Franny Moyle by Constance: The Tragic, Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde Page B

send it to you,’ she informed her brother. Quite what this subsequent tale was is unclear. If it was another single story, this author has not tracked one published in 1887 or ‘88. But what is certain is that within a year of ‘Was It a Dream?’ Constance wrote an entire children’s book, There Was Once .
    This was for a different publisher, Ernest Nister. Nister came from Nuremberg, at that time the centre of the toy and colour printing industries, and he had built a considerable reputation as a publisherand printer of highly coloured children’s pop-up books. He ventured into the British market in 1888, with an approach to the children’s publishing that was different from that of the more ‘artistic’ and refined Leadenhall Press. In contrast to the grey, understated jacket of The Bairn’s Annual , books from the Nister stable had brightly coloured sentimental images of plump girls and boys holding fat little puppy dogs or playing together. It was an altogether more commercial and mass-market proposition.
    Constance must have been one of the first authors Nister signed in the UK. She was in good company, alongside writers such as Edith Nesbit and the then very popular and prolific Mrs Molesworth.
    There Was Once saw Constance re-tell a series of traditional nursery favourites that included the tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer and The Three Bears – in which, incidentally, Constance wrote about ‘Silver Locks’ not the ‘Goldilocks’ we are more familiar with today.
    â€˜There was once, my children, a little girl who loved to coax her grandmother to tell her stories. She was not a fairy grandmother, but she could tell beautiful fairy stories,’ Constance explained to her readers. ‘The little girl is grown up now, and the dear grandmother is gone, but there are still children who love the old fairy stories, so the little girl has written them out for you just as they were told to her.’
    Although the thrilling short stories that Oscar published in 1887, with their intrigues reflecting the fashion for spiritualism, could have offered little inspiration for the whimsical tales of magic and dreaming that his wife wrote for children, there is undoubtedly a sensibility in Constance’s choice of imagery and poignant tone that resonates with a set of fairy stories that Oscar would publish the following May, The Happy Prince and Other Tales .
    While he did not publish them until 1888, Oscar had been telling fairy stories for years. He had been rehearsing ‘The Happy Prince’ as far back as 1885, when he had related the tale to a group of Cambridge undergraduates when he and Constance went to visit Harry Marillier. 13 Apparently this was one of the first instances in which he tried out his tale of a statue of a Happy Prince standing highin an old town who sees nothing but unhappiness around him. Recruiting the services of a little swallow, the Prince asks the bird to pluck the jewels embedded in him and deliver them to the needy around him. The little swallow does so, but in carrying out this service to the Happy Prince he is delayed in his return to Egypt to such an extent that he misses his chance for migration. The swallow, now in love with the Prince, pays the ultimate price for his sacrifice. At the end of the story, when the statue is stripped of its former glory, the pair kiss each other once on the lips before the little bird falls down dead at the statue’s feet.
    Oscar’s verbal storytelling could be almost mesmerizing. According to a friend of Harry Marillier, Mrs Claude Beddington, on the night Constance showed her moonstones to Harry and Douglas Ainslie, Oscar went on to invent a tale about the fairies and sprites that lived in the heart of the stones. Oscar ‘wove fantastic legends of the mystical life within the cloudy shimmer’, related Mrs Beddington, ‘and when