The epistle is subtitled "Till kära mor på Bruna Dörren" ("To dear mother at The Brown Door [Tavern]"); its themes are drinking and death.

One of his best-known works, it is set to a tune extensively modified from one by Egidio Duni for Louis Anseaume's 1766 song-play La Clochette.

[5] The epistles, written and performed in different styles, from drinking songs and laments to pastorales, paint a complex picture of the life of the city during the 18th century.

A frequent theme is the demimonde, with Fredman's cheerfully drunk Order of Bacchus,[6] a loose company of ragged men who favour strong drink and prostitutes.

At the same time as depicting this realist side of life, Bellman creates a rococo picture, full of classical allusion, following the French post-Baroque poets.

The women, including the beautiful Ulla Winblad, are "nymphs", while Neptune's festive troop of followers and sea-creatures sport in Stockholm's waters.

[13] Massengale analyses the elaborate changes that Bellman made to the Anseaume-Duni melody, including splitting the music for Colinette's part of the song and placing it at the start and end of the epistle, certainly in his view a conscious reworking.

:||: Dubbelt Öl ger godt humör; Enkelt Öl jag aldrig smakar; Bränvins ångst mit hjerta skakar, Och jag står vid grafvens brädd Som en Bacchi hjelte klädd, Men föragtad och försmädd, För min egen skugga rädd.

The Bellman scholar Lars Lönnroth writes that this was the sixth epistle to be written, but that unlike the earlier five, the mood is not continuously cheerful, and Fredman does not appear as a letter-writing apostle: instead, he plays the role of a desperate confessor in front of a housewife at the tavern.

[17] The scholar of Swedish literature, Carina Burman, writes in her biography of Bellman that Fredman's world has two sides: one is drunkenness, dance, and love; the other is angst, hangovers, and a longing for death.

The epistle, she writes, sees Fredman speculating about the world after his death, when he has been "embalmed by Bacchus", but even as a dead man he cannot imagine leaving his tavern, asking that when his ghost returns to the Bruna Dörren, the barmaids are not to be mean with his drink.

In addition, Bellman was able to use what his audience knew to be borrowed music to reinforce the historical flavour of the epistles, introducing exactly the kind of ambiguity that he was seeking.