The Fair Children of Sherwood

Introduction. In his article “Charles Dickens” (Inside the Whale, 1940) George Orwell writes that:

The doctrine of ‘breaking the child’s spirit’ was in full vigour, and ‘The Fairchild Family’ was a standard book for children till late into the century. This evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty expurgated editions, but it is well worth reading in the original version. It gives some idea of the lengths to which child discipline was sometimes carried. Mr Fairchild, for instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first thrashes them, reciting Dr Watts’s ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’, between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging.

Orwell does not name the author of this book: it was Mary Martha Sherwood née Butt. This was not the first appearance of the book in Orwell’s writings, and it was not the last, as we will see. In another blog I will explain who Dr Watts was, and for those who wonder I will clarify what a gibbet was.

The Fairchild Family, 1818 (British Library copy)

Family Background. Mary Martha Butt was born on 6 May 1775 at Stanford in Worcestershire. Her father George Butt was born on Boxing Day 1741 in Lichfield the son of Dr Carey Butt a surgeon and pharmacist; studied at Westminster and Oxford; was ordained in 1765; and was appointed Rector of Stanford in 1771.

On 26 April 1773 George Butt married Martha Sherwood the daughter of Henry Sherwood a London silk merchant. George had got into debt at Oxford and building a new Stanford Rectory. He cleared his debts with his wife’s money. She controlled his finances and persuaded him to run a fee paying boys school at his rectory. He was a respected tutor.

George Butt wrote poetry, two volumes of sermons, and a religious novel; and a play that remained unpublished. He collected pictures and prints, and enjoyed the theatre. His Lichfield friends including Anna Seward the Swan of Lichfield; Charles Darwin’s grand-father Erasmus Darwin; and Dr Samuel Johnson of dictionary fame. George Butt died on 30 September 1795 aged fifty three.

George and Martha Butt had two children other than Mary Martha Butt. John Marten Butt was born on 10 March 1774; studied at Westminster and Oxford; and was appointed Rector of Oddingley in Worcestershire in 1806. His first wife Mary Ann Congreve gave him ten children and died in 1818. His second wife Jemima Hubbal gave him another four. He wrote some religious works. He died on 3 March 1846 aged seventy one.

George and Martha Butt’s third child Lucy Lyttleton Butt was born at Stanford on 29 April 1781. In 1806 she married the Reverend Charles Richard Cameron; and he was appointed curate in charge of St George’s, Pain’s Lane, a new chapel of ease in Lilleshall parish in Shropshire. It was built on land given by Lord Stafford; and with money from the local mine owners.

The Reverend and Mrs Cameron produced twelve children of whom seven predeceased her. She had her many Christian children’s books published under her married name Mrs Cameron. She died on 6 September 1858 aged seventy seven.

Early Life. Mary Martha Butt was home educated by her father, mother and brother. She would wear an iron collar to which a blackboard was attached and learnt Latin and Greek. Aged fifteen she was sent as a boarder to the Abbey School for Girls at Reading run by Simon Dominque de Saint Quentin and his first wife Ann de Saint Quentin née Pitts. His earlier pupils had included Jane Austen.

Mary Martha Butt wrote a novel Traditions. Her father found it and William Lane of Minerva Press of London published it in 1795. He published many sentimental and Gothic novels. The money from it was given to Monsieur de Saint Quentin who had had to sell his school to pay his gambling debts. He set up a new one in London whose pupils were to include the future Lady Caroline Lamb.

George Butt died on 29 September 1795. His widow and children settled in Bridgnorth in Shropshire. Mary Martha Butt wrote her next novel Margarita in 1798. Samuel Hazard a Bath bookseller publisher and agent paid her £40 for it, about £4,000, in our terms, and Minerva Press published it in four volumes in 1799. It was advertised as being by the author of Traditions.

Mary Martha Butt sold her next novel, The History of Susan Gray; as related by a clergyman; designed for the benefit of young women when going to service, to a publisher for £10. It was published in 1802. She was also a Sunday school teacher.

Marriage and Children. On 30 June 1803 Mary Martha Butt, twenty eight, married her cousin Captain Henry Sherwood, twenty seven, of the 53^rd (Shropshire) Regiment of Foot; despite having warned in Susan Gray that girls should beware of soldiers who were here today and gone tomorrow. In 1804 he was appointed paymaster of his regiment.

Captain and Mrs Sherwood lived in barracks in Sunderland and Morpeth in north east England where her first child, Mary Henrietta, was born in 1804 (see below). In 1805 Captain and Mrs Sherwood sailed for India arriving in 1806. She left her baby with its maternal grandmother and aunt on medical advice. Mrs Sherwood was pregnant when she set sail. The voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to Madras took four months and their ship had to avoid French commerce raiders.

The Sherwoods’ Indian billets included Calcutta, Dinapore, Berhampore, Cawnpore and Madras. Mrs Sherwood gave birth to two sons and four daughters in India. One son died of whooping cough in Bengal in 1807 aged one; and one daughter died there in 1808 aged one. Mrs Sherwood became an Evangelical influenced by the Anglican chaplain/missionary Henry Martyn. She set up schools where her husband was stationed; and taught British officers’ children, and the children of Indians in British employment.

The Sherwoods left India in 1815 and arrived in Britain in 1816 with four of their own children, two adopted ones and a motherless girl they were caring for. Captain Sherwood went on half pay and opened a Worcester boys’ school. His wife opened a girls’ school near Pershore in Worcestershire and taught English, French, astronomy, history, geography, handwriting and ciphering. Their last child George was born in 1819 and died in infancy in 1820.

Literary Career. Mrs Sherwood stopped writing when she was caring for babies but then resumed. An online bibliography of her writings, lists hundreds of her books, booklets, and religious tracts. She had many articles published especially in the Youth’s Magazine. Several volumes of her collected works were published in the nineteenth century.

The first book Mrs Sherwood wrote after she married was Little Henry and his Bearer written at Cawnpore and published in 1815. In it a dying eight year old British orphan converts his Hindu bearer to Christianity. Mrs Sherwood sent the manuscript to her sister Mrs Cameron, who sold it to Edward Houlston a Wellington, Shropshire, bookseller, for £5 (about £500 in our terms). It had had thirty seven editions by 1850 and was translated into French, German, Spanish, Hindustani, Chinese and Sinhalese.

Most of Mrs Sherwood’s books followed this pattern. She also wrote Gothic novels, historical fiction and non-fiction including An Introduction to Astronomy (1817), An Introduction to Geography (1818). In 1830 she ventured into true crime with The Oddingley Murders (1830); and A Sequel to the Oddingley Murders (1830). George Parker, the Oddingley Rector, had wanted local farmers to pay more tithes. On 24 June 1806 he was shot dead. No one was ever convicted of his murder. Mrs Sherwood’s brother replaced him at Oddingley and she knew many of those involved.

The Fairchild Family. Volume One of The History of the Fairchild Family was published in 1818 by John Hatchard of Piccadilly a London bookseller and publisher, whose bookshop still exists. Mrs Sherwood had written the first draft on her return voyage to Britain.

The book tells of a family striving towards godliness and consists of a series of lessons taught by the parents to their son and two daughters. They are taught to be godly; and that envy, greed, lying, disobedience and fighting are wrong. In one chapter two local children die. One a good little boy goes to heaven. The other a disobedient girl plays with candles, burns to death and presumably goes to hell.

Mrs Sherwood, an evangelical, believed in original sin. The gibbet incident that Orwell mentions occurs in the book. Mr Fairchild catches two of his children fighting; beats them with a cane; and in between blows reads aloud Dr Watts’ poem that begins, Let dogs delight to bark and bite. He then takes them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where a murderer’s corpse is hanging and rotting.

Gibbeting was when the bodies of criminals after they were hanged were taken to where they had lived. The bodies would be hung in a cage and left to rot. Between 1752 and 1832 murderers’ bodies were usually dissected for the benefit of medical students. Though we speak of “murderers’ bodies” most executions until the 1830’s were for offences such as forgery, armed robbery, rape, attempted murder and other serious crimes – not the taking of life. Such offenders were often gibbeted.

The first volume of the History of the Fairchild Family ran through many editions. Hatchard published Volume Two in 1842 and Volume Three in 1847. Mrs Sherwood had mellowed and more emphasis is placed on good breeding and kindness to the poor. Gibbeting was abolished in 1836 and in Volume Two the Fairchild father and son visit where the gibbet had stood and note its disappearance.

Politics and Religion. Mrs Sherwood supported the campaign against slavery which was abolished in the British Empire in 1833. She met William Wilberforce the campaigner against it in Worcester in 1820. They had a long talk about India. She also met Elizabeth Fry the Quaker Penal Reformer.

Mrs Sherwood detested Roman Catholicism as idolatrous. Some of her novels attacked it and especially the alleged conditions in nunneries and monasteries. She also disliked Hinduism but she had nothing against Indians merely wishing that they would become Christians. She respected Muslims and Jews because they only worshipped one god.

Mrs Sherwood believed that everybody should know their place in life and remember that it is the next world that matters. She wanted the rich and the middle classes to be kind and charitable to the poor, and the poor to be obedient and deferential.

William Darton and Son, an imprint that survived until 1985, published Mrs Sherwood’s novel Caroline Mordaunt in 1835. The title characters’ parents die when she is young. Her relatives pay for her education; she becomes a governess; changes from a flighty and discontented girl to a reliable and contented woman; tolerates arrogant nobles, silly writers, and dogmatic evangelicals; and eventually makes a good marriage.

Orwell and Sherwood. Orwell referred to The Fairchild Family as early as 1932 when it was a book he recommended to Brenda Salkeld as one of a number that were “in different ways a little off the track”. At this time both Orwell and Salkeld were teachers (as Brenda Salkeld remained during her working life).

In January 1945, in one of his “As I Please” columns, Orwell returned to the book, writing

I have been re-reading with some interest The Fairchild Family, which was written in 1813 and was for fifty years or more a standard book for children. Unfortunately I only possess the first volume…”

He would have been unaware of the gibbet being removed, lacking the later volumes. After giving more details of the book he concludes:

A curious and interesting feature of the book is that the Fairchild children, reared upon these stern principles, seem to be rather exceptionally untrustworthy. As soon as their parents’ backs are turned they invariably misbehave themselves, which suggests that flogging and bread and water are not a very satisfactory treatment after all. It is worth recording, by the way, that the author, Mrs. Sherwood, brought up several children, and at any rate they did not actually die under her ministrations.

These remarks suggest that Orwell knew something of Mrs Sherwood’s biography. Although he makes no reference to India perhaps Orwell knew that the Sherwoods, like his own family, the Blairs, had Indian imperial associations. I pointed out that Orwell first mentioned the book while he was school-teacher, by the time he wrote this third appreciation he had become the adoptive father of a son. Perhaps he was exploring different attitudes to parenting as he re-read a book of his youth. Equally, with the references to judicial pain and horror one can also appreciate the stirrings that became the childhood of Winston Smith, alluded to in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and recall of Orwell’s own horrific treatment as a schoolboy described in “Such, Such were the Joys”.

Final Years. In the 1830’s Captain and Mrs Sherwood travelled extensively on the continent especially in France and Switzerland. In 1832 she met Sir Walter Scott on a return voyage from Holland. She lent him a pen and gave him some ink.

The Sherwoods moved to London in 1849. She continued writing. Captain Sherwood died there on 6 December 1849 aged seventy three. Mrs Sherwood died there on 22 September 1851 of diarrhoea and exhaustion aged seventy six.

Captain and Mrs Sherwood’s oldest child Mary Henrietta Sherwood, born in England in 1804, had stayed behind when her parents went to India. In 1826 she married the Reverend Charles Thomas Dawes. They had nine children. Their fifth child Edwyn Sandys Dawes a merchant navy officer rose to be a shipping and insurance magnate and was knighted.

Conclusion. Mrs Sherwood was at heart a good woman, judged by the standards of her time. The past is another country. Mark Twain savagely mocked writers like her in his story The Good Little Boy and the Bad Little Boy. In real life the good often fail and the bad succeed; and society decides what is good and evil.

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