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At Eton he was always dressing up and reciting Shakespeare… I was absurdly devoted to him… he always set an absurdly high value on personal appearance, and onceread a paper before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good. He certainly was wonderfully handsome. People who did not like him, Philistines and college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere prettiness. I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner. He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many people who were not. He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to think him dreadfully insincere. (pp. 52–3)
    It is significant that the main theme of this story is forgery and deception: what matters in it is not the distinction between truth and lies, but the ability to sustain a falsehood – a topic which Wilde explored more fully in his critical essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ in
Intentions
(1891). Other stories provide variations on this basic theme. For example, the plots of both ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’ and ‘The Model Millionaire’ involve a sustained deception. In the first story a widow so desires mystery that she literally invents a secret life; the irony of Wilde’s tale is that the heroine is only living the appearance of a double life. What matters is not the ‘reality’ behind the secret, but the woman’s ability to sustain a belief in secrecy. In the second story, a millionaire wants to be painted as a pauper. During the course of the story the millionaire fails to keep his real identity secret, but his lie is maintained by the work of art – his portrait. In both these examples the emphasis is not upon truth-telling, for the revelation of truth is seen as a mark of failure; success, rather, is an ability to sustain a deception. At one level this reversal of the traditional truth-telling functions of ghost and mystery stories is part of Wilde’s larger strategy of parody, but the interest in revaluing deception is also part of the sexual subtexts of the stories. The idea of deception in Wilde’s own life was linked to an emerging homosexual consciousness, and the need to maintain secrets, as his trials later revealed, was both urgent and necessary. Indeed nearly all of Wilde’s writing is obsessed with the parallel themes of secrecy, unmasking and love, and an enduring element of many of the stories is the power of a love which society either ignores or sees as illicit: the dwarf’s inappropriate love for theInfanta; the Fisherman’s profane love for the Mermaid; the invisibility of the Prince’s benevolent love of children, and so on. In this way the archetypal themes of the stories, those of love and its vulnerability, are placed in very specific contexts. So, on the one hand, the stories fulfil the demands of their respective genres by being accessible to a very wide audience; but the contexts they use invariably work in a coded way, and are to be recognized only by a coterie audience. This dual function makes for the stories’ paradoxical qualities – their simplicity and complexity, their heterodoxy and orthodoxy, their appeal to adults and children.
    In the century since Wilde’s short stories were first published, literary critics have had little to say about them: either they are dismissed as juvenilia, or they are simply overlooked. However, many of the themes and character-types so well known from Wilde’s comedies were first established in the stories. Like his drama the stories are inhabited by witty dandies who keep their social world at a distance with a well-turned epigram, by the imperious dowagers who run London Society and by innocents who suffer for their honesty in a corrupt world. In the