Oscar Wilde wrote and published short stories over nearly a decade of his short life. Until now, the exact details of the publishing histories of The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), “The Portrait of Mr W.H.”, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891), and A House of Pomegranates (1891) in critical bibliographies such as Stuart Mason (1914), Edward Halim Mikhail (1978), or Thomas Mikolyzk (1993) are incomplete and have not been significantly updated in over a century of scholarship. The tables below provide more detailed bibliographical descriptions of the periodical publications of Wilde’s short stories between 1887 and 1889 (Table 1) as well as the first American and British editions of the short story collections (Table 2). These tables have been creating using press articles retrieved from digital databases.
Table 1: Periodical publications of Oscar Wilde's short fiction
| Periodical | Issue, number, pages | Date of publication | Illustrations | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Canterville Ghost | The Court and Society Review | Part I: no. 138, 183–186 | 23 February 1887 | 1 (by F.H. Townsend) |
| Part II, III, IV: no. 139, pp. 207-211 | 2 March 1887 | 1 (by F.H. Townsend) | ||
| Tribune (New York) | Vol. XLVL, no, 14742, p. 14 | 27 March 1887 | 0 | |
| Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime: A Story of Cheiromancy | The Court and Society Review | Part I & II: no.149, pp. 447-450 | 11 May 1887 | 1 (by F.H. Townsend) |
| Part III & IV: no. 150, pp. 471–473 | 18 May 1887 | 0 | ||
| Part V & VI: no. 151, pp. 495–497 | 25 May 1887 | 1 (by F.H. Townsend) | ||
| Lady Alroy | The World: A Joumal for “Men and Women” | Vol. XVI, no. 673, pp. 18-20 | 25 May 1887 | 0 |
| The Model Millionaire | The World: A Joumal for “Men and Women” | Vol. XXVI, no. 877, pp 18-49 | 22 June 1887 | 0 |
| The Portrait of Mr W.H. | Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine | Vol CXLVI, no. 885, pp. 424 | 1 July 1889 | 0 |
| The Electric Magazine of Foreign Literature | Vol. L no. 2, pp. 236-250 | 1 August 1889 | 0 | |
| The Young King | Lady's Pictorial: A Newspaper for the Home | Christmas 1888 edition, pp. 1-5, | December 1888 | 5 (by J. Bernard Patridge) |
| The Birthday of the Little Princess | Paris Illustré (London, New York) | - | March 1889 | - |
| L’Anniverssaire de la naissance de la petite Princesse | Paris Illustré (Paris) | Vol. II, no. 65, pp. 203, 208, 207, 209 | March 1889 | 0 |
Table 2: Publishing details of Oscar Wilde's short story collections
| The Happy Prince and Other Tales1 | Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories2 | A House of Pomegranates3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publication date | 31 May 1888 | 18 July 1891 | November 1891 |
| Publisher | David Nutt | Osgood & McIlvaine | Osgood & McIlvaine |
| Visual artists | Walter Crane & George Percy Jacomb-Hood | Charles Ricketts | Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon |
| Printer | Ballantyne Press | R & R Clark | Chiswick Press |
| Print run first edition | 1,000 ordinary copies4 | 1,500 ordinary copies | 1,000 ordinary copies |
| Price | 5s | 2s | £1,1s |
| Dedicatees | Carlos Blacker | No | Constance Lloyd |
| Size | Small quarto (8 3/4 by 6 4/2 inches) | Crown octavo (7 by 4 1/2 inches) | Small quarto (8 1/4 by 6 3/4 inches) |
| Pages | viii + 116 (16,238 words) | iv + 168 (28,157 words) | viii + 192 (33,156 words) |
1 On 25 August 1888, Roberts Brothers published the first American edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales at $1.2 In September 1891, Dodd, Mead, and Co. published 500 copies of the first American edition of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories at $1.3 In February 1892, Dodd, Mead, and Co. published the first American edition of A House of Pomegranates at $5.4 Sixty-five (65) copies of large-paper edition were published at £1,1s. | |||