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The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children. Part I. Containing, the little Dog Trusty; or, the Liar and Boy of Truth. The Orange Man; or the honest Boy and the Thief. Tarlton. Lazy Lawrence. The False Key: and Barring-out. To which is prefixed, an Address to Parents. The second Edition.

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Second edition, very rare, of the first collection of children’s stories by Maria Edgeworth, revised and expanded from the first edition of the same year – this is Part I only, but only one complete set survives from the first two editions (see below). The first edition of Part I had only five stories, separately paginated; this edition added the longest story, ‘The Barring Out; or, Party Spirit’ (pp. 149–226), and made a number of smaller corrections throughout (see Pollard). Part II was published in two volumes, each of three stories; by the third edition (1800), the collection now comprised seventeen stories in six volumes; the first two stories here were cut and transplanted into Early Lessons (1801). ‘Edgeworth’s convincing psychological portraits are matched by equally realistic depictions of her characters’ social milieux’ (Hockliffe project online). The latter are quite varied, and while the moral emphasis is on hard work and honesty, the rewards are rarely those of social elevation.

‘Bibliographers have their work cut out with Maria Edgeworth’s writing for children. She continually made changes to her work as it appeared in successive editions … Her first published work would have appeared when Edgeworth was only fifteen years old, had it not been withdrawn at the last minute. … It was therefore in 1796 that Edgeworth’s first work for children was published – The Parent’s Assistant – although it seems likely that some of the stories it contained had first been written as early as 1790 or 1791 (Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p. 157). The first and second edition (which also appeared in 1796) were both in three volumes. Since no complete copies of these early editions exist in any one place, it is difficult to tell exactly which tales Edgeworth included’ (ibid.).

Extremely popular and much reprinted, The Parent’s Assistant was reviewed by Sarah Trimmer, read by Queen Victoria, and mentioned by Thackeray in Vanity Fair, but few copies of the early editions survive. Of the first edition, Part I is at CUL, St Andrew’s, and Florida, while of Part II Pollard notes a single copy of vol. 1 only. An interim issue of the second edition, with ‘Barring Out’ but with no edition statement, was sold at Sotheby’s in 1975 (now untraced). Of the second edition of Part I, ESTC records copies at BL, Bodleian (2 copies); and UCLA (there is also one at Toronto). Part II, vol. 1 is at Toronto only; Part II, vol. 2 is at Bodleian and Toronto only.

ESTC T133446; Osborne II, 880 (and cf. I, 149); Slade 2B. See Pollard, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s The Parent’s Assistant, the first edition’, The Book Collector, 1971.