This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

 

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S ORIGINAL STORIES

WITH FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS BY WILLIAM BLAKE

BY

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY E. V. LUCAS

BY

LONDON HENRY FROWDE 1906

p. iiOXFORD: HORACE HART PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

p. ii

OXFORD: HORACE HART

PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

p. iiiEDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

p. iii

The germ of the Original Stories was, I imagine, a suggestion (in the manner of publishers) from Mary Wollstonecraft’s employer, Johnson of St. Paul’s Churchyard, that something more or less in the manner of Mrs. Trimmer’s History of the Robins, the great nursery success of 1786, might be a profitable speculation. For I doubt if the production of a book for children would ever have occurred spontaneously to an author so much more interested in the status of women and other adult matters. However, the idea being given her, she quickly wrote the book—in 1787 or 1788—carrying out in it to a far higher power, in Mrs. Mason, the self-confidence and rectitude of Mrs. Trimmer’s leading lady, Mrs. Benson, who in her turn had been preceded by that other flawless instructor of youth, Mr. Barlow. None of these exemplars could do wrong; but the Mrs. Mason whom we meet in the following pages far transcends the others in conscious merit. Mrs. Benson in the History of the Robins (with the author of which Mary Wollstonecraft was on friendly terms) was sufficiently like the Protagonist of the Old Testament to be, when among 

  P 1/75 next