The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
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The story begins
High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt.
He was very much admired indeed. “He is as beautiful as a weathercock,” remarked one of the Town Councillors who wished to gain a reputation for having artistic tastes; “only not quite so useful,” he added, fearing lest people should think him unpractical, which he really was not.
“Why can’t you be like the Happy Prince?” asked a sensible mother of her little boy who was crying for the moon. “The Happy Prince never dreams of crying for anything.”
1888
~16,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 55 minutes
David Nutt, 1888
A gilded city, a garden, and a rocket in a ditch
Chapter summaries
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
4,353 KB (EPUB) · 4,382 KB (AZW3) · 4,363 KB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg
The Happy Prince and Other Tales is Oscar Wilde’s only collection of fairy tales, five short stories written for children and read ever since by adults who suspect they are not quite for children at all. A gilded statue gives away its jewels and gold to the poor of a city; a nightingale stains a white rose red with her own heart; a selfish giant’s garden stays locked in winter until a child climbs a tree; a devoted gardener is ruined by a devoted friend; and a damp firework delivers a lecture on its own importance from a ditch. The tone is the joke: these are Christian parables with the sentiment left in and the moral put in italics.
Wilde wrote the tales in the late 1880s, at the height of his campaign for aestheticism, and they are the most disarming argument he ever made for beauty’s usefulness: the statue is beautiful because it is generous, the nightingale is beautiful because she has been moved, the giant is cursed until he loves. The Happy Prince and Other Tales are among the few Victorian children’s books to have survived their own moralising, and they are short enough to read in a single sitting. This page offers the complete collection as a free epub, with a summary, characters and analysis below. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #902.
The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde: Summary, Characters & Themes
The Happy Prince and Other Tales is a summary and analysis of Oscar Wilde’s 1888 collection of five fairy stories, written for children and published in London by David Nutt with illustrations by Walter Crane and G. P. Jacomb-Hood. The stories share a form — a brief parable, an unpleasant surprise, a moral — and a voice: the voice of a man telling children something he would not tell their parents.
The most famous of the five, The Happy Prince, concerns a gilded statue overlooking a city of poverty. The prince, who never knew sorrow while alive, persuades a swallow bound for Egypt to carry away his ruby, his sapphire eyes and finally his gold leaf, one gift at a time. When the swallow dies at his feet the statue’s lead heart cracks, and the tale ends in a heaven where God tells an angel to bring the two most precious things in the city: the heart and the dead bird. It is the story that made Oscar Wilde famous as a storyteller before the plays did.
The Nightingale and the Rose is the cruellest of the set. A student weeps because he has no red rose to give the professor’s daughter; the nightingale sings all night with her breast pressed to a thorn, staining a white rose red, and dies to make the flower, which the girl then rejects because a chamberlain’s nephew has given her jewels. The Selfish Giant is the gentlest: the giant walls off his garden, which stays in eternal winter until children creep in through a broken wall, and the smallest child — who turns out to be something more — teaches him that his garden is only his when it is shared.
The Devoted Friend is the satirical one. Hans tends his garden and the Miller takes his flowers, his planks and his wheelbarrow, calling it friendship; a request to fetch a doctor in a storm kills him, and the Miller delivers a eulogy about the tragedy of giving. The Remarkable Rocket, the last and silliest, is a firework convinced of its own genius, soaked through with self-regard, which fails to go off in the grand display and finishes its career haranguing frogs from a ditch.
Wilde’s fairy tales sit close to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, but where those stories punish and reward, Wilde’s quietly invert the accounting: the generous are destroyed, the selfish are disciplined by a kindness they cannot understand, and the silliest thing in the book is the one that survives. He went on to write The Picture of Dorian Gray and the comedies; these five stories are the shape his best theme took before he wrote the plays — that beauty is not decoration but a moral fact, and that a society which cannot see it will kill it. For more of his work, see all Oscar Wilde books. The full text is available from Project Gutenberg #902.
Historical Context
1888 was the year Wilde became famous as a talker, editor of The Woman’s World and a target of Punch; it was also a year of hard poverty in London, with the East End slums and the match girls’ strike of the same summer living not far from the drawing rooms his stories were read in. The Happy Prince’s city — where children cry for bread and a seamstress’s boy has a fever — is not an allegory of anywhere in particular; it is the London an evening walk could reach.
The tales belong to the aesthetic movement, which held that art need not be useful or moral to be valuable. Wilde, its most articulate mischief-maker, made the claim by writing parables about generosity: if art is not for anything, the statue is not for anything except giving everything away. The Christian imagery is deliberate — the swallow lays down its life, the child in the garden has wounds in his hands and feet — and was read at the time as sentimental rather than scandalous, which is how it got under the guard of the reviewers.
The book’s subsequent life has been odd: adapted for stage and animation, set to music, translated into dozens of languages, it became a fixture of children’s anthologies even as its author became a figure of scandal after the 1895 trials. That afterlife is part of the point. Wilde wrote a group of stories in which the good are not rewarded and the cheap are not punished, and the world has been quietly reading them to children ever since.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- The Happy Prince: A gilded statue on a tall column above the city, covered in gold leaf, with sapphires for eyes and a great ruby in his sword-hilt. He was a prince who never knew sorrow while he lived; as a statue he can see all the misery of the town, and he gives it away piece by piece.
- The Swallow: A migrant bird on his way to Egypt who stops to rest at the statue’s feet, is persuaded to stay, and becomes the prince’s messenger. He carries the ruby, the sapphires and the gold leaf to the poor, and dies of cold at the prince’s feet.
- The seamstress: A poor woman embroidering passion-flowers on a satin gown for the Queen’s maid of honour; her little boy is ill and asks for oranges. She is the first of the people the swallow is sent to help.
- The young playwright: A starving writer in a garret, too cold to finish his play, who receives a sapphire from the prince’s eye. He is the second recipient, and his gratitude is entirely for the stone.
- The match girl: A child in the square below, crying because she has dropped her matches in the gutter and will be beaten if she goes home. The prince gives her the other sapphire, and the swallow carries it to her.
Core Literary Themes
- Beauty and sacrifice: The statue is beautiful, and every act of charity makes it less beautiful. Wilde asks what beauty is for, and answers that it is worth more when it is given away than when it is admired.
- Charity and poverty: The city’s poor are invisible from the ground but visible from the column: the seamstress, the playwright, the match girl, the beggars in the shadows. The story is a catalogue of need that polite society does not see.
- Christian symbolism: The swallow and the prince are rewarded in paradise, and the lead heart that will not melt is the one thing the town’s judgement cannot see. Wilde borrows the shape of a parable and fills it with his own ethics.
- Art versus usefulness: The Mayor and the Town Councillors want a statue that looks like a statue. Once the gold is gone they call it shabby and pull it down — art as ornament judged by people who cannot see what it has been doing.
- The judgement of the town: The story ends not with the poor but with the town’s officials and the angels. Wilde’s irony is aimed at the people who decide what is valuable, and it still lands.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales?
This is the complete 1888 collection, not a single extracted story: all five tales, in the order Wilde published them, so the funny one at the end is still there after the deaths.
The edition is built for e-readers rather than for scans: clean typography, a working table of contents, and the text checked against the Project Gutenberg transcription, so the swallow’s speeches and the rocket’s harangues survive intact.
It is short. About sixteen thousand words, roughly an hour of reading, and five self-contained stories — ideal for a child’s bedtime, a train journey, or the week you decide to read Wilde properly.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #902 — the source text used for this edition.
- Original 1888 collection All five stories, in the published order, with no abridgement or modernisation.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One file for every reader: Apple Books and Kobo take the EPUB or KEPUB, Kindles take the AZW3.
- Summary and analysis Movements, characters, themes and historical context on this page, if you want the reading before the story.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Turn of the Screw — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Yellow Wallpaper — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The collection has no chapters, so this guide follows its five stories in the order Wilde printed them, with a note on what each one is doing.
- 1. The Happy Prince: A statue on a column, gilded in gold leaf with sapphires for eyes and a ruby in his sword-hilt, is admired by a city that ignores its poor. A swallow, delayed on his way to Egypt by a love affair with a reed, shelters at the statue’s feet and is recruited as a courier: the ruby goes to a seamstress with a feverish son, one sapphire to a playwright freezing in a garret, the other to a match girl who has dropped her matches in the gutter, and finally the gold leaf is peeled away and distributed to the poor. The swallow, who has missed Egypt for good, dies of cold; the lead heart cracks; the city’s councillors melt the statue down and quarrel over the metal. The angel brings the heart and the bird to God, and the story ends there.
- 2. The Nightingale and the Rose: A student laments that he has no red rose for the professor’s daughter. The nightingale, who believes the student is a true lover, is told by the rose tree that the only way to bloom red in winter is to sing all night with her breast against a thorn. She does; the rose opens red; she dies. The student picks it, presents it, and is refused — the girl prefers the jewels a chamberlain’s nephew has sent. He throws the rose into the gutter, decides that love is a silly thing compared with logic, and goes back to his books.
- 3. The Selfish Giant: A giant returns from seven years with his friend the Cornish ogre to find children playing in his garden. He builds a wall and puts up a notice, and winter settles permanently on the garden while spring stays outside. One morning the children creep in through a hole, the trees blossom where they climb, and the smallest child cannot reach a branch; the giant lifts him into the tree, the garden thaws, and the giant knocks the wall down. He waits years for the child to return, and when he does the boy has wounds in his hands and feet and says he is taking the giant to his garden in Paradise; the giant is found dead under a white blossom tree.
- 4. The Devoted Friend: A Linnet tells the Water-rat the story of little Hans, a gardener with a cottage and a garden, and Hugh the Miller, who calls himself Hans’s devoted friend. The Miller takes Hans’s primroses and apples for his own, promises a wheelbarrow he never delivers, and lectures him on the beauty of giving. When the Miller’s son is hurt, the Miller sends Hans for the doctor on a dark, wet night, without a lantern; Hans drowns in the bog. The Miller walks in front of the funeral procession, weeping, and observes that any misfortune is a great loss to a man with a family.
- 5. The Remarkable Rocket: The fireworks for a royal wedding are laid out in the garden and talk among themselves. The Rocket, who is damp from a careless soaking, delivers a long speech about his own genius and sensibility, and is left out of the display. Tossed into a ditch, he holds forth to a frog, a dragonfly and a duck, is used as a stick by some boys, and finally explodes in a woodpile when nobody is watching. The story ends with him falling on a goose and thinking himself a great success.
- 6. Reading the collection: The five stories are usually read as children’s tales, and they work that way, but their structure is adult: each one sets up a Christian or sentimental expectation and then pays it off with a cost. Read in order they show Wilde’s method hardening — the Happy Prince and the Nightingale are pure sacrifice, the Giant is sacrifice rewarded, the Devoted Friend is sacrifice exploited, and the Rocket is the first appearance of the Wildean talker who will fill the plays. The collection is also a small anthology of Victorian prose rhythm: the sentences shorten as the stories get crueller.
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Part of: Gothic & Horror Classics · Classic Books by Length and Reading Time
