Mary Shine Thompson

Oscar Wilde is best known as a subversive wit and sophisticated dramatist, but he has published two volumes of fairy tales for children, The Happy Prince (1888) and The House of Pomegranates (1891), which have gained wide popularity and comparison with the work of Hans Christian Andersen. However, until recently, Wilde’s tales received little critical attention. This paper will introduce the conference audience to a selection of the tales including the well-known ‘The Happy Prince’ and the less popular ‘The Young King’ and ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’. It will draw attention to their narrative forms and their complex content – for example, how their angry response to poverty is at odds with their indulgent description of riches. In this way it will raise questions about the demands the tales make on young readers, drawing support from illustrations in editions of the tales published during the last century and supplemented by extracts.

The paper will argue that Wilde’s attitude to his child reader is radically different from the conventional late Victorian perceptions of children, and is in fact in line with some influential contemporary attitudes, such as those expressed by among others, Mathew Lipman, Joseph Dunne Ann Margaret Sharp, Ron Read and Roger Sutcliffe. His implied young readers are critical thinkers who may take pleasure in fantasy and rich description, but they are expected to discriminate between reality and fantasy, between aesthetic pleasure and the need to satirise greed and social pretensions. The tales’ persistent attention to surface detail directs the reader to Wilde’s theory that no underlying authenticity or absolute truth exists. We can only construct constantly changing fictions of the world we inhabit and how we see ourselves as individuals. So Wilde can claim that ‘change is the one quality that we can predicate of [human nature]’.

Through illustration and example, this paper will show that the tales’ complex narration and structure, the literary devices they employ and their uncompromising and unsentimental endings combine to subvert
expectations of children’s literature (at the end of the nineteenth century and even now, a century later). The paper will point out how the collections draw attention to issues that currently concern educators - issues such as children’s capacity for serious reflective thinking and the related topic of how society perceives childhood today. As such they might be compared with ground breaking texts written a century later, such as Jon Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man (1993) or Aidan Chamber’s Breaktime (1978). The respect they show their young readers’ sophisticated critical ability is at odds with the often condescending, sentimental ways middle class children were viewed in the 1880s and 1890s. Indeed the fact that the tales were and are read by children and adults alike is evidence that they blurred the boundaries between adulthood and childhood so firmly drawn at the turn of the century.

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