The History of Sandford and Merton

by Thomas Day, Stephen Bygrave (Editor), Stephen Bending (Editor)

Among the earliest novels written about children, for children, The History of Sandford and Merton was enormously popular for a century and a half after its first publication in 1783–9. The novel is Enlightenment for beginners, offering a course of education in class, race, and gender to its six year-old protagonists, the robust farm-boy Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, the spoiled boy from the big house. Sandford and Merton offers entertaining and practical lessons in manners, masculinity, and class politics. This Broadview Edition includes the original illustrations, along with contemporary reviews and other material on childhood by John Locke, Thomas Day, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others.

Genres: Fiction

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1789

About the author

Thomas Day was a British author and abolitionist. He was well known for the book The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–1789) which emphasized Rousseauvian educational ideals.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Abigail]

Originally published in three volumes, in 1783, 1786 and 1789, The History of Sandford and Merton was a wildly popular English children's novel throughout the nineteenth century, going through forty-three British editions alone by 1883. Thomas Day, a wealthy Englishman, abolitionist and philosopher, known for his extraordinary "wife training" experiment - see How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate for a fuller exploration of this - as well as for penning The Dying Negro (1773), one of the earliest Abolitionist poems in English, was also the author of this philosophical novel for children, in which he set forth many of his ideas about education and morality. The main narrative follows the adventures of the eponymous Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, the former a goodhearted and virtuous farm boy, the latter a spoiled young gentleman from the "big house" who clearly needs to mend his ways. Both boys are tutored by Mr. Barlow, following an incident in which Harry saves Tommy from a snake, and through the use of many inset stories, as well as numerous incidents in their own lives, Tommy is eventually reformed, becoming a less snobby, less prejudiced, and far more humane individual. Questions of justice and kindness - between the wealthy and the poor, between white and black, even between human and animal - are explored throughout, and although Tommy is for a time led astray by two public school boys he meets, he eventually returns to the right path...

The History of Sandford and Merton is an absolutely fascinating book, if one is interested in the history of children's literature and/or educational theory in the English-speaking world, and I am very glad indeed that it was included in the syllabus of my masters course. One can see the influence of such thinkers as Rousseau and Locke on Day, and how he used his two titular figures to explore the correct and incorrect way in which to raise and educate a young boy. Apparently, many of the 19th-century editions of the book excised the countless inset stories, related to the boys by their tutor, opting for a more streamlined narrative featuring just Sandford and Merton's doings. While I can certainly understand why that was done, in order to create a more enjoyable read for young children themselves, it does tend to rob the book of a certain 18th-century feeling that is most charming. It's not really the style now, but this sort of thing - the main narrative being interrupted for teaching tales, in order to illustrate a point - seems to have been almost ubiquitous at the time, and if one wants to get a sense of the original book, as its creator intended it, one should certainly lay hands on an edition that contains the unexpurgated 18th-century text. The edition I read was edited by Stephen Bygrave and Stephen Bending, and published by Broadview Press, who have reprinted a number of key 18th-century children's books, including Sarah Fielding's The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy . This is such a rich book, in terms of ideas, that I imagine it would yield a most interesting dissertation, in its own right. For my own part, I was struck by some of the egalitarian themes here - the idea that whites are not superior to blacks, the notion that wild animals deserve our protection, the rejection of class as the only indicator of virtue - ideas which, contrary to what some contemporary readers might expect, were not at all unusual in the pages of English children's literature of the late 18th century. Quite a few texts that I have read from this period, as it happens, address humane treatment of animals, benevolence toward the less fortunate, and the rejection of slavery as immoral. I don't want to overstate: there is much here that is outdated, and one need only read the book mentioned above, about Day's wife-training experiment, to appreciate that the author's notions of gender, and his expectations of women, were certainly not egalitarian. That said, I was still impressed by some of the positions taken by Day.

This is not everyday reading, and is not one I would recommend to everyone. I can't see today's children enjoying it, and even some adults who read children's literature might find it dry and off-putting. But for those readers interested in 18th-century children's literature and/or educational theory, it is a definite must! Just make sure, as mentioned, to obtain a copy with the full, original text.

[Mirte]

The History of Sandford and Merton goes off to a fairly slow start, but once Tommy and Harry are at Mr Barlow's, the story picks up pace. I can really see the attraction of the book to children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as it includes stories about historic people, faraway countries and much more exotic extraordinary stuff that would speak to the mind of a middle-class British child. The dynamic between the two boys is perhaps a bit simplistic, and I got slightly fed up with Harry's utter and complete goodness at times, but it portrays growing up, learning to acknowledge your own faults and attempting to amend them quite well. Unfortunately, I did feel the book was too long - a hundred pages less would probably have prevent my finding the book slightly tedious in the end.

[blake]

I suppose it is unjust of me to imagine that people who criticize an obviously didactic work for children for being "too didactic" are really objecting to the lessons contained therein, but I nonetheless do. Perhaps it's merely projection, however, as I personally found myself less engaged when I disagreed with the moral of a particular story or rant.

This massive bestseller is a pretty fascinating look at a philosophy that is both Christian and christian and very, very English to boot. It is ostensibly about a rich boy whose father, troubled by the boy's spoiled nature, sends him to live with a pastor and a successful farmer's son in order to build character. Mostly this narrative serves as a launching point for other fables, which keep the prose from bogging down.

One thing that is more Christian than English (where those two things come into conflict) was an embrace of all humanity as brothers, as equals under God, and quite often an exaltation of "barbarian" cultures over the English. This is over-played, even, in the Rousseau-ian sense of failing to recognize that tribal cultures—while not without considerable merit in many ways—are also frequently brutal and unvirtuous. (This would be Rousseau over Christianity over Anglophilia, I guess.)

I found myself objecting to the puritanical views of arts and music. Now, granted, the Classical period (during which this was written) was inordinately fond of amazingly dull stuff, and the late Rococo was about to usher in a period of bloody revolution in France—well, maybe I'm undermining my own point here, but something about babies and bathwater seems relevant.

The other major issue, to my mind, was the idea that one could not help but be corrupted by wealth or refinement. This highly selective idea seems like a drive toward failure. In the end, when Lord Merton offers Farmer Sandford money for having taught his son how not to be a prat, and Sandford rejects this on the basis of the strife such money would cause him and the decadence it would bring to his wife and daughters. Merits of pushing an iron plough notwithstanding, farms are notoriously capricious about providing sustenance, and money could just as well be translated into items that improve survival as well as those that enervate.

Caveats aside, I liked it, not the least because I was personally engaged in a lot of physical labor at the time, and I found myself agreeing that there is tremendous merit in the same—whether one can afford to hire others to do the work or not.

[Lulu]

1783, 1786, 1789

[Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere)]

Find the book at Gutenberg here (note some versions have illustrations), and wikipedia page here. If you want to read about the eccentric author, his wikipedia page is here.

It's thanks to another GRfolk, Bettie's review of How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate - or adding the book to a shelf prior to review - which made me look up the author and then this book - and well, that's the random way you sometimes find yourself reading odd books you'd never heard of the day before.

[Cara Byrne]

From a different time and place, this moralistic set of stories for young children includes adventures and lessons. This is a helpful work for children's literature scholars looking to read early examples of texts written for children. Day's own personal history is also worth learning more about, as his attempts at wife-rearing through adopting several young girls is as outrageous as it sounds.