The Remarkable Rocket
fable by Oscar Wilde
"The Remarkable Rocket" is a short fairytale, first published in 1888 in The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of five fairytales written by Oscar Wilde.
"The Remarkable Rocket" is a parody of aristocratic vanity and masculine conceit.
Although the story is written in simple language, the humour is directed at adults.
Plot summary
A wealthy prince and a beautiful Russian princess, who are meant to marry, meet for the first time and fall madly in love with each other. Their wedding is to be a huge celebration for the entire realm, with all sorts of entertainment, including fireworks as a grand finale at midnight. The princess has never seen fireworks, so the king and the prince are eager for her to see them. These fireworks have the ability to speak and they talk amongst themselves before they are launched by the pyrotechnic.
Among the fireworks is a Rocket, who is arrogant, pompous and condescending. When he brags about his heritage, the others call him insensitive, and he takes great offence. To prove his sensitivity, the Remarkable Rocket bursts into tears before he is lit, and is too damp to catch fire.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Remarkable Rocket” as fable by Oscar Wilde. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as fable by Oscar Wilde. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3795454. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1888.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Remarkable Rocket” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.