Where does Dorian Gray spend the evening of the day he learns that Sibyl Vane is dead?

At the opera, in the box of Lord Henry's sister, he heard Patti sing. He later shrugged that a thing one never talks about has never happened.

In which city was Oscar Wilde, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, born to a surgeon and a poet?

Dublin was his birthplace, and he studied classics at Trinity College there before leaving for England. His mother wrote nationalist verse under the pen name Speranza.

Which instrument is Dorian Gray seated at when Lord Henry first sets eyes on him?

A piano, where he sits with his back to the door turning the pages of Schumann's Forest Scenes. He begs to borrow the music so that he can learn it.

Where is Dorian Gray when he first meets Lord Henry, the man who will reshape his life?

In an artist's studio, where he has come to sit for the final touches to his portrait. The painter begs his visitor not to spoil the boy, and is ignored.

In Dorian Gray, James Vane takes leave of his sister Sibyl before leaving for which distant country?

Australia is where his mother hopes he will make a fortune, though she doubts the Colonies have any society worth the name. He vows to kill any man who wrongs his sister.

By her own account, why does Sibyl Vane perform so woodenly before Dorian Gray's guests?

Real love made acting hollow, she tells him: having felt the thing itself, she could no longer mimic it on a painted stage. He answers that she has killed his love.

At which university did Lord Henry and the painter of Dorian Gray's portrait become friends?

Oxford is where the two met, and the painter introduces his guest to Dorian as an old friend from those days. Wilde himself studied there, at Magdalen College.

What is the surname of Lord Henry, the witty aristocrat who leads Dorian Gray astray?

Wotton is the family name, though friends simply call him Harry. He is always late on principle, holding that punctuality is the thief of time.

In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry's wife Victoria runs away with a man who played which composer exquisitely?

Chopin is also what he asks Dorian to play for him that evening, and he admits the house is rather lonely without her. He calls married life merely a bad habit.

Wilde, the author of Dorian Gray, was a leading voice of which movement devoted to art for art's sake?

Aestheticism prized beauty above any moral lesson. Gilbert and Sullivan mocked its followers in their stage satire Patience.

After Dorian Gray commits murder, what appears on one of the hands in his portrait?

A wet red stain gleams there, as though the canvas had sweated blood. He had forgotten, for the first time in his life, to cover the picture the night before.

Drawn by the beauty of its ritual, Dorian Gray was once rumoured to be joining which communion?

Roman Catholic ritual fascinated him, and he loved to kneel on the cold marble and watch the priest at the altar. Yet he never formally accepted any creed.

What becomes of the chemist whom Dorian Gray blackmails into destroying the murdered man's body?

He takes his own life one night in his laboratory, without ever betraying the secret he had been forced to keep. The two had once been inseparable, drawn together by music.

Why does the painter of Dorian Gray's portrait at first refuse to send it to any exhibition?

It reveals his own feelings, he says: he has put too much of himself into the canvas. Every portrait painted with feeling, he argues, is a portrait of the painter, not the sitter.

What does Dorian Gray first place in front of the altered portrait to keep it out of sight?

A leather screen of gilt Spanish work, stamped with a Louis-Quatorze pattern, did the job. He wondered whether it had ever before concealed the secret of a man's life.

Which lord, Dorian Gray's grandfather, was notorious for quarrelling with cabmen over their fares?

Kelso was thought a mean dog by his peers. In Madrid even the Queen asked after the English noble who haggled with his drivers.

How did Dorian Gray's father, a penniless young officer, die within months of his runaway marriage?

In a duel at Spa, fought with a hired adventurer who was said to have spitted him like a pigeon. His widow came home and died within the year.

What does the painter of Dorian Gray's portrait seize when he decides to destroy the finished canvas?

A palette knife with a thin steel blade is what he finds among the paint tubes. Dorian tears it from his hand, crying that to rip the picture up would be murder.

Which kind of tradesman does Dorian Gray send for when the portrait must be carried upstairs?

A frame-maker named Mr Hubbard, florid and red-whiskered, comes in person from South Audley Street. He asks to look at the work of art and is told it would not interest him.

After seeing Sibyl Vane play which heroine in boy's clothes does Dorian Gray become engaged to her?

Rosalind, in a moss-coloured velvet jerkin and a cap with a hawk's feather, had never seemed to him more exquisite. He went behind the scenes afterwards and they kissed.

Which ruined friend, whose downfall is laid at Dorian Gray's door, turns up beside him in the opium den?

Adrian Singleton had forged a friend's name on a bill, and says none of the chaps will speak to him now. With the drug, he tells Dorian, one does not want friends.

Who played Gladys, the painter's niece invented as a love interest for the 1945 film of Dorian Gray?

Donna Reed took the part a year before It's a Wonderful Life made her a Christmas fixture. No such niece exists in the novel.

Which barrister, later the leader of Ulster unionism, quoted Dorian Gray against Wilde in court in 1895?

Edward Carson had been a fellow student of the man he was now cross-examining. Wilde won the most laughs in court, but his old classmate scored the legal points.

In Dorian Gray, what truth does James Vane wring from his mother before he leaves home?

She never married his father, a gentleman who was not free to wed and died without providing for them. She finds the blunt question a letdown, like a bad rehearsal.

Dorian Gray once went to a costume ball as a French admiral in a dress covered with 560 of what?

Pearls covered his costume as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, during the years he studied jewels. He would spend whole days rearranging his collection of stones in their cases.

Which choreographer brought a contemporary dance version of Dorian Gray to the Edinburgh Festival in 2008?

Matthew Bourne had already shaken up ballet with a Swan Lake danced by all-male swans. His Dorian Gray opened at the festival that August.

In the 1945 film, Dorian Gray makes his wish in front of an Egyptian statue of which animal?

A cat statue with supposed magical powers stands nearby as he speaks. The novel offers no such explanation for how the wish comes true.

Which future Sherlock Holmes played Dorian Gray on television in 1961 and the portrait's painter in 1976?

Jeremy Brett returned fifteen years after playing the ageless hero, this time as the man who paints him. His celebrated Granada run as the detective began in 1984.

What is the name of Dorian Gray's country estate, where he entertains a duchess in the conservatory?

Selby Royal came to him through his mother's family. Its disused attics supplied the Renaissance tapestries that hang in his town house.

Which British firm published the expanded twenty-chapter book edition of Dorian Gray in April 1891?

Ward, Lock & Co. also owned the rights to Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. For the book edition Wilde added six new chapters and a preface.

Wilde's preface to Dorian Gray first appeared in March 1891, a month before the book, in which periodical?

The Fortnightly Review printed it as his reply to the critics who had savaged the magazine version. It became famous as a manifesto in its own right.

In Wilde's typescript of Dorian Gray, the fictional French novel was called Le Secret de whom?

Raoul gave his name to the invented title, credited to an equally invented author, Catulle Sarrazin. In the published novel the yellow book has no title at all.

At whose crowded party does the painter first set eyes on Dorian Gray and turn pale with terror?

Lady Brandon's crush is where he tried to flee and stumbled into his shrill hostess, who then introduced them. Lord Henry calls her a peacock in everything but beauty.

What does Dorian Gray wrap around the portrait before workmen carry it out of his library?

A purple satin coverlet, embroidered with gold in seventeenth-century Venice, struck him as fitting. It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead.

Which British novelist's 2002 book Dorian, an Imitation turns the portrait into a video installation?

Will Self began it as a film script that never got made, then reworked the pages into a novel. His version opens in June 1981 and runs to 1997.

Which Austrian star of Visconti's films played Dorian Gray in a 1970 version set in the modern day?

Helmut Berger took the role a year after his breakthrough in The Damned. The film swaps Victorian drawing rooms for the sexual liberation of its own era.

Which duchess, a house guest of Dorian Gray, flirts with him over tea just before he faints?

Monmouth is her title; her jaded husband, a man of sixty, collects Brazilian beetles. She is sparring with Lord Henry when Dorian collapses in a swoon.

Which French poet's Émaux et Camées does Dorian Gray open on the sofa the morning after the murder?

Théophile Gautier's stanzas on Venice carry him back to an autumn he once spent there. The copy, printed on Japanese paper, was a gift from a friend he later ruined.

Which supernatural teen series, created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, cast Jedidiah Goodacre as Dorian Gray?

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina made him a warlock who runs an exclusive nightclub. Another fantasy series, The Librarians, also featured him, played by Luke Cook.

After the chemist finishes his grim work for Dorian Gray, the smell of which acid hangs in the upstairs room?

Nitric fumes are all that linger: the thing that had been sitting at the table is gone. The chemist asks only that the two of them never see each other again.