INTRODUCTION

       by Stephen Fry

      Eighteen eighty-eight was a happy period in Oscar Wilde’s life that saw him comfortably established in Tite Street, Chelsea with Constance, his young, beautiful, clever and loving wife. He enjoyed a reputation as a literary cub who had realised his early Oxford promise and was rapidly growing into a fully maned literary lion. The couple’s two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, were only three and two years old respectively at this time, so unless they were even more prodigiously gifted than their father it seems unlikely that they had yet read or had read to them the tales collected in The Happy Prince and Other Stories, which came out that very year.

      In these stories, and in The House of Pomegranates, which was published three years later, Wilde’s gifts as story-teller, prose poet, wit and moralist came fully to the fore. For some readers, myself included, he never quite matched that particular combination so well in any other genre.

      To the fairytales drawn from those two books have been added The Model Millionaire and The Canterville Ghost, which were originally published in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories but which we felt would augment this edition well.

      Wilde’s children’s stories are simple enough to be understood and enjoyed by even the oldest adults. I have provided small separate introductions for each, but first a word about the author.

      Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854—1900) continues to be a figure for all ages. Indeed, the more time that passes, the more he seems new and fit for us, or at least for some amongst us. Now that they no longer believe in the power of popular music or revolutionary politics to change the world it is to artists and intellectuals that idealistic and imaginative students will turn. Posters of Wilde and Einstein are more likely to be found on the bedroom walls of the young these days than images of Jim Morrison or Che Guevara, who offered