I am a big fan of Oscar Wilde, but I confess that The Canterville Ghost is my least favourite of his works. I still enjoy it but find that it has dated more than his plays and poetry, possibly precisely because it is prose. While I know that it is - as most of Wilde's work - a satire, I still find it suffers from the rather heavy handed sentimentality that marks so much Victorian fiction. While this is also apparent in some of Wilde's fairy tales, it seems to fit somewhat less comfortably in the real world setting (albeit a real world that contains a ghost), and this somewhat blunts the wit and satire, for my taste at any rate.