The Selfish Giant

Wilde (1854-1900) was an Anglo-Irish author, editor, and playwright whose career spanned the late Victorian era. Though he was a prolific writer whose works encompass a range of genres, Wilde became famous primarily for his eccentric personality and his then scandalous views on morality. Many of Wilde’s works examine the hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes, revealing how their actions contradicted their professed moral standards. Wilde was also famously a devotee of aestheticism, a literary and cultural movement that championed art for its own sake, independent of any moral or social “message.” In the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde argues that “[t]here is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Michael Patrick Gillespie, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, p. 3).

In spite of this, Wilde’s fairy tales are arguably meant for moral education. In the 1880s, Wilde began writing fairy tales for literary magazines. Wilde’s stories rounded out a golden age for fairy tales, which included contemporary authors such as Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, and J. M. Barrie. Additionally, Wilde drew on the writings of his mother, Lady Jane Wilde, who was also a writer of fairy tales.