Description

An intriguing ephemeral pamphlet is the first publication of Oscar Wilde’s short stories The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant in original language in Turkey. The text, accompanied with the Ottoman-French dictionary were published for the English-learning pupils of the Galatasaray Lycée by professor H. M. Thompson. Not much is known about Thompson, except that he was years before employed as a professor of English in the Don University, in Rostov-on-Don in Russia.

In the introduction Thompson praises the interests of the Turks in English language, which developed in the previous years. This pamphlet was published as the first in a series of similar stories, yet it is not sure, if further issues were ever published.

With the following year, the official alphabet in Turkey changed from Ottoman to Latin and such publications could not be used anymore for schooling purposes.

The story The Happy Prince was entirely translated to Ottoman in the following year by Salih Zeki Aktay under the title Bahtiyar Prens.

The pamphlet is very rare. We could not trace any other examples nor any other issues from this series.