Oscar Wilde Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
60 free Oscar Wilde trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Oscar Wilde trivia quiz covers the whole arc, from Merrion Square to the Hôtel d'Alsace. The easy questions cover the only novel, the most famous comedy, the city he was born in, the lover known as Bosie, the two years' hard labour and the Paris cemetery where lipstick used to cover his tomb. From there it moves through the life: the surgeon father and nationalist poet mother, Portora and Trinity, the Magdalen rooms full of lilies and blue china, the Newdigate Prize, the D'Oyly Carte lecture tour, Constance Lloyd, Tite Street and The Woman's World. The harder end covers the calling card misspelt 'somdomite', the barrister who cross-examined him, the £5,000 bail, cell C.3.3, the treadmill and oakum, the trooper whose hanging became The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the alias Sebastian Melmoth, the Dreyfus document, the deathbed baptism, the 2017 pardon and the library card returned in 2025. Every answer was checked against Wilde's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our classic literature and famous authors quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Oscar Wilde born in 1854?
Dublin
Dublin was home until Oxford: born at 21 Westland Row, he grew up on Merrion Square, where his mother hosted a leading literary salon.
Q 02Under what pen name did Wilde's mother Jane write poetry for the Young Irelanders?
Speranza
Speranza is Italian for 'hope'. Under the name she went beyond verse, using the nationalist paper The Nation to urge Irishmen to rise in arms against British rule.
Q 03What was the profession of Wilde's father, Sir William Wilde?
Ear and eye surgeon
Ear and eye surgeon Sir William Wilde was knighted in 1864. That December a former patient's accusations against him ended in a libel trial, where she won a farthing in damages.
Q 04How did Wilde's two elder half-sisters Mary and Emily die in 1871?
Their dresses caught fire at a dance
Their dresses caught fire at a dance, a ball at a County Monaghan country house: a sister's dress brushed an open flame as she danced, and both were so badly burned that they died within weeks.
Q 05Wilde's poem 'Requiescat' was written in memory of whom?
His sister Isola, who died aged nine
His sister Isola, who died aged nine, was buried in County Longford in 1867. Wilde decorated an envelope to hold a lock of her hair and kept it until his own death in Paris.
Q 06Where was Wilde educated as a boarder from 1864 to 1871?
Portora Royal School
Portora Royal School in Enniskillen never got him onto a playing field: he took no part in the games, preferring books, and left with a scholarship to Trinity College.
Q 07Which Trinity College professor did Wilde call 'my first and best teacher'?
J. P. Mahaffy
J. P. Mahaffy thanked his pupil in print for improving his book Social Life in Greece. In 1877 he took Wilde to Greece, and Oxford suspended Wilde for a term for coming back late.
Q 08Which award for Greek did Wilde win at Trinity College in 1874?
The Berkeley Gold Medal
The Berkeley Gold Medal was founded by the philosopher Bishop Berkeley. It later served Wilde as ready cash: back in London and short of money in 1883, he pawned it.
Q 09At which Oxford college did Wilde read Greats from 1874 to 1878?
Magdalen
Magdalen gave him a classics scholarship in 1874. He left with a double first, telling a friend the dons were astonished to see 'the Bad Boy doing so well in the end'.
Q 10At Oxford, Wilde famously quipped about the struggle to live up to what?
His blue china
His blue china: the quip, reported in several wordings, was denounced in a sermon at Oxford's University Church as 'a form of heathenism' that had to be fought and crushed.
Q 11On the day set for his Catholic baptism, what did young Wilde send the priest instead?
A bunch of altar lilies
A bunch of altar lilies arrived at the Brompton Oratory in his place. He hovered at the Church's door for the rest of his life and was received into it only on his deathbed.
Q 12Which two Oxford figures were the leading influences on Wilde's aestheticism?
Walter Pater and John Ruskin
Walter Pater and John Ruskin pulled him two ways: Pater taught him to live for beauty, while Ruskin set undergraduates, Wilde by his own account among them, to building a road across Hinksey marsh.
Q 13For which poem did Wilde win the 1878 Newdigate Prize at Oxford?
Q 21At which Chelsea address did the Wildes make their home?
Tite Street
Tite Street, No 16 (now 34), was decorated largely in white by the designer E. W. Godwin. In 1895 Wilde's creditors forced a sale of everything in it, and a curious crowd jostled through the rooms.
Q 22What was the original title of the magazine Wilde edited from 1887 and soon renamed?
The Lady's World
The Lady's World was a fashion monthly when Wilde took it over. He told the publisher the name had 'a certain taint of vulgarity', had it changed to The Woman's World and brought in serious articles by women.
Q 23When Wilde wished he had made a witticism, which artist replied 'You will, Oscar, you will'?
James McNeill Whistler
'Ravenna'
'Ravenna' was a stroke of luck: he had passed through the Italian city on his way to Greece in 1877, and it was then announced as the prize subject. He recited the poem in the Sheldonian Theatre.
Q 14Wilde's childhood sweetheart Florence Balcombe married which author in 1878?
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker, the future author of Dracula, won her hand. Wilde wrote asking her to return a little gold cross he had once given her, and said he was leaving Ireland, 'probably for good'.
Q 15Which impresario invited Wilde to lecture across North America in 1882 to help promote Patience?
Richard D'Oyly Carte
Richard D'Oyly Carte feared Americans would miss the joke of Gilbert and Sullivan's satire without a live aesthete to laugh at, so he shipped them Wilde. A tour planned for four months ran to nearly a year.
Q 16In which Colorado mining town did Wilde claim to have drunk whiskey with miners on his American tour?
Leadville
Leadville's miners lowered him down a silver mine in a bucket for supper, where, he said, all three courses were whisky. In a saloon there he admired a notice begging patrons not to shoot the pianist, who was doing his best.
Q 17Which society beauty did Wilde tutor in Latin and later encourage to take up acting?
Lillie Langtry
Lillie Langtry, the 'Jersey Lily', took the advice: her London stage debut in 1881 caused a sensation, and she went on to tour Britain and the United States with her own company.
Q 18Punch greeted Wilde's 1881 Poems with the squib 'The poet is Wilde, but his poetry's' what?
Tame
Tame was Punch's verdict, and the Oxford Union was harsher: when Wilde gave its library a copy, members voted to send it back as too heavily borrowed. The public disagreed, and the book ran through several editions.
Q 19Whom did Wilde marry on 29 May 1884?
Constance Lloyd
Constance Lloyd was the daughter of an Irish barrister. After his conviction she moved abroad with their sons, yet in 1896 she travelled back from Genoa to tell him in prison, in person, that his mother had died.
Q 20What were the names of Wilde's two sons?
Cyril and Vyvyan
Cyril and Vyvyan were taken abroad and given the surname Holland to shield them from the scandal. Cyril was killed by a sniper in France in 1915; Vyvyan wrote the memoir Son of Oscar Wilde.
James McNeill Whistler meant it as a charge of theft. He went on to accuse Wilde in print of helping himself to his ideas on art, and the friendship ended in a public quarrel.
Q 24Which 1888 Wilde collection contains his story of a jewelled statue and a swallow?
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
The Happy Prince and Other Tales opens with a statue who has a swallow strip off his jewels and gold leaf for the poor. Left shabby, he is pulled down and melted, but his leaden heart will not melt.
Q 25Wilde's 'The Portrait of Mr. W. H.' argues that Shakespeare's sonnets were written for whom?
A boy actor called Willie Hughes
A boy actor called Willie Hughes is conjured in the story from puns on 'Will' and 'hues' in the sonnets themselves. 'You must believe in Willie Hughes,' Wilde told a friend; 'I almost do, myself.'
Q 26Wilde's essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism valued socialism chiefly because it would lead to what?
Individualism
Individualism was the point: with private property gone and machines doing the dull work, Wilde argued, everyone could live as artists do. George Orwell summed up the vision as a world 'populated by artists'.
Q 27Which author was commissioned at the same 1889 dinner as Wilde's Dorian Gray?
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle left with an order for The Sign of the Four: the editor of Lippincott's Monthly had dined him and Wilde together at London's Langham Hotel and signed up both. Doyle called it 'a golden evening'.
Q 28How many novels did Oscar Wilde write?
One
One: The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Daily Chronicle called it a poisonous book, and five years later Queensberry's counsel read passages from it in court to discredit its author.
Q 29Wilde wrote his play Salomé not in English but in which language?
French
French was the language he chose while staying in Paris. When the censor banned a London production for putting biblical characters on stage, he threatened to leave England and take French citizenship.
Q 30Who provided the illustrations for the 1894 English edition of Salomé?
Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley's drawings made the book famous, but Wilde was not won over: he told a friend they were like the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes in the margins of his copybook.