Sarah Trimmer

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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.
Painting of Sarah Trimmer by Henry Howard, exhibited 1798. She sits at a table bearing books (including a bible), inkwell and spare quill pens, holding one pen and some sheets of paper (as well as her spectacles). Her grey hair is mostly covered by a white mob cap with grey ribbon round it; she wears a checked dress and a black shawl with white neckerchief and black neckband. She is smiling slightly. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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, 1997.
56
Literary responses Eliza Fenwick
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 Annabella Plumptre
The Stories were approved by Sarah Trimmer .
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.
qtd. in
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, 2006, 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, 1990.
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...
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.
qtd. in
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
231
Recently Sylvia Harcstark Myers
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...
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
Textual Features Eliza Cook
In the address to her readers in the first issue EC casts herself as an unpatronising contributor to popular education: Let it not be imagined I am appointing myself any particular right to lead or...
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 ...
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 Eliza Cook
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.
qtd. in
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
106
Unlike Wollstonecraft , she sees women's sphere as naturally limited and...

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