Original Stories from Real Life

Margaret King walked out of her marriage in 1805, left Ireland for Italy, and spent the rest of her life under a borrowed name — Mrs Mason, the teacher in a children's book written by the woman who had been her own governess. Wollstonecraft spent a year with the Kingsboroughs in 1786 and 1787, and this is what she made of the household: in the book, two girls, Mary and Caroline, fourteen and twelve, are handed over to a woman who keeps taking them out to look at things. A walk on which they are caught tormenting insects; a poor family in London. Every outing is followed by conversation, and the conversation is the lesson; there are no rules to memorise, because Wollstonecraft did not believe a child could be told into virtue. The method is Rousseau's, out of Emile, and Thomas Day's, out of Sandford and Merton; the difference is that the teacher is a woman and the pupils are girls. Mrs Mason corrects before she consoles. Her first business is to clear out what the girls have picked up — the borrowed prejudice, the accomplishment mistaken for knowledge — and only then to build. Joseph Johnson published it anonymously at two shillings; the second edition of 1791 carried Wollstonecraft's name and six plates by William Blake, who designed and engraved every one himself. Some Blake scholars have read his Mrs Mason as a figure of tyranny rather than instruction. It was reprinted in Dublin, translated into German in 1795, and stayed in print for decades — the last edition was 1820 or as late as 1835, depending on which scholar is counting. By the end of the nineteenth century people bought it for the pictures.