“The Happy Prince” is set in a fictional city marked by a deep inequality between the poverty of the townspeople and the riches of the wealthy. In keeping with the fairy tale genre, the lands described are fictional and full of fantastical elements, and the events play out over an unspecified timeframe, though the story also occasionally hints at Wilde’s own Victorian context.
The reader learns about the city and its divisions from the statue of the Happy Prince, who stands on a tall column high above the city. He tells the Swallow:
“I lived in the Palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter. In the daytime I played with my companions in the garden, and in the evening I led the dance in the Great Hall. Round the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything about me was so beautiful. […] And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city”
The Happy Prince’s bird's-eye view of the city lays bare the stark division between the idyllic lives of those who live in the palace and the “ugliness and misery” of those who live in the city. The palace itself is called "Sans-Souci," which is French for "without worry," thus emphasizing the care-free life of the wealthy. The “very lofty wall” that runs around the palace garden also signifies the metaphorical wall by which the rich block out the sorrows of the poor and live in blissful ignorance. The Happy Prince’s description of the palace as a place “where sorrow is not allowed to enter” enshrouds the palace with a mysticism, as if the place itself is able to expel sorrow.
However, despite the clear fantastical elements of the setting, there are also elements that betray Wilde’s own context, blurring the real and the fictional. The references to Egypt, for example, while exoticized in this story as somewhere far away and mystical, still roots the story in the real world. Similarly, though the setting of the story has no explicitly specified timeframe, there are hints of Wilde’s own Victorian context that seep through. The inequalities between the rich and the poor in the city, for instance, mirror the stark divisions that also plagued Victorian London (where Wilde lived). Meanwhile, the clearly satirical descriptions of the town councillors who exacerbate these divisions are also designed to mock the politics of Wilde’s own time.
