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.
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...
Textual Features
Jane West
JW
uses heroic couplets for formal poems like To the Island of Sicily (on the retreat of the king and queen of the Two Sicilies before the French Army of Italy, commanded by Napoleon
...
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
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...
Occupation
Priscilla Wakefield
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...
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.
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...
Leisure and Society
Anna Margaretta Larpent
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Moody
She has a sharp eye for gender issues, including those surrounding domestic work. The Housewife's Prayer is addressed to Economy, a name which might be loosely translated as balancing the budget, and ends with the...
