The Rose and the Ring

A fairy godmother gives two royal children the worst gift she can think of — a little misfortune — and the crowns of Paflagonia and Crim Tartary change heads three times before the accounts are settled. Thackeray drew the pictures first, at Rome in the winter of 1854, for a Twelfth Night party of English children, and wrote the story to fit them. It is the funniest attack on royal pretension in Victorian children's writing, and the ring and the rose only make people look beautiful, never good.