The work was originally passed off as an authentic work by a Persian imam named Horam translated into English by "Sir Charles Morell, formerly ambassador from the British Settlements in India to the Great Mogul" and published by an anonymous "editor."

Further editions appeared in 1780, 1794, 1800, 1805, 1814, 1849, and 1861, the last two selected, revised, "purified and remodelled" by Archbishop Whately "with a view of developing a religious moral."

Thomas Seccombe calls "the stories ... good in themselves; they are interspersed with some satire upon the professions of so-called Christians; and, for the rest, are skilfully modelled upon the 'Arabian Nights'.

"[1] John Beer, in the introduction to the 1975 Everyman edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Poems (p. vi), notes the influence of several of Ridley's tales on Kubla Khan.

John Martin's painting Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (1812) is based on the eighth tale.