But these influences find themselves combined with a peculiarly Wildean attitude to life and art: the statue must lose its outward beauty to be truly useful to society. The happy prince, its the story of a statue of a prince who had lived closed in a palace and he has never known suffering, until. In some ways, we might regard ‘The Happy Prince’ as a combination of Hans Christian Andersen’s wistfully tragic fairy tales and Charles Dickens’s social problem novels about child poverty. Oscar Wilde - The Happy Prince and Other Stories - Illustrated by Everett Shinn -Signed by Illustrator - 1940 First Edition. Wilde himself once said that this and his other fairy stories were ‘an attempt to mirror modern life in a form remote from reality – to deal with modern problems in a mode that is ideal and not imitative’. Bing Crosby and Orson Welles, those giants of Hollywood, even tried to make it into a musical extravaganza, though not with any real success.

‘The Happy Prince’ has been dramatised on many occasions, and remains one of Oscar Wilde’s best-known works – perhaps his best-loved short story. ‘The Happy Prince’ is a sad tale that clearly owes much to earlier fairy stories, especially the tales of Hans. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.The Swallow agrees to help the Happy Prince because he loves him, and the Happy Prince wants to give up his gold and his jewels out of compassion for the poor and downtrodden of the city. Of Oscar Wilde’s various short works for children, ‘The Happy Prince’ (1888) occupies a special place as his signature tale, and is perhaps Wilde’s definitive statement about the relationship between inner and outer beauty. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

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Oscar wilde the prince