The Hockliffe Project: Mary Martha Sherwood, The History of Little Henry and His Bearer

There can be no doubt about the enormous popularity of Little Henry and his Bearer. Having been first published in 1814, it reached a twenty-second edition by 1825 (also in the Hockliffe Collection: 0212B - and the links below lead to pages from this earlier edition) and the same publisher, Houlston's of Wellington, Shropshire, brought out a thirty-seventh in 1850. New editions were published throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, both in English and a multiplicity of other languages. Sherwood's bibliographer, M. Nancy Cutt, has even discovered an edition of 1967 which apparently takes the book at face value rather than as a work to be considered chiefly for its historical interest (Cutt 1974: 117). This edition probably dates from c.1830. Houlston's only established a London office in 1825, and this edition's imprint lists that address before the older Shropshire premises (Cutt 1974: 33). Perhaps the most interesting feature of this edition is the book-list at the back which lists many of Mrs. Sherwood's works. Many of her tracts are available for just one penny, or may be purchased at 7 shillings for one hundred (book-list). The idea was clearly that wealthy individuals or organisations would purchase large numbers of the tracts and distribute them gratis to their poor neighbours.

Mrs. Sherwood was born Mary Martha Butt in 1775. Her early life was comfortable although strictly disciplined. In her autobiography Mrs. Sherwood describes roaming freely in the countryside around the village of Stanford, near Worcester, where her father was rector. But from the ages of five to twelve she was also forced to wear an iron collar and a back-board - she called them the 'stocks' - for several hours a day to improve her posture (compare the girls who are forced to sit in stocks to improve their posture in Dorothy Kilner's The Holyday Present, 157: pp.38-42). Sherwood began to write when very young. She may have been influenced in this by her father, who had moved in intellectual circles in his own youth in Litchfield, socialising with Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Thomas Day, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Johnson and Anna Seward. (He had also briefly been chaplain to George III.) By the time she was twenty Sherwood had been published. She had produced The Traditions in 1795, which she followed in 1799 with Margarita. Both were fairly standard lightly-gothic novels published at William Lane's Minerva Press (although it has been asserted that The Traditions was published by subscription for the benefit of the master at the Abbey School, Reading, where both Sherwood and her sister Lucy, later Cameron, had both been pupils - Dawson 1996: 272). The sudden death of Sherwood's father in 1796 led to an enforced removal to a much more retired existence in Bridgnorth. It was perhaps here that Sherwood, along with her sister, first began to develop the Evangelical style of writing for which they were both to become so celebrated. Influenced by the example of Hannah More, they produced simple, religious tales, ostensibly for the pupils of the Sunday School at which they had begun to teach, for example Sherwood's The History of Susan Gray which she published in 1802. Sarah Trimmer approved of the work, commending it in the usually vitriolic Guardian of Education because 'all the arguments which Reason and Religion can furnish [are] enforced by the most striking examples of persevering Virtue' (v.1 [1802], p.267). But even Trimmer's exacting standards became too lax for Sherwood, and by the time the book was reissued by Houlston's in 1815 she edited out what she thought of as the book's doctrinal faults and further 'evangelized' it (Darton 1910: 202; Cutt 1974: 28-29).

What had changed in the time between the first and second publication of The History of Susan Gray was that Sherwood had been to India. She had married her cousin, Henry Sherwood, in 1803. He was a soldier, and within two years of their marriage he was posted to Calcutta. Sherwood decided to accompany him, leaving their infant child in the care of her mother and sister. The rest of the Sherwoods remained in India until 1816. It was here that her Evangelical agenda developed fully, partly through her own reading and her growing conviction that the impiety of both the 'pagan' Indians and the British army needed redress, and party under the influence of the certain Evangelical army chaplains whom she met. Sherwood decided to concentrate her attention on the children who fell within her ambit. Her attitude is summed up in her journal. An early entry, for example, records her reaction to meeting the son of an eminent British family in Calcutta. The four-year-old could speak hardly any English, but was fluent in the 'Native language', prompting Sherwood to write,

Is it not dreadful to leave children to such an age as this to the entire management not only of servants but of Pagans, & the horrid profligacy of Pagans may be conjectured by what I am told is visible in their worship & religious ceremonies ... Please God I should ever be tried I will take warning from the experience of others and never will trust a Christian lamb within the jaws of the Lion who goes about seeking whom he may devour. I do not blame the poor natives of the country ... the time I hope will come when the glorious light of Christianity will shine upon them.Cutt 1974: 3

This missionary zeal, and her refusal to contemplate any assimilation of one culture into another, underlies Little Henry and his Bearer and the other tracts and stories Sherwood produced while in India. It also provided the motivation for the school she established, where she taught basic literacy and religion to soldiers, soldier's children, and such members of the indigenous population as were to be found in the military encampments.

The Sherwood family returned to Britain in 1816, settling near Worcester. From 1818 to 1830 Sherwood ran a boarding school for girls, as well as looking after her own five remaining children and two adopted orphans. But Sherwood was also at her most prolific as a writer during this period. For Houlston and others she, and her sister, produced numerous tracts, chapbook tales and longer pieces of fiction each year. Some of this output can be considered hack work, though always piously intended. Both Sherwood and Cameron, it is said, produced tales to accompany whatever wood-cuts Houlston happened to have in stock (Carpenter and Pritchard 1984: 484). Certainly many of these were rather thin works on tried and tested themes, even if they are among the most sprightly contributions to the genre (see for example 0213A-J). Other works constituted much more substantial projects, like Sherwood's The Little Woodman and his Dog Cæsar (1818: 0214) or her most famous story, The History of the Fairchild Family (first part 1818, published by John Hatchard). Other books added a more specific agenda to the always underlying Evangelicalism. Mary's The Nun (1833) and The Monk of Cimies (1834), amongst others, were virulently anti-Catholic. Her History of Henry Milner (published in parts, 1822-1837) was an attempt to rewrite Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton (1783-89: see 0091-0092) without the dangerous influence of Rousseau. Rousseau's idea of the natural child, inherently innocent, was anathema to the Evangelical understanding of the child as already corrupted by original sin. However, Sherwood's 'penny' books, of which several are in the Hockliffe Collection (0213A-0213L), generally adopted a milder tone. Not only were they less severe on their sinful protagonists, but they could relax literary proprieties too. Thus Sherwood often used fairy tales elements, as well as gothic settings, to engage the less committed reader.

Sherwood closed her school in 1830. She traveled in Europe for two years before returning to dedicate herself to writing once again. She was publishing new material right up until 1849, two years before her death.

For further analysis of Sherwood's work see Cutt 1974, Demers 1991 and Vallone 1991. For a sympathetic reconsideration of the life and work of Sherwood, a bibliography of her writing, and biographical material (from which much of the above has been taken), see Dawson 1996: 267-81.

Little Henry and his Bearer tells the story of Henry L---, an orphan living at Dinapore in India. The first page tells of the loss of his father, who was killed in the East India Company's service whilst 'attacking a mud fort belonging to a Zemeendar', and of the subsequent death of his mother before Henry was a year old. Henry is taken into the household of a well-meaning British lady, but she is wholly uninterested in his welfare. It is only his 'bearer', Boosy, who looks after the boy. (A bearer, a note explains, is a servant whose work is to carry a palanquin and who is often employed to look after children - pp.8-9.) Henry grows up, therefore, scarcely able to speak any English (not at all unlike the child whom Sherwood described in her journal, above). He is taken in hand at the age of five by 'a young lady, who was just arrived from England' - a figure representing Sherwood herself of course - who supervises his religious education (p.17). Much of the book is comprised of their rather catechism-like conversation. By the end of the tale, Henry has mastered Christianity, or rather Sherwood's highly active version of it, and he turns missionary himself, seeking to convert Boosy. He succeeds, but dies himself, and the book ends with an unusual and stark representation of his fate - an image of his tombstone (p.139).

Judging by the narrative alone it is perhaps difficult to account for the extraordinary success of Little Henry. The simplicity and directness of its language is probably the book's greatest strength. M. Nancy Cutt has also praised the depiction of the book's hero. She thinks him 'irresistible', with his delicate complexion, fair hair and blue eyes, his 'quaint costume of "panjammahs" and silver bangles on his ankles', and she calls him 'an interesting variation of the child of nature' (Cutt 1974: 17). Boosy, his bearer, was a similarly appealing character, calculated to appeal to the missionary impulse. The scattered Hindustani terms were likewise surely designed to engage to the reader, even if the religious zeal of the tale did not itself appeal.

Sherwood sent the manuscript of Little Henry and his Bearer to her sister, Lucy, in England in 1813. She acted as Sherwood's agent, and sold the copyright for £5 to Edward Houlston. He was, Sherwood recorded, 'a young bookseller, just beginning life at Wellington in Shropshire' (Darton 1910: 413), although in fact the earliest Houlston imprint dates from 1804 (when Edward was probably working in partnership with his mother - as seems to be the case with 0124). The firm quickly prospered with an Evangelical list founded squarely on Sherwood's prolific output. The £5 paid to her for Little Henry and his Bearer, although this was also the sum Sherwood received for many other early works, was way below its market value. Certainly once Sherwood had sold The History of the Fairchild Family to Hatchard, a rival Evangelical publisher based in London, Houston suddenly raised his payment to £25 for The Indian Pilgrim (1818) (Cutt 1974: 28-29). Of course Sherwood did not see a copy of Little Henry and his Bearer in print until a year or so after its publication, when the wife of a Baptist missionary brought a copy from England to Calcutta. Its popularity in Britain meant that Sherwood was lionised by those recently arrived in India, many of whom supposed the author of Little Henry and his Bearer to be a man (Darton 1910: 413).