Rectitude and Romanticism

MARTHA MARY SHERWOOD · CHARLES AND MARY LAMB

The History of Little Henry and his Bearer;
The History of the Fairchild Family;
Tales from Shakespeare

EVANGELICAL MORALISTS AND THE FAIRYTALE merchants, nevertheless, coexisted in the literary ecosystem for decades, and their two worldviews tangle in the genre to this day. Still, at this stage, both traditions were talking slightly past children rather than directly to them. The moralists aimed to idealize and reproach children; and fairytales may have appealed to children, but they weren’t necessarily about them.

As the nineteenth century dawned, literature for children aimed at evoking – as Roger Lancelyn Green put it – “the child of fact” rather than “the child of wishful thinking” was still just barely glimmering on the horizon.* The bestselling work of Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851) is one of the most notorious inheritors of the Janeway line of doing things.

Martha Mary Butt, whose vicar father was at one point chaplainin-ordinary to George III, learned her severity young. Looking back on her childhood, for instance, she described without any apparent ill feeling having spent seven years or so locked into a set of stocks:

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.*

I daresay most of us would “not unseldom” bolt off into the woods at the end of a school day if we had spent it strapped into a medieval torture device, but autres temps, autres mœurs.

She married a cousin, Henry Sherwood, when she was in her mid-twenties and they had a daughter before, in 1805, his military career took the family to India. Mrs Sherwood had to leave her child, Mary Henrietta, back in England with her mother. Their son Henry, with whom she had been pregnant on the voyage to India, died of whooping cough when he was two – and not long afterwards Mrs Sherwood got God, and in a big way. She went on to have another five children, as well as adopting foundlings in India and starting an orphanage there.

Can it be coincidence that Henry was the name of the protagonist of her breakthrough book, The History of Little Henry and his Bearer (1814)? It’s a contribution to the popular evangelical genre sometimes called the “Obituary Tract” – in which, as we’ve seen, a pious tot goes gratefully to Jesus leaving all around moved and reproached by his precocious holiness. But within that paradigm – and here is where she starts to move things forward – there’s more going on with little Henry.

The poor mite, born at Dinapore in eastern India, is briskly orphaned on the first page and taken in by a philanthropic lady of the sort whose charitable engagement ends with the writing of a check. She takes him in to her large pukka house, instructs her servants to give him whatever he needs, and “would not afterwards suffer Henry to give her the least trouble.”

Henry is, instead, brought up by a native bearer called Boosy, who “attended him night and day, warmed his pap, rocked his cot, dressed and undressed and washed him, and did everything for him as tenderly as if he had been his own child.” Henry doesn’t speak English, but “he could talk with Boosy in his language as fast as possible; and he knew every word, good or bad, which the natives spoke. He used to sit in the verandah between his bearer’s knees, and chew paun, and eat bazar sweetmeats.” The grand lady having neglected his religious education, Henry at the age of five had conceived the idea (from observing Boosy and remembering his mother’s trips to church) that there were “a great many Gods, and that the God that his Mamma went to pray to at Dinapore was no better than the Gods of wood, and stone, and clay, which his bearer worshipped.” Henry’s loving relationship with Boosy – tenderly if sentimentally evoked – has turned him into an opium-chewing little pagan.*

The pivot comes when a clergyman’s daughter from England comes to stay, equipped with “a box of Bibles, and some pretty little children’s books and pictures.” Gradually winning Henry’s trust, she tries to give him the basics of Christian instruction, declaring that there is only one true God, and warning of the “dreadful hell, prepared for those who die in their sins.” His first reaction is indignation, but she wins him to monotheism when she takes “one of the Hindoo Gods made of baked earth” and throws it on the floor to shatter into “an hundred pieces”: “Henry, what can this God do for you? It cannot help itself. Call to it, and ask it to get up. You see, it cannot move.”

Henry is brought to God – and made crushingly conscious of being steeped in sin, and the eternal death that is its reward. He becomes pious, charitable, modest, humble and studious. The very recognizably natural child – devoted to Boosy, potty-mouthed, shy, a little naughty, fond of sweets – turns into a little evangelist. Henry’s adoptive mamma is later to complain that their visitor has “made a Methodist, a downright canting Methodist, of the boy.” Yet Henry’s dearest companion is still Boosy. I don’t think it’s too much to say that Mrs Sherwood’s doctrinal rectitude tugs, at times, against her instincts as a novelist.

The book’s best, its most living, passages aren’t its catechistic exchanges and its solemn scriptural precepts (she quotes chapter and verse – literally) but its descriptions of Indian life and landscape. There’s a lovely mention of the “creaking of the punkah and the guggling of the water in the hookah,” and out in the open air:

On their left-hand was the broad stream of the Ganges winding round the curved shore, till it was lost behind the Raja-mehal hills. The budgerow, gayly painted, was fastened to the shore just below them […]. Before them, and on their right hand, was a beautiful country, abounding with corn-fields, topes of trees, thatched cottages with their little bamboo porches, plantain and palm trees; beyond which the Raja-mehal hills were seen, some bare to their summits, and others covered with jungle, which even now affords a shelter to tigers, rhinoceroses, and wild hogs.

To an English reader the story would have the attractive quality of the exotic. To children in India – Sherwood’s calling to missionary work had her set up schools there – they would be relatable in a way that books set in England might not.

In due course the machinery of the genre cranks into action. Henry is taken ill and turns up his toes, at the age of eight, amid a flurry of damp-eyed biblical quotations. His last thoughts are prayers for the conversion of Boosy – and, though readings from the Bible in Hindi while the boy was healthy didn’t do it, emotional blackmail gets there in the end. After Henry is gone, Boosy joins the household of a pious Mr Smith, “renounced cast, and declared himself a Christian.” The book went into seven languages and remained in print for most of the nineteenth century. My hunch is that it’s the human sympathy in the characterization of Henry’s relationship with Boosy, and the novelistic touches in the descriptions of India, rather than the formal piety, that gave it its enduring appeal.

Yet the work for which Mrs Sherwood is now most remembered, and most pilloried, came after the family’s return to Britain in 1816. The History of the Fairchild Family (1818).* Its distinguishing virtues are its unflinching piety and its surprisingly high body count. The day-to-day adventures of an English family are presented as lessons in the perils of sin and the necessity of repentance. Divine and parental authority are echoes of one another: “I stand,” Mr Fairchild says at one point, “in the place of God to you, whilst you are a child.”

The godly and respectable Mr and Mrs Fairchild live in a house in the country with a pleasant garden. They have three children between the ages of nine and six (Lucy, Emily, and Henry), two servants (Betty and John) and neighbors with Bunyanesque names such as Friendly, Trueman, Goodwill, Noble, and Cutshorter. Each chapter closes with a prayer and a hymn appropriate to the story that precedes it, and the Fairchild children are all prone to saying things like: “Oh! I wish I could love the Lord Jesus Christ more than I do; but my wicked heart will not let me.” Punishment is frequent and severe. Sometimes it comes from a parent: when Henry is falling behind in his Latin prep, for instance, Mr Fairchild “took a small horse-whip, and, making John hold him, he flogged him well, and sent him to bed.” Sometimes it comes from the Almighty. The prideful and disobedient Miss Augusta Noble (apple-thief, mocker of God, all-round show-off) is burned to death: “a warning to all children how they presume to disobey their parents.” Emily nearly dies just from stealing “damascenes”* – she spills juice on herself, washes her frock to cover it up, puts it on wet and gets a fever as a result.

The most notorious episode comes in “Story on the Sixth Commandment.” Mr Fairchild finds the kids squabbling about who gets to play with a doll. He steps in, takes away the doll, and whips the hands of all three children with a rod “till they smarted again” while reciting a poem about the wickedness of children fighting. They are made to stand in the corner of the room, don’t get breakfast, and an educational outing is proposed for the early afternoon, to a broken-down old brick house set in an overgrown garden. It’s not the house that Mr Fairchild wants to show them, though.

Just between that and the wood stood a gibbet, on which the body of a man hung in chains: it had not yet fallen to pieces, although it had hung there some years. The body had on a blue coat, a silk handkerchief round the neck, with shoes and stockings, and every other part of the dress still entire: but the face of the corpse was so shocking, that the children could not look at it […] Whilst Mr Fairchild was speaking, the wind blew strong and shook the body upon the gibbet, rattling the chains on which it hung.

Beneath this decaying corpse, Mr Fairchild tells them the story of the man hanging in the gibbet – a fratricide who had lived in the adjoining house before killing his brother and being hanged. The traumatized children resolve to stop quarreling. When a neighbor dies Mr Fairchild announces, as if suggesting a donkey-ride at the beach: “Should you like to see the corpse, my dears? You never saw a corpse, I think?”

All this may read like black comedy, but it’s a faithful picture of a world in which death was more present, and more present to children, than it is now; and one in which the besetting fear of mortal sin was a real thing. In its own era, it was admired for its realism – which, compared to its seventeenth-century ancestors, is justified praise. Stiff-backed though Mrs Sherwood may be, there is a proper sense (albeit often a disapproving one) of the lives and characters of real children in this book. That squabble over the doll has a recognizable childhood energy, and there are lovely descriptions of the children feeding parsley to the family’s tame pet hare.

You see them playing on a swing (“Swing me higher! Swing me higher!”), the joy in play feelingly evoked – even though the consequences of such immoderation, this being Mrs Sherwood, are two teeth knocked out, a grotesquely swollen eye and lip, and blood pouring from a bashed nose. Emily’s train of thought while she’s sneaking into the pantry for another of those near-fatal damsons is novelistically inhabited – “I will not take any more damascenes; I will go back, I think. But yet, as I am come so far, and am just got to the closet, I will just take one damascene – it shall be the last; I will never come here again, without Mamma’s leave.”

One episode of delinquency sees the children failing to make their beds, scoffing “a large quantity of toast and butter” before dirtying their clothes chasing a pig out of the garden, then repairing to a kindly neighbor to eat cake and drink cider. Just William on the road to perdition.

Mrs Sherwood’s work and that of the tradition she inherited was one of the things that needed to be got past to reach the midvictorian Golden Age. As Peter Hunt has written, “evangelistic attitudes dominated children’s books until the end of the eighteenth century, and influenced, directly or in reaction, attitudes almost to the end of the nineteenth.”* But it was hugely popular in its own era – and it looked, sometimes despite itself, forward as well as back.

So to see children’s literature moving uniformly from didacticism to delight, then, would be to oversimplify. As seen from the end of the eighteenth century, the earnestness of Mrs Barbauld and Mrs Trimmer had been a step backwards from the playfulness of Newbery. Charles Lamb, writing to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1802, complained of going to the bookshop in search of a copy of Goody Two-Shoes. His complaint, and it was a Romantic’s complaint, was that the Gradgrinds had taken over:

Mrs Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. B.’s and Mrs Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge[…]

Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history? Damn them! – I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and child.

This is a little unfair to Mrs Barbauld. Nevertheless, Mary Lamb (1764–1847), she of the thwarted bookshop trip,* combined with her Barbauld-skeptical brother Charles (1774–1834) to produce another of the era’s classics of children’s literature. Their Tales from Shakespeare (1807) was, in its way, an educative work – a work with a design on its audience – but it was interested in educating its readers to appreciate artistic rather than moral excellence; it is “submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare.”

They aren’t seeking to create an abstract of Shakespeare’s work, but to give “as much of Shakespeare’s own words as possible” (this was much easier in the tragedies than the comedies, apparently, the former being Charles’s bailiwick and the latter Mary’s) so as to offer “a few hints and little foretastes of the great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years.” They also direct it toward young women in particular – noting that boys will tend to “have the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are” and can be expected to have the best scenes from Shakespeare by heart before their sisters. An inequity in education marked; and an effort made to rectify it.

It was a harbinger of what was to come. The Lambs’ ambition doesn’t omit moral improvement – the preface closes by assuring readers that Shakespeare’s plays are “enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue” and teach “courtesy, benignity, generosity and humility” – but It’s one of the first children’s books in the English canon in which God doesn’t play any obvious role. And it has never been out of print.

* Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales, [p].

* Quoted in Mary Palgrave’s introduction to a 1931 edition of The Fairchild Family.

* Mrs Sherwood glosses paun as “an intoxicating mixture of opium & sugar etc.” The active ingredient of paan, which is still widely chewed today, is actually betel nut rather than opium, though.

* The full title lets you know plainly what it’s about: The History of the Fairchild Family, or, The Child’s Manual; being a collection of stories calculated to shew the importance and effects of a religious education.

* Damsons.

* Peter Hunt, An Introduction to Children’s Literature, [p].

Letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 23 October 1802, in E.v. Lucas (ed.) The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb (J. M. Dent & Sons, Methuen & Co, 1935).

* And, possibly more traumatically, of the 1796 episode of mental illness that caused her to stab and kill her own mother; her brother wrested the knife from her hand. A bit like something from the Brothers Grimm.