And yet, when she began to write books for children, after some years of married life in India, she put on an iron collar of her own accord, to set forth the dire consequences of Original Sin. When (perhaps late in a chapter) she took it off, her imagination could conjure up no fairies; but working upon the memories of her own childhood, it brought life into the tale.
Mrs. Sherwood wrote an extraordinary number of children’s books; many were published by Houlston the Quaker as chap-books.[142] The sternest and most uncompromising dogmatism cannot crush the life out of them, nor weaken the vivid pictures they contain. Her first journey across the hills to Lichfield, when she was a child of four, had made a deeper impression on her mind than all her Indian travels. She had fresher memories of the English hills than of “the Indian Caucasus hanging as brilliant clouds on the horizon”. The quiet inland life that is the chief matter of her autobiography[143] is reflected in most of her stories. She is not concerned with any wider interests; great events pass unnoticed, as they do in some nurseries; but whenever Mrs. Sherwood remembers her Doctrines, she goes back to the Warnings and Examples of the seventeenth century. There is a grim shadow on her nursery wall, and in the midst of the most innocent employments, her little people shrink and cower. This spectre stood over her when she tampered with a book which children of all ages understand and enjoy. She accepted The Pilgrim’s Progress as a part of her creed; her knowledge of it accounts for the fine simplicity of her style. Yet in her Infant’s Progress from the Valley of Destruction to Everlasting Glory,[144] there is not a giant nor a castle to atone for her bane on “toys” which the strictest philosopher would pass as harmless and instructive. Her poor little pilgrim suffers a martyrdom of denial in a juvenile Vanity Fair:
“Then I saw that certain of these teachers of vanities came and spread forth their toys before Humble Mind, to wit, pencils, and paints, maps and drawings, pagan poems and fabulous histories, musical instruments of various kinds, with all the gaudy fripperies of modern learning.”
Some of these things had been the delight of Mrs. Sherwood’s youth; but in her passion for dogma, she forgot the white horse and the fairy tales, and persuaded herself that an iron collar was the only protection against vanity.
Her adaptation of Sarah Fielding’s Governess[145] shows the same Puritan intolerance. The book had been in her own nursery library, along with Margery Two-Shoes, Robinson Crusoe and “two sets of fairy tales.” Yet she expurgated all but one of the “moral” fairy tales allowed by Mrs. Teachum, and inserted in their place “such appropriate relations as seemed more likely to conduce to juvenile edification.”
It is likely (and for her children’s sake to be hoped) that Mrs. Sherwood’s practice was kinder and more cheerful than her precepts. The Fairchild Family,[146] the best known, and the best of her books, is full of interest and reality; and in this, the setting is her home and the persons are her own children.
To enjoy it, a child must skip solid pages of doctrine, and would do well besides to skip most of the stories read by the Fairchild Family out of little gilt books which “the good-natured John” brought them from the Fair.
These were chap-books, but of a sort only less forbidding than those the pedlar carried in Puritan days. John gave the largest to Lucy and the other to Emily. “‘Here is two pennyworth, and there is three pennyworth,’ said he.
‘My book,’ said Emily, ‘is the History of the Orphan Boy![147], and there are a great many pictures in it; the first is the picture of a funeral.’