Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: The Aesthetically and Socially Engaged Child

Abstract

‘Oscar Wilde and fairy tales? Putting the two in the same sentence has a jarring effect’ suggests fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar.[i] This has to do, in large part, with Wilde’s fame as a decadent author and an aesthete. While some have found Wilde’s choice of writing children’s literature, in the form of his fairy tales, a strange one, this interest in childhood is less surprising than one might think. Conceptualizations of childhood at the fin de siècle were influenced by lingering Romantic ideas of childhood built upon the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth[ii], as well as the budding psychological field of Child Study spearheaded in Britain by James Sully.[iii] Scholars in this field perceived the child as both evolutionarily ‘savage’ or animalistic and, also, Romantically imaginative, rebellious, and visionary. While older models of Romantic childhood, both savage and sweet, defined the child by simplicity, Wilde addressed child readers as an audience capable of understanding complex ironies, multilayered moral messages, and even open-ended problems in the world. Wilde uses fairy tales as pathways to engage the child reader with his critiques of the world as it is and his vision for the world as it could be.

[i] Maria Tatar, ‘The Aesthetics of Altruism in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales’, in Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 145-57 (p. 145).

[ii] See, for example, Eric Tribunella and Carrie Hintz, Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction (Broadview, 2019); Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Childhood Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840 – 1900 (Oxford University Press, 2010); James R. Kincaid, Child Loving: The Erotic Child in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 1992); Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Marah Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009); and Victoria Ford Smith, Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2017).

[iii] James Sully. Studies of Childhood (Aberdeen University Press, 1896), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/cu31924055378305 [accessed 5 January 2026].