The lead heart and the dead swallow are discarded like they are nothing, but when God tells an Angel to bring Him the two most precious things in the city, the Angel brings him the dead bird and the lead heart. When the Mayor finds the statue in such a decrepit state, he decides to take it down, melt it, and make an ornate statue of himself.

As a result, the Happy Prince’s lead heart breaks. By the time winter arrives, though, the Happy Prince is stripped of all his beauty while the Swallow dies of the harsh cold. The Swallow loves the Prince and decides to stay. He then asks the Swallow to distribute the gemstones and gold leaf from his form to various families in need. Now, though, he can see the suffering of his people. The Swallow notices the Prince is crying, and the Prince explains that during his lifetime, he had lived in a palace devoid of misery, and therefore had never experienced sorrow. One night, a Swallow who had not gone to Egypt with his flock for the winter because he was pursuing a beautiful Reed arrives in the city and rests on the Happy Prince’s statue. He oversees the town and is pained by the suffering of his people. But these influences find themselves combined with a peculiarly Wildean attitude to life and art: the statue must lose its outward beauty to be truly useful to society.High above a city stands an ornate statue of the Happy Prince, recently deceased. In some ways, we might regard ‘The Happy Prince’ as a combination of Hans Christian Andersen’s wistfully tragic fairy tales and Charles Dickens’s social problem novels about child poverty. Wilde himself once said that this and his other fairy stories were ‘an attempt to mirror modern life in a form remote from reality – to deal with modern problems in a mode that is ideal and not imitative’. Bing Crosby and Orson Welles, those giants of Hollywood, even tried to make it into a musical extravaganza, though not with any real success.

‘The Happy Prince’ has been dramatised on many occasions, and remains one of Oscar Wilde’s best-known works – perhaps his best-loved short story.

The Swallow agrees to help the Happy Prince because he loves him, and the Happy Prince wants to give up his gold and his jewels out of compassion for the poor and downtrodden of the city.

The happy prince and other stories