(a) On the occasion of a literary dispute at Reynolds’s house, Mrs. Trimmer, then Miss Kirby, fifteen years old, produced from her pocket a copy of Paradise Lost. Johnson marked his appreciation of the incident as recorded above.
(b) From 1802 to 1804, Mrs. Trimmer edited The Guardian of Education (published monthly) which exercised a kind of censorship over children’s books. A reference by Mrs. T. to Perrault’s Tales, which she had read as a child, called forth the criticism of a correspondent who denounced “Cinderella” in particular as encouraging envy, jealousy, vanity and other evil passions in children. Mrs. Trimmer’s principles forced her to agree with this stern moralist.
Bird stories by Mr. Kendall include:
The Crested Wren. E. Newbery, 1799; The Swallow. E. Newbery, 1800; The Sparrow and The Canary Bird are also mentioned in The Stories of Senex; or, Little Histories of Little People, by the same author.
Elizabeth Sandham also wrote:
The Adventures of a Bullfinch. J. Harris, 1809.
and The Perambulations of a Bee and a Butterfly, 1812.