Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories

by Mary Wollstonecraft

In Lesson X, which I quote, although it says nothing of charity or kindness, a vastly more human spirit is found than in any of Mrs. Mason’s homilies on our duty to the afflicted:—

See how much taller you are than William. In four years you have learned to eat, to walk, to talk. Why do you smile? You can do much more, you think: you can wash your hands and face. Very well. I should never kiss a dirty face. And you can comb your head with the pretty comb you always put by in your own drawer. To be sure, you do all this to be ready to take a walk with me. You would be obliged to stay at home, if you could not comb your own hair. Betty is busy getting the dinner ready, and only brushes William’s hair, because he cannot do it for himself.

Betty is making an apple-pye. You love an apple-pye; but I do not bid you make one. Your hands are not strong enough to mix the butter and flour together; and you must not try to pare the apples, because you cannot manage a great knife.

Never touch the large knives: they are very sharp, and you might cut your finger to the bone. You are a little girl, and ought to have a little knife. When you are as tall as I am, you shall have a knife as large as mine; and when you are as strong as I am, and have learned to manage it, you will not hurt yourself.

You can trundle a hoop, you say; and jump over a stick. O, I forgot!—and march like men in the red coats, when papa plays a pretty tune on the fiddle.

Even a very little of the tender spirit that this lesson breathes, even a very little of its sense of play, would have leavened the Original Stories into a more wholesome consistency. As it stands, that book is one of the most perfect examples of the success with which, a century or more ago, any ingratiating quality could be kept out of a work for the young. According to William Godwin, his unhappy wife had always a pretty and endearing way with children. Yet of pretty and endearing ways, as of humour, I take him to have been a bad judge; for I do not think that any woman possessing enough sympathy to attach children to her as he, in one of the most curious biographies in the language, assures us that she had, could have suppressed the gift so completely in her first book for young minds. And the Mrs. Masonic character of her own Preface supports my view.

I do not wish to suggest that previous to 1787 Mary Wollstonecraft had been a stranger to suffering. Far from it. Her life had known little joy. Her father’s excesses, her mother’s grief and poverty, her sister’s misfortunes, her own homelessness, and, to crown all, the death of her close friend Frances Blood, must have dimmed if not obliterated most of her happy impulses. But it is one thing to suffer bereavement and to be anxious about the troubles of others near and dear; and it is quite another to suffer oneself by loving, even to a point of personal disaster, and then losing both that love and the friendliness (such as it was) of the world. Imlay’s desertion and the birth of Fanny were real things beside which a drunken father, unhappy sisters, and a dead friend were mere trifles.

This little book is to my mind chiefly interesting for two reasons apart from its original purpose—for the light it throws on the attitude of the nursery authors of that day towards children, and for the character of Mrs. Mason, a type of the dominant British character, in petticoats, here for the first time (so far as my reading goes) set on paper.

I have no information regarding the success of the Original Stories in their day, and such spirited efforts as are now made to obtain them by collectors are, we know, due rather to Blake than to Mary Wollstonecraft; but any measure of popularity that they may have enjoyed illustrates the awful state of slavery in which the children of the seventeen-nineties must have subsisted. It is indeed wonderful to me to think that only a poor hundred years ago such hard and arid presentations of adult perfection and infantile incapacity should have been considered, even by capable writers, all that the intelligence of children needed or their tender inexperience deserved. I do not deny that children are not to-day too much considered: indeed, I think that they are: I think there is now an unfortunate tendency to provide them with literature in such variety as to anticipate, and possibly supplant, the most valuable natural workings of their minds in almost every direction; but such activity at any rate indicates a desire on the part of the writers of these books to understand their readers, whereas I can detect none in the Original Stories or in hundreds of kindred works of that day. Sandford and Merton and Mrs. Trimmer’s book stand apart: there is much humanity and imaginative sympathy in both; but with the majority of nursery authors, to fling down a collection of homilies was sufficient.

The odd thing is that every one was equally thoughtless: it is not merely that Mary Wollstonecraft should consider such an intellectual stone as Chapter XV worth preparing for poor little fellow creatures that needed bread; but that her publisher Johnson should consider it the kind of thing to send forth, and that, with artists capable of dramatic interest available, he should hand the commission to illustrate it to William Blake, who, exquisitely charming as were his drawings for his own Songs, was as yet in no sense of the word an ingratiating illustrator of narratives of real life for young eyes. And there still remains the parent or friend who, picking up the book in a shop, considered it the kind of thing to strike a bliss into the soul of Master Henry or Miss Susan as a birthday present. It is all, at this date, so incredible, so shortsighted, so cruel, one could almost say. No one seems to have tried at all: the idea of wooing a child was not in the air—certainly Mary Wollstonecraft had none of it.

Who it was that first discerned the child to be a thing of joy, a character apart worth coming to without patronage, a flower, a fairy, I cannot say. But Blake, in his writings, had much to do with the discovery, and Wordsworth perhaps more. Certain, however, is it that Mary Wollstonecraft, even if she had glimmerings of this truth, had no more; and those she suppressed when the pen was in her hand.

I might remark here that the circumstance that Blake’s drawings for Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, which Mary Wollstonecraft translated in 1791, also for Johnson, are more interesting and dramatic, is due to the fact that he merely adapted the work of the German artist. Blake was uniformly below himself in this kind of employment. Only in the rapt freedoms of the angelic harper in his hut, in the picture opposite page 56 of the present work, does he approach his true genius; while in his conception of Mrs. Mason I have no confidence. Not slim and willowy and pensive was she in my mental picture of her: I figure a matron of sterner stuff and solider build.

But having said this against the Original Stories, I have said all, for as the casket enshrining Mrs. Mason its value remains unassailable.