Oscar Wilde's Dark Fable of False Friendship Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) is remembered primarily as a playwright and wit — the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, the aphorist of Victorian salon culture. Less well remembered is that he was also the author of a set of dark, precise fairy tales that belong among the most unsettling moral fables in the English literary tradition. "The Devoted Friend," published in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), is told as a story within a story: a Water-rat and a Linnet discuss the nature of friendship by the edge of a pond, and the Linnet tells the tale of Little Hans and Hugh the Miller. What follows is a study in the…