Mary Martha Sherwood - Legacy

Legacy

As Britain's education system became more secularized in the second half of the nineteenth century, Sherwood's evangelical books were used mainly to teach the poor and in Sunday schools. Hence her missionary stories were the most influential of all her works. According to Cutt, "these stories, which in themselves kept alive the missionary spirit and perpetuated that paternal attitude towards India that lasted into the, were widely imitated" and "an unfortunate assumption of racial superiority was fostered by the over-simplification of some of Mrs. Sherwood's successors." These books influenced Charlotte Maria Tucker ("A.L.O.E.") and even perhaps Rudyard Kipling. In the United States, Sherwood's early works were very popular and were republished well into the 1840s; after that, a tradition of specifically American children's literature began to develop with authors such as Louisa May Alcott.

Sherwood was also instrumental in developing the ideology of the Victorian family. Cutt acknowledges that "the omniscient Victorian parent was not the creation of Mrs. Sherwood, but of the Victorians themselves; nevertheless, by presenting the parent as God's vicar in the family, she had planted and fostered the idea." This in turn increased the value placed on childhood innocence.

The prevalence of death in Sherwood's early stories and her vivid portrayal of its worldly and otherworldly consequences have often caused twentieth-century critics to deride her works. Nevertheless, Sherwood's stories prepared the literary ground for writers such as Charles Kingsley and Charlotte Yonge. It has even been suggested that John Ruskin used Henry Milner as the basis for his imaginative autobiography Praeterita (1885–89). Sherwood's narrative experiments with a variety of genres allowed other writers to pursue innovative forms of children's fiction. Furthermore, her imaginative use of tracts domesticated reformist literature and also encouraged radical writers such as Harriet Martineau to employ the same genre, if to opposite ends. Because of the popularity of Sherwood's works and their impact on later writers, Janis Dawson writes: "though her books are no longer widely read, she is regarded as one of the most significant authors of children's literature of the nineteenth century."