I always worry, when I re-read this story every few years, that I will have outgrown it, but so far its effect on me has only become more textured and stronger overall. It is – unambiguously, I suppose – a children’s story; Wilde wrote it for his son Cyril, and these days I really hear and am moved by the fatherly tones and concerns in it. Wilde was probably my first proper literary love, and at some point the story also became more poignant and fascinating for me because of a growing awareness I had of how deeply and kind of presciently it relates to developments in his own life. He memorably refers back to it in De Profundis, just after this award-winning motion picture of a paragraph:

“I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:—all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.”

But my love of this story predates my love of Wilde, and goes back to the very beginnings of my love of reading. I don’t remember the details of how the story first struck me, only that it struck me with great force, great emotional force. A scene from a bit later in the timeline of my relationship with the story comes to mind. Towards the end of secondary school, I read it out to my Philosophy class. We were considering the question ‘What is art?’ and the teacher had invited any of us who wanted to to present an exhibit to the class. I didn’t read it very well – I stumbled on a few words, and even made, so as to pre-empt sniggers, an awkward spur-of-the-moment substitution of a perhaps unfortunately dated expression. I didn’t bring out the different voices especially either. But when I looked up at the end, there were tears running down the teacher’s face.

First collected in The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888. Available on Wikisource