ABSTRACT
Mary Martha Butt was born in 1775, second child of the Rector of Stanford near Worcester, the Rev. George Butt, and his wife Martha. She went to the Abbey School at Reading, where Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra had also been pupils. In 1803 she married her maternal cousin, Captain Henry Sherwood, just returned from the West Indies with the 53rd Regiment. Leaving behind an infant daughter, she followed her husband to India in 1805. Returning in 1816, the Sherwoods ran a boarding school for girls in Worcester from 1818 to 1830. Little Henry and His Bearer, Sherwood’s evangelical tale based on an infant son who had died in India, was extremely successful, going through more than a hundred editions. Another bestseller was The History of the Fairchild Family (1818). Continuing the tradition of didactic children’s literature written by evangelical women such as More, Trimmer, or Kilner, Sherwood wrote about 400 tales and tracts, eventually dying in 1851.
