ABSTRACT
Originally planned as an insertion for Richard and Honora Edgeworth’s children’s tale, Harry and Lucy (1779), Day’s novel, The History of Sandford and Merton, A Work Intended for the Use of Children, grew to be enormously successful in its three installments (1783, 1786, 1789). Day’s frame tale involves three principal characters. In need of correction is Tommy Merton, a spoiled son of a country gentleman just returned from Jamaica, where he had several black servants to wait upon him, who were forbidden upon any account to contradict him. If he walked, there always went two negroes with him, one of whom carried a large umbrella to keep the sun from him, and the other was to carry him in his arms, whenever he was tired. Just as in Kilner’s The Rotchfords, the children are taught the virtues of charity towards Africans.
