The Picture of Dorian Gray Trivia
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100 free The Picture of Dorian Gray trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Picture of Dorian Gray trivia quiz covers Oscar Wilde's only novel from its first, censored magazine printing to the Technicolor portrait that won an Oscar. The easy questions ask who wrote it, what happens to the portrait, who paints it, which aristocrat corrupts Dorian, who Sibyl Vane is and how the story ends. From there it moves through the 1890 and 1891 texts, the famous preface, the French novel that poisons Dorian and the trial in which the book was read aloud against its author. The hard end is for people who have read both versions: the dinner at the Langham that also produced a Sherlock Holmes novel, the 500 words the editor cut, the bookseller that pulled the magazine from its railway stalls, the Canadian painter whose portrait sitting sparked the idea, the Disraeli novel that may have named Sibyl Vane, the museum that owns the 1945 film's monstrous portrait and the awards named after Dorian. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on the novel, Oscar Wilde, the 1945 and 2009 films, Penny Dreadful and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Oscar Wilde, Gothic literature and Victorian novels quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city does Dorian Gray lead his double life of drawing rooms and opium dens?
London
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.
Q 02What does Dorian Gray say he would give if only the portrait could grow old in his place?
His soul
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.
Q 03Which artist paints the portrait of Dorian Gray?
Basil Hallward
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.
Q 04Lord Henry calls the portrait's sitter a young Adonis and then which other beautiful youth of Greek myth?
Narcissus
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.
Q 05Sibyl Vane, the young woman Dorian Gray falls for and then casts aside, works as what?
An actress
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.
Q 06By what pet name does Sibyl Vane refer to Dorian, the only clue her brother later has to his identity?
Prince Charming
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.
Q 07How does Dorian talk James Vane out of shooting him outside the opium den?
He shows him his young face
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.
Q 08How does James Vane, stalking Dorian for revenge, meet his end?
Accidentally shot during a shooting party
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.
Q 09After the murder, Dorian blackmails which former friend into using chemistry to destroy the body?
Alan Campbell
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.
Q 10How does the novel end for Dorian Gray?
He stabs the portrait and dies
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.
Q 11In which room of his house does Dorian Gray lock the portrait away?
The old schoolroom
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.
Q 12Which real book is the 'poisonous' French novel Lord Henry sends Dorian usually taken to be?
À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans
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.
Q 13The shorter first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in July 1890 in which Philadelphia monthly?
Q 21After the scandalised reviews of 1890, which British bookseller would not sell the magazine issue carrying Dorian Gray?
WHSmith
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.
Q 22Whose defence lawyer read Dorian Gray aloud in court in 1895 and suggested it was a 'perverted' novel?
The Marquess of Queensberry
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.
Q 23Which critic, 'the only critic of the century whose opinion I set high', led Wilde to alter one passage of Dorian Gray?
Lippincott's Monthly Magazine
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.
Q 14The 1889 Langham Hotel dinner that commissioned Wilde's novel also produced which Sherlock Holmes book?
The Sign of the Four
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.
Q 15What did editor J. M. Stoddart do to Wilde's typescript before its 1890 magazine debut?
Censored it
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.
Q 16In The Picture of Dorian Gray, what proves to the painter that the hideous portrait is his own work?
His own signature
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.
Q 17Which word completes the last line of Wilde's preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 'All art is quite …'?
Useless
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'.
Q 18Wilde's famous preface, a manifesto for art for art's sake, is written as a series of what?
Epigrams
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.'
Q 19Wilde said the idea for Dorian Gray struck him in 1887 while doing what?
Sitting for a painter
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.'
Q 20Where is the painter of the portrait about to travel on the night Dorian kills him?
Paris
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.
Walter Pater
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'.
Q 24How does Lord Henry finish his line in Dorian Gray, 'Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of …'?
Nothing
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.
Q 25Some critics see an influence on Dorian Gray in Vivian Grey, an 1826 novel by which future British prime minister?
Benjamin Disraeli
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.
Q 26Lord Henry teases that the village girl Dorian has just given up may end up like which Shakespeare heroine?
Ophelia
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.
Q 27Which Wilde story, written just before Dorian Gray, is about the supposed muse of Shakespeare's sonnets?
The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
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.
Q 28Readers who take The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Faust story cast Lord Henry as which figure?
The Devil
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.
Q 29The 1945 MGM film of The Picture of Dorian Gray won its only Academy Award in which category?
Black-and-white cinematography
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.
Q 30The 1945 film of Dorian Gray shows the portrait in brief colour inserts shot in which process?
Three-strip Technicolor
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.