For scholars of women’s literary education, few names are better known than that of Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810). A prolific author and critic of children’s literature, and a significant pedagogue, Trimmer dedicated her life to advancing education and conservative Anglicanism, with no little success. Commentators report that, in 1800, Elizabeth Newbery’s catalogue of her uncle-in- law’s renowned London bookstore shows that the shop ‘stocked more titles by Mrs. Trimmer than any other author’; and, in its time, Trimmer’s seminal periodical, The Guardian of Education (1802–6), ‘dominated the field of children’s literature reviewing’. Her writing for children was unusually prominent in contemporary circulating libraries,

and her most celebrated children’s book, Fabulous Histories (1786), ‘was a nursery staple for over a century’. Prima facie, it is easy to agree with Frederick Joseph Harvey Darton’s tautological statement that ‘[t]he importance of Sarah Trimmer is that she was important. [… S]he made herself, in respect of her writings for and about children, completely typical of the […] English upper middle-class’.

Given that Trimmer’s name is so well known and that her importance may be taken as read, it is noteworthy that Matthew Grenby – who has lately published most about her life and work – should refer to ‘the vast gap […] between [her] consequence to her contemporaries and her position on the margins of literary history today’. This disparity can largely be attributed to what has become a received wisdom characterisation of her as ‘the enemy of imagination’: a significant description in context because, as James Engell has put it, imagination was the conceptual ‘quintessence of Romanticism’. In imagination, Romanticism determined ‘an idea whose power both to assimilate and to foster other ideas seemed virtually limitless’. Jonathan Wordsworth reports that, for John Keats, ‘that which is imagined will be found to be real’ whilst simultaneously human imagination ‘is in the same relation to its celestial “reflection”, as human existence is to heaven’. William Wordsworth discovered in imagination ‘something mysterious, beyond human experience’, William Blake identified in it the opposite to self-negating rationalism, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought of it as a faculty with layers ranging from tertiary ‘fancy’ to the primary means (at the very least) by which humans perceive everything.