Themes
Art apart from ethics
The letters open with the claim that 'The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate', and every later letter returns to it. An artist 'has no ethical sympathies at all', Wilde tells the Scots Observer: virtue and wickedness are to him what colours are to a painter, and Shakespeare took as much delight in Iago as in Imogen. The critic's cardinal sin is to confuse the artist with his subject-matter, and Wilde treats a review that does so as a failure of criticism rather than a moral judgement.
The moral he did not want
Wilde's sharpest turn is to admit that the book has a moral after all: 'All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.' He traces it through Basil, Dorian and Lord Henry, then calls it 'the only error in the book.' To the Daily Chronicle he explains that the difficulty was keeping the moral subordinate to the art, so that it works only in the lives of the characters and never becomes the object of the work. He hopes to make it less apparent in the book edition.
Censorship and the rights of literature
The St. James's Gazette's hint that the book might be proceeded against provokes Wilde's most serious letter. He protests against 'the monstrous theory' that a Government should censor imaginative literature, and says no writer should ever sanction it. 'It is proper that limitation should be placed on action. It is not proper that limitation should be placed on art.' When the editor asks what rights literature has, he answers that they are the rights of intellect, and that a work of art is not a form of action but thought.
The mirror of the reader
Wilde claims that the book gives each reader back to himself. Dorian's sins are deliberately left vague: 'What Dorian Gray's sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.' In the letter on art and morality he lists how each paper read it, the literary Speaker as fascinating art, the Christian papers as a parable, the Gazette as something dreadful, and concludes: 'It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.'
Contempt for the press
Wilde fights the papers with their own weapon, the public letter, while mocking the trade. Throwing a book in the fire is 'what one does with newspapers'; 'novelette' is 'the slang of Fleet Street'; writing to newspapers 'has a deteriorating influence on style.' He claims to have thrown two hundred and thirteen reviews into the wastepaper basket unanswered, and his last letter turns the whole controversy into a comedy, with the Scots Observer's correspondents recast as the editor's puppets.