Moral Tales: A Selection

Book excerpt: In their moral tales, writers such as Hannah More, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth embraced explicitly didactic aims, seeking to instill normative moral behavior in their readers while entertaining them with vivid, emotional storytelling. In More’s “Tawney Rachel,” for example, a servant girl suffers severe consequences for succumbing to superstition; in Opie’s “The Black Velvet Pelisse,” a young woman is rewarded for a charitable act with a desirable marriage; and in Edgeworth’s “The Dun,” a wealthy man’s selfishness destroys a poor family before he finally sees the error of his ways. This edition offers a selection of five short fictions by More, Opie, and Edgeworth—the best-known writers of the moral tale—prefaced by a critical introduction to the genre and its place in the complex and fascinating debates surrounding the writing and reading of fiction in the Romantic period. The volume concludes with a variety of background materials that help situate the moral tale in its late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary contexts, including moral tales for children, theories of education, and contemporary reviews.