These tales contain many of the elements of traditional folktales: the triumph of good over evil, the creation of a fantasy world, and the use of the supernatural.
However, these stories address human vice, such as insensitivity, egoism, greed and vanity, they also portray the opposite: the virtues of compassion, generosity, and love.
They were meant, as Wilde himself noted, partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness.
