Introduction
hilarating. Although gifted with considerable literary skill, Mrs. Sherwood's attitude to children and life seems to me to have been curiously wrong. No one in that busy day toiled harder, although I have no doubt unconsciously, to make very good children priggish and less good children unhappy. Through her immense volume of writings runs a strong streak of moral snobbishness utterly opposed to the federation of mankind. Children are called upon at every turn to assist in the separation of the sheep and the goats. This strikes me as mischievous and retrogressive, although, since in Mrs. Sherwood's day it was expected, she must not be too hardly treated. 'Little Robert,' however, is a simple narrative unmarred by the defect I have named.
Mrs. Sherwood's faults are not wholly summed up in the foregoing indictment. I regret to say that in the story of Emily's recovery, in The Fairchild Family, she makes honeysuckle, wild roses, primroses, violets, and anemones bloom simultaneously.
'The Trial,' on page 86, is from Evenings at Home, by John Aikin (1747-1822) and his sister, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825). It is a little book in three volumes which formed part of every child's library for many years, and might well be modernized for the children of our own time. For the most part the book is instructive; only rarely is there any fun. Mrs. Barbauld's share was only fifteen pieces, and it is, I think, probable that Dr. Aikin was the author of 'The Trial,' which was, he says, imitated from an old book called Juvenile Trials. This I have not seen, but in Mary Howitt's Treasury of Tales, 1860, a similar collection to the present volume, is an extract describing the trial of one Sally Dalia.
We come now, on page 98, to one of the best stories for children that has been written—'The Basket Woman,' by Maria Edgeworth. In her previous story, 'The Purple Jar,' we saw Miss Edgeworth only as a moral narrator for the nursery; here she is something more—a novelist for the nursery. She was the first to bring the machinery of the novel to bear upon such events as children want to hear about;
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