Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sarah Trimmer
-
Standard Name: Trimmer, Sarah
Birth Name: Sarah Kirby
Married Name: Sarah Trimmer
ST
's writing arose out of her work for two causes, religion and education, brought most closely together in her interest in Sunday schools. She edited magazines and was a pioneer both in animal stories for children and in the reviewing of children's books. Her pedagogical concerns place her in the tradition of Barbauld
and Genlis
, but her sense of religion is narrower, and her writing more pedestrian. She was a populariser and an activist for better training for the poor. From the opening of her publishing career in the 1780s, her output was phenomenally high; its continuance after her death suggests a kind of production line or at least a family business.
In a typical day, AML
read Tom Paine
to herself, and Sarah Trimmer
and some Latin with her sons. She went to see the kangaroo, the Polygraphic Exhibition, and Thomas Holcroft
's Road to Ruin.
Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Farrar Straus Giroux.
56
Literary responses
Annabella Plumptre
The Stories were approved by Sarah Trimmer
.
Literary responses
Eliza Fenwick
This, together with Presents for Good Girls and Presents for Good Boys, was reviewed in Sarah Trimmer
's The Guardian of Education in 1804. Scholar Lissa Paul
believes that EF
succeeded better than almost...
Literary responses
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
The London Magazine welcomed the collection on its first appearance as thoroughly suitable for respectable households, conceived according to a chaste and elegant plan.
Dow, Gillian. “The British Reception of Madame de Genlis’s Writings for Children: Plays and Tales of Instruction and Delight”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
29
, No. 3, pp. 367-81.
368
The Critical Review linked its praise to complaint about the...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gunning
This was noticed both in the Critical Review and in Sarah Trimmer
's The Guardian of Education.
Immel, Andrea, and Mitzi Myers. Revolutionary Reviewing. Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California.
89
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Sarah Trimmer
disapproved of Things by their right Names and also of The Rookery, in which she felt the community of birds showed republican tendencies. George Eliot
, who read this book at seven...
Literary responses
Hester Mulso Chapone
Her brother John
wrote of the Praises that resound on all Sides following the publication of this book, though he regretted that reviewers, in praising the moral content, had ignored the literary style.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
A moral author who sought to do good by her writings, PW
was equally energetic in practical philanthropy. From 1791 she helped run a childbirth charity which supplied pregnant women with midwifery care and an...
Occupation
Hannah More
HM
's group of Somerset schools was larger than Sarah Trimmer
's group at Brentford near London. By the end of the century the Mores had founded regular schools, Sunday schools, adult schools, and...
Publishing
Frances Arabella Rowden
Her book did well. Many clergy, many parents of girls in the Hans Place school, many relations of the author and of her dedicatee subscribed, plus Elizabeth Gunning
, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
, and Sarah Trimmer
Textual Features
Charlotte Yonge
CM's preface (dated March 1870) says that as a child she preferred the inherited books of the former generation to any moderns except Maria Edgeworth
.
Yonge, Charlotte, editor. A Storehouse of Stories. Macmillan.
In the address to her readers in the first issue EC
casts herself as an unpatronising contributor to popular education: Let it not be imagined I am appointing myself any particular right to lead or...
Textual Features
Eliza Cook
Her poetic topics strongly reflect her reliance on well-tried promoters of sentiment: death, parting, gypsies, favourite horses and dogs, local feeling for Scotland or Ireland. The collection closes with a section of poems for...
Textual Features
Priscilla Wakefield
PW
welcomes the way that Adam Smith
and other Scottish Enlightenment writers have made womanhood a branch of philosophy, not a little interesting.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
106
Unlike Wollstonecraft
, she sees women's sphere as naturally limited and...
Textual Features
Susanna Watts
The many pictures in the volume include diagrams of the hold of a slave ship, I & Dash my Dog (a sketch), and prints of Hester Mulso Chapone
, Lady Rachel Russell
(with a copy...