In 1788 Blake contracted to provide six engravings for Mary Wollstonecraft's collection of parables for children, Original Stories from Real Life. He later illustrated Wollstonecraft's translation of C. W. Salzmann's Elements of Morality (1790).

As this frontispiece from the second edition of 1791 shows, Blake's designs for this work were rather pedestrian, hardly distinguishable from hundreds of other illustrations of the time and radically different from the powerful, often haunting images of his illuminated texts.