Short Stories About Kindness: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about kindness, from The Happy Prince and Where Love Is, God Is to A Cup of Tea and The Rattrap, summarised and compared for readers and writers.
Kindness is hard to write because it has no conflict in it, and the writers here solved that by asking what kindness costs, who it is really for, and whether the recipient wanted it. Readers come to these stories for reassurance and leave with something more useful.
The collection starts with the fables, moves through Tolstoy's parables, and ends with the sharper modern cases where a kind act reveals the giver. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. A gilded statue above a city asks a swallow to carry his jewels and gold leaf to the poor, one piece at a time, until winter comes and the bird is too weak to leave. The town councillors then decide the statue is shabby.
The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde. A giant walls his garden against children and finds that spring will not come inside it. One small boy who cannot reach a branch changes his mind, and years later the boy returns with marks on his hands.
Where Love Is, God Is by Leo Tolstoy. Martin the cobbler, grieving his son, hears a voice promise to visit him the next day and spends it watching the street. He gives tea to a sweeper, feeds a woman with a baby, and settles a quarrel over a stolen apple.
What Men Live By by Leo Tolstoy. Simon the shoemaker finds a naked stranger by a wayside shrine and brings him home, over his wife's objections. The stranger works for him six years and smiles three times, each time for a reason.
A Cup of Tea by Katherine Mansfield. Rosemary Fell, rich and pleased with herself, takes a hungry girl home from a Regent Street pavement to see what will happen. What happens is that her husband calls the girl pretty.
Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen by O. Henry. Every year an old gentleman finds Stuffy Pete on a bench in Union Square and buys him a dinner he can barely eat. This year Stuffy has already been fed once, and cannot say so.
An Angel in Disguise by T. S. Arthur. When a drunken woman dies, the village divides her healthy children among willing homes and leaves the crippled girl Maggie behind. Joe Thompson carries her home to a wife who wants no child in the house.
The Rattrap by Selma Lagerlof. A thieving pedlar is mistaken for an old comrade by an ironmaster and brought home for Christmas, and the daughter Edla insists he stay even after the mistake is found out. He leaves her a rattrap and something inside it.
The Beggar by Anton Chekhov. A lawyer catches a beggar lying about his past and, to reform him, sets him to chop wood for a few kopecks. Years later the man explains who actually chopped the wood and why he changed.
Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore. Rahmun the fruit seller stops each day to talk with a five-year-old girl who once feared him, and her father tolerates it with amusement. Years later, on her wedding day, the father gives him money he had set aside for the lights.
Reading them together
The collection's argument is that kindness is proved by what the giver does not get back. The swallow gets no spring; Martin gets no visitor he can recognise; Edla gets a rattrap. Where the giver does get something, Rosemary's flattering self-image, the old gentleman's yearly ritual, the story turns on the moment that reward is threatened, and kindness has to survive being embarrassed.
Chekhov's The Beggar and Tagore's Kabuliwala are the two where the kind act is done by someone other than the person who thinks they did it, and both are the better for the correction.
If you want to write about kindness
What writers can take from this
- Read the two Wilde fables first; they set up every question the harder stories ask.
- Pair A Cup of Tea with The Rattrap: both are about a rich person taking in a stranger, with opposite results.
- Tolstoy's two parables are best read aloud, one per evening.
- In The Beggar, watch for the cook Olga; she is on the page far less than she matters.
- Kabuliwala rewards attention to the father, who is the narrator and not the hero.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character performs an act of kindness expecting a specific reward, does not get it, and has to decide whether the act still counts.
Questions
What is the best short story about kindness?
The Happy Prince is the most loved, and Where Love Is, God Is the most quoted. A Cup of Tea is the one that most complicates the theme.
Which short stories about kindness are good for students?
The Selfish Giant, The Happy Prince, An Angel in Disguise and Kabuliwala are short, clear and much taught. The Beggar and The Rattrap work well for discussing whether motives matter.
Which classic story about kindness is the shortest?
The Selfish Giant, at about fifteen hundred words. An Angel in Disguise and The Beggar are each around two thousand.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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