Mary Martha Sherwood

Mary Martha Butt was born on 6 May 1775 in Stanford-on-Teme, Worcestershire, the eldest daughter and second child of Martha Butt and Reverend George Butt, the chaplain in ordinary to George III. As a young child, before the age of six, Sherwood composed stories in her head before she could write and begged her mother to copy them down. Her brother was her constant companion. She was forced to stand in the stocks while doing her lessons: {{blockquote Sherwood's and her sister Lucy Lyttelton's education was wide-ranging for girls in the late eighteenth century: Sherwood learnt Latin and Greek and was allowed to read freely in her father's library. Sherwood states in her autobiography that by the age of thirteen, she had reached her full height, but her mother continued to dress her like a child, so she hid in the woods with a book and a doll. Despite her lonely childhood, she seems to have enjoyed attending Madame St. Quentin's School for Girls at Reading Abbey, which was run by French émigrés and also attended by Jane Austen. At Bridgnorth Sherwood began writing sentimental novels; in 1802 she sold Margarita for £40 to Mr. Hazard of Bath, and The History of Susan Grey, a Pamela-like novel, for £10. She also taught at a local Sunday school. ==Marriage and India==

In 1799, Sherwood married her cousin, Captain Henry Sherwood. For several years, she accompanied her husband and his regiment, the 53rd Foot, on postings throughout Britain. In 1804, he was promoted to paymaster, which slightly improved their finances. In 1805 the regiment was ordered to India and the Sherwoods were forced to leave behind their first child, Mary Henrietta, with Sherwood's mother and sister in England. Sherwood's four-month voyage to India was hard; she was pregnant again and the regiment's ship was attacked by French warships. The Sherwoods stayed in India for eleven years, moving with the army and a growing family from Calcutta (Kolkata) to Dinapore (Danapur), Berhampore (Baharampur), Cawnpore (Kanpur) and Meerut. They had six children there: Henry (1805–1807), Lucy Martha (1807–1808), Lucy Elizabeth (1809–1835), Emily (1811–1833), Henry Martyn, who became a minister (181321 January 1912), and Sophia (born 1815). After the death of her second child, Henry, of whooping cough, Sherwood began to consider converting to evangelical Christianity. The missionary Henry Martyn (after whom she had named her sixth child) finally convinced her, but it was the chaplain to the company who first made her aware of her "human depravity" and need for redemption. After her conversion, she was anxious to pursue evangelical missionary work in India, but she first had to persuade the East India Company that its policy of religious neutrality was ill-conceived. The social and political support for missionary programmes in Britain eventually persuaded the company to approve her endeavours. Sherwood set up schools for the children of army officers and for the local Indian children attached to the camp. They were often taught in her home because no buildings were available. The first school began with 13 children and grew to over 40, with pupils ranging from the very young to adolescents; uneducated soldiers attended at times. Sherwood discovered that traditional British teaching materials did not appeal to children raised in India and so wrote her own Indian and army-themed stories, such as The History of Little Henry and his Bearer (1814) and The Memoirs of Sergeant Dale, his Daughter and the Orphan Mary (1815). Sherwood adopted neglected or orphaned children from the camp. In 1807 she adopted a three-year-old who had been given too much medicinal gin and in 1808 a malnourished two-year-old. She found homes for those she could not adopt and founded an orphanage. In 1816, on medical advice, she and her family returned to Britain. Sherwood relates in her autobiography that she was continually ill in India; it was believed at the time that neither she nor her children could survive in a tropical climate. ==Return to Britain and death==

When the Sherwoods returned to Britain, they were financially strapped. Captain Sherwood, having been put on half-pay, opened a school in Henwick, Worcestershire. Relying on her fame as an author and her teaching experience in India, Sherwood decided to establish a boarding school for girls in Wick; it remained in operation for eight years. She taught English, French, astronomy, history, geography, grammar, writing and arithmetic. At the same time, she wrote hundreds of tracts, novels, and other works for children and the poor, increasing her popularity in both the United States and Britain. The History of Henry Milner (1822) was one of Sherwood's most successful books; children sent her fan mail, begging her to write a sequel; one child sent her "ornamental pens" with which to do so. Babies were named after the hero. Sherwood published much of what she wrote in ''The Youth's Magazine'', a children's periodical that she edited for over 20 years. By the 1830s, the Sherwoods had become more prosperous and the family decided to travel to the European continent. The texts that Sherwood wrote following this trip reflect her exposure to French culture. She also embarked on a large and complex Old Testament project at this time, for which she learned Hebrew. To assist her, her husband assembled, over the course of ten years, a large Hebrew-English concordance. Sherwood's autobiography provides few details of the last approximately forty years of her life, although even in her seventies, Sherwood wrote for four or five hours a day; many of the books were co-authored with Sherwood's daughter, Sophia. According to M. Nancy Cutt, a Sherwood scholar, this joint authorship led to a "watery sentimentality" not evident in Sherwood's earlier works as well as a greater emphasis on issues of class. In 1849, the Sherwoods moved to Twickenham, Middlesex, and in December of that year Captain Sherwood died. Sherwood herself died almost two years later on 20 September 1851. ==Literary analysis==

Sherwood scholar M. Nancy Cutt has argued that Sherwood's career divides into three periods: (1) her romantic period (1795–1805), in which she wrote a few sentimental novels, (2) her evangelical period (1810), in which she produced her most popular and influential works, and (3) her post-evangelical period (). Several underlying themes pervade most of Sherwood's works through these periods: "her conviction of inherent human corruption", her belief that literature "had a catechetical utility" for every rank of society, her belief that "the dynamics of family life" should reflect central Christian principles, and her "virulent" anti-Catholicism. The children's literature scholar Gillian Avery has argued that The Fairchild Family was "as much a part of English childhood as Alice was later to become". Although the book was popular, some scraps of evidence have survived suggesting that readers did not always interpret it as Sherwood would have wanted. Lord Frederic Hamilton writes, for instance, that "there was plenty about eating and drinking; one could always skip the prayers, and there were three or four very brightly written accounts of funerals in it". Although The Fairchild Family has gained a reputation in the twentieth century as didactic, in the early nineteenth century it was viewed as delightfully realistic. Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901), a critic who also wrote children's literature, praised "the gusto with which [Sherwood] dwells on new dolls" and "the absolutely sensational naughtiness" of the children. Most twentieth-century critics, including George Orwell, who called it "an evil book", have condemned the book's harshness, pointing to the Fairchilds' moral-filled visit to a gibbet with a rotting corpse swinging from it; but Cutt and others argue that the positive depiction of the nuclear family in the text, particularly Sherwood's emphasis on parents' responsibility to educate their own children, was important to the book's appeal. She argues that Sherwood's "influence", through books such as the Fairchild Family, "upon the domestic pattern of Victorian life can hardly be overestimated". The Fairchild Family was so successful that Sherwood wrote two sequels, in 1842 and 1847. These reflected her changing values as well as those of the Victorian period. Significantly, the servants in PartI, "who are almost part of the family, are pushed aside in PartIII by their gossiping, flattering counterparts in the fine manor-house." The most extensive thematic change in the series was the disappearance of evangelicalism. Whereas all the lessons in PartI highlight the children's "human depravity" and encourage the reader to think in terms of the afterlife, in Parts IIand III, other Victorian values such as "respectability" and filial obedience come to the fore. Dawson describes the difference in terms of parental indulgence; in Parts II and III, the Fairchild parents employ softer disciplinary tactics than in PartI. Evangelical tract literature in the 1820s and 1830s During the 1820s and 1830s, Sherwood wrote a great many tracts for the poor. Like her novels for the middle class, they "taught the lessons of personal endurance, reliance on Providence, and acceptance of one's earthly status". Emphasizing individual experience and one's personal relationship with God, they discouraged readers from attributing their successes or failures to "larger economic and political forces". In this, they resembled the Cheap Repository Tracts, many written by Hannah More. As Linda Peterson, a scholar of nineteenth-century women's literature, argues, Sherwood's tracts use a Biblical "interpretative frame" to highlight the fleetingness of earthly things. For example, in A Drive in the Coach through the Streets of London (1819), Julia is granted the privilege of shopping with her mother only if she will "behave wisely in the streets" and "not give [her] mind to self-pleasing". She cannot keep this promise and she eagerly peeks in at every store window and begs her mother to buy her everything she sees. Her mother, therefore, allows her to select one item from every shop. Julia, ecstatic, chooses blue satin boots, a penknife, and a new hat with flowers, and other items until the pair reach the undertaker's shop. There her mood droops considerably and she realizes the moral of the lesson, recited by her mother, as she picks out a coffin: "but she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth" (1 Timothy 5:6). Anti-Catholicism in the 1830s Sherwood's anti-Catholicism appears most obviously in her works from the 1820s and 1830s. During the 1820s in Britain, Catholics were agitating for greater civil rights and it was at this time that Sherwood wrote her most sustained attacks against them. When the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 was passed, Sherwood and many like her were frightened of the influence Catholics might gain in the government and wrote Victoria (1833), The Nun (1833), and The Monk of Cimies (1834) to illustrate some of the supposed dangers of Catholicism. The Monk narrates, in the first person, Edmund Etherington's decision to renounce the Church of England and join the Catholic church. While a monk, he ridicules his fellow brothers, plans a murder and debauches a young woman. Some evangelicals disagreed with her views on Catholic Emancipation and were uncomfortable with these books; one evangelical reviewer called The Monk of Cimies "unfair and unconvincing". Colonialism While in India, Sherwood wrote a series of texts based on colonial life. Her most popular, The History of Little Henry and his Bearer (1814), tells of a young British boy who, on his deathbed, converts Boosy, the Indian man who has taken care of him throughout his childhood. The book was enormously successful; it reached 37 editions by 1850 and was translated into French, German, Spanish, Hindustani, Chinese, and Sinhalese. Sherwood's tale blends the realistic with the sentimental and introduces her readers to Hindustani words and descriptions of what she felt was authentic Indian life. As Cutt explains, "With this work, the obituary tract (which invariably stressed conversion and a Christian death) had assumed the colouring of romance." Sherwood also wrote a companion story titled Little Lucy and her Dhaye (1825) that told a similar tale. The Indian Pilgrim (1818) demonstrates Sherwood's religious biases: "Muslims and Jews receive better treatment than Hindus because of their belief in one God, but Roman Catholics fare little better than the Hindu idolaters." The Indian Pilgrim, though never published in India, was popular in Britain and America. Sherwood also wrote texts for Indian servants of British families in the style of British writings for the poor. One such was The Ayah and Lady (1813) in which the ayah or maid is "portrayed as sly, selfish, lazy, and untrustworthy. Her employers are well aware of her faults, yet they tolerate her". A more culturally sensitive and realistic portrayal of Indians appears in The Last Days of Boosy (1842), a sequel to The History of Little Henry and his Bearer, where the converted Boosy is cast out of his family and community after his conversion to Christianity. Sherwood's writings on India reveal her sense of superiority over the inhabitants of India; the subcontinent therefore appears in her works as a morally corrupt land in need of reformation. She wrote The History of George Desmond (1821) to warn young men of the dangers of emigrating to India. Sherwood's books shaped the minds of several generations of young Britons. According to Cutt, Sherwood's depictions of India were among the few available to young British readers; such children "acquired a strong conviction of the rightness of missions, which, while it inculcated sincere concern for, and a genuine kindness towards an alien people for whom Britain was responsible, quite destroyed any latent respect for Indian tradition." Using a postcolonial analysis, Nandini Bhattacharya emphasizes the complex relationship between Sherwood's evangelicalism and her colonialism. She argues that Sherwood's evangelical stories demonstrate the deep colonial "mistrust of feminized agency", represented by a dying child in Little Henry and his Bearer. Henry "subvert[s] the colonialist's fantasy of universal identity by generating a subaltern identity that mimics and explodes that fantasy". But ultimately, Bhattacharya argues, Sherwood creates neither a wholly colonialist text nor a post-colonial text; the deaths of children such as Henry eliminate any possibility for an alternative consciousnesses to mature. Later writings: Victorianism By 1830, Sherwood's works had drifted from evangelicalism and reflected more conventional Victorian plots and themes. For example, Gipsy Babes (1826), perhaps inspired by Walter Scott's Guy Mannering (1815), emphasizes "human affections". In 1835, she wrote a Gothic novel for adolescents entitled Shanty the Blacksmith, which Cutt calls "a gripping [and] exciting tale" and employs the tropes of the genre: "lost heir, ruined castle, humble helpers and faithful retainer, sinister and mysterious gypsies, prisoner and plot". In 1835, Sherwood published the novel Caroline Mordaunt, about a young woman forced to become a governess. Her parents die when she is young, but luckily relatives pay to educate her, so she can earn her own living. It follows her progress from a flighty, discontented girl to a reliable, content woman; she learns to accommodate herself to the whims of a proud nobility, silly literati, and dogmatic evangelicals. She realizes that in her dependent position she must be content with less than complete happiness. Once she recognizes this, though, she finds God, and in the last chapter an ideal husband, so granting her near-complete happiness after all. Cutt suggests that in these works, Sherwood drew on Jane Austen and Jane Taylor for a new "lively, humorous, and satirical strain". In both later works such as Caroline Mordaunt and her earlier evangelical texts, Sherwood followed the Victorian project of prescribing gender roles; while her later works outlined ever more stringent and narrow roles for each sex, her early works such as The Fairchild Family suggested demarcations as well: Lucy and Emily learn to sew and keep house while Henry tends the garden and learns Latin. ==Legacy==

As Britain's education system became more secular in the later nineteenth century, Sherwood's evangelical books were used mainly to teach the poor and in Sunday schools. Her missionary stories were the most influential of all her works, for according to Cutt, they "kept alive the missionary spirit and perpetuated that paternal attitude towards India that lasted into the [twentieth century], were widely imitated" and "an unfortunate assumption of racial superiority was fostered by the over-simplification of some of Mrs. Sherwood's successors". They influenced Charlotte Maria Tucker ("A.L.O.E.") and even perhaps Rudyard Kipling. In the United States, Sherwood's early works were popular and republished well into the 1840s; thereafter a tradition of specifically American children's literature began to develop with authors such as Louisa May Alcott. Sherwood was also instrumental in developing the ideology of the Victorian family. Cutt acknowledges that "the omniscient Victorian parent was not the creation of Mrs. Sherwood, but of the Victorians themselves; nevertheless, by presenting the parent as God's vicar in the family, she had planted and fostered the idea". The prevalence of death in Sherwood's early stories and vivid portrayal of its worldly and otherworldly consequences have often caused twentieth-century critics to deride her works. However, Sherwood's stories influenced the styles for other writers such as Charles Kingsley and Charlotte Mary Yonge. It has been surmised that John Ruskin used Henry Milner as the basis for his imaginative autobiography Praeterita (1885–1889). Sherwood's narrative experiments with various genres allowed other writers to pursue innovative forms of children's fiction. Her imaginative use of tracts domesticated reformist literature and encouraged radicals such as Harriet Martineau to employ the same genre, although for opposite purposes. Due to the popularity of Sherwood's works and their impact on later writers, Janis Dawson writes: "Though her books are no longer widely read, she is regarded as one of the most significant authors of children's literature of the nineteenth century". ==Selected works==

• The History of Little Henry and his Bearer, 1814 • The History of Susan Gray, 1815, revised • Stories Explanatory of the Church Catechism, 1817 • The History of the Fairchild Family, 1818 • The Indian Pilgrim, 1818 • An Introduction to Geography, 1818 • The Governess, or The Little Female Academy, 1820 • The History of George Desmond, 1821 • ''The Infant's Progress'', 1821, 2nd edition • The History of Henry Milner, 1822 • The History of Little Lucy and her Dhaye, 1823 • The Lady of the Manor, 1823–1829 • Soffrona and her Cat Muff, 1828 • Scripture Prints, with Explanations in the Form of Familiar Dialogues, 1831 • The Monk of Cimies, 1834 • Caroline Mordaunt, or The Governess, 1835 • Shanty the Blacksmith, 1835 • The Last Days of Boosy, the Bearer of Little Henry 1842 • ''The Youth's Magazine'' (1822–1848)"This periodical... brought out tales, tracts, and articles by Mrs. Sherwood for over twenty-five years (signed at first M.M., and after 1827, M.M.S.) The earlier tales were rapidly reprinted by Houlston, Darton, Melrose, Knight and Lacey and the R.T.S. [Religious Tract Society], as well as by various American publishers". • The Works of Mrs. Sherwood by Harper & Bros. (1834–1857) collected works ==Further reading==

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