Sarah Trimmer - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

Trimmer's most popular book, Fabulous Histories, was reprinted for at least 133 years and had a profound impact on generations of readers and writers. In 1877, when the firm of Griffith and Farran published it as part of their "Original Juvenile Library," they advertised it as "the delicious story of Dicksy, Flapsy, and Pecksy, who can have forgotten it? It is as fresh today as it was half a century ago." Tess Cosslett has also suggested that the names of Trimmer's birds — Dicksy, Pecksy, Flapsy and Robin—bear a striking resemblance to the rabbits — Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter — in Beatrix Potter's children's books.

Trimmer also influenced the children's writers of her own age; William Godwin's Fables, Ancient and Modern (1805), for example, imitates Trimmer's Ladder to Learning. Among her contemporary admirers was Frances Burney, who remarked in a letter to her sister Esther about the education of the latter's 10-year-old daughter, "Mrs. Trimmer I should suppose admirable for a girl" (as an introduction to the Scriptures).

While Trimmer was highly respected for her charity work during her lifetime and for her books long after her death, her reputation began to wane at the end of the 19th century and plummeted during the 20th century. One reason for this is that her textbooks, so widely used during the first half of the century, were replaced by secular books in the second half of the century. The tone of her books was no longer seen as consonant with British society. An early scholar of children's literature, Geoffrey Summerfield, describes her this way: “Of all the morally shrill women active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, she was probably the shrillest. Unbalanced, frenetic, paranoid, she may have been, but no one could deny her energy and perseverance in defending the souls of the children of England from the assaults of the devil.” Recently, however, children's literature scholars have attempted to view 18th-century children's literature within its historical context rather than judge it against modern tastes; scholars such as Grenby, Ruwe, Ferguson, Fyfe and Cosslett have reassessed Trimmer's work. Because Trimmer does not fit the mold of 20th-century feminism — that is, since she did not rebel against the social mores of her society as did Mary Wollstonecraft — she did not attract the attention of early feminist scholars. However, as Ruwe points out, “by the confluence of political, historical, and pedagogical events at the turn of the century, a woman such as Trimmer was able to gain a greater visibility in the realm of public letters than was perhaps typical before or after"; Trimmer was a "role model for other women authors", and these later authors often acknowledged their debt explicitly, as did the author of The Footsteps to Mrs. Trimmer’s Sacred History.