beside which a drunken father, unhappy sisters, and a dead friend were mere trifles.

p. vii

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 p. viiiconsidered: 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.

p. viii

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 

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