Sarah Trimmer (née Kirby; 6 January 1741 – 15 December 1810) was an English writer and critic of 18th-century British children's literature, as well as an educational reformer.

[3] Because of her father's connections within the artistic community, Trimmer was able to meet the painters William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough as well as the by-then legendary writer and critic Samuel Johnson.

Johnson, delighted that she admired Milton enough to carry his works with her at all times, "subsequently invited her to his house and presented her with a volume of his famous periodical The Rambler".

[8] 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.

[11] 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.

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'".

As scholar Deborah Wills has argued: "[The Œconomy of Charity] is actually informed by a highly politicized subtext which anticipates, subverts, and counters anti-Sunday School arguments.

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.

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 virtues".

[9] 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".

[33] Another difference between the two writers lies in the role of authority: whereas Barbauld's texts and those she wrote with her brother, emphasize dialogues between teacher and pupil, Trimmer's textual conversations, Fyfe notes, were "controlled by the parent".

[31] However, Donelle Ruwe, a scholar of 18th-century children's literature, has pointed out that An Easy Introduction is not entirely a conservative text—it challenges 18th-century notions of the proper roles for women laid out in conduct manuals such as those written by John Gregory and James Fordyce.

[37] In January (1788) Mrs Trimmer and John Marshall announced a new joint venture, The family magazine; or a repository of religious instruction and rational amusement.

It was a monthly periodical "designed to counteract the pernicious tendency of immoral books &c. which have circulated of late years among the inferior classes of people,"[38] and usually included one engraved plate.

[25] Trimmer was an able promoter of her materials; she knew that her books would not reach large numbers of poor children in charity schools unless they were funded and publicized by the SPCK.

In 1793, she sent 12 copies of her treatise Reflections upon the Education in Charity Schools with the Outlines of a Plan Appropriate Instruction for the Children of the Poor to the subcommittee that chose the books funded by the organization.

"[47] Moira Ferguson, a scholar of the 18th and 19th centuries, places these themes in a larger historical context, arguing that "the fears of the author and her class about an industrial revolution in ascendance and its repercussions are evident.

The text subtly opts for conservative solutions: maintenance of order and established values, resignation and compliance from the poor at home, expatriation for foreigners who do not assimilate easily.

"[48] A second overarching theme in the text is rationality; Trimmer expresses the common fear of the power of fiction in her preface, explaining to her childish readers that her fable is not real and that animals cannot really speak.

[55] To do so, she evaluated the educational theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Madame de Genlis, Joseph Lancaster, and Andrew Bell, among others.

[64] Trimmer is perhaps most famous now for her condemnation of fairy tales, such as the various translations of Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (originally published in 1697),[65] because they endorsed an irrational view of the world and suggested that children could become successful too easily (in other words, they did not have to work).

[69] One of the reasons Trimmer believed fairy tales were dangerous was because they led child readers into a fantasy world where adults could not follow and control their exposure to harmful experiences.

[70] She was just as horrified by the graphic illustrations included with some fairy tale collections, complaining that "little children, whose minds are susceptible of every impression; and who from the liveliness of their imaginations are apt to convert into realities whatever forcibly strikes their fancy" should not be allowed to see such scenes as Blue Beard hacking his wife's head off.

[72] Her views were shaped by Abbé Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–98) (she extracted large sections from this text into the Guardian itself) but also by her fears of the ongoing wars between France and Britain during the 1790s.

A year after reading the Experiment, an English Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, adopted many of its principles for his school in London and then published his own book, Improvements in Education (1803), which repeated many of Bell's ideas.

'Tis mine, receiv'd within the social hall, The hidden gems of virtue to record; A genius pure from envy's tainting gall, Meek in reproach, and careless of reward... For seventy years thy lamp benignly shone, And thousands hail'd it as a guiding star.

After more than thirty years' residence in a house, in which I have known many comforts, and in a neighbourhood where I have endeavoured to make myself respected, I am likely to be obliged to seek for a new habitation; and there is not one within so short a distance as to enable me to fulfil the wishes of my heart by attending to the schools.

[81] 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?

"[82] 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.

[88] 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.