THE AUTHOR OF "THE FAIRCHILD FAMILY"

by
W. LEY I7. has been a shock to me to discover that the younger generation to-day has never heard of The Fairchild Family. In my own youth, though few of us may have read it. we all knew about it. We knew that it was a book of moral uplift for the young. we knew that its author. Mrs. Sherwood. took the gloomiest view of human nature. and we knew of the famous scene in which Mr. Fairchild takes his children for a walk on a Sunday afternoon in order that they might see a corpse dangling from a gibbet; a spectacle from which. of course, many improving lessons could be drawn. But what we had no idea of was that Mrs. Sherwood had written no fewer than 350 other similar books. Her pen was never idle. She must have been the most prolific writer who ever lived. Now. all this prodigious output Mis,. Royde Smith has had to examine'. She has had not only to digest the half-million words of Mrs. Sher
wood's autobiography but to read and analyse her interminable novels (two of them ran to seven volumes each), because it is in the novels that you find the portrait she unconsciously painted of herself and it is an essential clue to her state of mind. Before such a labour of research one can only stand in awe. But her reward, and ours, has been a book of quite extraordinary fascination.
MRS. Sherwood's writings were a powerful influence on the religious temper of England in the 19th century and on the education
of the young. She was obsessed with a sense of her mission to teach the Truth. But she considered herself the sole arbiter of scriptural interpretation. She abandoned the Established Church for Methodism; she abandoned Methodism and ended her life ip splendid isolation from either church or chapel. convinced that she was herself bishop, priest and deacon in a church of her own.
" A universal heretic. says the author, "she regarded all belief but her own to be heretical."
She died very peacefully in 1851; her son, though in orders, was not sent for: she did not even ask for him; " the barriers she had herself erected against any ghostly intervention between herself and the Divine Being Whose Word sire had interpreted so long and with so much emphasis on her correct understanding of it. still held." Nothing of her was to survive save one thing only. and it survives to this day: the Popish body she had so successfully raised. It was in no little degree due to Mrs. Sherwood that when the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk appeared it found its public ready-made.
IN Mrs. Sherwood's mind there was nothing to choose between the Hindoo and the Catholic. Mr. Fairchild tells his daughter Lucy: It is a great mistake. my dear. to suppose that there are no idolaters left in tlw world; more than onethird of the inhabitants of the globe are supposed to be idolaters: there are numbers its Africa. in Asia. and in America. and the Roman Catholics in Europe.
The Hindu() she had seen in India where the early years of her married life were spent and it inspired her early novels. In later years she travelled in a leisurely fashion in France and Italy, seeing only what she was looking out for, misinterpreting it, and making up the rest.
The fruit of these travels was a series of novels, Victoria. Tire Na,,. Tlw Monk of Cimies, and a book called Sabbaths on the Continent, in which her travesty of Catholic life touches virtuosity. If it is any guide to the circulation these books may have attained there is the fact, vouched for by Miss Royde Smith's publishers, that none of the books of Dickens. Thackeray. Scott or the Bronte's attained, during the author's lifetime, anything like the circulation of The Fairchild Family. She was clearly a best-seller, here and in America. Her American publishers assured her that her books sold " by the hundred thousand " and were to be found " in every hamlet and in every mother's boudoir." Her English publishers seem to have grasped all they could get and asked for more. And this was the England, saturated with Mrs. Sherwood, to which Wiseman addreSsed his letter Front the Flaminian Gate! To read the analyses of these novels is to form a faint idea of the anti-Catholic prejudice our grandfathers had to overcome.
IT is a little late in the day to praise Miss Royde Smith as a literary artist. Her sensitiveness and a certain classic restraint well become the subject of this book. How easy it would be merely to make fun of Mrs. Sherwood and all her works! How difficult at times not to turn and rend the woman! But this is not Miss Royde Smith's may.
Again. what a mine is here for the ironist! It is miraculous how she manages to keep her irony at half-cock; it twinkles merrily on every page; but it is never more than a twinkle. Mrs. Sherwood's tragedy was that she had all the
makings of a good. even of a great novelise In the rare moments when she forgot her Juggernaut, the Pope of Rome, she could turn out a scene worthy of the best in English fic
tion. We might be talking of her to-day as we talk of Miss Austen or Mrs. Gaskell. Miss Ruyde Smith never lets us forget this; nor will she let us carry away a picture of Mrs. Sherwood other than of a good woman. She seems to have been a charming creature. She was an excellent wife and mother.
The book is a masterpiece of spiritual discernment and-let us not hesitate to use the great word-of charity.
(0 The State of Mind of Mrs. Sherwood. By Naomi Royde Smith. Macmillan. 7s. 6d.)