50 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'.