A House of Pomegranates

Wilde dedicated the book to his wife Constance, and dedicated each of the four tales separately to a different woman — Margaret Elizabeth Sackville-West, Mrs William H. Grenfell, H.S.H. Alice, Princess of Monaco, and Miss Margot Tennant. The first edition was designed and illustrated by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who made the physical book — its ornate binding, its capital letters and endpapers — part of its argument about beauty and the labour behind it.

The tales are harsher than the earlier Happy Prince collection and more elaborate in their language. Reviewers who expected another children's book were troubled; Wilde replied in a public letter to The Speaker in December 1891 that the tales were meant for readers of any age with a taste for what he called 'delicate ornamental fantasy.' The book failed commercially in his lifetime and now sits, quietly, in the direct line between Hans Christian Andersen and every later fable that takes its cruelty seriously.

Each story stages the same recognition in a different key: a coronation robe woven by dying weavers, a court dwarf who dies of self-knowledge, a fisherman who cuts loose his soul for a love the church cannot approve, and a proud beautiful child who denies his own mother at the door. What varies is how the recognition arrives, whether it arrives in time, and what the world does to the person who has it.

The Young King. A shepherd boy who has been living with a goatherd is revealed to be the dying king's illegitimate grandson and brought to the palace to prepare for his coronation. Sensitive to beauty, he commissions elaborate coronation robes — spun gold, rubies from a mine, pearls dived for at sea. On the night before the ceremony he dreams three dreams: the weavers dying at their looms to make the robe, a boy drowning at the end of a diving rope to fetch a single pearl, and enslaved men killed by fever in the ruby mine. He wakes and refuses to wear the robes, going to his coronation in his shepherd's rags and a crown of briars.

The Birthday of the Infanta. The twelve-year-old daughter of the King of Spain is celebrating her birthday at court. The entertainments include a dwarf brought from the forest, whom the courtiers have taught to dance. The Infanta throws him a white rose. He runs into the empty palace looking for her and passes a mirror for the first time in his life. Realising he is ugly and grotesque, and that everyone in the garden had been laughing at him, he dies of a broken heart. The Infanta, told of his death, tells her attendants that in future those who come to play with her must have no hearts.

The Fisherman and His Soul. A young fisherman catches a Mermaid in his nets and releases her in exchange for her singing over his boat. He falls in love with her, and to be with her he agrees to send away his Soul, which she cannot love. The Priest denounces him; a Witch on the mountain performs the ritual that separates them. Each year the Soul returns to the shore and tries to tempt him back with tales of wisdom, then wealth, then the beauty of a dancing girl. The third temptation works. When he finds his Mermaid dead in the tide, his heart breaks with hers. Strange flowers grow from his grave, and the Priest — who had refused to bury him in the churchyard — is left to reconsider what he had condemned.

The Star-Child. Two woodcutters find a golden-starred baby wrapped in a cloak in a snowdrift. One takes him home. The Star-Child grows up strikingly beautiful and utterly cruel — mocking the poor, torturing small animals, driving out a leprous beggar-woman who claims to be his mother. He is instantly disfigured into a toad-like ugliness and cast out of the village. He wanders for years searching for the woman he denied, doing penance. In a distant city he is enslaved by a Magician, refuses to steal for him, and finally rescues a leper who is the disguised king of the land. His mother appears, he embraces her, and she and the leper reveal themselves as the king and queen of that country. His beauty is restored; he rules justly, and dies after three years.