Mary Martha Sherwood (née Butt; 6 May 177522 September 1851) was an English children's writer. Of her more than four hundred works, the best known include The History of Little Henry and his Bearer (1814) and the two series The History of Henry Milner (1822–1837) and The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–1847). Her evangelicalism permeated her early writings, but later works cover common Victorian themes, such as domesticity.
Mary Martha Butt married Captain Henry Sherwood and moved to India for eleven years. She converted to evangelical Christianity, opened schools for the children of army officers and local Indian children, adopted neglected or orphaned children, and founded an orphanage. She was inspired to write fiction for the children in the military encampments. Her work was well received in Britain, where the Sherwoods returned in 1816 for medical reasons. She opened a boarding school, edited a children's magazine, and published hundreds of tracts, novels, and other works for children and the poor, which increased her popularity in both the United States and Britain. She died in 1851 in Twickenham, Middlesex.
Sherwood's career included three periods: her romantic period (1795–1805), her evangelical period (1810), in which she produced her most popular and influential works, and her post-evangelical period (). Themes in her writing included "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. Sherwood was called "one of the most significant authors of children's literature of the nineteenth century". Her depictions of domesticity and ties with India may have influenced many young readers, but her work fell from favour as children's literature broadened in the late nineteenth century.
Early life 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:
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.
Sherwood spent some of her teenage years in Lichfield, where she enjoyed the company of the naturalist Erasmus Darwin, the educational reformer Richard Lovell Edgeworth, his daughter Maria Edgeworth, and the poet Anna Seward. Although she was intellectually stimulated by them, she was distressed by their lack of faith and later described Richard Edgeworth as an "infidel". She also criticized Seward's persona of the female author, writing in her autobiography that she would never model herself on a woman who wore a wig and accumulated male flatterers. She was determined to become a writer and her father encouraged her. When she was 17, her father helped her publish her first story, Traditions (1795).
When Sherwood's father died in 1795, her family retired from active social life, since her mother preferred seclusion, and moved to Bridgnorth, Shropshire, into "a somewhat uncomfortable house" in the town's High Street. 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.
Early writings: Sentimental novels Sherwood's earliest works are the sentimental novels Traditions (1795) and Margarita (1795). Both are more worldly than her later works, but neither received much recognition. By contrast, The History of Susan Gray, written for the girls of her Sunday school class in Bridgnorth, made Sherwood a famous author. Like Hannah More's tracts, it is designed to teach middle-class morality to the poor. This novel, which children's literature scholar Patricia Demers, describes as a "purified Pamela", tells the story of Susan, an orphaned servant girl who "resists the advances of a philandering soldier; though trembling with emotion at the man's declaration of love and promise of marriage". Susan's story is told from her deathbed, so the reader is regularly reminded of the "wages of sin". A separate narrator, seemingly Sherwood, often interrupts the tale to warn readers against particular actions, such as deceiving themselves that God will spare "bad women" because there are so many of them. Despite a didactic tone that is often distasteful to modern readers, Susan Gray was so popular at the time of its publication that it was pirated by several publishers. In 1816, Sherwood published a revised version, which Sarah Trimmer reviewed positively in The Guardian of Education. Sherwood wrote a companion story to Susan Gray, The History of Lucy Clare, which was published in 1810.
French literary influences Although Sherwood disagreed with the principles espoused by French Revolutionaries, her own works are modelled on French children's literature, much of it infused with Rousseauvian ideals. For example, in The History of Henry Milner, PartI (1822) and The History of the Fairchild Family, PartI (1818), Sherwood adopts Arnaud Berquin's "habitual pattern of small domestic situations acted out by children under the eye of parents or fellows". Likewise, The Lady of the Manor (1823–1829) shares similar themes and structures with Madame de Genlis' Tales of the Castle (1785). David Hanson, a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, has questioned this interpretation, arguing that the tales told by the maternal figure in The Lady of the Manor demonstrate a "distrust of parents", and of mothers in particular, because they illustrate the folly of overly permissive parenting. In these inset stories, only outsiders discipline children correctly.