Although Oscar Wilde is best remembered as a dramatist, novelist, essayist, poet, brilliant conversationalist, and flamboyant personality, he was also a writer of fairy tales. Wilde's notoriety--including his arrest and conviction in 1895 for violating the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which criminalized homosexual activity--led some to regard him as an inappropriate writer for children. However, Wilde's fairy tales reveal themes of morality, Christianity, and beauty and thus reflect the contradiction between Wilde's public persona and his literary works. Collected in two books, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), Wilde's fairy tales were published at the beginning of his most productive literary period. Influenced by the author's association with John Ruskin and Walter Pater, they remain remarkable examples of the literary fairy tale popular in Victorian England and contain themes that dominate Wilde's other, more notable literary works.

Born at Westland Row, Dublin, on 16 October...