Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life

In 1788, Joseph Johnson published the first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's morally instructive narrative for children, Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. A few years later, Johnson decided to issue a new edition, for which he commissioned Blake to prepare a series of illustrations. He executed at least eleven monochrome drawings (ten extant, Butlin 244), from which Johnson selected six to be engraved by Blake for publication in the 1791 edition. The preliminary drawing for plate 5 is untraced. Two states of the plates appear variously in copies of the 1791 edition; a third state appears in the 1796 edition. For descriptions of the states, see the Editors’ Notes to the plates in both copies published in the Archive.

Modern interpreters of the illustrations for Original Stories have detected a pictorial critique of Wollstonecraft's stories. Blake appears to have found her morality too calculating, rationalistic, and rigid. He represents Wollstonecraft's spokesperson, Mrs. Mason, as a domineering presence. From Blake's perspective, Mason's acts of charity are excessively condescending and tend to reinforce the underlying social conditions that create disparities between wealth and poverty. As Blake wrote in "The Human Abstract," "Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor" (Erdman page 27).