Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness is the only complete work of children's literature by the 18th-century English feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Original Stories begins with a frame story that sketches out the education of two young girls by their maternal teacher Mrs. Mason, followed by a series of didactic tales. The book was first published by Joseph Johnson in 1788; a second, illustrated edition, with engravings by William Blake, was released in 1791 and remained in print for around a quarter of a century.

In Original Stories, Wollstonecraft employed the then-burgeoning genre of children's literature to promote the education of women and an emerging middle-class ideology. She argued that women would be able to become rational adults if they were educated properly as children, which was not a widely held belief in the 18th century, and contended that the nascent middle-class ethos was superior to the court culture represented by fairy tales and to the values of chance and luck found in chapbook stories for the poor. Wollstonecraft, in developing her own pedagogy, also responded to the works of the two most important educational theorists of the 18th century: John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Historical and biographical context

Wollstonecraft's oeuvre shows "a keen and vital concern with education, especially the education of girls and women".Richardson, "Mary Wollstonecraft", 24. One year before she published Original Stories, she wrote a conduct book (a popular 18th-century genre, akin to the modern self-help book) entitled Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), which describes how to raise the ideal middle-class woman. In 1789, she assembled The Female Speaker, a text meant to edify the minds of young women by exposing them to literature; she modelled it after William Enfield's anthology The Speaker, which was designed specifically for men. Just one year later, she translated Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Elements of Morality, a popular German pedagogical text. Wollstonecraft continued writing on educational issues in her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which is largely a defence of female education. She also devotes an entire chapter to outlining a national education plan—she envisioned a half-public, half-private, co-educational system.Wollstonecraft, Vindications, Chapter 12. She also directly challenged Rousseau's Emile (1762), which claimed that women should not be taught to reason since they were formed for men's pleasureRousseau, Emile: "Men’s morals, their passions, their tastes, their pleasures, their very happiness also depend on women. Thus the whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honored by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and sweet—these are the duties of women at all times, and they ought to be taught from childhood" (365). and that their abilities lay in observation rather than reason.Rousseau, Emile: "Woman has more wit, man more genius; woman observes, and man reasons" (387). When Wollstonecraft died in 1797, she was working on two more educational works: "Management of Infants", a parenting manual; and "Lessons", a reading primer inspired by Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children (1778–79).

Wollstonecraft was not alone in focusing her revolutionary writings on education; as Alan Richardson, a scholar of the period, points out, "most liberal and radical intellectuals of the time viewed education as the cornerstone of any movement for social reform".Richardson, "Mary Wollstonecraft", 25. One reason these thinkers emphasized the training of the young mind was the pervasive acceptance during the 18th century of Locke's theory of mind. He posited that the mind is a "blank slate" or tabula rasa, free from innate ideas, and that because children enter the world without preconceived notions; whatever ideas they absorb early in life will fundamentally affect their later development. Locke explained this process through a theory he labelled the association of ideas; the ideas that children connect, such as fear and darkness, are stronger than those ideas adults associate, therefore instructors, according to Locke, must carefully consider what they expose children to early in life.Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Roger Woolhouse. New York: Penguin Books (1997), 356–57; for an introduction to Locke's theory of mind see Nicholas Jolley, "The Origin and Nature of Ideas." Locke: His Philosophical Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999); for an explanation of Locke's Essay (including the doctrine of innate ideas) in relation to other eighteenth-century ideas, see John Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1956).

Plot summary

Modelled on Madame de Genlis's Adèle et Théodore (1782) and Tales of the Castle (1785), both of which have frame stories and a series of inset moral tales, Original Stories narrates the re-education of two young girls, fourteen-year-old Mary and twelve-year-old Caroline, by a wise and benevolent maternal figure, Mrs. Mason. (Wollstonecraft probably named these characters after people in her own life. She became acquainted with a Miss Mason while teaching in Newington Green, whom she greatly respected, and she taught two girls named Mary and Caroline while she was a governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland.)See "Letter 26: To George Blood, Newington Green, July 20th, 1785" in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd. New York: Penguin Books (2003) and Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Penguin (1992), 67ff. Margaret King, who was greatly affected by her governess, saying she "had freed her mind from all superstitions,Todd, 116. later adopted "Mrs Mason" as a pseudonym.) After the death of their mother, the girls are sent to live with Mrs. Mason in the country. They are full of faults, such as greediness and vanity, and Mrs. Mason, through stories, real-world demonstrations, and her own example, cures the girls of most of their moral failings and imbues them with a desire to be virtuous.

Mrs. Mason's amalgam of tales and teaching excursions dominates the text; although the text emphasizes the girls' moral progress, the reader learns very little about the girls themselves. The work consists largely of personal histories of people known to Mrs. Mason and of moral tales for the edification of Mary and Caroline and the reader. For example, "The History of Charles Townley" illustrates the fatal consequences of procrastination. Mrs. Mason takes the girls to Charles Townley's ruined mansion to tell them the cautionary tale of a "boy of uncommon abilities, and strong feelings"; unfortunately, "he ever permitted those feelings to direct his conduct, without submitting to the direction of reason; I mean, the present emotion governed him ... He always indeed intended to act right in every particular to-morrow; but to-day he followed the prevailing whim" (emphasis Wollstonecraft's).Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life (1791), 85. Charles wants to help those in need, but he is easily distracted by novels and plays. He eventually loses all of his money but his one remaining friend helps him regain his fortune in India. Yet even when this friend needs assistance, Charles cannot act quickly enough and, tragically, his friend is imprisoned and dies and his friend's daughter is forced to marry a rake. When Charles returns to England, he is overcome with guilt. He rescues the daughter from her unhappy marriage, but both she and he have gone slightly insane by the end of the story, she from her marriage and he from guilt.Wollstonecraft, Original Stories, Chapter 10.

Original Stories is primarily about leaving the imperfections of childhood behind and becoming a rational and charitable adult; it does not romanticise childhood as an innocent and ideal state of being. The inset stories themselves emphasise the balance of reason and emotion required for the girls to become mature, a theme that permeates Wollstonecraft's works, particularly A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Literary analysis Original Stories gained a reputation in the 20th century as an oppressively didactic book and was derided by early scholars of children's literature such as Geoffrey Summerfield.Summerfield wrote that Original Stories "has a strong claim to be the most sinister, ugly, overbearing book for children ever published" (229); see also Darton (196–97) and Jackson (146–47). Recent scholars, particularly Mitzi Myers, have re-evaluated Wollstonecraft's book and 18th-century children's literature in general, assessing it within its historical context rather than judging it according to modern tastes. Myers suggests, in her series of seminal articles, that women writers of children's literature such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth were not only using the genre of children's literature to teach but also to promote visions of society distinct from those of the Romantics.See, for example, Mitzi Myers, "De-Romanticizing the Subject: Maria Edgeworth’s "The Bracelets," Mythologizes of Origin, and the Daughter’s Coming to Writing." Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices. Eds. Paula R. Feldman and Teresa M. Kelley. Hanover: University Press of New England (1995), Mitzi Myers, "Portrait of the Female Artist as a Young Robin: Maria Edgeworth’s Telltale Tailpiece." The Lion and the Unicorn 20.2 (1996): 230–263, and Mitzi Myers, "Child’s Play as Woman’s Peace Work: Maria Edgeworth’s 'The Cherry Orchard,' Historical Rebellion Narratives, and Contemporary Cultural Studies." Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture. Eds. Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1999). These authors believed that they could effect great change by exposing young children to their ideas of a better society, even though they were "only" writing stories about seemingly insignificant topics such as small animals or little girls.Myers, 34–35; see also Kelly, 58. Myers argues that because scholars have traditionally paid more attention to Romantic poetry and prose (the works of William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example) than to children's literature, they have missed the social critique that these women writers of children's literature were offering.

Pedagogical theory

The two most influential pedagogical works in 18th-century Europe were John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. In Original Stories and her other works on education, Wollstonecraft responds to these two works and counters with her own pedagogical theory.