Sunday School Moralists

Side by side with the Rational Moralists (though often in opposition to them) there existed another group of writer-educators who made religion the touchstone of their educational philosophies and for whom happiness did not denote the temporal, as with the Rational Moralists, but the spiritual.  Involved in the establishment of Britain's first Sunday Schools, active participants in the vanguard of the Evangelical movement, and supporters of charitable endeavors at home and of missionary outreach, these writers produced a vast amount of literature designed to persuade children of the absolute claim of religion (Demers and Moyles, 186).

Fabulous Histories (1786) by Sarah Trimmer, later known as The History of the Robins, was a series of fables intended to convey moral instruction and to promote kindness to animals.  The fables use a robin family, the Redbreasts, to teach about a human family, the Bensons.  This 1818 edition has woodcuts by Thomas Bewick, which show a play of light and texture for which he was justly famous.

The Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-8) were a series of pamphlets for Sunday School pupils devised, and largely written, by Hannah More.  The aim was to provide suitable reading-matter for the children and young people of the poor, who were being taught to read, but might fall victim to the vulgarities of the chapbooks and the seditious writings of Tom Paine and his followers, who looked favorably on the French Revolution.  The best known of More's Tracts is The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain (1795).  It is an account of how "a very worthy, charitable Gentleman" riding across the Plain, meets a poor but pious shepherd who tells of his love of the Bible and his contentment with his lot, despite the fact that his invalid wife is bringing up eight children on almost no money.

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