ABSTRACT
Mrs Sarah Trimmer, ardent defender of a Christian upbringing for all children, takes an ambivalent view of translations from ‘the continent’ in her infl uential monthly publication of articles, correspondence, and reviews of children’s books, The Guardian of Education (1802-1806). On the one hand she expresses in its early pages a fondness for Perrault’s Mother Goose’s Fairy Tales in her own childhood, and on the other she tartly distances herself from one of Mme d’Aulnoy’s stories: ‘those who indulge children with reading fairy tales, will approve of the History of the White Cat, which is taken from some French Work’ (vol. 1, 1802: 432). The tone suggests that children should not be indulged in fairy tales, and the attitude to French writing is dismissive. Trimmer’s anti-French sentiment reaches its height in her essay on Christian education in the second volume of The Guardian. Here she expresses the view that teaching French, the language of an ‘enemy . . . who has long meditated the ruin of the nation’, to English children ‘has been the occasion of incalculable mischief, by opening a passage for that torrent of infi delity and immorality which has been poured upon the nation from the continent through the channel of French books’ (vol. 2, 1803: 406). Immediately after this outburst Trimmer indicates the source of her distaste for French texts: ‘the next thing to be considered in a course of Christian education is the choice of English books’ (407). Only English books-the italics are Trimmer’s-could guarantee a truly Christian basis for moral education.
