Mrs. Wilson’s bees, ‘excessively pleased with the ingenuity and industry p. ivwith which these insects collect their honey and wax, form their cells, and deposit their store’; but Mrs. Mason, as we shall see, went still farther.

p. iv

It has to be remembered that the Original Stories were written when the author was twenty-nine, five years before she met Gilbert Imlay and six years before her daughter Fanny Imlay was born. I mention this fact because it seems to me to be very significant. I feel that had the book been written after Fanny’s birth, or even after the Imlay infatuation, it would have been somewhat different: not perhaps more entertaining, because its author had none of that imaginative sympathy with the young which would direct her pen in the direction of pure pleasure for them; but more human, more kindly, better. One can have indeed little doubt as to this after reading those curious first lessons for an infant which came from Mary Wollstonecraft’s pen in or about 1795, (printed in volume two of the Posthumous Works, 1798), and which give evidence of so much more tenderness and reasonableness (and at the same time want of Reason, which may have been Godwin’s God but will never stand in that relation either to English men or English children) than the monitress of the Original Stories, the impeccable Mrs. Mason, ever suggests. I know of no early instance where a mother talks down to an infant more prettily: continually descending herself to its level, yet never with any of Mrs. Mason’s arrogance and superiority. Not indeed that this poor mother, p. vwith her impulsive warm heart wounded, and most of her illusions gone, and few kindly eyes resting upon her, could ever have compassed much of Mrs. Mason’s prosperous self-satisfaction and authority had she wished to; for in the seven years between the composition of the Original Stories and the lessons for the minute Fanny Imlay, she had lived an emotional lifetime, and suffering much, pitied much.

p. v

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:—

CONTENTS

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 

 Prev. P 2/75 next