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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Model Millionaire, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Appearance vs. Reality
Artists and Society
Generosity and Compassion
Summary
Analysis
Hughie Erskine never learned that romance and charm are privileges of the rich. He has both romance and charm, but he lacks the money to back them up. Handsome, kind, and universally well-liked, he’s nevertheless intellectually undistinguished and hopeless at business. He has tried and failed several careers and is seemingly too gentle for the working world.
The story explicitly frames Hughie as a misfit in the unsentimental world of 1880s London. This society esteems the most superficial things in life—wealth and physical attractiveness. Being handsome but poor, Hughie lacks a clear place in this social structure. Paradoxically, his kindness and dreamy personality make him socially popular while ensuring that he will never get ahead in the cutthroat business world (and thus acquire the wealth that is necessary in this society to really enjoy romance). Hughie is stuck in an unfortunate position, but it’s unclear at this point whether his sentimental demeanor indicates his genuine bigheartedness or just lazy mediocrity in a handsome package.
Themes
Hughie loves Laura Merton, the daughter of a Colonel who admires Hughie but forbids their marriage until Hughie can come up with 10,000 pounds—a hopeless prospect for an unemployed person like Hughie.
The Colonel embodies this society’s contradictory set of values: he admires Hughie, presumably, for his looks and his gentleness, but he dismisses him for his poverty. As the enforcer of social expectations about wealth, the Colonel stands in the way of Hughie’s romantic fulfillment.
Themes
Hughie goes to visit his friend Alan Trevor, an eccentric but brilliant painter who was drawn to Hughie’s charm at first but then, later, to his “generous, reckless nature.” While rather odd-looking himself, Alan nonetheless declares that “men who are dandies and women who are darlings” should run the world.
Alan appears to exemplify this society’s superficial glorification of good looks. He proclaims that “dandies”—a common term at the time used to refer to men who prioritized their own appearance—and beautiful, vapid “darlings” should hold all the power. And yet, Alan himself is unattractive, and his social status rests not on looks but on his mastery of painting. The story thus probes how the rules of social hierarchy apply to artists—if at all. It also invites readers not to take Alan at his word, foreshadowing later revelations that things are not what they appear. Alan’s own fondness for Hughie likewise displays emphasizes the story’s juxtaposition between the superficial and the truly meaningful, as he fixated first on Hughie’s looks but eventually on his “generous” nature—the story’s first sign that Hughie’s goodness is deep and substantial, distinct from his superficial charm.
Themes
Today, the model sitting for Alan’s painting is an old beggar in rags. Alan is enthralled with the man’s expressive features and the artistic use he can make of them. Hughie expresses pity for the man and criticizes Alan for taking a high payout for his work while his model gets almost nothing. Alan lightheartedly counters that painting is hard work.
In this scene, the story reveals the depths of Hughie’s compassion by pitting it against Alan’s apparent callousness. Alan seems to believe that the beggar’s suffering is just artistic raw material for him, whereas Hughie can’t help but get drawn into the reality of that suffering. However, the flippancy with which Alan counters Hughie’s serious criticisms again suggests that he may be withholding something.
Themes
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When Alan steps out for a moment, Hughie is overcome with pity and gives the “forlorn” beggar his last sovereign, a donation he can hardly afford. The beggar thanks him deeply. Hughie then leaves to see Laura, who gently chides his generosity.
Here, Hughie proves that his kindness is more than just a cover for laziness: generosity lies deep in his core. His character is as pure as the sovereign (a coin of pure gold worth a pound) that he gives to the beggar. The story makes clear that there’s nothing showy or insincere about Hughie’s gift, since he’s alone with the beggar and there’s no one around to impress—or so it seems.
Themes
Later that night, Hughie walks into a club and sees Alan. Alan informs him that the model asked all about Hughie after he left. Hughie again expresses pity for the man, and Alan counters with an artist’s perspective: “‘What you call rags I call romance.’” Hughie calls painters “a heartless lot.”
From the beginning, the story has emphatically portrayed Hughie as a romantic. Yet, where Alan sees an artistic romance in the beggar, Hughie sees only misery. Alan doubles down on his denial that artists have any responsibility toward the world beyond turning it into art. This scene again seems to suggest that artists stand outside of the normal social structure: rough-edged and even “heartless,” the unromantic Alan nevertheless claims to see romance in societal misery, implicitly because it doesn’t affect him. An actual romantic like Hughie cannot romanticize poverty, on the other hand, since he experiences a version of it himself.
Themes
Alan says that he told the model all about Hughie’s romantic and financial woes. A shocked Hughie feels violated until Alan reveals that the model is no beggar but is, in fact, Baron Hausberg, one of the richest men in Europe. Hughie is now even more embarrassed, revealing to Alan that he foolishly gave the Baron a sovereign. Alan laughs hysterically at Hughie’s mistake, while half-jokingly ensuring him that it reflects highly on his “philanthropic spirit.”
Alan’s revelation pulls the rug out from beneath his whole exchange with Hughie. His cynical opinions take on a whole new and more playful light in retrospect, but he doesn’t retract them. Rather, the story leaves readers with a sense of ambiguity regarding Alan’s comments and behavior. The fact that he knowingly painted the Baron in disguise undermines his claim to merely take the world as it is and make art from it. Just as he deceives his future audience with the painting, he has deceived Hughie in conversation up to this point, and the beggar himself turns out to embody the untrustworthiness of appearances. Yet in this cascade of deceptions, Hughie’s “philanthropic spirit” remains as simple and pure as the sovereign that symbolized it, despite his present embarrassment.
Themes
The next morning, a messenger on behalf of Baron Hausberg arrives at Hughie’s house. Hughie immediately starts apologizing for presumably insulting the Baron, but the messenger interrupts to hand him a letter. It reads: “A wedding present to Hugh Erskine and Laura Merton, from an old beggar,” and it contains a check for 10,000 pounds.
Hughie’s kindness extends even to the point of feeling that he owes an apology to the millionaire who took his last coin. In this final twist, the story shows how that unblemished goodness of heart ultimately rescues Hughie from the very difficulties which up until now it had created for him. His generosity disqualified him from the working world and finally cost him his last coin, but that final act reverses everything for him and realizes his dreams. If he had been anything less than good to the core, he would likely have succumbed to bitterness before ever meeting the disguised Baron.
Themes
Hughie and Laura get married. Alan is the best man, and the Baron gives a speech. Alan declares that “millionaire models” are quite rare, but that “model millionaires are rarer still!”
Wilde plays on two related meanings of “model” here: as someone who poses for an artist, and as someone whose behavior is exemplary (after whom others may “model” their own lives). The Baron’s disguise turns out to have been twofold: not only was he not a beggar, but also, he lacked any of the expected greed or pretensions of a millionaire. In fact, he has as much of a “generous, reckless nature” as Hughie.
Themes
