very much in tune with the popular imagination of the time, and contributed to
mainstream popular culture, and many of the stories and series remained in print
throughout the nineteenth century.
Of the Cheap Repository Tracts some of the stories are merely pious: ‘The cottage
cook’, for example, is about a widow who finds consolation in teaching girls cooking and
dressmaking, and thus raising good wives for working men, but others are more racy. In
‘The two wealthy farmers’, Sir Dashall Squeeze blows his brains out; in ‘The Cheapside
apprentice’ the hero confesses ‘It was at the Dog and Duck I first saw the infamous Miss
West; she was many years older than myself, but her person was as lovely as her heart
was wicked...’ (More 1798:2: 3).
Legh Richmond was an Anglican clergyman, and his book, Annals of the Poor, is a
collection of stories about his parishioners on the Isle of Wight. Although not originally
intended for children, one story, ‘The young cottager’ is about the conversion and death
of a 10-year-old, Little Jane. It later became popular as a children’s book, and large
numbers were distributed as Sunday School prizes. Legh Richmond toured the country
distributing copies, and noted with satisfaction that it had proved ‘useful’ to many
children.
Mrs Sherwood’s Little Henry and his Bearer (1814) is set in India, where the author
lived for some time. Henry is first neglected and left to the care of servants, and then
rescued and converted by an English girl; Henry in turn converts his servant and then
dies. Apart from the details of the setting, the story is interesting as an example of a
favourite tract theme, that of the child who converts an adult: in teaching his servant
about Christ, Henry is carrying out the chief duty of an evangelical Christian. He is also
transcending the subordinate role of childhood—a child’s dream that children’s stories
often seek to fulfil. Here in a surprising context is an early example of the liberation of
childhood:
Here are two persons, who have been nearly fifty years in the world, sitting together
talking of their finery and painted toys; while a little creature, who eight years ago
had not breathed the breath of life, is endeavouring to impart divine knowledge to
the Heathen.Mrs Sherwood’s most famous tract is The History of the Fairchild Family (1818, 1842,
1847). Henry, Lucy and Emily on occasion lie, steal, and even get drunk on cider, and
are taken to task by their parents, all to show how sinful the human heart is without
God’s grace. Punishment is severe: Henry is completely excluded from the family for
days because he will not learn his Latin. When the children quarrel, they are taken to
see the remains of a murderer on a gibbet—the man has been hanged for killing his
brother, and their father warns them that they may fall into such sin if they persist in
quarrelling. It is difficult to judge the appeal of this book at a distance from the moral
climate in which it was written. Nineteenth-century commentators, who had been given
the book as children, suggest that they enjoyed the naughtiness and perhaps gained a
frisson from the gibbets and corpses. Alongside her severity, Mrs Sherwood makes the
Fairchild family’s life sound appealing, with details of outings and food. Certainly, the
preface to a facsimile edition of the 1870s claims that it was difficult to find an original
272 TYPES AND GENRES