Drawings for Mary Wollstonecraft's "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. Blake's extant drawings, now in the Library of Congress, are presented here. In addition to these ten designs, Blake must have executed at least one further drawing as a preliminary for his fifth plate; this drawing is untraced. A total of six designs were selected for publication in the 1791 edition of Wollstonecraft's book (Bentley 514); revised states were published in the 1796 edition. Blake engraved the designs himself.

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).