edition, ‘it has been so often read and re-read that most of the early editions have long
ere this been thumbed out of existence’ (Sherwood nd: ii).
The tractarians, in providing a mass of reading material for the newly literate, helped
to set a trend for later literature in which the themes of death, repentance, and poverty
overcome by virtue remained important.
Even as children’s literature became more liberal, evangelicalism remained a strong
force: even the sceptical Alice stories have an Easter message attached. However, some
writers were overtly critical: Charlotte M.Yonge, for example, commented that Mrs
Sherwood’s moral lessons ‘reflect the shifting opinions of a very untaught and conceited
though pious mind’ (Yonge 1869:308).
There were, however, two major changes in evangelical writing. The first was caused
by the rapid growth in popularity of fairy stories—although the usual response was to
rewrite them as Christian allegories. Charlotte Tucker, writing as A.L.O.E (A Lady of
England), for example, published a collection of moralised fairy stories, Old Friends with
New Faces, in 1858. This treatment of the tales was distasteful to many—notably
Charles Dickens, who wrote a forceful riposte to George Cruikshank’s teetotal version of
some of the tales, in ‘Fraudś on the fairies’, published in Household Words, in 1853. Other
Christian writers used the fairy tales to present their message in a way more acceptable
to their contemporaries; notable among these were Charles Kingsley with The Water
Babies (1863) and George MacDonald with At the Back of the North Wind (1871).
The second change was a response to the effects of industrialisation and poverty,
concern for which had been expressed through such writers as Kingsley and Dickens.
The setting of the stories shifted to the towns, and child protagonists became slum
dwellers and ‘street arabs’. Characteristic was Jessica’s First Prayer (1867) by Hesba
Stretton (Sara Smith), a direct attack on the religiosity of the wealthy which uses the
device of the adult converted by the child. Here, however, Jessica succeeds not because
of her grasp of doctrine but because of the childish simplicity of her faith. Daniel
Standing, the chapel caretaker who is converted, explains his conversion to the
minister: ‘She’s come often and often of a morning, and looked into my face with those
dear eyes of hers and said “Don’t you love Jesus Christ, Mr Dan’el?”’ (Stretton 1867:89).
A move has been made away from the story which presents an evangelically correct
doctrinal position in order to educate the reader, to one where the correct doctrine to
grasp is essentially that of a romantic view of childhood.
Stretton’s later books, populated by appealing waifs, were influenced by Dickens, and
many other writers followed suit. In Mrs O.F.Walton’s novel of theatrical children, A
Peep Behind the Scenes, Rosalie learns about Jesus from a picture of the Good Shepherd
and teaches her mother and various members of the cast of her drunken father’s
travelling show. Mrs Walton’s greatest success was Christie’s Old Organ (1882), in which
the waif who brings the organ grinder to conversion goes on to be a lay-preacher.
The ‘waif’ stories had a long life; writers like ‘Brenda’ (Mrs G. Castle Smith) produced
books, like Froggy’s Little Brother (1875), which survived well into the twentieth century.
One notable example is The Basket of Flowers, a translation from the German of
Christopher von Schmid (1823), which was still being offered as a Sunday School prize
in the 1950s.
RELIGIOUS WRITING FOR CHILDREN 273