EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

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 Mrs. Wilson’s bees, ‘excessively pleased with the ingenuity and industry with 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.

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, with 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.

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.

It was well for Mrs. Mason that Mary Wollstonecraft set her on paper in 1788. Had she waited until the Vindication of the Rights of Women was written in 1792 (and dedicated to Talleyrand), had she waited until little Fanny Imlay was born into a stony world, Mrs. Mason would never have been. Because it is the likes of Mrs. Mason that keep the rights of women, as Mary Wollstonecraft saw them, in the background, and demand the production of marriage lines. Mrs. Mason would have been the first to regret the unwomanliness of the publication both of the book and of the baby. The Preface to this book suggests that Mary Wollstonecraft was at that time, before she had loved and lost and suffered, something of a Mrs. Mason herself; but Mrs. Mason remained Masonic to the end, whereas poor Mary’s heart and mind were always in conflict. She may have loved pure Reason, but she loved Gilbert Imlay too. And this Mrs. Mason never did.

Mrs. Mason never nods. Her tact, her mental reaction, her confidence, her sense of duty and knowledge of duty, are alike marvellous. When the higher mercy compels her to end a wounded lark’s misery by putting her foot on its head, she ‘turns her own the other way’. At the close of a walk during which her charges have been ‘rational’, she shakes hands with them. Her highest praise to Mary, after the fruit-picking incident on page 40, is to call her ‘my friend’; ‘and she deserved the name,’ adds the lady, ‘for she was no longer a child.’ No child could be her friend. One wonders what she made of the beautiful words ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me.. for of such is the kingdom of Heaven’; but of course she did not know them: her Testament was obviously the Old.

Yet we have, as it happens, a comment on Christ’s remark, in her statement on page 8, made in one of her recurring monologues on superiority and inferiority, that it is ‘only to animals that children can do good’. Mrs. Mason’s expression of alarm and dismay on hearing the words ‘A little child shall lead them’ could be drawn adequately, one feels, only by Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend Fuseli.

‘I govern my servants and you,’ said Mrs. Mason, ‘by attending strictly to truth, and this observance keeping my head clear and my heart pure, I am ever ready to pray to the Author of Good, the Fountain of truth.’ She never paid unmeaning compliments, (and here it is interesting to compare the second paragraph of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Preface, where she plays at being a Mrs. Mason too), or permitted any word to drop from her tongue that her heart did not dictate. Hence she allowed Mrs. Trimmer’s History of the Robins to be lent to a little girl, only on condition that the little girl should be made to understand that birds cannot really talk. She had in her garden, although large, only one bed of tulips, because the tulip flaunts, whereas the rose, of which she had a profusion, is modest. That God made both does not seem to have troubled her. She thought that the poor who were willing to work ‘had a right to the comforts of life’. During a thunderstorm she walked with the same security as when the sun enlivened the prospect, since her love of virtue had overcome her fear of death. She was weaned from the world, ‘but not disgusted.’ When she visited those who have been reduced from their original place in society by misfortunes, she made such alterations in her dress as would suggest ceremony, lest too much familiarity should appear like disrespect. She forbade Caroline to cry when in pain, because the Most High was educating her for eternity. She thought that all diseases were sent to children by the Almighty to teach them patience and fortitude. She never sought bargains, wishing every one to receive the just value for their goods; and when her two charges at last left her, to return to their father, she dismissed them with the words, ‘You are now candidates for my friendship, and on your advancement in virtue my regard will in future depend.’

The great fault of Mrs. Mason is that she had none. One seems to understand why her own children and husband died so quickly.

Since I have read this little book a new kind of nightmare has come into my slumbers: I dream that I am walking with Mrs. Mason. The greatness and goodness of Mrs. Mason surround me, dominate me, suffocate me. With head erect, vigilant eye, and a smile of assurance and tolerance on her massive features, she sails on and on, holding my neatly-gloved hand, discoursing ever of the infinite mercy of God, the infinite paltriness of myself, and the infinite success of Mrs. Mason. I think that Mrs. Mason’s most terrible characteristic to me (who have never been quite sure of anything) is the readiness with which her decisions spring fully-armed from her brain. She knows not only everything, but herself too: she has no doubts. Here she joins hands with so much that is most triumphant in the British character. The Briton also is without doubts. He marches forward. He is right. It is when I contemplate him in this mood – and Mrs. Mason too – that I most wonder who my ancestors can have been.

The awful reality of Mrs. Mason proves that Mary Wollstonecraft, had she known her own power and kept her mental serenity, might have been a great novelist. Mrs. Mason was the first and strongest British Matron. She came before Mrs. Proudie, and also, it is interesting to note, before Sir Willoughby Patterne. But she was, I fear, an accident; for there is nothing like her in our author’s one experiment in adult fiction, The Wrongs of Woman.

E. V. LUCAS.