The voices of The Picture of Dorian Gray
9 voices in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Every one is a separate voice, cast to the character as written.
- Narrator — Third-person omniscient narrator moving through the salons, studios, and opium dens of late-Victorian London.
- Dorian Gray — An extraordinarily beautiful young aristocrat of about twenty when the story opens. Naïve and impressionable at first, he is slowly corrupted by Lord Henry's philosophy of pleasure. His portrait bears the weight of every sin while he retains his youth and looks indefinitely.
- Lord Henry Wotton — A brilliant, languid aristocrat in his mid-thirties who becomes Dorian's Mephistophelean guide. He speaks entirely in paradoxes and epigrams, values sensation over morality, and takes idle pleasure in watching Dorian's corruption from a safe distance.
- Basil Hallward — The talented painter who creates the fateful portrait of Dorian. Sincere, earnest, and deeply moral — he idealises Dorian and sees the good in him that no one else can. He is the novel's moral conscience and ultimately pays for it.
- Sibyl Vane — A seventeen-year-old actress of genius who performs Shakespeare at a cheap East End theatre. Dorian falls obsessively in love with her art; she falls genuinely in love with him. When she abandons her art for real emotion, Dorian abandons her — and she dies shortly after.
- James Vane — Sibyl's rough, protective brother — a sailor about to ship out for Australia when the story opens. Working-class, blunt, deeply suspicious of Dorian from the start. He spends years hunting Dorian to avenge Sibyl's death, dying in a hunting accident before he can act.
- Alan Campbell — A former close friend of Dorian's — a scientist and amateur chemist. Their friendship cooled mysteriously years before. Dorian blackmails him into dissolving Basil Hallward's body. Performs the act in cold horrified silence and dies by suicide not long after.
- Lady Narborough — A sharp-tongued, witty society hostess who adores Lord Henry's company. She appears at dinner parties and provides the sparkling surface of the upper-class world Dorian inhabits — a foil to the darkness beneath.
- Mrs. Vane — Sibyl and James's mother — a faded, vain actress who still thinks in theatrical gestures. Absorbed in her own performance of maternal grief, she cares more about appearances than about her children's welfare.