If the Sunday-school movement had not assumed some proportions about
this time, it would have been necessary to create a practical outlet
for the moral energy which dominated the authors of whom we have been
writing. Had Robert Raikes not conceived his plan when he did, the
ethical impulse would have run riot in a much wilder fashion, and
would have done no good at all. For, whatever may be said against the
old-time Sunday-school in a critical vein, one cannot ignore that its
establishment brought immediate benefit. As it was, the new institution
furnished the objective point for which the didactic school was blindly
groping, and developed the idea of personal service. The social ideal
was beginning to germinate.
Robert Raikes (1735 or 6–1811) was by profession a printer. He was of
benevolent disposition and met with much to arouse his sympathy for the
lower classes, whom he found indifferent to religion and hopelessly
uncouth in their daily living. With the religious revival which
swept through England around 1770, caused by the preaching of George
Whitefield, Raikes began his work in earnest, first among the city
prisons, where he was brought in contact with surprising conditions
which had long lain in obscurity because of a wide-spread public
indifference.
His observation thus trained to follow along this particular social
line, he soon became attracted toward the children apprenticed to
a certain pin factory. He saw that the discipline of work, however
exacting, however it denied them the care and attention due to all
young persons, was the only restrictive guidance they had. When Sunday
came, they ran wild, relieved of duty, and not imbued with any idea
of personal control. Their elders were living immoral lives; they had
no opportunity or incentive to improve; and their natural inclination
was to follow animal impulse and blind desire. To such a religious man
as Raikes, the mandate, “Suffer little children to come unto me,” was
most naturally suggested by such circumstances. Some means of occupying
these children on the Sabbath day must be devised.
So it was that on January 26, 1781, the first Sunday-school was opened.
Raikes poured his whole energy into organization, and, through the
medium of his own paper, the Gloucester _Journal_, spread broadcast his
written suggestions about the work to be done, and his descriptions
of the particular localities which most needed attention. He was in a
position to gain publicity, and his own personal earnestness counted
for a great deal. Already we have noted his relationship to Newbery,
whose literary connections probably afforded Raikes some assistance.
The movement had been of five years’ growth, when, in 1786, Raikes
was summoned before King George III. Their Majesties, both the King
and Queen, were interested by what they had heard, and wished to know
something more. The Queen was being almost daily enthused through the
intensity of Mrs. Trimmer’s pleadings. This good lady, already known
for her children’s books, had put into operation a Sunday-school of her
own at Brentwood, and it was to this that the King had paid a memorable
visit, leaving behind him a reputation for “kind and condescending
behaviour,” which won the hearts of all the children. In this way was
the official sanction placed upon Christianity as a practical force;
there was even every prospect of starting a Sunday-school at Windsor.
“A general joy reigns among the conductors,” cried the enthusiastic
Mrs. Trimmer, when she realised what interest was being shown in every
quarter.
The programme framed for Raikes’s little protégés was indeed
sufficiently full to keep them from the highways. He writes:
“The children were to come after ten in the morning, and stay till
twelve; they were then to go home and return at one; and after reading
a lesson, they were to be conducted to Church. After Church, they were
to be employed in repeating the catechism till after five, and then
dismissed, with an injunction to go home without making a noise.”
Lamb and Leigh Hunt, when together at Christ Hospital, were regarded
as veritable monks in their knowledge of the Bible; but these little
waifs were slaves of a rigorous order; there was nothing voluntary in
their desire for spiritual light. The time was to arrive when more
sunshine was to be mixed with the teaching, but in the beginning it
was necessary for Raikes to keep the Sabbath forcibly observed rather
than to devise a less exacting routine. He went about, untiring in his
efforts; he plead personally with parents, besides hoping that, through
the moral instruction being given to their children, they might be made
to see the outlet for their own salvation.
Years after, testimony was obtained from the survivors of Raikes’s
discipline. One William Brick had been a scholar of his, and the memory
of those days was vivid--perhaps a little too much so, but none the
less picturesque:
“I can remember Mr. Raikes well enough,” he said. “I remember his
caning me. I don’t suppose I minded it much. He used to cane boys on
the back of a chair. Some terrible bad chaps went to school when I
first went.... I know the parents of one or two of them used to walk
them to school with 14-lb. weights tied to their legs, to keep them
from running away.... When a boy was very bad, he would take him out
of the school, and march him home and get his parents to ‘wallop’ him.
_He’d stop and see it done_, and then bring the young urchin back,
rubbing his eyes and other places.... Every one in the city loved and
feared him.”
Such a scene is not prepossessing; nor does moral suasion appear to
have been as efficacious as the rod. Besides which, Raikes had a way of
looking at a trembling victim through his reading-glass, and exclaiming
in thunderous voice: “Ah, I can see you did not say your prayers this
morning.” An old man of eighty spoke of this circumstance with deep
feeling; and, in awe-stricken tones, he ended by saying: “The boys
believed he could see through stone walls with that glass; _and it
magnified his eye_, so that they were sometimes frightened, and told
wonderful stories about what Mr. Raikes could do with his wonderful
glass.”
The immediate influence this movement had upon children’s books was
to create a demand for tracts. Later on, after Thomas Carlyle, in
1839, had plead the cause of London public libraries, it suggested a
special class of library as a part of the Sunday-school machinery. A
general call was raised for juvenile books of a strictly religious
nature, with an appeal intended for a poorer class of readers. Miss
Hannah More represents the chief exponent of this grade of writing.
“All service ranks alike with God,” says Browning. But these ladies,
who were untiring in their devotion to the cause, who were, in their
parochial character, forerunners of the social worker of to-day, each
was known through her special interest. We speak of Miss Catherine
Sinclair, author of “Holiday House,” as the first to introduce benches
in the parks of Edinburgh, as the originator of drinking-fountains, as
the founder of cooking-depots; of Priscilla Wakefield as the originator
of savings-banks for the poor; of Miss More as the author of tracts;
and of Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, one of the forgotten New-England
writers, as the first to draw attention to the condition of the
newsboys. Mrs. Trimmer, therefore, is justly connected with the history
of the development of Sunday-schools.
In a tabular indication of the trend of juvenile literature, Sarah
Kirby Trimmer (1741–1810) may be said to have been a disciple of
Madame de Genlis and of Mrs. Barbauld, quite as much as a follower of
Rousseau and of Raikes; she inherited from her father an overweening
religious inclination, and several glimpses of her in the society of
the day reveal how deeply seated her serious nature was. In London
she talked with Dr. Johnson, Mr. Gainsborough, and Mr. Hogarth, and,
through recognised powers of reading aloud, she charmed many of her
friends. But it was a hopeless situation to cope with in a young girl,
when, a dispute having arisen between Sir Joshua Reynolds and one of
his friends, Sarah, being called upon to settle the point--a doubtful
passage in “Paradise Lost”--drew the volume from the pocket of her
skirt! At twenty-one she was married, destined to be the mother of six
sons and six daughters, and no sooner was the first child born than
she directed all of her attention, as Madame de Genlis did, to the
subject of education.
Wearisome it is to come in contact with a person of one idea. Mrs.
Trimmer naïvely confesses in her journal that she must have worn out
the patience of many a visitor with her views upon education. As the
years advanced, her opinions became more narrowed and more sectarian.
Mrs. Trimmer exhibited piety which was of the emotional, almost of the
hysterical kind, yet sincere in its whole-souled acceptance of Bible
truths. She questioned nothing; she believed with a simple faith that
lacked proportion. One has to view her entirely from the standpoint
of this single interest which had her under complete control. In her
“Guardian of Education” she dwelt much upon the dangerous matter
contained in children’s books; in her “New Plan of Education” she
condemned any attempt to extend the scope of education for the poor.
Her chief motive in both cases was to keep away from faith any cause
of its possible undoing. The earnestness put into her charity work,
her untiring devotion to the Sunday-school, a certain gentle charm
of conversation won for Mrs. Trimmer wide-spread attention. Her life
was guided by the belief in a divine mission; her days were well
ordered, from the hours before breakfast, which she reserved for the
learning of poetry, to the evenings, when she would give herself up
to meditation and prayer. In fact, during twenty-five years, she kept
a diary, penned in secret moments of retreat, a curious display of
over-welling feeling--pietistical neurasthenia. These pages are hardly
to be considered interpretative--they are outpourings, giving one an
awful sense of unworthiness, if life consists simply in submitting to
biblical strictures and in uttering biblical paraphrases.
But Mrs. Trimmer was withal an active little woman, whose three hours,
spent every Sunday over her journal, represented meditation only: in
her practise of Christianity she was zealous; and her pen was employed
in preparing the kind of food to foster a proper feeling among children
and cottagers and _servants_. In this latter respect there was a
change indeed from Miss Edgeworth, who considered the advisability
of separating young people entirely from any possible contact with
servants.
Among her children and her grandchildren, Mrs. Trimmer exerted profound
influence; the Sabbath day was observed with great strictness; toys
set aside while Stackhouse’s “Commentary on the Bible”[34] was brought
forth to look at; stories were told, and the progress of Bible heroes
traced upon maps of the Holy Land. The spirit of rest and peace
followed Mrs. Trimmer, who was averse to reading books of controversy.
We are given a picture of her in her venerable old age, walking with
her grandson among the plants and flowers, while she explained, with
a certain lyric simplicity, the truths, as she saw them with her meek
spirit, underlying the growth of the grass; and described the flight of
a sparrow which escaped not the notice of God. There was thus unfolded
to this little boy the holiness of all things in nature, permeated with
a divine grace; he was made to consider the lilies of the field, and
not a bush but might become to him a burning flame, not a stone but
might be rent asunder by the resurrection of a dried-up seed.
Mrs. Trimmer’s “Easy Lessons for Children,” her “Easy Introduction
to the Knowledge of Nature,” her “Sacred History for Young Persons,”
and her works explaining the catechism, were among the rare books
available for the purposes of Raikes’s followers. They were easily
understood; they explained satisfactorily for children, according to
grown-up standards, certain religious teachings. In the Catholic church
to-day, Mother Loyola is said to possess that same ability to unfold
the meaning of the most difficult doctrine so that Catholic children
can understand. Priests turn to her books rather than trust to their
own interpretations. The general interest aroused for the poor, for the
lower classes, appealed to Mrs. Trimmer; she became wholly absorbed;
she wrote “The Servant’s Friend” and edited a “Family Magazine,”
intended for their special instruction and amusement. Adopting Madame
de Genlis’s idea of using prints as a factor in nursery education, she
prepared a series of illustrations from ancient history and from the
Old Testament; and was further engaged in the simplification of Roman
and English history for young readers.
The book that has come down to us as representing Mrs. Trimmer’s work,
“The History of the Robins,” is a nature story of no mean value,
easy in narrative and full of appeal for very young persons who are
interested in simple incident. To American readers it is now available
in a cut-up state, for Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in editing it, called
the style “stilted” and diffuse, and thought that its unity could
better be preserved by dealing only with the robins, and not at all
with the extraneous doings of the Benson family.
When the Lambs removed to Enfield in 1827, Thomas Westwood, a boy of
thirteen, lived near them. It was not long before he and Elia were on
intimate terms, and he must have had exceptional merit for Lamb to give
him free entrée to his books. “Lamb,” so he has recorded, “initiated
me into a school of literature which Mrs. Trimmer might not have
considered the most salutary under the circumstances. Beaumont and
Fletcher, Webster, Farquhar, Defoe, Fielding,--these were the pastures
in which I delighted to graze in those early years; and which, in
spite of Trimmer, I believe did me less evil than good.”
An alteration in attitude appears to have been going on in several
directions; the social strata were readjusting themselves. For Hannah
More (1745–1833), it is claimed, stood at the parting of the roadways,
where clergymen and schoolmasters, once frowned upon as quite inferior
beings, now took positions of a higher nature. Had Miss More not thrown
herself so heartily into the moral movement, she might have occupied
a much more important position in English letters than she does. One
cannot help feeling that, by the part she took in the Sunday-school
development, she sacrificed her genius to a cause. In the biographies
of these well-intentioned writers for children and for poor people,
it is always satisfactory to linger, wherever opportunity presents,
on the genial aspects of their lives; they are estimated in criticism
so greatly by the weight, or by the lack of weight, of their ideas,
that the human value which existed at the time is often lost sight
of. However dry their preachments, their social lives were warmed by
human intercourse and human service. It is hard to forget such a group
as Scott, Maria and Patty Edgeworth, and others, listening to Patty
while she sang Irish melodies. A similar scene is associated with Sally
and Hannah More when they went to call on Dr. Johnson. He was not at
home, and the two, left together in the autocrat’s sanctum, disported
themselves in mock humour. Hannah approached his great chair, and sat
pompously in it, hoping to catch some of his genius. Can you not hear
Johnson’s laughter as he bluntly told her, when he was informed of the
incident, that he rarely sat in that particular chair?
Mrs. Barbauld was no less clever than Hannah More in the handling of
witty verse; in fact, the latter was ever ready with her gifts in the
drawing-room, and added generously her share to the circle gathered
around the actor, David Garrick. He it was who had sufficient faith in
Miss More’s dramatic ability to present two of her plays. Even at that
time she had a reputation among her associates for being very strict
in her religious observances; for one evening, it being Sunday, and
Garrick not averse to piano-playing, he turned to “Nine,” as he called
her, thus indicating that she was a favoured one among the muses, and
told her to leave the room, promising to call her back when the music
was over.
Hannah More’s social work is to be considered from the year (1789) that
Mr. Wilberforce, one of her close friends, discovered the deplorable
conditions existing in the districts around Cheddarcliff. Her long
intercourse with the Garricks, and her various literary endeavours
which took form during 1782 in her “Sacred Dramas” for the young, have
no direct bearing upon her connection with the religious movement
which places her in the general scheme with Robert Raikes and Mrs.
Trimmer. Patty More had had, at an earlier period, large experience in
school-teaching, and this was to prove of inestimable service, for it
was with her assistance that Hannah carried on the work in the Mendip
mining districts. The two met with some opposition, not only from the
classes for whom they were specially striving, but from those who, less
broad than themselves, held views regarding the Sunday-school that
placed spirituality above the actual needs of the poverty-stricken
communities. But, throughout, the Mores never swerved from their set
purpose, even though illness overtook them and made the situation still
harder than it was. For they were forced to ride many miles from their
home, at first unknown in the region they had elected to benefit, a
region cursed by ignorance, plagued by license, and wherein assault was
a common incident.
“Miss Wilberforce would have been shocked,” writes Hannah More, “could
she have seen the petty tyrants whose insolence we stroked, the ugly
children we fondled, the pointers and spaniels we caressed, the cider
we commended, and the wine we swallowed.”
A study of the centres established by these sisters, and which
gradually exerted an influence over twenty-eight miles of territory,
a distance traversed in a manner not unlike the journey of the
circuit-riders who are to be met with throughout the mountain
districts of the South, would throw considerable light on English
labour conditions as they then existed. The setting is an isolated wild
land, thus described by Miss More:
“Several of the grown-up youths had been tried at the last assizes;
three were the children of a person lately condemned to be hanged; many
thieves,--all ignorant, profane, and vicious beyond belief. Of this
banditti, we have enlisted 170; and when the clergyman, a hard man, who
is also the magistrate, saw these creatures kneeling around us, whom
he had seldom seen but to commit, or punish in some way, he burst into
tears.”
The work grew with the months, and mention is soon made of nine hundred
children flocking to a Mendip feast--little ones whose brightest
moments were centred in the regular visits of these ministering ladies.
Miss More’s powers were exerted toward counteracting the ideas being
spread by the French Revolution; both high and low were struggling
against them; they nearly swamped the genius of Wordsworth. Though she
rejoiced in the fall of the Bastille, she deplored the deification
of Nature and the reign of Reason, and vented her sarcasm on the
philosophy of Paine. Her chief alarm was felt for the effect such
opinions might have upon the middle class of England. But, despite
her conservatism, Miss More was regarded as too strong-minded
for religious work; the High Church accused her of too marked an
independence. She was advised, much to her own amusement, to publish a
confession of her faith. The discussion which ensued need not occupy
us; it may, perhaps, have infused into her juvenile tracts a more
determined tone, but it did not originally encourage her in their
composition.
This was brought about through a desire to give the children of the
poor districts religious literature as soon as they were able to
read. Mrs. Trimmer was the only author then available, and her books
were too expensive for the masses. The More sisters, therefore,
soliciting the interest of the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George
III, began the publication of the tracts, three a month, containing
short talks, ballads, and moral tales. These were scattered broadcast
over the country. The scheme lasted from 1794 to 1797, when they were
forced to discontinue it, for lack of pecuniary backing. But, during
the time, collections of “Repository Tracts” had been brought into
existence, which, for at least a quarter of a century, were to stand
representative of the best kind of reading for the poor.
A long list of books comprises the literary activity of Hannah
More,[35] but it is by such volumes as her “Christian Morals,” “Hints
toward Forming the Character of a Young Princess [Charlotte, Princess
of Wales],” “Practical Piety,” “The Spirit of Prayer,” “Strictures
on the Modern System of Female Education,” and “Thoughts on the
Importance of Manners” that her genuine art is overclouded. In her
“Repository Tracts,” she was content to approach the poor as a class,
nor was she willing to allow herself to forget for an instant that,
because of their poverty, they were a type of inferior being. Her
object was to make them content with their lot in life, and to have
them feel comfortable and worthy within their particular sphere. They
were potential with the strength that might place them at the head of
their class, but could not carry them outside of it. An insurmountable
barrier was thought to stretch between the high and low.
“The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain” is considered the most famous of Miss
More’s tracts. They all are redolent with the common moral ideal, but
the local colour in them is real and the glimpses of the poor people,
their homes, customs, beliefs, hopes, and despairs are described
with minute vividness and with much feeling. Whatever brightness they
contain is the sort that is gained by way of contrast,--an ethical
resolve to show that things are not so bad that they may not still be
worse. “Father,” says the little girl, “I wish I was big enough to say
grace. I am sure I would say it heartily to-day; for I was thinking
what _poor_ people do who have no salt to their potatoes.”
The standard is a narrow one; the child who does not go to church
is the bad child; the lack of a new gown fades before the delights
over owning a new Bible. Instead of marking books, as the Edgeworths
advised, Miss More italicised the passages worthy of memorising. Honest
toil is the subject-matter of these stories; the village is the scene
of many a vexation. The gaining of knowledge is only a means toward a
better understanding of the catechism; one’s duty is to learn to read,
else the Holy Writ is a closed subject. There is no aim to carry the
children outside of themselves by means of the highest imagination;
they are told how they are to cope with their own environment, how to
remain satisfied with their own station. They must be rich Christians,
but still remain poor people.
Although Walpole retracted some of the harsh censure which he at first
heaped upon Hannah More, he was not far wrong in his condemnation
of her “ill-natured strictures.” The person who does not recognise
a tendency, in all this literature, “to protract the imbecility of
childhood,” “to arrest the understanding instead of advancing it,” “to
give forwardness without strength” has failed to understand the true
function of a child’s book--to afford the nursery a good time, is the
way Mr. Lucas expresses it.
Was there not something in this religious one-sidedness to belittle the
true dignity of the spirit?[36] Heaven lies about us in our infancy,
and we find ourselves in a beautiful land of promise; we are placed
therein to face the years; by experience, by training, by guidance
along the lines of our own natures, we are prepared to understand
something of the character of the way we shall have to tread alone. We
should be made to face the future, but not to discount the present.
We find ourselves defined by circumstances, but we need not remain
slaves to them. To stigmatise a class in literature is to stigmatise
a reader. Miss More and her contemporaries never questioned their
social attitude--whether it was just or broad or transitory. Full of
the pioneer work which they were doing, they did not recognise the
right for the poor which was already the right for the rich. Juvenile
literature was not for the heart of all youth, but for the benefaction
of this one and of that. And while the educational idea broadened
and was to advance with the scientific spirit on the one hand, on the
other, it had narrowed and was destined for a long, monotonous struggle
with the conscious Sunday-school tale. This character of story was
flat and void, and, because removed from the reality of nature, it was
robbed of the inherent spirit of truth. It identified religion with
literary meekness.