In 
September 1882 Oscar Wilde, who was then in New York, was interviewed for the New-York Tribune. He told his interviewer that ‘the most interesting reading that he had seen in the newspapers lately had been the letters in The Tribune describing the excursions of the Fresh Air Children. He quoted from several of the letters the sayings of the children’.‘Oscar Wilde on Children and Flowers’, New-York Tribune (New York, NY), 11 Sep. 1882, 8, in Marland, R. (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, I, 461–2
Illustration by Windsor McKay. Image: Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1925.
The Fresh Air Fund was a charity established in 1877 with the aim of giving impoverished children in New York City vacations in the countryside. The New-York Tribune supported the endeavour, and each summer the paper would be filled with long articles about the activities of the children. A feature of these articles, as Wilde had noticed, was the amusing and often poignant comments of the children on country life.
When I discovered Wilde’s interview back in 2021 I was sufficiently intrigued that I perused many of the Fresh Air Fund articles that were published in the Tribune while Wilde was in America. Later that year I read Josephine Guy’s edition of Wilde’s first play Vera; or, The Nihilists and was surprised to see that a line spoken by a child in the play named Nicholas seemed to be derived from one I recalled from a Fresh Air Fund article.
In the play, the relevant exchange is as follows:
nicholas: Vera does everything in the world belong to somebody.
vera: Now-a-days, yes.
[...]
nicholas: Then who owns the robins?Guy, J. M. (ed.) (2021) Plays IV, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 11, Oxford University Press, 112.119–24; Marland, R. (ed.) (2026) Vera; or, The Nihilists: A Critical Edition of Oscar Wilde’s First Play, Little Eye, 175.47–51
After reading the exchange I went back to the Tribune and dug out this story:
One boy who lives in a Brooklyn tenement, over a butcher’s shop, cannot understand why people have so much land about their houses. ‘When is there going to be a house between this one and the next?’ he asks. ‘Who owns all the robins?’ was his inquiry on the first morning.‘Good Done and Received by Children’, New-York Tribune (New York, NY), 3 Aug. 1882, 2 (view source)
I wrote about Wilde pilfering from the Fresh Air Fund article in my 2021 paper for Notes & Queries, which you can read for free here.
Now, I have found another example of him doing the exact same thing.
‘How rich you are!’
In the summer of 1887 Wilde had recently been appointed editor of the magazine The Woman’s World. He corresponded with the author Phoebe Allen about an article he wanted her to contribute to the magazine about teaching botany to children. In the first of two extant letters to Allen, he wrote:
I am very pleased to have you amongst my contributors, and think your subject [part of letter missing] any little anecdotes you can give about the love of children for flowers, or the ignorance they have of a flower’s life and nature, would [rest of letter cut away with signature].Oscar Wilde to Phoebe Allen, [?Jun.–Jul. 1887], in Holland, M. & Hart-Davis, R. (eds) (2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Fourth Estate, 305
The second letter begins:
Dear Miss Allen,
I am so glad you like the story of the Arab: when you receive your proof you can easily put it in somewhere, but of course my name must not be mentioned. I don’t think it would do.
I quite agree with you that poor chiidren wonder at flowers more than the children of the rich, but our poor little Arabs know very little about the country.Oscar Wilde to Phoebe Allen, [?Jun.–Jul. 1887], in Holland, M. & Hart-Davis, R. (eds) (2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Fourth Estate, 306
What seems clear is that Wilde, in the missing part of his first letter, had told Allen an anecdote about a poor street child, whom he refers to using what was then the common term ‘[street] Arab’. Possibly, given what Wilde says in his second letter, this anecdote was about a child wondering at flowers.
Fortunately, we don’t have to guess at what this anecdote must have been, because it was one of Wilde’s favourites. Here is the version he told to the Tribune interviewer in September 1882:
The best thing that has been said about flowers I believe since Christ talked about the lilies, was said to me by a child in the streets of London. I was going along with a whole armful of flowers, when a street Arab playing in the gutter looked up and exclaimed in astonishment: ‘Lord! how rich you must be.’
Wilde also told the anecdote to his friends John Ruskin and Charles Ricketts,Ricketts, C. (1932) Recollections of Oscar Wilde, Nonesuch, 29 and to the editor of the Philadephia magazine Quiz.[Florence Duncan], ‘Some More’, Quiz (Philadelphia, PA), 1 Feb. 1882, 4, in Marland, R. (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Little Eye, I, 85–7 (view source) He used it in Vera, in the same scene as the line about robins.Marland, R. (ed.) (2026) Vera; or, The Nihilists: A Critical Edition of Oscar Wilde’s First Play, Little Eye, 175.33–8
Wilde is the only source I can find for this story. Although another source may be found in the future, at present the story appears to be based on something that happened to Wilde. But this is not the case for another anecdote that Wilde told Allen.
‘Apples that grow in barrels’
Children in an apple tree. Image: Kate Greenaway’s Marigold Garden: Pictures and Rhymes (c. 1885).
In his second letter to Allen, Wilde wrote:
I remember one of them [a poor child], on the occasion of a first visit to the country, scrambling out of an orchard and saying very [part of letter missing] ‘like them that grows in barrels best!’ The fruiterer’s shop was clearly his only previous experience of nature.
This letter, like the first, is damaged. But we are able to get the gist. A child from the city has visited the country, sampled an apple plucked from a tree, and found its flavour wanting compared to those to be purchased from a city greengrocer, where stock was displayed in barrels.
Wilde represents the apple anecdote to Allen as if it were something that he had personally witnessed. But I was suspicious. It sounds like a comment that could have been made by a Fresh Air Fund child.
I searched the Tribune and, sure enough, found the following in a 16 July 1882 article about Fresh Air Fund children journeying by train to the countryside:
There was one boy, of about ten, [who] sat in a pensive mood most of the way, but as he reached his journey’s end suddenly looked up and said:
‘Say, mister, will we see apples on trees?’
‘Ho! of course you will,’ said his companion, with a tone of conscious superiority.
‘But I don’t like them,’ added he; ‘I ate some when Mr. Parsons took me to the country last summer, and they were sour. Apples that grow in barrels are best.’‘Breezes from the Sound’, New-York Tribune (New York, NY), 16 Jul. 1882, 7 (view source)
This article was published the day after Wilde lectured in the swanky resort town of Newport. Wilde must have picked up a copy of the paper at the resort – the major New York dailies would have been delivered to the resort so that wealthy vacationers could keep up with news from the metropolis.
Wilde always enjoyed the inadvertantly amusing sayings of children. He wrote an 1887 review of an article by American humorist Mark Twain about malapropisms made by schoolchildren, and considered one child’s definition of ‘plagiarist’ as ‘a writer of plays’ to be ‘the most brilliant thing that has been said on modern literature for some time’. He was also delighted by the directness and simplicity of such adages as ‘There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens’ and ‘The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure domestic hostility’.‘The Child Philosopher’, Court and Society Review (London, UK), 20 Apr. 1887, 379–80, in Guy, J. (ed.) (2007) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 4: Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, Oxford University Press, No. 64, ll. 17, 27–8, 32, 36 Wilde scholar Rodney Shewan finds in Wilde’s review the precursors of the comic child-sages of Wilde’s fairy stories, such as the charity children in ‘The Happy Prince’ and the miller’s son in ‘The Devoted Friend’.Shewan, R. (1977) Oscar Wilde: Art & Egotism, Macmillan, 38–9 But Wilde’s interest in the sayings of the Fresh Air Fund children precedes his fairy stories and the Mark Twain review.
If you enjoyed this article, please see my earlier article about a joke Wilde stole for use in his lecture ‘Personal Impressions of America’.