Original Stories from Real Life - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness is the only complete work of children's literature

Children's literature

Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...

by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

. Original Stories begins with a frame story

Frame story

A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...

, which sketches out the education of two young girls by their maternal teacher Mrs. Mason, followed by a series of didactic

Didacticism

Didacticism is an artistic philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art. The term has its origin in the Ancient Greek word διδακτικός , "related to education/teaching." Originally, signifying learning in a fascinating and intriguing...

tales. The book was first published by Joseph Johnson

Joseph Johnson (publisher)

Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues...

in 1788

1788 in literature

-Events:*Ann Ward marries William Radcliffe, gaining the surname under which she will become known as a writer of Gothic novels.*Joseph Johnson and Thomas Christie found the Analytical Review.-New books:...

; a second, illustrated edition, with engravings by William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

, was released in 1791 and remained in print for around a quarter of a century.

In Original Stories Wollstonecraft employed the then burgeoning genre of children's literature to promote the education of women and an emerging middle-class ideology. She argued that women would be able to become rational adults if they were educated properly as children, which was not a widely held belief in the 18th century, and contended that the nascent middle-class ethos was superior to the court culture represented by fairy tales and to the values of chance and luck found in chapbook

Chapbook

A chapbook is a pocket-sized booklet. The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera , popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales,...

stories for the poor. Wollstonecraft, in developing her own pedagogy, also responded to the works of the two most important educational theorists of the 18th century: John Locke

John Locke

John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...

and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...

Historical and biographical context

Wollstonecraft's oeuvre shows "a keen and vital concern with education, especially the education of girls and women". One year before she published Original Stories, she wrote a conduct book

Conduct book

Conduct books are a genre of books that attempt to educate the reader on social norms. As a genre, they began in the mid-to-late Middle Ages, although antecedents such as The Maxims of Ptahhotep are among the earliest surviving works...

(a popular 18th-century genre, akin to the modern self-help book) entitled Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is the first published work of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Published in 1787 by her friend Joseph Johnson, Thoughts is a conduct book that offers advice on female education...

(1787) which describes how to raise the ideal middle-class woman. In 1789, she assembled The Female Speaker, a text meant to edify the minds of young women by exposing them to literature; she modelled it after William Enfield's

William Enfield

William Enfield was a British Unitarian minister who published a bestselling book on elocution entitled The Speaker .-Life:...

anthology The Speaker which was designed specifically for men. Just one year later, she translated Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's

Christian Gotthilf Salzmann

Christian Gotthilf Salzmann was the founder of the Schnepfenthal institution, a school dedicated to new modes of education...

Elements of Morality, a popular German pedagogical text. Wollstonecraft continued writing on educational issues in her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects , written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th...

(1792), which is largely a defence of female education. She also devotes an entire chapter to outlining a national education plan—she envisioned a half-public, half-private, co-educational system. She also directly challenged Rousseau's

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and children's author.A "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when female professional writers were rare...

Lessons for Children
Lessons for Children
Lessons for Children is a series of four age-adapted reading primers written by the prominent 18th-century British poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Published in 1778 and 1779, the books initiated a revolution in children's literature in the Anglo-American world...

(1778–79).

Wollstonecraft was not alone in focusing her revolutionary writings on education; as Alan Richardson, a scholar of the period, points out, "most liberal and radical intellectuals of the time viewed education as the cornerstone of any movement for social reform". One reason these thinkers emphasized the training of the young mind was the pervasive acceptance during the 18th century of Locke's

John Locke

theory of mind

Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...

. He posited that the mind is a "blank slate" or tabula rasa
Tabula rasa
Tabula rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects...

, free from innate ideas, and that because children enter the world without preconceived notions; whatever ideas they absorb early in life will fundamentally affect their later development. Locke explained this process through a theory he labelled the association of ideas
Association of Ideas
Association of Ideas, or Mental association, is a term used principally in the history of philosophy and of psychology to refer to explanations about the conditions under which representations arise in consciousness, and also for a principle put forward by an important historical school of thinkers...

; the ideas that children connect, such as fear and darkness, are stronger than those ideas adults associate, therefore instructors, according to Locke, must carefully consider what they expose children to early in life.

Plot summary

Modelled on Madame de Genlis's Adèle et Théodore (1782) and Tales of the Castle (1785), both of which have frame stories and a series of inset moral tales, Original Stories narrates the re-education of two young girls, fourteen-year-old Mary and twelve-year-old Caroline, by a wise and benevolent maternal figure, Mrs. Mason. (Wollstonecraft probably named these characters after people in her own life. She became acquainted with a Miss Mason while teaching in Newington Green

Newington Green

Newington Green is an open space in north London which straddles the border between Islington and Hackney. It gives its name to the surrounding area, roughly bounded by Ball's Pond Road to the south, Petherton Road to the west, the southern section of Stoke Newington with Green Lanes-Matthias Road...

, whom she greatly respected, and she taught two girls named Mary and Caroline while she was a governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

. Margaret King

Margaret King

Margaret King was an Irish hostess, writer, traveller, and medical adviser. Despite her wealthy aristocratic background, she had republican sympathies, shaped in part by having been a favoured pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft...

, who was greatly affected by her governess, saying she "had freed her mind from all superstitions, later adopted "Mrs Mason" as a pseudonym.) After the death of their mother, the girls are sent to live with Mrs. Mason in the country. They are full of faults, such as greediness and vanity, and Mrs. Mason, through stories, real-world demonstrations, and her own example, cures the girls of most of their moral failings and imbues them with a desire to be virtuous.

Mrs. Mason's amalgam of tales and teaching excursions dominates the text; although the text emphasizes the girls' moral progress, the reader learns very little about the girls themselves. The work consists largely of personal histories of people known to Mrs. Mason and of moral tales for the edification of Mary and Caroline and the reader. For example, "The History of Charles Townley" illustrates the fatal consequences of procrastination. Mrs. Mason takes the girls to Charles Townley's ruined mansion to tell them the cautionary tale

Cautionary tale

A cautionary tale is a tale told in folklore, to warn its hearer of a danger. There are three essential parts to a cautionary tale, though they can be introduced in a large variety of ways. First, a taboo or prohibition is stated: some act, location, or thing is said to be dangerous. Then, the...

of a “boy of uncommon abilities, and strong feelings"; unfortunately, "he ever permitted those feelings to direct his conduct, without submitting to the direction of reason; I mean, the present emotion governed him ... He always indeed intended to act right in every particular to-morrow; but to-day [sic] he followed the prevailing whim" (emphasis Wollstonecraft's). Charles wants to help those in need, but he is easily distracted by novels and plays. He eventually loses all of his money but his one remaining friend helps him regain his fortune in India. Yet even when this friend needs assistance, Charles cannot act quickly enough and, tragically, his friend is imprisoned and dies and his friend's daughter is forced to marry a rake

Rake (character)

A rake, short for rakehell, is a historic term applied to a man who is habituated to immoral conduct, frequently a heartless womanizer. Often a rake was a man who wasted his fortune on gambling, wine, women and song, incurring lavish debts in the process...

. When Charles returns to England, he is overcome with guilt. He rescues the daughter from her unhappy marriage, but both she and he have gone slightly insane by the end of the story, she from her marriage and he from guilt.

Original Stories is primarily about leaving the imperfections of childhood behind and becoming a rational and charitable adult; it does not romanticize childhood as an innocent and ideal state of being. The inset stories themselves emphasize the balance of reason and emotion required for the girls to become mature, a theme that permeates Wollstonecraft's works, particularly A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects , written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th...

.

Literary analysis

Original Stories gained a reputation in the 20th century as an oppressively didactic book and was derided by early scholars of children’s literature such as Geoffrey Summerfield. Recent scholars, particularly Mitzi Myers, have reevaluated Wollstonecraft’s book and 18th-century children’s literature in general, assessing it within its historical context rather than judging it according to modern tastes. Myers suggests, in her series of seminal articles, that women writers of children’s literature such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe...

were not only using the genre of children’s literature to teach but also to promote visions of society distinct from those of the Romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

s. These authors believed that they could effect great change by exposing young children to their ideas of a better society, even though they were "only" writing stories about seemingly insignificant topics such as small animals or little girls. Myers argues that because scholars have traditionally paid more attention to Romantic poetry and prose (the works of William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....

and Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...

, for example) than to children’s literature, they have missed the social critique that these women writers of children’s literature were offering.

Pedagogical theory

The two most influential pedagogical works in 18th-century Europe were John Locke's

John Locke

Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Some Thoughts Concerning Education is a 1693 treatise on the education of gentlemen written by the English philosopher John Locke. For over a century, it was the most important philosophical work on education in England...

(1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Emile
Emile: Or, On Education
Émile, or On Education is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. Due to a section of the book entitled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” Émile was be...

. In Original Stories and her other works on education, Wollstonecraft responds to these two works and counters with her own pedagogical theory.

Wollstonecraft follows Locke in emphasizing the role of the senses in learning; for her, as Myers writes, "ideally, children should learn not from direct teaching but from living examples apprehended through the senses.” Wollstonecraft’s Mrs. Mason takes Mary and Caroline out into the world in order to instruct them—their very first lesson is a nature walk that teaches them not to torture but rather to respect animals as part of God's creation. Mrs. Mason uses the experiences of everyday life as a teaching tool because they are grounded in concrete realities and easily absorbed through the senses; she will seize on “a bad habit, a passerby, a visit, a natural scene, a holiday festivity” and then apply them to a moral lesson that she wants to inculcate into her pupils. Mrs. Mason also tells Mary and Caroline the unfortunate or tragic histories of people she has known, such as that of Jane Fretful, who died because of her bad behavior; Jane was an angry and selfish little girl and eventually her anger affected her health and killed her. Her misbehaviour "broke her mother's heart" and "hastened her death"; Jane's guilt over this event and:

her peevish temper, preyed on her impaired constitution. She had not, by doing good, prepared her soul for another state, or cherished any hopes that could disarm death of its terrors, or render that last sleep sweet—its approach was dreadful!—and she hastened her end, scolding the physician for not curing her. Her lifeless countenance displayed the marks of convulsive anger; and she left an ample fortune behind her to those who did not regret her loss. They followed her to the grave on which no one shed a tear. She was soon forgotten; and I [says Mrs. Mason] only remember her, to warn you to shun her errors.

Mrs. Mason also takes her charges to visit models of virtue, such as Mrs. Trueman who, though poor, still manages to be charitable and a comfort to her family. At the end of one visit, Mrs. Mason reminds the girls that Mrs. Trueman "loves truth, and she is ever exercising benevolence and love—from the insect, that she avoids treading on, her affection may be traced to that Being who lives for ever.—And it is from her goodness her agreeable qualities spring." Wollstonecraft also adheres to the Lockean conception of the mind as a “blank slate”: in Original Stories, Mrs. Mason describes her own mind using these same terms.

Wollstonecraft was not as receptive to Rousseau’s ideas as she was to Locke’s; she appropriated the aesthetic of the sublime

Sublime (philosophy)

In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic...

to challenge Rousseau's ideas regarding the education of women (discussed in more detail below). During the 18th century, “the sublime” was associated with awe, fear, strength and masculinity. As Myers writes, “to convey her message for female readers that achievement comes from within, Wollstonecraft substitutes the strength, force, and mental expansion associated with heroic sublime for the littleness, delicacy, and beauty that Rousseau and aestheticians such as Edmund Burke equate with womanhood". Unlike writers such as Rousseau and Burke

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....

, who portray women as innately weak and silly, Wollstonecraft argues that women can indeed achieve the intellectual heights associated with the sublime.

Although Wollstonecraft disagreed with much of Rousseau’s fundamental philosophy, she did agree with many of his educational methods, including his emphasis on teaching through example and experience rather than through precept. In this, she was following children’s writers such as Thomas Day

Thomas Day

Thomas Day was a British author and abolitionist. He was well-known for the children's book The History of Sandford and Merton which emphasized Rousseauvian educational ideals.-Life and works:...

who, in his popular The History of Sandford and Merton
The History of Sandford and Merton
The History of Sandford and Merton was a bestselling children's book written by Thomas Day. He began his book as a contribution to Richard Lovell and Honora Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy, a collection of short stories for children that Maria Edgeworth continued some years after Honora died...

(1783–89), also emphasized learning by experience rather than by rote and rules. Gary Kelly, in his book on Wollstonecraft's thought, explains how this idea and others important to Wollstonecraft are reflected in the title to her work—Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness:

The first part of the title indicates that the ‘stories’ are not merely fictitious but have a factual basis in domestic, quotidian life, though readers would understand ‘from real life’ to mean ‘based on’ or ‘adapted from real ‘life’, and not necessarily ‘representation of actual events’. The ‘stories’ are ‘original’ because narratives for children should start afresh in order to avoid continued ideological contamination from vulgar chapbooks or courtly ‘fairy tales’. The phrase ‘real life’ strengthens ‘original’, excluding both the artificial and the fictional or imaginary. ‘Conversations’ suggests familiar, familial discourse rather than formal moralizing. ‘Calculated’ suggests a programme rationally determined. These ‘conversations’ and ‘stories’ are also to construct the youthful self in a particular way, by regulating ‘the affections’ or emotional self and forming ‘the mind’ or rational and moral self ‘to truth and goodness’ – understood in terms of professional middle-class culture.

As Richardson explains, in Original Stories adulthood is defined by the ability to discipline oneself by “constructing moral tales” out of one’s life. Wollstonecraft's extensive use of inset tales encourages her readers to construct a moral narrative out of their own lives, with a predetermined ending. At the end of the book, Mary and Caroline no longer require a teacher because they have internalized the storylines which Mrs. Mason has taught them—they know the stories that they are supposed to enact.

Gender

As in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft does not highlight the differences between men and women as much as she emphasizes the importance of virtue in Original Stories. Moreover, she defines virtue in such a way that it applies to both sexes. Traditionally, as Kelly explains, virtue was tied to femininity and chastity, but Wollstonecraft’s text rejects this definition and argues instead that virtue should be characterized by reason and self-control. Myers has also pointed out that Mrs. Mason’s desire to instill rationality in her charges is potentially liberating for women readers and their daughters as such a pedagogy was in direct contrast to much that was being written at the time by conduct book

Conduct book

writers such as James Fordyce

James Fordyce

James Fordyce, DD , was a Scottish Presbyterian minister and poet. He is best known for his collection of sermons published in 1766 as Sermons for Young Women, popularly known as Fordyce's Sermons.-Early life:...

and John Gregory

John Gregory (moralist)

John Gregory , a.k.a. John Gregorie, was an eighteenth-century Scottish physician, medical writer and moralist....

and philosophers such as Rousseau, who asserted the intellectual weakness of women and the secondary status of their gender.

But it was against Rousseau's depiction of femininity and female education that Wollstonecraft was most vigorously reacting in Original Stories. Rousseau argued in Emile that women were naturally cunning and manipulative, but he viewed these traits positively:

[G]uile is a natural talent with the fair sex, and since I am persuaded that all the natural inclinations are good and right in themselves, I am of the opinion that this one should be cultivated like the others... This peculiar cleverness given to the fair sex is a very equitable compensation for their lesser share of strength, a compensation without which women would be not man’s companion but his slave. It is by means of this superiority in talent that she keeps herself his equal and that she governs him while obeying him... She has in her favor only her art and her beauty.

For Rousseau, women possessed "guile" and "beauty" that allowed them to control men while men possessed "strength" and "reason" that allowed them to control women. In contrast to Rousseau's presentation of Sophie, the fictional figure he employs in Book V of Emile to represent the ideal woman, who is enamoured of her own image in a mirror and who falls in love with a character in a novel, Wollstonecraft depicts Mrs. Mason as a rational and sincere teacher who attempts to pass those traits on to Mary and Caroline.

Class

Original Stories encourages its readers to develop what were at the time coming to be labelled middle-class values: industry, self-discipline, economy, and charity. As Andrew O’Malley points out in his analysis of 18th-century children’s books, “middle-class writers wanted children to associate happiness with morality and social utility instead” of “the trappings of wealth and status". The end of the 18th century saw the development of what is now referred to as the “middle-class ethos", and “children’s literature became one of the crucial mechanisms for disseminating and consolidating middle-class ideology” throughout British and American society. Works by children’s writers such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

, Ellenor Fenn

Ellenor Fenn

Ellenor Fenn was a prolific 18th-century writer of children's books.-Early life:Fenn was born on 12 March 1743/44 in Westhorpe, Suffolk to Sheppard and Susanna Frere. John Frere was her elder brother and John Hookham Frere her nephew. In 1766 she married the antiquarian John Fenn and moved with...

, Sarah Trimmer

Sarah Trimmer

Sarah Trimmer was a noted writer and critic of British children's literature in the eighteenth century...

, and Dorothy Kilner

Dorothy Kilner

Dorothy Kilner was a prolific English writer of children's books during the late 18th century.-Life:...

all embrace this ethos, although they differ radically in their opinions on other political issues, such as the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

.

One way that writers such as Wollstonecraft helped to shape the new genre of children's literature at the end of the 18th century was by attempting to remove its chapbook

Chapbook

and fairy tale

Fairy tale

A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...

associations and replace them with a middle-class ideology. Many of these writers considered chapbooks and fairy tales to be associated with the poor and the rich, respectively. As Kelly explains, “traditional chapbook literature embodies a lottery mentality of carpe diem, belief in fortune, wish for lucky gifts (such as great strength, cleverness or beauty), a view of time as cyclical or repetitive and an avid interest in predicting the future." In contrast, 18th-century children's literature "embodies an investment mentality. This meant saving for the future, ‘proper’ distribution of personal resources, avoiding extravagance, conceiving of time and one’s own life as cumulative and progressive, and valuing self-discipline and personal development for a better future under one’s own control.” Sarah Trimmer, for example, contends in her Guardian of Education
The Guardian of Education
The Guardian of Education was the first successful periodical dedicated to reviewing children's literature in Britain. It was edited by eighteenth-century educationalist, children's author, and Sunday school advocate Sarah Trimmer and was published from June 1802 until September 1806 by J. Hatchard...

, the first successful periodical dedicated to reviewing children’s books, that children should not read fairy tales precisely because they will lead to slothfulness and superstition.

Illustrations

William Blake

, who often did illustrative work for Wollstonecraft's publisher Joseph Johnson

Joseph Johnson (publisher)

Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues...

, was engaged to design and engrave six plates for the second edition of Original Stories. Blake scholars tend to read these plates as challenges to Wollstonecraft’s text. For example, Orm Mitchell, basing his interpretation on Blake's personal mythology

William Blake's mythology

The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake contain a rich invented mythology , in which Blake worked to encode his revolutionary spiritual and political ideas into a prophecy for a new age. This desire to recreate the cosmos is the heart of his work and his psychology...

(which is elaborated in his other works) argues that in the frontispiece to the work:

The two girls gaze out wistfully from beneath the outstretched arms of Mrs. Mason. The hats that the children wear are drawn in such a way that they form halos around their heads, a touch Blake also uses in Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of...

to indicate the innate and divine visionary capacity of the child (see for example “The Ecchoing Green” and “The Little [B]oy Found”). The children’s eyes are open – they are looking at what a fine morning it is and longing to take part in it. They cannot participate, however, for they are under the suffocating influence of Mrs. Mason. In contrast to the children’s halo-like hats Mrs. Mason wears a large cumbrous bonnet. Her eyes are downcast to such an extent that they appear to be shut. Blake often draws Urizen's
Urizen
In the complex mythology of William Blake, Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law. He is usually depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect's tools, to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares people in webs of law and conventional culture...

eyes in this way to signify the blindness of his rational and materialist ‘Single vision.’ See for example plates 1, 9 and 22 of The Book of Urizen
The Book of Urizen
The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English writer William Blake, illustrated by Blake's own plates. It was originally published as The First Book of Urizen in 1794. Later editions dropped the "First". The book takes its name from the character Urizen in Blake's mythology,...

and plate 11 of For Children: The Gates of Paradise where Urizenic 'Aged Ignorance,’ wearing large spectacles, blindly clips the wings of a child thus preventing its imaginative flight in the morning sunrise. Ironically then, Mrs. Mason is the only individual in the illustration who is not seeing what a fine morning it is. She looks down at the hard factual earth, ignoring the infinite and holy life around her. (emphasis Mitchell's)

Myers, in contrast, relying on a more traditional art historical

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

interpretation of the image, reads it more positively. She agrees that the children's hats resemble halos but she identifies Mrs. Mason's position as one of a "protective cruciform", evoking a "heroic, even Christlike ... female mentorial tradition". Myers views Mrs. Mason as a sacrificial hero rather than as an oppressive adult who cannot see the glories of nature.

Publication and reception history

Original Stories was first published anonymously in 1788, the same year as Wollstonecraft's first novel Mary: A Fiction
Mary: A Fiction
Mary: A Fiction is the only complete novel by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a heroine's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man...

, and cost two shilling

Shilling

The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive...

s. When the second edition came out in 1791, Wollstonecraft’s name was printed on the title page; after the 1790 publication of her Vindication of the Rights of Men, she had become well-known and her name would have boosted sales. Joseph Johnson

Joseph Johnson (publisher)

Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues...

, the publisher of Original Stories and all of Wollstonecraft's other works, commissioned William Blake

William Blake

to design six illustrations for the second edition, which cost two shillings and six pence. It is not entirely clear how long the book remained continuously in print. According to Gary Kelly, a prominent Wollstonecraft scholar, the last edition of Original Stories was published in 1820, but without Wollstonecraft’s name on the title page (by that time she had become a reviled figure in Britain because her husband William Godwin

William Godwin

William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...

had revealed her unorthodox lifestyle in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is William Godwin's biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ....

(1798)). According to Alan Richardson and the editors of the Masterworks of Children's Literature series, Original Stories was published until 1835. It was also printed in Dublin in 1791 and 1799 and translated into German in 1795.

By the time C. M. Hewins, a librarian for the Hartford Library Association who wrote children's books herself, wrote a "History of Children's Books" in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, Original Stories was more famous for its plates by Blake than it was for its text by Wollstonecraft. The bulk of the article's discussion is dedicated to Blake, although, strangely enough, not to his work on Original Stories. Hewins does mention that the book was "new and in demand in the autumn of that year [1791], [but is] now unknown to the bookstalls". Original Stories is now primarily reprinted for scholars, students, and those interested in the history of children’s literature.

Full

Bator, Robert, ed. Masterworks of Children's Literature: The Middle Period, c.1740 - c.1836. Vol. 3. New York: Stonehill Publishing Company, 1983. ISBN 0-87754-377-1.
Todd, Janet
Janet Todd
Janet Margaret Todd is a Welsh-born academic and a well-respected author of many books on women in literature. Todd was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare...

and Marilyn Butler
Marilyn Butler
Marilyn Butler is a British literary critic. She was Rector of Exeter College, Oxford from 1993 to 2004, and was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, from 1986 to 1993...

, eds. The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. 7 vols. London: William Pickering, 1989. ISBN 0-8147-9225-1. (in volume 4)
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

. Original Stories from Real Life. London: Printed for Joseph Johnson, 1788. Available from Eighteenth Century Collections Online. (by subscription only) Retrieved on 13 October 2007.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Original Stories from Real Life. 2nd ed. London: Printed for Joseph Johnson, 1791. Available from Eighteenth Century Collections Online. (by subscription only) Retrieved on 13 October 2007.

Partial

Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard, eds. Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-19-860228-6.
Demmers, Patricia, ed. From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children's Literature to 1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-19-541889-1.
Zipes, Jack, Lissa Paul, Lynne Vallone, Peter Hunt and Gillian Avery, eds. The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. ISBN 0-393-97538-X.

External links

A 1906 reprint of the 1791 edition at Google Books
Mary Wollstonecraft: A 'Speculative and Dissenting Spirit' by Janet Todd
Janet Todd
Janet Margaret Todd is a Welsh-born academic and a well-respected author of many books on women in literature. Todd was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare...

at www.bbc.co.uk

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