Mary Wollstonecraft had also worked as a governess before turning to writing as a
career; her publisher, Joseph Johnson, made something of a specialism out of didactic
literature for children. In Original Stories from Real Life (1788) she used the setting of a
girls’ school for her series of moral tales, but was rather less inspiring than Sarah
Fielding. Her contemporary, Dorothy Kilner’s, Anecdotes of a Boarding School; or an
Antidote to the Vices of those Useful Seminaries (c.1783) set out the dangers of boarding
schools even more explicitly, but only served to make them exciting places for her
readers: ‘we all get out of bed, and play blindman’s buff, or dance about in the dark:
then if we hear any noise, and think anybody is coming, away we all run helter-skelter,
to get into our beds’. Dorothy Kilner also wrote about less privileged education in The
Village School (c.1795) and produced simple lesson books for children which included
Short Conversations (c.1785). Her most entertaining story was The Life and
Perambulation of a Mouse (c.1783–1784), where play again featured: ‘After the more
serious employment of reading each morning was concluded, we danced, we sung, we
played at blind-man’s buff, battledore and shuttlecock, and many other games equally
diverting and innocent.’
Her sister-in-law, Mary Ann Kilner, was also a popular writer, although less prolific.
The Adventures of a Pincushion (c.1780) and The Memoirs of a Peg-Top (c.1781) went into
many editions; the combination of sound common sense, amusing detail and
imaginative writing seems to have appealed to parents.
Locke was not the only influential theorist; his emphasis on the impression of virtue
on young minds and the need to treat children as rational creatures, was only one
strand of thought. Following the translation of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile into
English in 1763, in which it was judged that children’s (or rather boys’) education
should be related to their status as reflective creatures of the natural world, writers
adopted new methods of imparting morality. Children had to learn rationality through
experience. Maria Edgeworth, whose best known story—‘The purple jar’—first appeared
in The Parent’s Assistant (1796), was one of Rousseau’s most faithful disciples in
imparting this ideology. Rosamund is offered a gift by her mother, and instead of
choosing the sensible pair of new shoes opts for a purple jar in the apothecary’s shop.
Her old shoes let her down and she finally has to acknowledge that mother knows best
and to ‘hope, I shall be wiser another time’. The idea that children learn best through
acting out a lesson was one which many writers adopted from Rousseau. French writers
from this school were imported and achieved a wide readership, including Rousseau’s
friend the Marquise D’Epinay whose Conversations of Emily was published in English in
1787.
Another English Rousseauist was Thomas Day; his Sandford and Merton (1783—
1789) became one of the most popular sets of tales for boys during this period and was
widely adapted and reissued well into the nineteenth century. Harry Sandford and
Tommy Merton have a series of largely unconnected adventures in the original version,
unexciting material by later standards, but one of the first attempts to depict recognisably
real boys exploring a friendship through active incident. Day’s Little Jack (1788) was
equally firm in its Rousseauism, with its depiction of the hero’s natural upbringing in
his ‘little hut of clay’ and allusions to the Crusoe tale of survival through ingenuity and
tenacity.
144 TYPES AND GENRES