Mary Martha Sherwood
Encyclopedia
Mary Martha Sherwood (6 May 1775 – 22 September 1851) was a prolific and influential writer of children's literature
in 19th-century Britain
. She composed over 400 books, tract
s, magazine articles, and chapbook
s; among the most famous are The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
(1814), The History of Henry Milner (1822–37), and The History of the Fairchild Family
(1818–47). Sherwood is known primarily for the strong evangelicalism
that colored her early writings; however, her later works are characterized by common Victorian
themes, such as domesticity.
Sherwood's childhood was uneventful, although she recalled it as the happiest part of her life. After she married Captain Henry Sherwood and moved to India
, she converted to evangelical Christianity and began to write for children. Although her books were initially intended only for the children of the military encampments in India, the British public also received them enthusiastically. The Sherwoods returned to England after a decade in India and, building upon her popularity, Sherwood opened a boarding school and published scores of texts for children and the poor.
Many of Sherwood's books were bestsellers and she has been described as "one of the most significant authors of children's literature of the nineteenth century." Her depictions of domesticity and Britain's relationship with India likely shaped the opinions of many young British readers. However, her works fell from favor as a different style of children's literature came into fashion during the late nineteenth century, one exemplified by Lewis Carroll's
playful and nonsensical Alice in Wonderland.
, Worcestershire
; she was the eldest daughter and second child of Martha Butt and Reverend George Butt, the chaplain in ordinary to George III. In her autobiography, Sherwood describes herself as an imaginative and playful child. She composed stories in her head before she could write and begged her mother to copy them down. Sherwood remembered her childhood as a delightful time filled with exciting "adventures" undertaken with her brother. She even makes the best of the "stocks" that she was forced to stand in while she did her lessons:
Sherwood's education was wide-ranging for a girl during the late eighteenth century: she learned Latin
and Greek
and was permitted to read freely in her father's library.
Sherwood states in her autobiography that she was tall and ungainly for her age and that she hid in the woods with her doll to escape visitors. But she seems to have enjoyed attending Madame St. Quentin's School for Girls at Reading Abbey, the same school Jane Austen
had attended. Sherwood's autobiography relates that her generally happy childhood was marred only by the intrusion of the French Revolution
, particularly since Reading Abbey was run by French émigré
s.
Sherwood spent some of her teenage years in Lichfield
, where she enjoyed the company of the eminent naturalist
Erasmus Darwin
, the educational reformer Richard Lovell Edgeworth
, his daughter Maria Edgeworth
— who later became a famous writer in her own right — and the celebrated poet Anna Seward
. Although she was intellectually stimulated by this group of gifted writers, she was distressed by their lack of faith and later described Richard Edgeworth as an "infidel." She also criticized Seward's persona of the female author, writing in her autobiography that she would never model herself after a woman who wore a wig and accumulated male flatterers. Despite what she viewed as the pitfalls of fame, she was determined to become a writer and when she was seventeen her father, who encouraged her writing, helped her publish her first story, Traditions (1795).
When Sherwood's father died in 1795, her family retired from its active social life, since her mother preferred seclusion, and moved to Bridgnorth
, Shropshire
. At Bridgnorth Sherwood began writing sentimental novel
s; in 1802 she sold Margarita for £
40 to Mr. Hazard of Bath, and The History of Susan Grey, a Pamela-like novel, for £
10. During this time she also taught at a local Sunday school
.
Over half of Sherwood's autobiography is devoted to nostalgically reflecting on her childhood years; the majority of the remaining text is dedicated to the difficult early years of her marriage, particularly those spent in India
.
On 30 June 1803, Sherwood became an army wife by marrying her cousin Captain Henry Sherwood (1776–1849). (Intermarriage between cousins was a common practice before the twentieth century.) For several years, she accompanied her husband and his regiment, the 53rd Foot, on numerous postings throughout Britain. In 1804, Capt. Sherwood was promoted to paymaster
, which slightly improved the couple's finances. In 1805 the regiment was ordered to India and the Sherwoods were forced to leave their first child, Mary Henrietta, with Sherwood's mother and sister in England.
Sherwood's four-month sea voyage to India was difficult; she was again pregnant and the regiment's ship was attacked by French warships
. The Sherwoods stayed in India for eleven years, moving with the army and an ever-increasing family from Calcutta (Kolkata
) to Dinapore (Danapur
) to Berhampore (Baharampur
) to Cawnpore (Kanpur) to Meerut (Meerut). They had six children in India: Henry (1805–1807), Lucy Martha (1807–1808), Lucy Elizabeth (1809–1835), Emily (1811–1833), Henry Martyn (1813–?), and Sophia (1815–?). The deaths of the infants Henry and Lucy Martha and later of young Emily and Lucy Elizabeth affected Sherwood deeply; she frequently named the heroes and heroines of her books (many of whom die) after her late children.
Following the agonizing death of her second child, Henry, of whooping cough, Sherwood began to consider converting to evangelical Christianity
. The famous missionary Henry Martyn
(for whom she named her sixth child) finally convinced her; but it was the chaplain to the company, Mr. Parson, who first made her aware of her "human depravity" and her need for redemption. After her conversion, she was anxious to pursue evangelical missionary work in India, but she first had to persuade the East India Company that its policy of religious neutrality was ill-conceived. Because there was social and political support for missionary programs in Britain, the Company eventually approved her endeavors. Sherwood established schools for both the children of army officers and the local Indian children attached to the camp. The children were often taught in her home, as no buildings were available. The first school began with 13 children and grew to over 40, with pupils ranging from the very young to adolescents; uneducated soldiers also attended at times. Sherwood discovered that traditional British teaching materials did not appeal to children raised in India, and therefore wrote her own Indian- and army-themed stories, such as The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
(1814) and The Memoirs of Sergeant Dale, his Daughter and the Orphan Mary (1815).
Sherwood also adopted neglected or orphaned children from the camp. In 1807 she adopted Annie Child, a three-year-old who had been given too much medicinal gin
and in 1808 a malnourished two-year-old Sally Pownal. She found homes for those she could not adopt and founded an orphanage. In 1816, on the advice of doctors, she and her family returned to Britain; in her autobiography Sherwood relates that she was continually ill in India and it was believed at the time that neither she nor any of her children could survive in a tropical climate.
. Relying on her fame as an author and her teaching experience in India, Sherwood also decided to establish a boarding school for girls in Wick; it remained in operation for eight years. She taught English
, French
, astronomy, history
, geography, grammar
, writing and arithmetic
. At the same time, she wrote hundreds of tracts
, novels and other works for children and the poor, increasing her popularity in both the United States and Britain. The History of Henry Milner (1822) was one of Sherwood's most successful books; children sent her fan mail, begging her to write a sequel—one sent her "ornamental pens" with which to do so. Babies were named after the hero. Sherwood published much of what she wrote in The Youth's Magazine, a children's periodical that she edited for over two decades.
By the 1830s, the Sherwoods had become more prosperous and the family decided to travel to the continent. The texts that Sherwood wrote following this trip reflect her exposure to French culture in particular. She also embarked on a large and complex Old Testament
project at this time, for which she learned Hebrew. To assist her, her husband assembled, over the course of ten years, a large Hebrew-English concordance
. Unfortunately, Sherwood's autobiography provides scant details regarding the last forty-odd years of her life. However, we do know that even in her seventies, Sherwood wrote for four or five hours a day; many of these books were co-authored with Sherwood's daughter, Sophia. According to M. Nancy Cutt, a Sherwood scholar, this joint authorship led to a "watery sentimentality" not evident in Sherwood's earlier works as well as a greater emphasis on issues of class.
In 1849, the Sherwoods moved to Twickenham
, Middlesex
and in December of that year Captain Sherwood died. Sherwood herself died almost two years later on 20 September 1851.
period (1795–1805), during which she wrote a few sentimental novel
s; (2) her evangelical
period (1810–c. 1830), during which she produced her most popular and influential works; and (3) her post-evangelical period (c. 1830–1851). Several underlying themes pervade most of Sherwood's works throughout these periods: "her conviction of inherent human corruption"; her belief that literature "had a catechetical utility" for every rank of society; her belief that "the dynamics of family life" should reflect central Christian principles; and her "virulent" anti-Catholicism
.
s Traditions (1795) and Margarita (1795); although both are more worldly than her later works, neither received much recognition. By contrast, The History of Susan Gray, which was written for the girls of her Sunday school
class in Bridgnorth, made Sherwood a famous author. Like Hannah More's
tracts
, the novel is designed to teach middle-class morality to the poor. This novel—which Patricia Demers, a children's literature scholar, describes as a "purified Pamela"—tells the story of Susan, an orphaned servant girl, who "resists the advances of a philandering soldier; though trembling with emotion at the man's declaration of love and promise of marriage." The reader is regularly reminded of the "wages of sin" since Susan's story is told from her deathbed. A separate narrator, seemingly Sherwood, often interrupts the tale to warn readers against particular actions, such as becoming a "bad woman." Despite a didactic tone that is often distasteful to modern readers, Susan Gray was so popular at the time of its release that it was pirated by multiple publishers. In 1816, Sherwood published a revised and "improved" version, which Sarah Trimmer
positively reviewed in The Guardian of Education
. Sherwood wrote a companion story, The History of Lucy Clare, which was published in 1810.
aries, her own works are modeled on French children's literature, much of which is infused with Rousseauvian
ideals. For example, in The History of Henry Milner, Part I (1822) and The History of the Fairchild Family, Part I (1818) Sherwood adopts Arnaud Berquin's
"habitual pattern of small domestic situations acted out by children under the eye of parents or fellows." Likewise, The Lady of the Manor (1823–29) shares similar themes and structures with Madame de Genlis' Tales of the Castle (1785). David Hanson, a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, has questioned this interpretation, however, arguing that the tales told by the maternal figure in The Lady of the Manor demonstrate a "distrust of parents," and of mothers in particular, because they illustrate the folly of overly permissive parenting. In these inset stories, only outsiders discipline children correctly.
One of Sherwood's aims in her evangelically-themed The History of Henry Milner (1822–37) was to challenge what she saw as the irreligion inherent in French pedagogy. Henry Milner was written in direct response to Thomas Day's
The History of Sandford and Merton
(1783–89), a novel founded on the philosophy of Rousseau (whose writings Sherwood had lambasted as "the well-spring of infidelity"). Nevertheless, as children's literature scholar Janis Dawson points out, the structure and emphasis of Henry greatly resemble Rousseau's own Emile
(1762): their pedagogies are very similar, even if their underlying assumptions about childhood are diametrically opposed. Both books isolate the child in order to encourage him to learn from the natural world, but Sherwood's Henry is naturally depraved while Rousseau's Emile is naturally good. As the series progressed, however, Sherwood's views of religion changed (she became a universalist
), causing her to place greater emphasis on childhood innocence in the later volumes.
writings are the need to recognize one's innate "depravity" and the need to prepare oneself for eternity. For Sherwood, the most important lessons emphasize "faith, resignation, and implicit obedience to the will of God." In her adaptation of John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress (1678)—The Infant's Progress (1821)—she represents original sin
as a child named "In-bred Sin" who tempts the young pilgrims on their way to the Celestial City (Heaven) and it is these battles with In-bred Sin that constitute the major conflict of the text. The allegory
is complex and, as Demers admits, "tedious" for even the "willing reader." Thus, "some young readers may have found [In-bred Sin's] activities more interesting than the spiritual struggles of the little heroes, reading the book as an adventure story rather than as a guide to salvation." Such religious allegory, although not always so overt, continued to be a favorite literary device of Sherwood's.
Sherwood also infused her works with political and social messages dear to evangelicals during the teens and twenties, such as the crucial role of missions, the value of charity, the evils of slavery
and the necessity of Sabbath observance. She wrote Biblically-based introductions to astronomy and ancient history so that children would have Christian textbooks. As Cutt argues, "the intent of these (as indeed of all Evangelical texts) was to offset the deistic tendency to consider knowledge an end in itself." Sherwood also revised classic children's books to make them appropriately religious, such as Sarah Fielding's
The Governess
(1749). Sherwood's efforts to make religion more palatable through children's fiction were not always regarded favorably by the entire evangelical community; The Evangelical Magazine harshly reviewed her Stories Explanatory of the Church Catechism (1817), complaining that it was overly reliant on exciting fictional tales to convey its religious message.
As Cutt argues, "the great overriding metaphor of all [Sherwood's] work is the representation of divine order by the harmonious family relationship (inevitably set in its own pastoral Eden). . . No writer made it clearer to her readers that the child who is dutiful within his family is blessed in the sight of God; or stressed more firmly that family bonds are but the earthly and visible end of a spiritual bond running up to the very throne of God." Demers has referred to this "consciously double vision" as the quintessentially Romantic
element of Sherwood's writing. Nowhere is this theme more evident than in Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family
, the first part of which was published in 1818.
Of all of Sherwood's evangelically-themed books, The History of the Fairchild Family was the most popular. When she published it with John Hatchard of Piccadilly
, she assured it and the ten other books she published with him a "social distinction" not attached to her other publications. The Fairchild Family tells the story of a family striving towards godliness and consists of a series of lessons taught by the Fairchild parents to their three children (Emily, Lucy and Henry) regarding not only the proper orientation of their souls towards Heaven but also the right earthly morality (envy, greed, lying, disobedience, and fighting are immoral). The overarching narrative of the tale also includes a series of tract
-like stories which illustrate these moral lessons. For example, stories of the deaths of two neighborhood children, Charles Trueman and Miss Augusta Noble, help the Fairchild children to understand how and why they need to look to the state of their own hearts. The faithful and "true" Charles has a transcendent deathbed experience, suggesting that he was saved; by contrast, the heedless and disobedient Augusta burns up while playing with candles and is presumably damned. Unlike previous allegorical literature with these themes, such as Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress, Sherwood domesticated her story—actions in the children's day-to-day lives, such as stealing fruit, are of supreme importance because they relate directly to their salvation. Each chapter also includes prayers and hymns (by Philip Doddridge
, Isaac Watts
, Charles Wesley
, William Cowper
and Ann
and Jane Taylor
, among others) that are thematically linked to it.
The Fairchild Family continued to be a bestseller (remaining in print until 1913) despite the increasingly popular Wordsworthian
image of childhood innocence. In fact, one scholar has even suggested that it "influenced Dickens's depictions of Pip's fears of the convict, the gibbet, and 'the horrible young man' at the close of Chapter 1" in Great Expectations
(1860–61). Children's literature scholar Gillian Avery
has argued that The Fairchild Family was "as much a part of English childhood as Alice was later to become." Although the book was popular, some scraps of evidence have survived suggesting that readers did not always interpret it as Sherwood would have wanted. Lord Frederic Hamilton writes, for instance, that "there was plenty about eating and drinking; one could always skip the prayers, and there were three or four very brightly written accounts of funerals in it." Although The Fairchild Family has gained a reputation in the twentieth century as an oppressively didactic book, in the early nineteenth century it was viewed as delightfully realistic. Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901), a critic who also wrote children's literature, praised "the gusto with which [Sherwood] dwells on new dolls" and "the absolutely sensational naughtiness" of the children. Most twentieth-century critics have condemned the book's harshness, pointing to the Fairchilds' moral-filled visit to a gibbet
with a rotting corpse swinging from it; but Cutt and others argue that the positive depiction of the nuclear family in the text, particularly Sherwood's emphasis on parents' responsibility to educate their own children, was an important part of the book's appeal. She argues that Sherwood's "influence," via books such as the Fairchild Family, "upon the domestic pattern of Victorian life can hardly be overestimated."
The Fairchild Family was so successful that Sherwood wrote two sequels, one in 1842 and one in 1847. These reflected her changing values as well as those of the Victorian period. Significantly, the servants in Part I, "who are almost part of the family, are pushed aside in Part III by their gossiping, flattering counterparts in the fine manor-house." But the most extensive thematic change in the series was the disappearance of evangelicalism
. Whereas all of the lessons in Part I highlight the children's "human depravity" and encourage the reader to think in terms of the afterlife, in Parts II and III, other Victorian
values such as "respectability" and filial obedience come to the fore. Dawson describes the difference in terms of parental indulgence; in Parts II and III, the Fairchild parents employ softer disciplinary tactics than in Part I.
for the poor; like her novels for the middle class, they "taught the lessons of personal endurance, reliance on Providence, and acceptance of one's earthly status." Emphasizing individual experience and one's personal relationship with God, they discouraged readers from attributing their successes or failures to "larger economic and political forces." In this, they resembled the Cheap Repository Tracts
, many of which were written by Hannah More
. As Linda Peterson, a scholar of nineteenth-century women's literature, argues, Sherwood's tracts use a Biblical "interpretative frame" in order to highlight the fleetingness of earthly things. For example, in A Drive in the Coach through the Streets of London (1819), Julia is granted the privilege of shopping with her mother only if she will "behave wisely in the streets" and "not give [her] mind to self-pleasing." Of course, she cannot keep this promise and she eagerly peeks in at every store window and begs her mother to buy her everything she sees. Her mother therefore allows her to select one item from every shop. Julia, ecstatic, chooses, among other things, blue satin boots, a penknife, and a new hat with flowers, until the pair reach the undertaker's shop. There her mood droops considerably and she realizes the moral of the lesson, recited by her mother, as she picks out a coffin: "but she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth" (1 Timothy 5:6).
appears most obviously in her works from the 1820s and 1830s. During the 1820s in Britain, Catholics were agitating for greater civil rights and it was at this time that Sherwood wrote her most sustained attacks against them. When the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829, Sherwood and many like her were frightened of the influence that Catholics might gain in the government. Therefore, she wrote Victoria (1833), The Nun (1833) and The Monk of Cimies (1834) in order to illustrate some of the dangers of Catholicism. The Monk narrates, in the first person, Edmund Etherington's decision to renounce the Church of England
and join the Catholic church
. While a monk, he ridicules his fellow brothers, plans a murder and debauches a young woman. But evangelicals were not all in agreement on the issue of Catholic Emancipation and some were uncomfortable with these books; one evangelical reviewer called The Monk of Cimies "unfair and unconvincing."
, Sherwood wrote a series of texts based on colonial life. Her most popular work, The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
(1814), tells the story of a young British boy who, on his deathbed, converts Boosy, the Indian man who has taken care of him throughout his childhood. The book was enormously successful; it reached 37 editions by 1850 and was translated into French
, German
, Spanish
, Hindustani
, Chinese
, and Sinhalese. Sherwood's tale blends the realistic
with the sentimental
and introduces her readers to Hindustani words and descriptions of what she felt was authentic Indian life. As Cutt explains, "with this work, the obituary tract (which invariably stressed conversion and a Christian death) had assumed the colouring of romance." Sherwood also wrote a companion story titled Little Lucy and her Dhaye (1825) that told a similar tale but from a little girl's perspective.
In The Indian Pilgrim (1818) Sherwood tried to adapt Pilgrim's Progress for the Indian context; the work focused on "the supposed depravity and pagan idolatry of Brahmans, fakirs, nautch (dance) girls, and soldiers' temporary wives." This text demonstrates Sherwood's religious biases: "Muslims and Jews receive better treatment than Hindus because of their belief in one God, but Roman Catholics fare little better than the Hindu idolaters." The Indian Pilgrim, although never published in India, was popular in Britain and America. Sherwood also wrote texts for Indian servants of British families in the style of British writings for the poor. One of these was The Ayah and Lady (1813) in which the ayah, or maid, is "portrayed as sly, selfish, lazy, and untrustworthy. Her employers are well aware of her faults, yet they tolerate her." A more culturally sensitive and realistic portrayal of Indians appears in The Last Days of Boosy (1842), a sequel to The History of Little Henry and his Bearer, in which the converted Boosy is cast out of his family and community because of his conversion to Christianity.
Colonial themes were a constant thread in Sherwood's texts; The History of Henry Milner (1822–37), its sequel John Marten (1844), and The Indian Orphans (1839) all evince Sherwood's interest in these topics. Her writings on India reveal her strong sense of European, if not specifically British, superiority; India therefore appears in her works as a morally corrupt land in need of reformation. She wrote The History of George Desmond (1821) to warn young men of the dangers of emigrating to India. Sherwood's books shaped the minds of several generations of young Britons. According to Cutt, Sherwood's depictions of India were among the few available to young British readers; such children "acquired a strong conviction of the rightness of missions, which, while it inculcated sincere concern for, and a genuine kindness towards an alien people for whom Britain was responsible, quite destroyed any latent respect for Indian tradition." Cutt attributes the growing paternalism of nineteenth-century British polices on India in part to the widespread popularity of Sherwood's books.
Using a postcolonial
analysis, Nandini Bhattacharya emphasizes the complex relationship between Sherwood's evangelicalism and her colonialism. She argues that Sherwood's evangelical stories demonstrate the deep colonial "mistrust of feminized agency," represented by a dying child in Little Henry and his Bearer. Henry "subvert[s] the colonialist's fantasy of universal identity by generating a subaltern identity that mimics and explodes that fantasy." But, ultimately, Bhattacharya argues, Sherwood creates neither a completely colonialist text nor a subaltern
text; the deaths of children such as Henry eliminate any possibility for an alternative consciousnesses to mature.
and her novels and stories reflected more conventional Victorian
plots and themes. For example, Gipsy Babes (1826), perhaps inspired by Walter Scott's
Guy Mannering
(1815), emphasizes "human affections." In 1835, she published a Gothic novel for adolescents titled Shanty the Blacksmith; it employs all the tropes of the genre—"lost heir, ruined castle, humble helpers and faithful retainer, sinister and mysterious gypsies, prisoner and plot" in what Cutt calls "a gripping" and "exciting tale." In 1835 Sherwood published the novel Caroline Mordaunt; it tells the story of a young woman forced to become a governess
. Her parents die when she is young, but luckily her relatives pay to educate her so that she can earn her own living. The novel follows her progress from a flighty, discontented girl to a reliable, content woman; she learns how to accommodate herself to the whims of the proud nobility, silly literati
, and dogmatic evangelicals. She realizes that in her dependent position she must content herself with less than complete happiness. Once she recognizes this, though, she finds God and, in the last chapter, an ideal husband, thus granting her near complete happiness. Cutt suggests that Sherwood drew on the works of Jane Austen
and Jane Taylor
for a new "lively, humorous, and satirical strain" in works such as this.
In both later works such as Caroline Mordaunt and her earlier evangelical texts, Sherwood participated in the Victorian project of prescribing gender roles; while her later works outlined ever more stringent and narrow roles for each sex, her early works such as The Fairchild Family suggested such demarcations as well: Lucy and Emily learn to sew and keep house while Henry tends the garden and learns Latin
.
As Britain's education system became more secularized in the second half of the nineteenth century, Sherwood's evangelical books were used mainly to teach the poor and in Sunday school
s. Hence her missionary stories were the most influential of all her works. According to Cutt, "these stories, which in themselves kept alive the missionary spirit and perpetuated that paternal attitude towards India that lasted into the [twentieth century], were widely imitated" and "an unfortunate assumption of racial superiority was fostered by the over-simplification of some of Mrs. Sherwood's successors." These books influenced Charlotte Maria Tucker
("A.L.O.E.") and even perhaps Rudyard Kipling
. In the United States, Sherwood's early works were very popular and were republished well into the 1840s; after that, a tradition of specifically American children's literature began to develop with authors such as Louisa May Alcott
.
Sherwood was also instrumental in developing the ideology of the Victorian family. Cutt acknowledges that "the omniscient Victorian parent was not the creation of Mrs. Sherwood, but of the Victorians themselves; nevertheless, by presenting the parent as God's vicar in the family, she had planted and fostered the idea." This in turn increased the value placed on childhood innocence.
The prevalence of death in Sherwood's early stories and her vivid portrayal of its worldly and otherworldly consequences have often caused twentieth-century critics to deride her works. Nevertheless, Sherwood's stories prepared the literary ground for writers such as Charles Kingsley
and Charlotte Yonge. It has even been suggested that John Ruskin
used Henry Milner as the basis for his imaginative autobiography Praeterita (1885–89). Sherwood's narrative experiments with a variety of genres allowed other writers to pursue innovative forms of children's fiction
. Furthermore, her imaginative use of tract
s domesticated reformist literature and also encouraged radical writers such as Harriet Martineau
to employ the same genre, if to opposite ends. Because of the popularity of Sherwood's works and their impact on later writers, Janis Dawson writes: "though her books are no longer widely read, she is regarded as one of the most significant authors of children's literature of the nineteenth century."
s and religious tracts
, see the list of works by Mary Martha Sherwood.
Children's literature
Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...
in 19th-century Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. She composed over 400 books, tract
Tract (literature)
A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political purposes, though far more often the former. They are...
s, magazine articles, and chapbook
Chapbook
A chapbook is a pocket-sized booklet. The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera , popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales,...
s; among the most famous are The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
The History of Little Henry and his Bearer was a popular children's book written by Mary Martha Sherwood. It was continuously in print for 70 years after its initial publication and was translated into French, German, Spanish, Hindustani , Chinese, Marathi , Tamil , and Sinhalese...
(1814), The History of Henry Milner (1822–37), and The History of the Fairchild Family
The History of the Fairchild Family
The History of the Fairchild Family by Mary Martha Sherwood was a series of bestselling children's books in nineteenth century Britain. The three volumes, published in 1818, 1842 and 1847, detail the lives of the Fairchild children...
(1818–47). Sherwood is known primarily for the strong evangelicalism
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
that colored her early writings; however, her later works are characterized by common Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
themes, such as domesticity.
Sherwood's childhood was uneventful, although she recalled it as the happiest part of her life. After she married Captain Henry Sherwood and moved to India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, she converted to evangelical Christianity and began to write for children. Although her books were initially intended only for the children of the military encampments in India, the British public also received them enthusiastically. The Sherwoods returned to England after a decade in India and, building upon her popularity, Sherwood opened a boarding school and published scores of texts for children and the poor.
Many of Sherwood's books were bestsellers and she has been described as "one of the most significant authors of children's literature of the nineteenth century." Her depictions of domesticity and Britain's relationship with India likely shaped the opinions of many young British readers. However, her works fell from favor as a different style of children's literature came into fashion during the late nineteenth century, one exemplified by Lewis Carroll's
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
playful and nonsensical Alice in Wonderland.
Early life
Sherwood was born on 6 May 1775, in Stanford-on-TemeStanford-on-Teme
Stanford-on-Teme is a village and, with the village of Orleton just under one mile away, also a civil parish in the Malvern Hills District in the county of Worcestershire, England.-External links:*...
, Worcestershire
Worcestershire
Worcestershire is a non-metropolitan county, established in antiquity, located in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region...
; she was the eldest daughter and second child of Martha Butt and Reverend George Butt, the chaplain in ordinary to George III. In her autobiography, Sherwood describes herself as an imaginative and playful child. She composed stories in her head before she could write and begged her mother to copy them down. Sherwood remembered her childhood as a delightful time filled with exciting "adventures" undertaken with her brother. She even makes the best of the "stocks" that she was forced to stand in while she did her lessons:
It was the fashion then for children to wear iron collars round the neck, with back-boards strapped over the shoulders. To one of these I was subjected from my sixth to my thirteenth year. I generally did all my lessons standing in stocks, with this same collar round my neck; it was put on in the morning, and seldom taken off till late in the evening . . . And yet I was a very happy child, and when relieved from my collars I not unseldom manifested my delight by starting from our hall-door and taking a run for half a mile through the woods.
Sherwood's education was wide-ranging for a girl during the late eighteenth century: she learned Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
and Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
and was permitted to read freely in her father's library.
Sherwood states in her autobiography that she was tall and ungainly for her age and that she hid in the woods with her doll to escape visitors. But she seems to have enjoyed attending Madame St. Quentin's School for Girls at Reading Abbey, the same school Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
had attended. Sherwood's autobiography relates that her generally happy childhood was marred only by the intrusion of the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, particularly since Reading Abbey was run by French émigré
Émigré
Émigré is a French term that literally refers to a person who has "migrated out", but often carries a connotation of politico-social self-exile....
s.
Sherwood spent some of her teenage years in Lichfield
Lichfield
Lichfield is a cathedral city, civil parish and district in Staffordshire, England. One of eight civil parishes with city status in England, Lichfield is situated roughly north of Birmingham...
, where she enjoyed the company of the eminent naturalist
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin was an English physician who turned down George III's invitation to be a physician to the King. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave trade abolitionist,inventor and poet...
, the educational reformer Richard Lovell Edgeworth
Richard Lovell Edgeworth
Richard Lovell Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish politician, writer and inventor.-Biography:Edgeworth was born in Pierrepont Street, Bath, England, grandson of Sir Salathiel Lovell through his daughter, Jane Lovell....
, his daughter Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe...
— who later became a famous writer in her own right — and the celebrated poet Anna Seward
Anna Seward
Anna Seward was an English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield.-Life:Seward was the elder daughter of Thomas Seward , prebendary of Lichfield and Salisbury, and author...
. Although she was intellectually stimulated by this group of gifted writers, she was distressed by their lack of faith and later described Richard Edgeworth as an "infidel." She also criticized Seward's persona of the female author, writing in her autobiography that she would never model herself after a woman who wore a wig and accumulated male flatterers. Despite what she viewed as the pitfalls of fame, she was determined to become a writer and when she was seventeen her father, who encouraged her writing, helped her publish her first story, Traditions (1795).
When Sherwood's father died in 1795, her family retired from its active social life, since her mother preferred seclusion, and moved to Bridgnorth
Bridgnorth
Bridgnorth is a town in Shropshire, England, along the Severn Valley. It is split into Low Town and High Town, named on account of their elevations relative to the River Severn, which separates the upper town on the right bank from the lower on the left...
, Shropshire
Shropshire
Shropshire is a county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. It borders Wales to the west...
. At Bridgnorth Sherwood began writing sentimental novel
Sentimental novel
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility...
s; in 1802 she sold Margarita for £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
40 to Mr. Hazard of Bath, and The History of Susan Grey, a Pamela-like novel, for £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
10. During this time she also taught at a local Sunday school
Sunday school
Sunday school is the generic name for many different types of religious education pursued on Sundays by various denominations.-England:The first Sunday school may have been opened in 1751 in St. Mary's Church, Nottingham. Another early start was made by Hannah Ball, a native of High Wycombe in...
.
Over half of Sherwood's autobiography is devoted to nostalgically reflecting on her childhood years; the majority of the remaining text is dedicated to the difficult early years of her marriage, particularly those spent in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
.
Marriage and India
Paymaster
A paymaster often is, but is not required to be, a lawyer . When dealing with commission payments on contracts dealing with large amounts of money , most banks in the United States are very wary of handling such large amounts of money...
, which slightly improved the couple's finances. In 1805 the regiment was ordered to India and the Sherwoods were forced to leave their first child, Mary Henrietta, with Sherwood's mother and sister in England.
Sherwood's four-month sea voyage to India was difficult; she was again pregnant and the regiment's ship was attacked by French warships
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
. The Sherwoods stayed in India for eleven years, moving with the army and an ever-increasing family from Calcutta (Kolkata
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
) to Dinapore (Danapur
Danapur
Danapur , sometimes known as Dinapur or Dinapore is a satellite town of Patna in Bihar state of India. It is located on the bank of the River Sone which merges with River Ganges at Digha a few kilometers from Danapur...
) to Berhampore (Baharampur
Baharampur
Baharampur is a city in the West Bengal state of India. Baharampur is the sixth largest city in West Bengal and situated in central part of West Bengal. Baharampur is nominated for becoming the municipal corporation...
) to Cawnpore (Kanpur) to Meerut (Meerut). They had six children in India: Henry (1805–1807), Lucy Martha (1807–1808), Lucy Elizabeth (1809–1835), Emily (1811–1833), Henry Martyn (1813–?), and Sophia (1815–?). The deaths of the infants Henry and Lucy Martha and later of young Emily and Lucy Elizabeth affected Sherwood deeply; she frequently named the heroes and heroines of her books (many of whom die) after her late children.
Following the agonizing death of her second child, Henry, of whooping cough, Sherwood began to consider converting to evangelical Christianity
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
. The famous missionary Henry Martyn
Henry Martyn
Henry Martyn was an Anglican priest and missionary to the peoples of India and Persia. Born in Truro, Cornwall, he was educated at Truro Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge. A chance encounter with Charles Simeon led him to become a missionary...
(for whom she named her sixth child) finally convinced her; but it was the chaplain to the company, Mr. Parson, who first made her aware of her "human depravity" and her need for redemption. After her conversion, she was anxious to pursue evangelical missionary work in India, but she first had to persuade the East India Company that its policy of religious neutrality was ill-conceived. Because there was social and political support for missionary programs in Britain, the Company eventually approved her endeavors. Sherwood established schools for both the children of army officers and the local Indian children attached to the camp. The children were often taught in her home, as no buildings were available. The first school began with 13 children and grew to over 40, with pupils ranging from the very young to adolescents; uneducated soldiers also attended at times. Sherwood discovered that traditional British teaching materials did not appeal to children raised in India, and therefore wrote her own Indian- and army-themed stories, such as The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
The History of Little Henry and his Bearer was a popular children's book written by Mary Martha Sherwood. It was continuously in print for 70 years after its initial publication and was translated into French, German, Spanish, Hindustani , Chinese, Marathi , Tamil , and Sinhalese...
(1814) and The Memoirs of Sergeant Dale, his Daughter and the Orphan Mary (1815).
Sherwood also adopted neglected or orphaned children from the camp. In 1807 she adopted Annie Child, a three-year-old who had been given too much medicinal gin
Gin
Gin is a spirit which derives its predominant flavour from juniper berries . Although several different styles of gin have existed since its origins, it is broadly differentiated into two basic legal categories...
and in 1808 a malnourished two-year-old Sally Pownal. She found homes for those she could not adopt and founded an orphanage. In 1816, on the advice of doctors, she and her family returned to Britain; in her autobiography Sherwood relates that she was continually ill in India and it was believed at the time that neither she nor any of her children could survive in a tropical climate.
Return to Britain and death
When the Sherwoods returned to Britain, they were financially strapped. Captain Sherwood, having been put on half-pay, opened a school in Henwick, WorcestershireWorcestershire
Worcestershire is a non-metropolitan county, established in antiquity, located in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region...
. Relying on her fame as an author and her teaching experience in India, Sherwood also decided to establish a boarding school for girls in Wick; it remained in operation for eight years. She taught English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, astronomy, history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, geography, grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
, writing and arithmetic
Arithmetic
Arithmetic or arithmetics is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations. It involves the study of quantity, especially as the result of combining numbers...
. At the same time, she wrote hundreds of tracts
Tract (literature)
A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political purposes, though far more often the former. They are...
, novels and other works for children and the poor, increasing her popularity in both the United States and Britain. The History of Henry Milner (1822) was one of Sherwood's most successful books; children sent her fan mail, begging her to write a sequel—one sent her "ornamental pens" with which to do so. Babies were named after the hero. Sherwood published much of what she wrote in The Youth's Magazine, a children's periodical that she edited for over two decades.
By the 1830s, the Sherwoods had become more prosperous and the family decided to travel to the continent. The texts that Sherwood wrote following this trip reflect her exposure to French culture in particular. She also embarked on a large and complex Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
project at this time, for which she learned Hebrew. To assist her, her husband assembled, over the course of ten years, a large Hebrew-English concordance
Concordance (publishing)
A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Vedas, Bible, Qur'an...
. Unfortunately, Sherwood's autobiography provides scant details regarding the last forty-odd years of her life. However, we do know that even in her seventies, Sherwood wrote for four or five hours a day; many of these books were co-authored with Sherwood's daughter, Sophia. According to M. Nancy Cutt, a Sherwood scholar, this joint authorship led to a "watery sentimentality" not evident in Sherwood's earlier works as well as a greater emphasis on issues of class.
In 1849, the Sherwoods moved to Twickenham
Twickenham
Twickenham is a large suburban town southwest of central London. It is the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and one of the locally important district centres identified in the London Plan...
, Middlesex
Middlesex
Middlesex is one of the historic counties of England and the second smallest by area. The low-lying county contained the wealthy and politically independent City of London on its southern boundary and was dominated by it from a very early time...
and in December of that year Captain Sherwood died. Sherwood herself died almost two years later on 20 September 1851.
Literary analysis
Sherwood scholar M. Nancy Cutt has argued that Sherwood's career can be usefully divided into three periods: (1) her romanticRomanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
period (1795–1805), during which she wrote a few sentimental novel
Sentimental novel
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility...
s; (2) her evangelical
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
period (1810–c. 1830), during which she produced her most popular and influential works; and (3) her post-evangelical period (c. 1830–1851). Several underlying themes pervade most of Sherwood's works throughout these periods: "her conviction of inherent human corruption"; her belief that literature "had a catechetical utility" for every rank of society; her belief that "the dynamics of family life" should reflect central Christian principles; and her "virulent" anti-Catholicism
Anti-Catholicism
Anti-Catholicism is a generic term for discrimination, hostility or prejudice directed against Catholicism, and especially against the Catholic Church, its clergy or its adherents...
.
Early writings: sentimental novels
Sherwood's earliest works are the sentimental novelSentimental novel
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility...
s Traditions (1795) and Margarita (1795); although both are more worldly than her later works, neither received much recognition. By contrast, The History of Susan Gray, which was written for the girls of her Sunday school
Sunday school
Sunday school is the generic name for many different types of religious education pursued on Sundays by various denominations.-England:The first Sunday school may have been opened in 1751 in St. Mary's Church, Nottingham. Another early start was made by Hannah Ball, a native of High Wycombe in...
class in Bridgnorth, made Sherwood a famous author. Like Hannah More's
Hannah More
Hannah More was an English religious writer, and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical...
tracts
Tract (literature)
A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political purposes, though far more often the former. They are...
, the novel is designed to teach middle-class morality to the poor. This novel—which Patricia Demers, a children's literature scholar, describes as a "purified Pamela"—tells the story of Susan, an orphaned servant girl, who "resists the advances of a philandering soldier; though trembling with emotion at the man's declaration of love and promise of marriage." The reader is regularly reminded of the "wages of sin" since Susan's story is told from her deathbed. A separate narrator, seemingly Sherwood, often interrupts the tale to warn readers against particular actions, such as becoming a "bad woman." Despite a didactic tone that is often distasteful to modern readers, Susan Gray was so popular at the time of its release that it was pirated by multiple publishers. In 1816, Sherwood published a revised and "improved" version, which Sarah Trimmer
Sarah Trimmer
Sarah Trimmer was a noted writer and critic of British children's literature in the eighteenth century...
positively reviewed in The Guardian of Education
The Guardian of Education
The Guardian of Education was the first successful periodical dedicated to reviewing children's literature in Britain. It was edited by eighteenth-century educationalist, children's author, and Sunday school advocate Sarah Trimmer and was published from June 1802 until September 1806 by J. Hatchard...
. Sherwood wrote a companion story, The History of Lucy Clare, which was published in 1810.
French literary influences
Although Sherwood disagreed with the principles espoused by French revolutionFrench Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
aries, her own works are modeled on French children's literature, much of which is infused with Rousseauvian
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
ideals. For example, in The History of Henry Milner, Part I (1822) and The History of the Fairchild Family, Part I (1818) Sherwood adopts Arnaud Berquin's
Arnaud Berquin
Arnaud Berquin was a French children's author.His most famous work was L'Ami des Enfans which was first translated into English, albeit bowdlerised, by Mary Stockdale and published in London in 1783-4 by Mary's father John Stockdale.The work remained popular until the middle of the nineteenth...
"habitual pattern of small domestic situations acted out by children under the eye of parents or fellows." Likewise, The Lady of the Manor (1823–29) shares similar themes and structures with Madame de Genlis' Tales of the Castle (1785). David Hanson, a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, has questioned this interpretation, however, arguing that the tales told by the maternal figure in The Lady of the Manor demonstrate a "distrust of parents," and of mothers in particular, because they illustrate the folly of overly permissive parenting. In these inset stories, only outsiders discipline children correctly.
One of Sherwood's aims in her evangelically-themed The History of Henry Milner (1822–37) was to challenge what she saw as the irreligion inherent in French pedagogy. Henry Milner was written in direct response to Thomas Day's
Thomas Day
Thomas Day was a British author and abolitionist. He was well-known for the children's book The History of Sandford and Merton which emphasized Rousseauvian educational ideals.-Life and works:...
The History of Sandford and Merton
The History of Sandford and Merton
The History of Sandford and Merton was a bestselling children's book written by Thomas Day. He began his book as a contribution to Richard Lovell and Honora Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy, a collection of short stories for children that Maria Edgeworth continued some years after Honora died...
(1783–89), a novel founded on the philosophy of Rousseau (whose writings Sherwood had lambasted as "the well-spring of infidelity"). Nevertheless, as children's literature scholar Janis Dawson points out, the structure and emphasis of Henry greatly resemble Rousseau's own Emile
Emile: Or, On Education
Émile, or On Education is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. Due to a section of the book entitled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” Émile was be...
(1762): their pedagogies are very similar, even if their underlying assumptions about childhood are diametrically opposed. Both books isolate the child in order to encourage him to learn from the natural world, but Sherwood's Henry is naturally depraved while Rousseau's Emile is naturally good. As the series progressed, however, Sherwood's views of religion changed (she became a universalist
Universal reconciliation
In Christian theology, universal reconciliation is the doctrine that all sinful and alienated human souls—because of divine love and mercy—will ultimately be reconciled to God.Universal salvation may be related to the perception of a problem of Hell, standing opposed to ideas...
), causing her to place greater emphasis on childhood innocence in the later volumes.
Evangelicalism
The strongest themes in Sherwood's early evangelicalEvangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
writings are the need to recognize one's innate "depravity" and the need to prepare oneself for eternity. For Sherwood, the most important lessons emphasize "faith, resignation, and implicit obedience to the will of God." In her adaptation of John Bunyan's
John Bunyan
John Bunyan was an English Christian writer and preacher, famous for writing The Pilgrim's Progress. Though he was a Reformed Baptist, in the Church of England he is remembered with a Lesser Festival on 30 August, and on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church on 29 August.-Life:In 1628,...
Pilgrim's Progress (1678)—The Infant's Progress (1821)—she represents original sin
Original sin
Original sin is, according to a Christian theological doctrine, humanity's state of sin resulting from the Fall of Man. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred...
as a child named "In-bred Sin" who tempts the young pilgrims on their way to the Celestial City (Heaven) and it is these battles with In-bred Sin that constitute the major conflict of the text. The allegory
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
is complex and, as Demers admits, "tedious" for even the "willing reader." Thus, "some young readers may have found [In-bred Sin's] activities more interesting than the spiritual struggles of the little heroes, reading the book as an adventure story rather than as a guide to salvation." Such religious allegory, although not always so overt, continued to be a favorite literary device of Sherwood's.
Sherwood also infused her works with political and social messages dear to evangelicals during the teens and twenties, such as the crucial role of missions, the value of charity, the evils of slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
and the necessity of Sabbath observance. She wrote Biblically-based introductions to astronomy and ancient history so that children would have Christian textbooks. As Cutt argues, "the intent of these (as indeed of all Evangelical texts) was to offset the deistic tendency to consider knowledge an end in itself." Sherwood also revised classic children's books to make them appropriately religious, such as Sarah Fielding's
Sarah Fielding
Sarah Fielding was a British author and sister of the novelist Henry Fielding. She was the author of The Governess, or The Little Female Academy , which was the first novel in English written especially for children , and had earlier achieved success with her novel The Adventures of David Simple...
The Governess
The Governess, or The Little Female Academy
The Governess, or The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding is the first full-length novel written for children, and a significant work of children's literature of the 18th century.In her preface, the author says:-Bibliography:...
(1749). Sherwood's efforts to make religion more palatable through children's fiction were not always regarded favorably by the entire evangelical community; The Evangelical Magazine harshly reviewed her Stories Explanatory of the Church Catechism (1817), complaining that it was overly reliant on exciting fictional tales to convey its religious message.
The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–1847)
As Cutt argues, "the great overriding metaphor of all [Sherwood's] work is the representation of divine order by the harmonious family relationship (inevitably set in its own pastoral Eden). . . No writer made it clearer to her readers that the child who is dutiful within his family is blessed in the sight of God; or stressed more firmly that family bonds are but the earthly and visible end of a spiritual bond running up to the very throne of God." Demers has referred to this "consciously double vision" as the quintessentially Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
element of Sherwood's writing. Nowhere is this theme more evident than in Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family
The History of the Fairchild Family
The History of the Fairchild Family by Mary Martha Sherwood was a series of bestselling children's books in nineteenth century Britain. The three volumes, published in 1818, 1842 and 1847, detail the lives of the Fairchild children...
, the first part of which was published in 1818.
Of all of Sherwood's evangelically-themed books, The History of the Fairchild Family was the most popular. When she published it with John Hatchard of Piccadilly
Piccadilly
Piccadilly is a major street in central London, running from Hyde Park Corner in the west to Piccadilly Circus in the east. It is completely within the city of Westminster. The street is part of the A4 road, London's second most important western artery. St...
, she assured it and the ten other books she published with him a "social distinction" not attached to her other publications. The Fairchild Family tells the story of a family striving towards godliness and consists of a series of lessons taught by the Fairchild parents to their three children (Emily, Lucy and Henry) regarding not only the proper orientation of their souls towards Heaven but also the right earthly morality (envy, greed, lying, disobedience, and fighting are immoral). The overarching narrative of the tale also includes a series of tract
Tract (literature)
A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political purposes, though far more often the former. They are...
-like stories which illustrate these moral lessons. For example, stories of the deaths of two neighborhood children, Charles Trueman and Miss Augusta Noble, help the Fairchild children to understand how and why they need to look to the state of their own hearts. The faithful and "true" Charles has a transcendent deathbed experience, suggesting that he was saved; by contrast, the heedless and disobedient Augusta burns up while playing with candles and is presumably damned. Unlike previous allegorical literature with these themes, such as Bunyan's
John Bunyan
John Bunyan was an English Christian writer and preacher, famous for writing The Pilgrim's Progress. Though he was a Reformed Baptist, in the Church of England he is remembered with a Lesser Festival on 30 August, and on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church on 29 August.-Life:In 1628,...
Pilgrim's Progress, Sherwood domesticated her story—actions in the children's day-to-day lives, such as stealing fruit, are of supreme importance because they relate directly to their salvation. Each chapter also includes prayers and hymns (by Philip Doddridge
Philip Doddridge
Philip Doddridge DD was an English Nonconformist leader, educator, and hymnwriter.-Early life:...
, Isaac Watts
Isaac Watts
Isaac Watts was an English hymnwriter, theologian and logician. A prolific and popular hymnwriter, he was recognised as the "Father of English Hymnody", credited with some 750 hymns...
, Charles Wesley
Charles Wesley
Charles Wesley was an English leader of the Methodist movement, son of Anglican clergyman and poet Samuel Wesley, the younger brother of Anglican clergyman John Wesley and Anglican clergyman Samuel Wesley , and father of musician Samuel Wesley, and grandfather of musician Samuel Sebastian Wesley...
, William Cowper
William Cowper
William Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry...
and Ann
Ann Taylor (poet)
Ann Taylor was an English poet and literary critic. In her youth she was a writer of verse for children, for which she achieved long-lasting popularity. In the years immediately preceding her marriage, she became an astringent literary critic of growing reputation...
and Jane Taylor
Jane Taylor (poet)
Jane Taylor , was an English poet and novelist. She wrote the words for the song Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in 1806 at age 23, while living in Shilling Street, Lavenham, Suffolk....
, among others) that are thematically linked to it.
The Fairchild Family continued to be a bestseller (remaining in print until 1913) despite the increasingly popular Wordsworthian
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
image of childhood innocence. In fact, one scholar has even suggested that it "influenced Dickens's depictions of Pip's fears of the convict, the gibbet, and 'the horrible young man' at the close of Chapter 1" in Great Expectations
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens. It was first published in serial form in the publication All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. It has been adapted for stage and screen over 250 times....
(1860–61). Children's literature scholar Gillian Avery
Gillian Avery
Gillian Avery is a British children’s novelist and literary historian.She was born in Reigate on 30 September 1926 and attended Dunottar School there. She worked first as a journalist on the Surrey Mirror, then for Chambers Encyclopedia and Oxford University Press. In 1952 she married the...
has argued that The Fairchild Family was "as much a part of English childhood as Alice was later to become." Although the book was popular, some scraps of evidence have survived suggesting that readers did not always interpret it as Sherwood would have wanted. Lord Frederic Hamilton writes, for instance, that "there was plenty about eating and drinking; one could always skip the prayers, and there were three or four very brightly written accounts of funerals in it." Although The Fairchild Family has gained a reputation in the twentieth century as an oppressively didactic book, in the early nineteenth century it was viewed as delightfully realistic. Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901), a critic who also wrote children's literature, praised "the gusto with which [Sherwood] dwells on new dolls" and "the absolutely sensational naughtiness" of the children. Most twentieth-century critics have condemned the book's harshness, pointing to the Fairchilds' moral-filled visit to a gibbet
Gibbet
A gibbet is a gallows-type structure from which the dead bodies of executed criminals were hung on public display to deter other existing or potential criminals. In earlier times, up to the late 17th century, live gibbeting also took place, in which the criminal was placed alive in a metal cage...
with a rotting corpse swinging from it; but Cutt and others argue that the positive depiction of the nuclear family in the text, particularly Sherwood's emphasis on parents' responsibility to educate their own children, was an important part of the book's appeal. She argues that Sherwood's "influence," via books such as the Fairchild Family, "upon the domestic pattern of Victorian life can hardly be overestimated."
The Fairchild Family was so successful that Sherwood wrote two sequels, one in 1842 and one in 1847. These reflected her changing values as well as those of the Victorian period. Significantly, the servants in Part I, "who are almost part of the family, are pushed aside in Part III by their gossiping, flattering counterparts in the fine manor-house." But the most extensive thematic change in the series was the disappearance of evangelicalism
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
. Whereas all of the lessons in Part I highlight the children's "human depravity" and encourage the reader to think in terms of the afterlife, in Parts II and III, other Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
values such as "respectability" and filial obedience come to the fore. Dawson describes the difference in terms of parental indulgence; in Parts II and III, the Fairchild parents employ softer disciplinary tactics than in Part I.
Evangelical tract literature in the 1820s and 1830s
During the 1820s and 1830s, Sherwood wrote a great many tractsTract (literature)
A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political purposes, though far more often the former. They are...
for the poor; like her novels for the middle class, they "taught the lessons of personal endurance, reliance on Providence, and acceptance of one's earthly status." Emphasizing individual experience and one's personal relationship with God, they discouraged readers from attributing their successes or failures to "larger economic and political forces." In this, they resembled the Cheap Repository Tracts
Cheap Repository Tracts
The Cheap Repository Tracts was a series of around 120 political and religious tracts published between March 1795 and December 1797, for sale or distribution to literate poor people, as an alternative to the ‘corrupt and vicious little books and ballads which have been hung out of windows in the...
, many of which were written by Hannah More
Hannah More
Hannah More was an English religious writer, and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical...
. As Linda Peterson, a scholar of nineteenth-century women's literature, argues, Sherwood's tracts use a Biblical "interpretative frame" in order to highlight the fleetingness of earthly things. For example, in A Drive in the Coach through the Streets of London (1819), Julia is granted the privilege of shopping with her mother only if she will "behave wisely in the streets" and "not give [her] mind to self-pleasing." Of course, she cannot keep this promise and she eagerly peeks in at every store window and begs her mother to buy her everything she sees. Her mother therefore allows her to select one item from every shop. Julia, ecstatic, chooses, among other things, blue satin boots, a penknife, and a new hat with flowers, until the pair reach the undertaker's shop. There her mood droops considerably and she realizes the moral of the lesson, recited by her mother, as she picks out a coffin: "but she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth" (1 Timothy 5:6).
Anti-Catholicism in the 1830s
Sherwood's vigorous anti-CatholicismAnti-Catholicism
Anti-Catholicism is a generic term for discrimination, hostility or prejudice directed against Catholicism, and especially against the Catholic Church, its clergy or its adherents...
appears most obviously in her works from the 1820s and 1830s. During the 1820s in Britain, Catholics were agitating for greater civil rights and it was at this time that Sherwood wrote her most sustained attacks against them. When the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829, Sherwood and many like her were frightened of the influence that Catholics might gain in the government. Therefore, she wrote Victoria (1833), The Nun (1833) and The Monk of Cimies (1834) in order to illustrate some of the dangers of Catholicism. The Monk narrates, in the first person, Edmund Etherington's decision to renounce the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
and join the Catholic church
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
. While a monk, he ridicules his fellow brothers, plans a murder and debauches a young woman. But evangelicals were not all in agreement on the issue of Catholic Emancipation and some were uncomfortable with these books; one evangelical reviewer called The Monk of Cimies "unfair and unconvincing."
Colonialism
While in IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, Sherwood wrote a series of texts based on colonial life. Her most popular work, The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
The History of Little Henry and his Bearer
The History of Little Henry and his Bearer was a popular children's book written by Mary Martha Sherwood. It was continuously in print for 70 years after its initial publication and was translated into French, German, Spanish, Hindustani , Chinese, Marathi , Tamil , and Sinhalese...
(1814), tells the story of a young British boy who, on his deathbed, converts Boosy, the Indian man who has taken care of him throughout his childhood. The book was enormously successful; it reached 37 editions by 1850 and was translated into French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Hindustani
Hindustani language
Hindi-Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language and the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. It is also known as Hindustani , and historically, as Hindavi or Rekhta...
, Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, and Sinhalese. Sherwood's tale blends the realistic
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
with the sentimental
Sentimentality
Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason....
and introduces her readers to Hindustani words and descriptions of what she felt was authentic Indian life. As Cutt explains, "with this work, the obituary tract (which invariably stressed conversion and a Christian death) had assumed the colouring of romance." Sherwood also wrote a companion story titled Little Lucy and her Dhaye (1825) that told a similar tale but from a little girl's perspective.
Colonial themes were a constant thread in Sherwood's texts; The History of Henry Milner (1822–37), its sequel John Marten (1844), and The Indian Orphans (1839) all evince Sherwood's interest in these topics. Her writings on India reveal her strong sense of European, if not specifically British, superiority; India therefore appears in her works as a morally corrupt land in need of reformation. She wrote The History of George Desmond (1821) to warn young men of the dangers of emigrating to India. Sherwood's books shaped the minds of several generations of young Britons. According to Cutt, Sherwood's depictions of India were among the few available to young British readers; such children "acquired a strong conviction of the rightness of missions, which, while it inculcated sincere concern for, and a genuine kindness towards an alien people for whom Britain was responsible, quite destroyed any latent respect for Indian tradition." Cutt attributes the growing paternalism of nineteenth-century British polices on India in part to the widespread popularity of Sherwood's books.
Using a postcolonial
Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...
analysis, Nandini Bhattacharya emphasizes the complex relationship between Sherwood's evangelicalism and her colonialism. She argues that Sherwood's evangelical stories demonstrate the deep colonial "mistrust of feminized agency," represented by a dying child in Little Henry and his Bearer. Henry "subvert[s] the colonialist's fantasy of universal identity by generating a subaltern identity that mimics and explodes that fantasy." But, ultimately, Bhattacharya argues, Sherwood creates neither a completely colonialist text nor a subaltern
Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...
text; the deaths of children such as Henry eliminate any possibility for an alternative consciousnesses to mature.
Later writings: Victorianism
By 1830, Sherwood's works had drifted away from evangelicalismEvangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
and her novels and stories reflected more conventional Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
plots and themes. For example, Gipsy Babes (1826), perhaps inspired by Walter Scott's
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
Guy Mannering
Guy Mannering
Guy Mannering or The Astrologer is a novel by Sir Walter Scott, published anonymously in 1815. According to an introduction that Scott wrote in 1829, he had originally intended to write a story of the supernatural, but changed his mind soon after starting...
(1815), emphasizes "human affections." In 1835, she published a Gothic novel for adolescents titled Shanty the Blacksmith; it employs all the tropes of the genre—"lost heir, ruined castle, humble helpers and faithful retainer, sinister and mysterious gypsies, prisoner and plot" in what Cutt calls "a gripping" and "exciting tale." In 1835 Sherwood published the novel Caroline Mordaunt; it tells the story of a young woman forced to become a governess
Governess
A governess is a girl or woman employed to teach and train children in a private household. In contrast to a nanny or a babysitter, she concentrates on teaching children, not on meeting their physical needs...
. Her parents die when she is young, but luckily her relatives pay to educate her so that she can earn her own living. The novel follows her progress from a flighty, discontented girl to a reliable, content woman; she learns how to accommodate herself to the whims of the proud nobility, silly literati
Literati
Literati may refer to:*Intellectuals or those who read and comment on literature*The scholar-bureaucrats or literati of imperial China**Literati painting, also known as the Southern School of painting, developed by Chinese literati...
, and dogmatic evangelicals. She realizes that in her dependent position she must content herself with less than complete happiness. Once she recognizes this, though, she finds God and, in the last chapter, an ideal husband, thus granting her near complete happiness. Cutt suggests that Sherwood drew on the works of Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
and Jane Taylor
Jane Taylor (poet)
Jane Taylor , was an English poet and novelist. She wrote the words for the song Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in 1806 at age 23, while living in Shilling Street, Lavenham, Suffolk....
for a new "lively, humorous, and satirical strain" in works such as this.
In both later works such as Caroline Mordaunt and her earlier evangelical texts, Sherwood participated in the Victorian project of prescribing gender roles; while her later works outlined ever more stringent and narrow roles for each sex, her early works such as The Fairchild Family suggested such demarcations as well: Lucy and Emily learn to sew and keep house while Henry tends the garden and learns Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
.
Legacy
Sunday school
Sunday school is the generic name for many different types of religious education pursued on Sundays by various denominations.-England:The first Sunday school may have been opened in 1751 in St. Mary's Church, Nottingham. Another early start was made by Hannah Ball, a native of High Wycombe in...
s. Hence her missionary stories were the most influential of all her works. According to Cutt, "these stories, which in themselves kept alive the missionary spirit and perpetuated that paternal attitude towards India that lasted into the [twentieth century], were widely imitated" and "an unfortunate assumption of racial superiority was fostered by the over-simplification of some of Mrs. Sherwood's successors." These books influenced Charlotte Maria Tucker
Charlotte Maria Tucker
Charlotte Maria Tucker , English author, who wrote under the pseudonym A.L.O.E. , was born near Barnet, Middlesex, the daughter of Henry St George Tucker , a distinguished official of the British East India Company...
("A.L.O.E.") and even perhaps Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
. In the United States, Sherwood's early works were very popular and were republished well into the 1840s; after that, a tradition of specifically American children's literature began to develop with authors such as Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Little Women was set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, and published in 1868...
.
Sherwood was also instrumental in developing the ideology of the Victorian family. Cutt acknowledges that "the omniscient Victorian parent was not the creation of Mrs. Sherwood, but of the Victorians themselves; nevertheless, by presenting the parent as God's vicar in the family, she had planted and fostered the idea." This in turn increased the value placed on childhood innocence.
The prevalence of death in Sherwood's early stories and her vivid portrayal of its worldly and otherworldly consequences have often caused twentieth-century critics to deride her works. Nevertheless, Sherwood's stories prepared the literary ground for writers such as Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...
and Charlotte Yonge. It has even been suggested that John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
used Henry Milner as the basis for his imaginative autobiography Praeterita (1885–89). Sherwood's narrative experiments with a variety of genres allowed other writers to pursue innovative forms of children's fiction
Children's literature
Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...
. Furthermore, her imaginative use of tract
Tract (literature)
A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political purposes, though far more often the former. They are...
s domesticated reformist literature and also encouraged radical writers such as Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist....
to employ the same genre, if to opposite ends. Because of the popularity of Sherwood's works and their impact on later writers, Janis Dawson writes: "though her books are no longer widely read, she is regarded as one of the most significant authors of children's literature of the nineteenth century."
Selected works
This is a list of some of Sherwood's most important works. For a more complete list of her works that includes her many chapbookChapbook
A chapbook is a pocket-sized booklet. The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera , popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales,...
s and religious tracts
Tract (literature)
A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political purposes, though far more often the former. They are...
, see the list of works by Mary Martha Sherwood.
- The History of Little Henry and his BearerThe History of Little Henry and his BearerThe History of Little Henry and his Bearer was a popular children's book written by Mary Martha Sherwood. It was continuously in print for 70 years after its initial publication and was translated into French, German, Spanish, Hindustani , Chinese, Marathi , Tamil , and Sinhalese...
(1814) - The History of Susan Gray (1815) (revised)
- Stories Explanatory of the Church Catechism (1817)
- The History of the Fairchild FamilyThe History of the Fairchild FamilyThe History of the Fairchild Family by Mary Martha Sherwood was a series of bestselling children's books in nineteenth century Britain. The three volumes, published in 1818, 1842 and 1847, detail the lives of the Fairchild children...
(1818) - The Indian Pilgrim (1818)
- An Introduction to Geography (1818)
- The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1820)
- The History of George Desmond (1821)
- The Infant's Progress (1821, 2nd edition)
- The History of Henry Milner (1822)
- The History of Little Lucy and her Dhaye (1823)
- The Lady of the Manor (1823–29)
- The Monk of Cimies (1834)
- Caroline Mordaunt, or The Governess (1835)
- Shanty the Blacksmith (1835)
- The Last Days of Boosy, the Bearer of Little Henry (1842)
- The Youth's Magazine (1822–48) - "This periodical . . . brought out tales, tracts, and articles by Mrs. Sherwood for over twenty-five years (signed at first M.M., and after 1827, M.M.S.) The earlier tales were rapidly reprinted by Houlston, Darton, Melrose, Knight and Lacey and the R.T.S. [Religious Tract Society], as well as by various American publishers."
- The Works of Mrs. Sherwood by Harper & Bros. (1834–57) - most complete collected works
External links
- Biographical sketch of Sherwood and links to etexts at Literary Heritage
- Finding aid at UCLA for their collection of Sherwood's manuscripts and diaries
Online full-text resources
- History of the Fairchild Family Part I (1818)
- The Lady of the Manor (1823-29)
- Père la Chaise (1823)
- Arzoomund (1829, 2nd edition)
- The Indian Pilgrim (1858 edition)
- The History of the Fairchild Family, Part III (1847)
- The Little Woodman and his Dog Cæsar and the Orphan Boy (1860 edition)
- The History of Little Henry and his Bearer (1816, 7th edition)
- The Infant's Progress (1821, 2nd edition)
- The History of Henry Milner Part IV (1837)
- Shanty the Blacksmith (1852)
- Roxobel, Vol. 1 (1831)
- The Orphans of Normandy (1828, 2nd edition)
- Emancipation (1829)
- The Lily of the Valley (1844, 6th edition)
- The Latter Days (1833)
- The Fairy Knoll (1848)
- The Little Momiere (1833)
- Katharine Seward (1837, 3rd edition)
- The Garland (1835)
- Jamie Gordon (1851)