Oscar Wilde, "The Young King" (Ireland)

It’s December 24. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Oscar Wilde’s story, “The Young King”:

Oscar Wilde wrote two volumes of magical tales, probably for his own children, though he said they were "intended neither for the British child nor the British public." His incisive humour and his penchant for exuberant prose is transformed in these stories into beautifully wrought, powerfully imagined fables that show Wilde’s concern not only with his much-publicized aestheticism but with the harsh social problems of Victorian England. “The Young King,” a poignant example of both these concerns, was published in 1891 in the volume A Garden of Pomegranates. Four years later, accused of homosexual acts, he was imprisoned in Reading Gaol. He died on November 30, 1900, in Paris, where he had exiled himself after his release.

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