Sarah Trimmer - Motherhood and Philanthropy

Motherhood and Philanthropy

Trimmer was close to her parents; after her marriage, she walked to visit her father every day, later accompanied by her eldest children. She and her husband had 12 children in all—six boys and six girls. Trimmer was responsible for her children's education and it was the combination of her duties as a mother and a teacher that initially sparked her interest in education.

Inspired by Robert Raikes, Trimmer also became active in the Sunday school movement, founding the first Sunday school for poor children in Old Brentford in 1786. She and two of the ministers in her parish, Charles Sturgess and Charles Coates, organized a fund drive and established several schools for the poor children of the neighborhood. Initially, five hundred boys and girls wanted to attend Trimmer's Sunday school; unable to accommodate such numbers, she decided to exclude those under five years of age and restricted each family to one pupil. The parish set up three schools, each with about thirty students—one for older boys, one for younger boys and one for girls. While some other educational reformers of the period such as Mary Wollstonecraft argued for co-educational instruction, Trimmer was opposed to such pedagogical changes; she believed in educating the sexes separately. The students were taught to read, with the aim of teaching them to read the Bible. The students were also encouraged to keep clean—"a present of a brush and comb was given to all who desired them". Trimmer's schools became so well known and admired that Raikes, Trimmer's initial inspiration, recommended those who needed assistance organizing a Sunday school to turn to Trimmer; even Queen Charlotte asked Trimmer's advice on founding a Sunday school at Windsor.

After her visit to the queen, Trimmer was inspired to write The Œconomy of Charity, which describes how readers, specifically women, can establish Sunday schools in their own communities. However, her book accomplished much more than this. While proponents of Sunday schools such as Raikes and Trimmer claimed that the schools would help control the growing social unrest of the poor, critics claimed that these schools would only encourage the social upheaval they were trying to quell. The Hon. John Byng, for example, issued the dire warning that "not only would education 'teach them to read seditious pamphlets, books and publications against Christianity'… but it would render them unfit for 'the laborious employment to which their rank in society had destined them'". Trimmer agreed that the poor were "destined" by God to be poor but would argue that her schools reinforced that divine social hierarchy. The Sunday school debate was waged in churches, in Parliament and in print; in publishing The Œconomy of Charity, Trimmer was entering this vigorous debate.

As scholar Deborah Wills has argued: " is actually informed by a highly politicized subtext which anticipates, subverts, and counters anti-Sunday School arguments. outlines a programme through which the Sunday School, when properly administered, can serve as a means of instituting social control and intensifying hierarchy. …Trimmer’s carefully modest and unassuming text is thus revealed as a middle-class manifesto for the appropriation of social, political, and religious power in the name of moral instruction."

For example, Trimmer contends that Sunday schools teach their pupils not merely to read the Bible but how to draw the proper theological and political conclusions from it. Furthermore, Trimmer argues that the responsibility for educating the poor rests on the shoulders of the middle class alone. By eliminating the aristocracy from an active role in her philanthropic programs, "Trimmer ensures that those who actually regulate the Sunday School curriculum are those who will both embody and perpetuate bourgeois culture”. As Wills points out, this distinguishes her from other philanthropists of the time such as Hannah More.

“O Lord, I wish to promote thy holy religion which is dreadfully neglected. I am desirous to save young persons from the vices of the age.”

— Sarah Trimmer

Trimmer also founded and oversaw charity schools in her neighborhood. She directed promising students from her Sunday schools, which met only once a week, to these charity schools, which met several times a week. As she wrote in her journal, these schools seemed to her to "afford a happy prospect of rescuing many poor children from vice and profligacy". While the Sunday schools were funded by subscription, that is, donations from people within the parish, the charity schools were largely funded by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which had funded the first charity schools around a century earlier. Trimmer criticized the rote learning that went on in traditional charity schools and tried to institute a more dynamic catechetical method in her own schools that would stimulate students to ask questions. She wrote in her journal, “my earnest desire is to compose a course of teaching for Charity Schools, by which the children may learn in reality, and not by rote, the principles of the Christian Religion, as taught in the Scriptures". Trimmer also established schools of industry to which she directed her less promising pupils. These schools would teach girls, for example, how to knit and spin. Initially, Trimmer believed that the schools would turn a profit since the girls would spin and knit all day long; however, the girls were unskilled and turned out poor products that could not be sold. Trimmer viewed this project as a failure.

Wilfried Keutsch, a modern scholar of the 18th century, has criticized Trimmer's projects as naive and moralistic:

no indication that Sarah Trimmer based her many efforts to instruct and improve the children of the poor on detailed social analysis, but it is apparent that she was deeply disturbed not only by their needs but also about the increasing pauperization of the country. Whether she understood that society was changing from a more feudal to a more modern bourgeois structure, in which many of the stabilizing old personal ties were removed and replaced by the cash-nexus, is not clear. …on the whole she displays no interest in the social and economic causes of poverty. Instead she offers a model of improvement which rests on a rigorous division of the working people and the poor into black and white: the deserving and the undeserving poor, the godly and the ungodly, the respectable and dutiful and the rebellious and undutiful, the idle and the industrious, that is, on an alternating identification of poverty with virtue and vice.

Although Sunday schools such as the ones established by Trimmer have often been characterized by modern scholars as a repressive device used by the middle class to impose their morality on the lower classes, Thomas Laqueur has argued that the poor embraced this opportunity to obtain literacy and disregarded many of the moral lessons forced upon them.