The Parent's Assistant

Moral tales for children written by a woman who had helped raise twenty-one siblings and tested every story on them: the purple jar, the false key, lazy Lawrence, simple Susan. Maria Edgeworth published them in 1796, and Walter Scott said she had shown him what could be done with ordinary life. The morals are firm and the children in them are recognisably real, which is why they survived the sermons. Thirty-three paintings of children at lessons, at play and in trouble, from Wilkie to Cassatt, keep Edgeworth's small pupils company.