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Daily · Classics

The Happy Prince, and Other Tales

Oscar Wilde · short story collection, 1888·1 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • He gives away both his sapphire eyes before the swallow leaves. One eye goes to a starving playwright too cold to finish his play; the other to a barefoot match girl crying over spoiled matches, so her father will not beat her.
  • The swallow dies at his feet and the leaden heart cracks. The Mayor calls the stripped statue "little better than a beggar" and has it melted down. The heart will not melt, so the foundry workers throw it on a dust-heap next to the dead bird.
  • A nightingale kills herself overnight to dye a rose red. She presses her breast against a thorn and sings while it drives deeper, and the white rose turns crimson as her voice fades; by dawn she lies dead in the grass with the thorn in her heart.
  • The girl who demanded that rose throws it away anyway. "Everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers," she says, since the Chamberlain's nephew sent her real gems. The student flings the rose into the street, where a cart wheel runs over it.
  • A Giant who walled children out gets a permanent winter. Snow, Frost, the North Wind, and Hail move in as guests until a small boy too weak to climb a tree softens him; the Giant tears down the wall himself and every tree blossoms again except one.
  • The Miller mourns his wheelbarrow more than his dead friend. Hans drowns fetching a doctor for the Miller's son at night. At the funeral the Miller calls himself "chief mourner" and "best friend," then complains he "had as good as given" Hans a broken wheelbarrow nobody will now buy.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: every act of real love in these five tales kills the one who gives it, and every character who survives chooses status or convenience instead, which makes this a far harder book than its fairy-tale binding lets on.

Wilde's fairy tales dress up class cruelty as bedtime stories, and in every one, real love costs the giver their life.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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