ABSTRACT
Mary Martha Sherwood (1775-1851) is best known for her History of the Fair child Family (1818), a popular children's book, which inculcated religious principles - sometimes by rather shocking means (notoriously, after they have been squabbling, Mr Fairchild takes the children to see a corpse hanging on a gibbet: 'one who first hated and afterwards killed his brother': 'Story on the Sixth Commandment'). The second child of George Butt (1741-95), divine and poet, and his wife Martha Sherwood, Mary Butt was born at Stanford in Worcestershire, attended the Abbey School, Reading, and on 30 June 1803 married her cousin, Captain Henry Sherwood (d. 1849). In the course of an eventful married life, Mrs Sherwood travelled widely, lived in India with her husband, whose regiment was posted there, and had eight children, of whom only three survived to adulthood. She wrote approximately three hundred stories and tracts, and her History of the Fairchild Family ran to three parts, from 1818 to the final part in 1847. The following extract is taken from the Life of Mrs Sherwood (1854) edited by her daughter, Sophia Kelly. 'There has been a singular Providence attending me through life,' Mrs Sherwood states, 'and preparing me in a remarkable manner for that which it was the Divine will I should do' (Life, p. 2). She is one of few women in this collection to describe a relatively happy childhood.
