Mary Martha Sherwood

F. J. Harvey Darton (1878–1936) published Life and Times in 1910. It is an account of the life and work of the well-loved children's author and educationalist Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851). Sherwood, a prolific writer, published numerous bestsellers, including the didactic series The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–47) and The History of Henry Milner (1822–37). Sherwood was also passionately involved in education; she established a number of schools both in England and in India, where she lived for 11 years from 1805, and where she became an evangelical Christian. Darton's account is based around excerpts from Sherwood's own diaries, which had been published in 1854 as Sherwood's 'autobiography', but with large sections removed. Darton restored the deleted sections and supplemented the diaries with details from the unpublished diaries of Sherwood's husband, Captain Henry Sherwood (1776–1849) and information supplied by the Sherwood family.