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Original Stories from Real Life
''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 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 pleasure〔Rousseau, ''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).〕
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