The Model Millionaire by Oscar Wilde
Quick answer: The Model Millionaire by Oscar Wilde: short summary with the ending, Hughie Erskine and Baron Hausberg explained, plus the craft behind Wilde's kindest twist.
A penniless young man visits his painter friend's studio, sees a wretched old beggar posing for a portrait, and quietly slips him the only sovereign he has, money he genuinely cannot spare. The beggar is one of the richest men in Europe. The Model Millionaire first appeared in The World in 1887 and was collected in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories in 1891.
At barely 2,000 words it is Wilde's lightest story, a comic anecdote with a golden heart, and it turns on a single reversal that O. Henry would spend a career industrialising two decades later. Students need its irony and its epigrams; writers should study how much charm per square inch a story can carry when it refuses to overstay.
The story in brief
Hughie Erskine is delightful, handsome, universally liked and entirely without money or the talent for making it; Wilde opens by observing, with affectionate cruelty, that unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Hughie loves Laura Merton and Laura loves him, but her father, a retired Colonel, has ruled that no engagement is possible until Hughie has ten thousand pounds of his own, a sum about as reachable for Hughie as the moon. One morning he calls on his friend Alan Trevor, a successful painter, and finds him at work on a life-sized portrait of a beggar: a pitiable old man in torn, patched rags, holding out a battered hat. Hughie, learning that the model is paid a shilling an hour while the painter will get two thousand guineas for the picture, feels the injustice of it, and when Trevor steps out, he crosses the studio and presses his last sovereign into the old man's hand. The beggar smiles and thanks him.
That evening Trevor tells Hughie the truth, with great enjoyment: the old model is Baron Hausberg, one of the richest men in Europe, who commissioned his own portrait in beggar's rags. Hughie is mortified at having given a millionaire a sovereign he needed himself, and goes home certain he has made a fool of himself. Next morning an elderly gentleman from the Baron arrives, and Hughie braces for embarrassment. Instead he is handed an envelope inscribed as a wedding present to Hugh Erskine and Laura Merton from an old beggar, and inside is a cheque for ten thousand pounds. The marriage follows; the Baron makes a speech at the wedding breakfast; and Trevor delivers the story's closing epigram, that millionaire models are rare enough, but model millionaires are rarer still.
The characters
Four figures, each given exactly as much depth as a fable of this weight can bear.
Themes and meaning
The set readings: generosity rewarded, appearances deceiving, and the difference between having money and deserving it. The title carries the whole argument in a pun: Hausberg has been a millionaire posing as a model, and becomes a model millionaire, an exemplary one, by answering kindness with magnificence. There is also Wilde's gentle economics: Hughie's sovereign, measured as a fraction of what he owns, is the largest gift in the story, and the ten thousand pounds merely repays it at the correct rate of exchange.
The sharper point is that the story tests Hughie when he believes nothing is at stake. He is not performing virtue for Laura, the Colonel or the reader; he thinks he is giving a shilling-an-hour model a private break. Wilde, so often the laureate of performance, here builds his plot on the one act in his fiction that is emphatically not a performance, and rewards it precisely because it had no audience. That inversion, from the author of The Remarkable Rocket, is the story's quiet joke on himself.
The craft: the anecdote perfected
Structurally this is a single-reversal story, and Wilde's discipline is in what he leaves out. There is no subplot, no second complication, no scene that does not either establish the need for ten thousand pounds, stage the sovereign, or pay it off. The misdirection is honest: the reader is told the model earns a shilling an hour, shown the torn cloak, and allowed to make the same assumption Hughie makes. When the reveal comes, every earlier detail re-reads correctly, which is the entire contract of twist fiction, honoured in miniature.
The other lesson is tonal: Wilde narrates charity in the voice of comedy. The opening epigrams about romance being the privilege of the rich set a cynical key, so the story's kindness arrives as a surprise inside its own wit, never as sentiment. If your generous endings taste of syrup, study how a dry narrator makes sweetness land; the same twist discipline and clean setup are what strong Structure marks reward when Writory's monthly Short Story Contest judges a reversal like this one.
Lines that carry it
Trevor's verdict, "Millionaire models are rare enough, but model millionaires are rarer still," is the rare closing epigram that is also the story's thesis, its title and its plot summary in eleven words. And the envelope's inscription, a wedding present from an old beggar, shows Wilde's tact: the Baron keeps the fiction of his rags one sentence longer, so the gift arrives as wit rather than charity.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, explain the title's double meaning: the millionaire who works as a model becomes a model, meaning exemplary, millionaire.
- Name the irony precisely: Hughie's most foolish-seeming act, giving away money he needs to a man who needs nothing, is what earns him everything.
- Note the proportion argument: the sovereign is a greater gift than the cheque, measured against what each giver possesses.
- As a writer, make your twist's misdirection honest; every detail before the reveal must survive a second reading.
- Cut anything that does not set up, stage or pay off your single reversal; this story is a lesson in leaving things out.
- Set a warm ending in a dry narrative voice, and let the wit protect the sweetness from sentimentality.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a small act of generosity is performed by someone who believes no one important is watching, toward someone who needs nothing, and let the gift return transformed. Keep it under 2,000 words and allow yourself exactly one reversal.
Questions
What happens at the end of The Model Millionaire?
Baron Hausberg, the millionaire Hughie mistook for a beggar and tipped with his last sovereign, sends him a wedding present: a cheque for ten thousand pounds, exactly the sum Laura's father demanded. Hughie and Laura marry, and Trevor closes the story by remarking that model millionaires are rarer than millionaire models.
What is the irony in The Model Millionaire?
Hughie gives money he cannot afford to a man who turns out to be one of the richest in Europe, seemingly a wasted kindness. The irony resolves generously: the pointless gift is the only investment that could have produced the fortune he needed, and the beggar he pitied becomes his benefactor.
What does the title The Model Millionaire mean?
It is a pun. Baron Hausberg is literally a millionaire working as an artist's model, and by rewarding Hughie's kindness with ten thousand pounds he proves himself a model millionaire in the other sense: an example of how a rich man ought to behave.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.