Agora: Red Deer Polytechnic Undergraduate Journal
Volume 16:2 (2025) Student Writer Awards

The Social Conditions of Poverty in Oscar
Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”: Reevaluating Causes and Effects of
Poverty in Victorian London
Mackenzie Sawchuk
While the Victorian period in London between 18371901 is often looked back upon by contemporaries as a time of
great prosperity for England’s industrial might as a world power
in terms of trade and production, the lassez-faire economic
policy that supported an unregulated free market also resulted in
disastrous failings for the working class people and encouraged
a growing wealth disparity between the aristocracy and the poor,
further exacerbating social problems felt mainly by the poorer
classes. Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale, “The Happy Prince” in his
collection titled The Happy Prince and Other Tales, published
in London in 1888, exposes the wealth gap between the wealthy
and the poor and the failings of both the wealthy classes and the
British Government during the Victorian period. Speaking from
the perspective of a gold statue who was once a “Prince” in a
great city, Wilde provides social commentary that both critiques
the attitudes of the wealthy towards the poor and creates

87

empathy for the poor throughout the story in order to humanize
them and their suffering to children reading his tale. Wilde’s
story reveals the widespread poverty across London during the
Victorian period and the social factors contributing to their
misery, including unemployment and homelessness, rampant
disease and starvation, and little support from the government in
terms of work and safety regulations that allowed for the
creation of workhouses across England which further worsened
the already dire circumstances of the poor classes.
Claiming to be a human in his past life, Wilde’s story
begins with the introduction of the “Happy Prince” statue and
his misery at being forced to witness the sufferings of the city
below him. Before coming alive as a statue, the Happy Prince
states that he “ did not know what tears were, for [he] lived in
the Palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter”
and “never cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything about
[him]was so beautiful” (Wilde ). After dying with no cause to
leave his palace walls as a human, the Happy Prince comes alive
again in the form of a giant gold statue erected above the city,
forced to “see all the ugliness and all the misery of [his] city, and
though [his] heart is made of lead yet [he] cannot choose but
weep” (Wilde). Seemingly coming alive again only to witness
misery and suffering he cannot physically stop, a sense of
punishment for the ignorance of the Happy Prince in his human

88

life is created. While the Prince’s wealth could shield him from
the realities of the city’s poor behind his palaces figurative and
literal walls, his new status as a gold statue forces him to face
the terrible treatment of the poor through his own ignorance and
assumptions, as well as through exploitative measures by
wealthy business owners increasing their already substantial
wealth. After a swallow chooses to sleep upon the Happy Prince,
he is able to convince the swallow to help him aid the poor
around the city. Throughout the story, the description of the poor
by the swallow reveals the devastating realities of the Victorian
era poor and the social problems contributing to their
exploitation and abuse, including Laissez-Faire Capitalism,
unemployment, homelessness, sickness, hunger, and the
perception of them by the weather classes as being violent, lazy,
stupid, and unmotivated to work for a living.
After gaining help from the swallow, the Happy Prince
statue sends the bird to a poor house in order to offer up the ruby
in his sword hilt to them to ease their suffering. Looking across
the city, the Prince sees a “poor house. One of the windows is
open, and through it [he] can see a woman seated at a table. Her
face is thin and worn, and she has coarse, red hands, all pricked
by the needle, for she is a seamstress…In a bed in the corner of
the room her little boy is lying ill. He has a fever, and is asking
for oranges. His mother has nothing to give him but river water,

89

so he is crying” (Wilde). The description reveals what the Happy
Prince must look upon everyday, that being the constant
suffering felt and experienced by the poor. The poor house in
which the woman lives has the windows smashed out, and she
and her son are confined to a single room that they must share
within the building, showing the crampedness of housing
available to the poor. While her son is sick, the poor mother has
no choice but to work, seemingly non-stop due to the condition
of her hands, with no respite. She has no food or medicine to
give her sick child, only river water, demonstrating her state of
destitution as she works in the hope of being able to care for her
child.
A British ship owner by the name of Charles Booth, also
decided to study the daily lives of London’s poor and middle
classes by creating a survey called the Charles Booth's Inquiry
into Life and Labour in London. Operating from 1886 to 1903,
Booth’s survey consisted of street by street walks accompanied
by police officers through various districts in London and
compiled notebooks of data on London’s poor and middle
classes, including information about their daily lives and general
observations by the surveyors of the poverty-stricken areas.
From the data, Booth was able to create a series of maps which
established the social conditions of a street’s inhabitants
according to a legend which delineated the various classes across

90

the city. Just as Wilde’s story reveals the dire conditions of the
Victorian poor and the disregard of them by the wealthy classes,
his maps also contradicted general beliefs of the wealthy classes
that London’s poor were isolated to a specific area and
inherently “unreachable” to the public. In Laura Vaughan’s
article discussing the effects of Charles Booths’ study, she states
that “He showed that districts such as the East End were not an
undifferentiated morass of poor, criminal streets, but in fact
contained a variety of classes, with finely differentiated
deprivation situations”(Vaughan 27). By providing a method to
visualize the widespread and scattered poverty across London,
his study proved to be a starting point for the wealthier classes
to be able to discuss and make apparent the systemic causes for
the recorded problems of the poor based on physical evidence
instead of general negative rhetoric regarding the character of
the poor. Instead of being able to assume that poverty was an
isolated problem and unrelated to the actions of the wealthier
classes, Booth’s maps proved that underlying societal factors
were contributing to the poverty and paved the way for future
advocates for the poor and social research. Both Wilde’s story
and Booth’s survey acted as a medium to reveal the reality of the
lives of the poor, critique the social problems contributing to
poverty, and humanize the poor to the wealthy classes who
regarded them as naturally violent and criminal.

91

Due to Laissez-Faire Economic policy dominating in
England during the 19th century and the booming industrial
revolution generating new products, markets, and capital,
London’s labor market was focused on fluctuating market
demands, which resulted in seasonal workers and casual
employment (Vaughan 8). Coupled with increased immigration
to the major cities looking for new job opportunities and
virtually no government regulation, business owners could drive
down wages tremendously due to the large workforce pool to
choose from and exploit their employees to work gruelling and
long hours under unsafe working conditions for meagre pay,
often not enough to support a family on a singular factory job.
Social reformer Andrew Mearns’ work titled The Outcry of
Outcast London: An inquiry Into the Condition of the Abject
Poor, published in 1883, reveals the inhumane working
conditions subjected upon the poor due to low government
regulation:
We ask a woman who is making tweed trousers, how
much she can earn in a day, and are told one shilling. But what
does a day mean to this poor soul? Seventeen hours! From five
in the morning to ten at night—no pause for meals. She eats her
crust and drinks a little tea as she works, making in truth, with
her needle and thread, not her living only, but her shroud. For
making men's shirts these women are paid 10d. a dozen; lawn

92

tennis aprons, 3d. a dozen; and babies' hoods, from 1s. 6d. to 2s.
6d. a dozen. (Mearns 16)
Mearns’ questioning of a poor Victorian woman
demonstrates the incredibly low wages and long hours that
people were forced to work in order to pay for food and lodging
for their families. More often than not, due to the incredibly low
wages and absent safety and child labor regulations controlled
by private businessmen, families were forced to send their young
children to work in the factories, docks, and mines to help
support the family, commonly risking their health and safety due
to unsafe working conditions. While the fortunate could find low
paying jobs, many turned to prostitution, thieving, petty and
violent crime, or simply wandered the streets aimlessly as they
could find no work or aid to support themselves (Booth/B/350).
As immigration increased and contributed to a large workpool,
private business and factory owners could drive down the wages
of their employees tremendously, and due to no government
intervention or regulation, these businessmen could very quickly
exploit

desperate

working

class

people

desperate

for

employment and force them to work in harsh conditions for
immensely long periods of time no matter the age, health
condition, or disability. Able to capitalize on the poors’
desperation for employment, private business owners decisions
to lower wages contributed to further social problems arising

93

from the increasing poverty, such as a housing crisis, epidemics
of contagious disease due to unhygienic conditions the poor
were subjected to, and the development of workhouses for the
poor.
As the story of the Happy Prince progresses, he asks the
swallow to stay and help him deliver his sapphire eyes to other
poor people within the city. Flying over the city, the swallow
witnessed “the rich making merry in their beautiful houses,
while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark
lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out
listlessly at the black streets. Under the archway of a bridge two
little boys were lying in one another’s arms to try and keep
themselves warm” (Wilde). Describing the contrast between the
bright and cheerful homes of the wealthy and the black, dark
streets and alleys that poor children frequented in a state of
listlessness demonstrates the rampant homelessness present in
the Victorian city. Wilde reveals the sad reality for the lives of
the Victorian poor as low wages and unemployment
compounded into a housing crises that saw the increase of poor
communal housing called “slums” and workhouses ran by
private business owner to house their employees in exchange for
work, often leading to abuse and further exploitation of the poor
for cheap labor made possible by absentee government
regulations. In police walk notebooks from Booth’s survey, the

94

poor streets, defined by the color black on the map, are described
with common characteristics of streets lined with two to three
storied buildings in which single rooms within the buildings
were rented out to entire poor families, resulting in immense
overcrowding (Duckworth, Booth/B/350 165-170). These
building’s windows were commonly smashed out and patched
by brown paper, the doors wide open, and occupied by ragged,
dirty, and barefooted children and women (Duckworth,
Booth/B/350 209). Similar to business owners, home and
property owners were not subject to government regulations
such as rent control, health and safety regulations, or
maintenance standards for the properties rented out to the poor,
and could get away with no repercussions for housing people in
unsafe, overcrowded, and unhygienic conditions for cheap rent.
In her article analyzing the findings of Charles Booth’s poverty
maps, Vaughan describes a notorious slum in London, known as
the Old Nichol in Shoreditch East London: “The Nichol was a
densely populated warren of streets containing appalling
housing conditions. Life expectancy was said to be just 16. The
district’s rotten housing stock meant that it was the last refuge of
the poor and its bewildering layout meant that it had a reputation
locally as a criminal enclave” (Vaughan 21-22). Due to rising
rent of other properties that only the wealthier classes could
afford, further pushing the poor into already full cheap housing,

95

these “slums” such as the Old Nichol became common places
for the poor to frequent as it was the only shelter financially
available to them. These “slums” were not regulated by
government officials and thus, private owners had no incentive
to upkeep the properties of slum housing, causing rampant
disease to spread due to unhygienic conditions paired with the
overcrowding of malnourished people creating the ideal
conditions for epidemics to spread quickly. Mearn’s also
ventured into slum housing and recorded the horrors of what
slum housing entailed for the poor, writing that “To get into
them you have to penetrate courts reeking with poisonous and
malodorous gases arising from accumulations of sewage and
refuse scattered in all directions and often flowing beneath your
feet;... You have to grope your way along dark and filthy
passages swarming with vermin” (Mearns 8). Mearns further
describes the rampant sickness and death prevalent in slum
housing, stating that inspector reports detail families living with
pigs in a single room, people sick with smallpox and confined to
filthy rooms, children running half naked and caked in dirt,
upwards of 7 people living all together in an underground
kitchen with a dead child in the room among them, a case of a
poor widow living with her three children and a dead baby who
had been deceased thirteen days, the father committing suicide
shortly before the death of the baby (Mearns 9). Along with

96

smallpox, cholera spread quickly to residents of slum housing as
people were forced to drink water contaminated with sewage,
prompting the Board of Health to administer pamphlets across
poor districts, such as one published in 1831 for the residents of
Portsmouth and Portsea:

(Carter, James)
While demonstrating the prevalence of cholera during
this time, the pamphlet also shows that government officials
were clearly aware of the unhealthy conditions of the poor and
were not simply unaware of the misery and suffering happening
around the country. Commonly thought to be inherently violent
criminals who were too lazy to work for living (Vaughan 27),
97

poor people were often looked down upon by the wealthier
classes which contributed to their continued abuse and
exploitation throughout the Victorian period as no further
thought or study went into social problems such as low wages
and exploitative labor that was actively contributing to the
poverty issues.
Also contributing to the exploitation of the poor through
labor was the creation of workhouses, mandated by the England
Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. Charlotte Newman states in
her article that the Act was meant to help relieve widespread
poverty and homelessness, however, it was made on the
assumption that poverty was the result of a population suffering
from idleness (123), not due to low wages and immigration
compounding into a situation working class people could not
escape. The Act established a Commission that would have the
power to oversee a system of relief for the poor through the
creation of “workhouses” that would offer relief to any ablebodied poor worker in exchange for labor (Newman 123).
Thought to reduce the amount of government aid spent on the
poor and lessen the rampant homelessness, the “workhouses”
were instead a shameful and harrowing prospect that was forced
upon the poor in their already dire circumstances (Newman
123). Once in the workhouse, the workers were referred to as
“paupers” and were subject to various abuses at the hands of

98

their “Guardians”. In a letter written by a pauper named James
Archer to the Poor Law Commissioners in 1863, he informed
them that “in consequence of the depression of Trade have been
unemployed for seven months” (Voices of Victorian Poor) and
that when he had applied to the Commission at an earlier date
for relief, they refused outside aid to his family, only offering
pauperism in the workhouse as an alternative. Refusing to be
pauperized and subject to the abuses in the workhouse, Archer
wrote that he told the Commissioner “ it was unjust treatment
and I should Resist it by Pursuing another course which was to
apply to you hoping you will not allow me to be perpetually
Pauperised without affording me a chance of Striving against it”
(Voices of the Victorian Poor). His determination to avoid the
workhouse demonstrates the fear and dread shared among the
poor who were forced into the workhouses through exploitation
by the Guardians. By refusing outside aid to families requesting
relief, the Guardians could manipulate the poor into becoming
pauperized, for they

feared death by starvation and

homelessness should they not accept. Countless letters were
written by paupers informing the Commission of the abuses they
suffered at the workhouses and an organization devoted to
exposing neglect towards the poor was created in response to the
workhouses in 1846, called the Poor Man’s Guardian Society.
They also created a newspaper called The Poor Man’s Guardian,

99

and released an anti-workhouse poster revealing the abuses the
poor were being subject to in the workhouse:

(Unknown Artist)

The poster depicts various scenes, including one of an
elderly pauper being whipped by a Guardian, begging “Oh Sir,
have mercy on me, I cannot work so hard, for I’m old, ill, and
feeble, allow me, but 10 minutes rest” (UK National Archives).
Another scene depicts paupers being hung by the ceiling from
their appendages, with the heading above them reading, “The
mode of Punishment for the incorrigible, by order of the
Overseers” (UK National Archives). Beside the hanging
paupers, a message reads “By order of the Commissioners of the

100

New Poor Laws, the period for all paupers to work is from 4 in
the morning to 10 at night. 3 hours allowed for clearing away
and sweeping the workhouse yard” (UK National Archives).
These scenes depict the paupers with shaven heads, rugged and
ripped clothing, and are all expressing fear of the Guardian in
the dark and dirty workhouse. The lack of regulations and
intervention when complaints were received by paupers allowed
the Guardians to subject their employees to inhumane work
hours, unsanitary and unsafe working and living conditions,
physical and sexual assault, could separate parents from their
children, deny them medical aid when ill, and abuse and
overwork the disabled and elderly with impunity, for no
repercussions by the law would follow the Gaurdians abuse and
exploitation of the poor for their own financial gain.
Oscar Wilde’s story of the Happy Prince shows the
desperation of the poor in the Victorian period and creates
empathy for the poor through the actions of the Happy Prince
statue and the swallow, and condemns the wealthy classes by
exposing the shallowness and ignorance of the mayor and the
town councillors. After giving his eyes, ruby sword hilt, and
golden covering to the poor across the city, the Happy Prince is
noticed by the city’s mayor and town councillors, exclaiming
“Dear me! how shabby the Happy Prince looks!” (Wilde),
agreeing that as he no longer had his beautiful material

101

attributes, that he looked “Little better than a beggar” (Wilde).
After knowing all that the Happy Prince has sacrificed for his
city’s poor, including his own vision, the mayor and town
councillors' perception of him as a “beggar” simply because he
looks “shabby” is while incredibly inaccurate and misplaced, the
common perception of poor people in the Vicorian times by the
wealthy classes. The wealthier men, only seeing worth and
legitimacy in material possessions or displays of wealth and
grandeur, look down upon the Happy Prince in his changed state,
although he is ironically the opposite of a beggar, freely giving
his material possessions to the poor, asking for nothing in return
for his gifts. Wilde reveals the perception of the poor by the
upper classes and their blatant ignorance of the sufferings of the
poor, as they only noticed the condition of the “shabby” statue,
not the immense amount of suffering felt by the poor around
their entire city. Wilde critiques the superficiality of the mayor
and councillors and encourages children reading the story to
aspire to act as the Happy Prince and the swallow would by
associating their good deeds and empathy for the poor as being
traits worthy of someone heaven-bound. After God calls out for
“the two most precious things in the city” (Wilde), angels bring
the Prince and the swallow to God, to which he says “for in my
garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in
my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me” (Wilde),

102

demonstrating their guaranteed ascent to Paradise for their good
deeds. Just as Wilde critiqued the treatment of the poor by the
wealthy class and encouraged empathy and changed perception
of the poor through his story for children, many other advocates
such as Charles Booth and Andrew Mearns dedicated analysis
and study of the social conditions surrounding poverty in
Victorian England through Booth’s Map Survey and Mearn’s
published expose condemning the treatment of the poor. While
the aforementioned people had the most influence in changing
the perception of Victorian England’s poor due to their elevated
status in society, the poor also played an active role in the
condemnation of their treatment by the government and Poor
Laws. They created organizations and wrote letters to board
officials detailing their experiences of abuse and exploitation
and the indisputable reasons for their sufferings, such as
unemployment, sickness, injury, and low pay. While these letters
may not have been accessible to the eyes of the wealthy classes
during the early Victorian period and therefore did not have
much influence in terms of their treatment, these letters
demonstrate that the poor were often educated, smart, hardworking, literate, and were not lazy thieves as they were
commonly thought to be by the wealthy classes, but instead
ordinary, law-abiding citizens simply unable to change their
socio-economic position, often forcing them into lucrative

103

businesses or illegal crimes in order to feed themselves and their
families.
By describing the various scenes of poverty across the
city, Wilde reveals the social issues surrounding mass poverty
within cities, such as unemployment, low wages for incredibly
long hours, homelessness, starvation, and repulsion of them by
the wealthy classes within their communities. Charles Booths’
study of maps corroborate Wilde’s depictions, as police
notebooks provide primary source material of the mass poverty
across London caused by these compounding social ills,
including descriptions of decrepit slum housing, the demand for
cheap housing due low wages and unregulated rent increases
coupled with increased immigration from foreign countries, the
ragged and starved state of poor women and children aimlessly
walking or playing in the streets, prostitutes and pimps looking
out from smashed windows, descriptions of the limited seasonal
trades available to the growing working class, and thieving and
stabbings taking place in the poorest areas where unemployment
was particularly prevalent. The compilation of this data into
maps to determine the social status of an areas inhabitants also
revealed that poverty was not isolated to a singular area in
London and due to an inherently “violent” or “criminal”
geographical area, but instead spread across the city, often in
close proximity to wealthy classes on adjacent streets and

104

blocks. Andrew Mearn’s publication of The Outcry of Outcast
London: An inquiry Into the Condition of the Abject Poor in
1883 also advocated for the poor by revealing and condemning
the treatment of the poor by their fellow Christians. He described
the horrors of slum housing resulting in overcrowding, disease
and death, the exhaustive long hours without rest worked by the
elderly to be able to afford little food and a place to live, and the
feelings of despair, hopelessness, and defeat felt by the poor
alike during the Victorian period due to the inhumanity and
ignorance of the upper classes to look into their sufferings
further and realize the factors outside of their control
contributing to their poverty. The Poor Law Amendment Act of
1834 that saw the creation of workhouses and “paupers” greatly
increased the abuse of the poor by forcing them into workhouses
by refusing them outside aid, and once pauperized, were bound
to the Guardians in charge of the workhouse. Due to the absence
of regulations, the workhouses were opportunities for the
Guardians to exploit the poor, as they exploited men, women,
the elderly, disabled, and children alike for their labor. Many
letters written by paupers detail abuse by the Guardians such as
long working hours with no rest, not being allowed to leave the
workhouse, physical and sexual abuse, inadequate access to
nutritous food and appropriate clothing, and denial of medical
care. The Act also prompted the creation of the Poor Man’s

105

Guardian Society which was dedicated to exposing the neglect
towards the poor within the workhouses and shares common
sentiments between the thousands of letters sent to the Poor Law
Commission during the Victorian period. In conclusion,
throughout Oscar Wilde’s story, “The Happy Prince”, the
mistreatment of the poor by the wealthy is critiqued and empathy
for the poor is created through the humanization of the poor’s
sufferings and the circumstances outside of their control. His
story, along with others works during the Victorian period that
advocated for the poor, demonstrate the social issues that
compounded to create a situation of perpetual and widespread
poverty during the Victorian period, and contributed to changing
the perception of the poor’s individual characteristics as being
the reason of their poverty towards the study of the socioeconomic factors being significant factors contributing to their
state of poverty.

106

Works Cited:
Archer, James. “Letter to Poor Law Commissioners”. Voices of
the Victorian Poor. Unknown publication date,
https://www.victorianpoor.org/
Carter, James. “Cholera Morbus”. UK National Archives. 31
October 1831,
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resource
s/victorian-industrial-towns/cholera-advice-poster/
Duckworth, George H. “Booth/B/350 George H. Duckworth’s
Notebook.” The London School of Economics and
Political Science, 2024,
https://booth.lse.ac.uk/notebook/booth-b-350?page=132
Mearns, Andrew. “The Bitter Outcry of Outcast London: An
Inquiry Into the Condition of the Abject Poor”. Project
Gutenberg.org, August 9, 2017,
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/55316/pg55316images.html
Newman, Charlotte. “To Punish or Protect: The New Poor
Law and the English Workhouse.” International
Journal of Historical Archaeology, vol. 18, no. 1, 2014,
pp. 122–45. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24572708. Accessed 18 Mar.
2025.

107

Unknown Artist. “The New Poor Law With A Description of
the New Workhouses, Look at the Picture-See”. UK
National Archives. Unknown publication date,
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resource
s/1834-poor-law/#background
Vaughan, Laura. “Charles Booth and the Mapping of Poverty.”
Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social
Cartography, UCL Press, 2018, pp. 61–92. JSTOR,
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv550dcj.8. Accessed 3 Mar.
2025.
Wilde, Oscar. “The Happy Prince”. Project Gutenberg.org,
May 1, 1997,
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/902/pg902images.html#chap01

108