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.
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...
Eventually Lady Elizabeth's illegitimate children, so unceremoniously disposed of as babies, were brought back to England to be educated (by Selina
, daughter of Sarah Trimmer
) together with Georgiana's cossetted offspring. The two Irish...
Textual Features
Eliza Cook
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...
Education
Frances Power Cobbe
FPC
received lessons from her nurse Martha Jones
and from her mother
. Her reading included Sarah Trimmer
's History of the Robins, Anna Barbauld
's Lessons for Children, and poetry by Jane Taylor
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.
Her home, too, contributed importantly to her education. She drew, painted, and made serious, carefully-labelled collections of wild flowers, stones, shells, and seaweed. Her first book, encountered at home when she was five and a...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Henrietta Maria Bowdler
In this work HMB
warns against improper choice of friends and the excesses of romantic friendship, even while she idealises true friendship. She praises the well-employed talents of Elizabeth Montagu
, Elizabeth Smith
, Hannah More
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Taken together, ALB
's various writings for children during her career as educator at Palgrave School
exerted enormous influence on other children's writers, such as Maria Edgeworth
, Sarah Trimmer
, Hannah More
, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The Critical Review gave high praise to each of the series. So did the Monthly, which also cracked her anonymity from the beginning.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
46 (1778): 160; 47 (1779): 320
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
191-2
Vulnerable as a Dissenter,...
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...
