He tells the swallow that he is only called the happy prince because he did not know what tears were, he lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, surrounded by a high wall where sorrow was not allowed to enter. He is crying because when he looks out over the town he sees nothing but suffering and misery. The swallow rests at his feet but is woken up by drops of rain which he realises are big tears falling from the happy prince’s eyes.

He stops en route at a town whose highest point is a column on top of which is a gorgeous statue of the happy prince. But after some time he realises the reed will never reply and so heads south. In the story all the swallows fly off to Egypt except one who dallies to woo a reed in the lake. The third of the happy prince’s charitable beneficiaries is a poor matchgirl freezing in the snow who, of course, reminds us of Andersen’s little matchgirl dying in the snow (Andersen’s story was published in 1845). Under the archway of a bridge two little boys were lying in one another’s arms to try and keep themselves warm He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets. The Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. The Happy PrinceĪctually, maybe more Hans Christian Andersen than Dickens, though both authors took the side of the poor and of poor children in particular, and so does Wilde. Pale poppies were broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, like white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling.

Wilde takes up Victorian sentimentality about children and poverty where Dickens left it but whereas Tiny Tim or Little Nell were accompanied by the comic, the grotesque and Dickens’s unquenchable verbal energy, Wilde sets his stories in the idealised realm of fairyland where statues and animals and rose bushes talk, and strives for a melodious smoothness, clothing his sweetly weeping tales in fin-de-siecle silver and gold: I’m rereading them in a lovely old illustrated Puffin edition (1973).

In May 1888, 4 months after the 22 year-old Kipling published Plain Tales from the Hills, the 33 year-old Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde published his first volume, ‘The Happy Prince and other stories’, five fairy tales for children.

The happy prince 1888