fairy tale
Although Charles Perrault (1628-1703) is firmly a citizen of the
seventeenth century, his Contes des fees, popularly known as
Mother Goose Stories, had by late in the eighteenth century become
staples of children's literature and had prompted many imitations.
William Lane of the Minerva Press in London, publisher of numerous
fictional pot-boilers, for instance, also brought out two-volume sets of
fairy tales in 1788 and 1794. Closer to home, Mary
Shelley's father, William Godwin,
under his psuedonym of Edward Baldwin, in 1805 published a set of Fables
Ancient and Modern for very young children that went through numerous
editions; and the Juvenile Library, which he ran with his second wife
Mary
Jane Clairmont, specialized in children's books with useful morality
appended. This series published the first English translation of Johann
David Wyss's perennial Swiss Family Robinson in 1814. Mary Shelley was thus as a
child uniquely conditioned by contemporary notions of children's
literature, and she was also encouraged to become a writer at a very young
age. The careful noting of Clerval's age (9) when he wrote his fairy tale
indicates that Mary Shelley has in mind her own debut at the age of 11, in
a satirical parody about an Englishman in France, Mounseer
Nongtongpaw, that was published in January 1807.
