The Guardian of Education
Encyclopedia
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
dedicated to reviewing children's literature
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 Britain. It was edited by eighteenth-century educationalist, children's author, and 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...
advocate Sarah Trimmer
Sarah Trimmer
Sarah Trimmer was a noted writer and critic of British children's literature in the eighteenth century...
and was published from June 1802 until September 1806 by J. Hatchard and F. C. and J. Rivington. The journal offered child-rearing advice and assessments of contemporary educational theories, and Trimmer even proffered her own educational theory after evaluating the major works of the day.
Fearing the influence of 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...
ary ideals, particularly those of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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...
, Trimmer emphasized orthodox
Orthodoxy
The word orthodox, from Greek orthos + doxa , is generally used to mean the adherence to accepted norms, more specifically to creeds, especially in religion...
Anglicanism
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...
and encouraged the perpetuation of the contemporary social and political order. Despite her conservatism, however, she agreed with Rousseau and other progressive educational reformers
Education reform
Education reform is the process of improving public education. Small improvements in education theoretically have large social returns, in health, wealth and well-being. Historically, reforms have taken different forms because the motivations of reformers have differed.A continuing motivation has...
on many issues, such as the damaging effects of rote learning
Rote learning
Rote learning is a learning technique which focuses on memorization. The major practice involved in rote learning is learning by repetition by which students commit information to memory in a highly structured way. The idea is that one will be able to quickly recall the meaning of the material the...
and the irrationalism of fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
s.
The Guardian of Education was the first periodical to review children's books seriously and with a distinctive set of criteria. Trimmer's reviews were carefully thought out; they influenced publishers and authors to alter the content of their books, helped to define the new genre of children's literature, and greatly affected the sales of children's books. The Guardian also offered the first history of children's literature; establishing a list of landmark books, which scholars still use today.
Founding and structure
Sarah TrimmerSarah Trimmer
Sarah Trimmer was a noted writer and critic of British children's literature in the eighteenth century...
was prompted to publish The Guardian of Education by the flood of new children's books on the market early in the nineteenth century and by her fear that those books might contain 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...
ary values. The 1790s had been one of the most tumultuous decades in Europe's history, with the French revolution, increased demands for reform in Britain, and the French Revolutionary Wars
French Revolutionary Wars
The French Revolutionary Wars were a series of major conflicts, from 1792 until 1802, fought between the French Revolutionary government and several European states...
. Following this upsurge in radicalism
Radicalism (historical)
The term Radical was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. It later became a general pejorative term for those favoring or seeking political reforms which include dramatic changes to the social order...
, a conservative backlash erupted in Britain; the Guardian was, in many ways, a part of this movement. In its pages, Trimmer denounced the Revolution and the philosophers whose works she believed were responsible for it, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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...
. She argued that there existed a vast conspiracy, organized by the atheistic
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
and democratic revolutionaries of France, to undermine and overthrow the legitimate governments of Europe. From her perspective, the conspirators were attempting to overturn traditional society by "endeavouring to infect the minds of the rising generation, through the medium of Books of Education and Children's Books" [emphasis Trimmer's]. She intended to combat this conspiracy by pointing parents towards properly Christian books.
Each issue of Trimmer's Guardian was divided into three sections: 1) extracts from texts which Trimmer thought would edify her adult readers (grouped under "Memoirs" and "Extracts from Sermons"); 2) an essay by Trimmer commenting on educational issues (contained in sections such as "Original Essays" and "Systems of Education Examined"); 3) and reviews of children's books. Trimmer herself wrote all of the essays listed under her name and all of the reviews, but she was not the author of the texts she extracted. The issues did not always consist of the same sections; for example, beginning in 1804 Trimmer started including an "Essay on Christian Education" and in 1805 occasionally reviewed "School books". Beginning a tradition that persists to this day, she divided the books she reviewed by age group: "Examination of Books for Children" (for those under fourteen) and "Books for Young Persons" (for those between fourteen and twenty-one).
Matthew Grenby, the foremost expert on Trimmer, estimates that the Guardians circulation was between 1,500 and 3,500 copies per issue. Thus the Guardian
The Critical Review
The Critical Review was first edited by Tobias Smollett from 1756 to 1763, and was contributed to by Samuel Johnson, David Hume, John Hunter, and Oliver Goldsmith, until 1817....
and the British Critic
British Critic
The British Critic: A New Review was a quarterly publication, established in 1793 as a conservative and high church review journal riding the tide of British reaction against the French Revolution.-High church review:...
, which both reached 3,500 by 1797, or the Analytical Review
Analytical Review
The Analytical Review was a periodical established in London in 1788 by the publisher Joseph Johnson and the writer Thomas Christie. Part of the Republic of Letters, it was a gadfly publication, which offered readers summaries and analyses of the many new publications issued at the end of the...
, which reached about 1,500, but not to the Monthly Review, which reached approximately 5,000. From June 1802 until January 1804, the Guardian appeared monthly; from then until it ceased publication in September 1806, it was issued quarterly. There were 28 issues in all.
Trimmer undertook a challenging task in publishing her periodical. According to Grenby, she aimed "to assess the current state of educational policy and praxis in Britain and to shape its future direction". To do so, she evaluated the educational theories of Rousseau, John Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
, Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...
, 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...
, Madame de Genlis, Joseph Lancaster
Joseph Lancaster
Joseph Lancaster was an English Quaker and public education innovator.-Life:Lancaster was born the son of a shopkeeper in Southwark, south London....
, and Andrew Bell
Andrew Bell (educationalist)
Andrew Bell was a Scottish Anglican priest and educationalist who pioneered the Madras System of Education in schools and was the founder of Madras College, a secondary school in St. Andrews.-His life and work:Andrew Bell was born at St. Andrews, in Scotland on 27 March 1753 and attended St...
, among others. In her "Essay on Christian Education", subsequently published separately as a pamphlet, she proposed her own comprehensive educational program.
Reviewing criteria and values
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Secularism
Secularism is the principle of separation between government institutions and the persons mandated to represent the State from religious institutions and religious dignitaries...
as well as evangelicalism, particularly as the latter manifested itself in Methodism
Methodism
Methodism is a movement of Protestant Christianity represented by a number of denominations and organizations, claiming a total of approximately seventy million adherents worldwide. The movement traces its roots to John Wesley's evangelistic revival movement within Anglicanism. His younger brother...
. Her reviews also reveal her to be a staunch monarchist and opponent of the French Revolution. As Grenby puts it, "her initial questions of any children’s books that came before her were always first, was it damaging to religion and second, was it damaging to political loyalty and the established social hierarchy". Religion was Trimmer's first priority and her emphasis on the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy
Biblical inerrancy
Biblical inerrancy is the doctrinal position that the Bible is accurate and totally free of error, that "Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact." Some equate inerrancy with infallibility; others do not.Conservative Christians generally believe that...
illustrated her fundamentalism. She wrote to a friend: "I will only say, that the more I reflect on the subject, the more I am convinced that it is not right to supersede the figurative style in which they speak of God and divine things, my opinion is, that whoever attempts to teach the truths of divine revelation, should follow the method of the inspired writers as nearly as possible" [emphasis Trimmer's]. For Trimmer, the truth of the Bible was not only in its content, but also in its style, and some of her harshest reviews were written against texts that altered both the style and the substance of the Bible.
Trimmer's fundamentalism, Grenby argues, does not necessarily mark her as a rigid thinker. Grenby points out that Trimmer, like Rousseau, believed children were naturally good. In this view, she was arguing against centuries of tradition, particularly Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
ical attitudes towards raising children (exemplified in the doctrine of 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...
). Although she attacked Rousseau's works, Grenby argues that she agreed with "Rousseau’s key idea, later taken up by the Romantics
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...
, that children should not be forced to become adults too early", in particular that they should not be exposed to political issues too soon. Trimmer also maintained that mothers and fathers should share the responsibility of caring for the family. Like the progressive educational reformers and children's authors 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...
and Thomas Day
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:...
and even Rousseau himself, Trimmer opposed rote learning and advocated flexible and conversational lessons that encouraged critical thinking in children. She also promoted breastfeeding
History of breastfeeding
Breastfeeding is the feeding of breastmilk to a child directly from mouth to breast contact.Various substitutes for breast milk have been introduced around the world, most notably infant formula.-Early history:...
(a controversial position at the time) and parental involvement in childhood education.
In his analysis of her reviews, Grenby comes to the conclusion "Trimmer was ... not nearly so vitriolic in her reviewing as her reputation suggests.... fewer than 50 [of the reviews] were chiefly negative, and of these only 18 were thoroughly excoriating. These were easily outweighed by the positive notices, although most of her reviews were mixed or – more surprisingly given her reputation for always impassioned appraisal – ambivalent." She objected primarily to texts that altered the Bible, such as William Godwin's
William Godwin
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...
Bible Stories (1802), and secondarily to books that promoted ideas she associated with 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...
. She also criticized the inclusion of scenes of death, characters who were insane, and representations of sexuality, as well as books that might frighten children. She typically praises books that encourage intellectual instruction, such as Anna Barbauld's
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and children's author.A "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when female professional writers were rare...
Lessons for Children
Lessons for Children
Lessons for Children is a series of four age-adapted reading primers written by the prominent 18th-century British poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Published in 1778 and 1779, the books initiated a revolution in children's literature in the Anglo-American world...
(1778–79).
Fairy tales
Trimmer is perhaps most famous now for her condemnation of fairy tales, such as the various translations of Charles Perrault'sCharles Perrault
Charles Perrault was a French author who laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known include Le Petit Chaperon rouge , Cendrillon , Le Chat Botté and La Barbe bleue...
Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé (1697). She disliked fairy tales because they endorsed an irrational view of the world and success without work. Trimmer's view of fairy tales, although often ridiculed by modern critics, was widespread at the end of the eighteenth century, in part because most educators accepted John Locke's
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
theory that the mind was a tabula rasa
Tabula rasa
Tabula rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects...
and therefore particularly sensitive to impressions early in life. Trimmer was opposed to fairy tales that were not grounded in reality and which would "excite an unregulated sensibility" in the reader. Without a proper moral or a moralizing narrator, fairy tales could lead a reader astray. Above all, she was concerned about "unmediated", unknown, and unsupervised feelings in the child reader. One of the reasons Trimmer believed fairy tales were dangerous was because they led child readers into a fantasy world where adults could not follow and control their exposure to harmful experiences. She was just as horrified by the graphic illustrations included with some fairy tale collections, complaining that "little children, whose minds are susceptible of every impression; and who from the liveliness of their imaginations are apt to convert into realities whatever forcibly strikes their fancy" should not be allowed to see such scenes as Blue Beard
Bluebeard
"Bluebeard" is a French literary folktale written by Charles Perrault and is one of eight tales by the author first published by Barbin in Paris in January 1697 in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a violent nobleman in the habit of murdering his wives and the...
hacking his wife's head off.
Fairy tales were often found in 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—cheap, disposable literature—which contained sensational stories such as Jack the Giant Killer
Jack the Giant Killer
"Jack the Giant Killer" is a British fairy tale about a plucky lad who slays a number of giants during King Arthur's reign. The tale is characterized by violence, gore, and blood-letting. Giants are prominent in Cornish folklore and Welsh Bardic lore, but the source of "Jack the Giant Killer" is...
along with lewder tales such as How to restore a lost Maidenhead, or solder a Crackt one. Chapbooks were the literature of the poor and Trimmer attempted to separate children's literature from texts she associated with the lower classes. Trimmer criticized the values associated with fairy tales, accusing them of perpetuating irrationality, superstition, and unfavorable images of stepparents. Rather than seeing Trimmer as a censor of fairy tales, therefore, children's literature scholar Nicholas Tucker
Nicholas Tucker
Nicholas Tucker is a British academic and writer who is an honorary Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.He was educated at Burgess Hill School in Hampstead, London, where his English teacher was briefly Bernice Rubens...
has argued, "by considering fairy tales as fair game for criticism rather than unthinking worship, Mrs Trimmer is at one with scholars today who have also written critically about the ideologies found in some individual stories".
French Revolution and religion
Trimmer's views of the French philosophes were shaped by Abbé Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of JacobinismMemoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism is a book by the French Jesuit, the Abbé Augustin Barruel....
(1797–98) (she extracted large sections from this text into the Guardian itself) but also by her fears of the ongoing wars between France and Britain during the 1790s
French Revolutionary Wars
The French Revolutionary Wars were a series of major conflicts, from 1792 until 1802, fought between the French Revolutionary government and several European states...
. Trimmer emphasized Christianity above all in her writings and maintained that one should to turn to God in times of trial. As children's literature scholar M. Nancy Cutt argues, Trimmer and writers like her "claimed emphatically that the degree of human happiness was in direct proportion to the degree of submission to the divine Will. Thus they repudiated the moralists' view that learning should exalt reason and work to the temporal happiness of the individual, which was governed by the best interests of society." Trimmer and her allies contended that French pedagogical theories led to an immoral nation, specifically, "deism
Deism
Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the...
, infidelity and revolution".
Reception and legacy
John Newbery
John Newbery was an English publisher of books who first made children's literature a sustainable and profitable part of the literary market. He also supported and published the works of Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson...
Tom Telescope and the Philosophy of Tops and Balls immediately removed the material Trimmer found offensive. Other scholars have argued that authors wrote with Trimmer's reviewing criteria in mind, one going so far as to call it "a manual for prospective writers". However, Trimmer's reviews were not always heeded; for example, her negative review of the sentimental
Sensibility
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered...
works of Edward Augustus Kendall
Edward Augustus Kendall
Edward Augustus Kendall, translator, social campaigner and miscellaneous writer, was born about 1776. He died at Pimlico 14 October 1842. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries....
, such as Keeper’s Travels in Search of His Master
Keeper’s Travels in search of his master
Keeper's Travels in Search of His Master is a children's novel written in 1798 by Edward Augustus Kendall, and reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. This work of popular romanticism is crucially important in marking the great change in the representation of animals in literature, from the...
, did little to dampen the sales of his works.
With its four hundred reviews, The Guardian of Education, as Grenby writes, "contributed to the establishment of children's literature as a secure, permanent and respectable literary genre". By excluding novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s, 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, 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...
, ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
s, and fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
s, it effectively decided what counted as children's literature and what did not. Furthermore, in one of her early essays, “Observations on the Changes which have taken place in Books for Children and Young Persons", Trimmer wrote the first history of children's literature. Its landmark books, such as Sarah Fielding's 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) and John Newbery's The History of Little Goody Two Shoes (1765), are still cited today by scholars as important in the development of children's literature.
It was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with the publication of the work of children's author and literary critic Charlotte Yonge, that any sustained reviewing or historicizing of children's literature took place again.