The History of Little Henry and His Bearer (1814), an Evangelical tract, was published on the heels of the Charter Act of 1813, an act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that introduced more regulation of the East India Company and legalized missionary work in India.Footnote ¹ The act implicitly rationalized expanding British dominance, invoking the moral mission to save the heathen. Little Henry captures this zeitgeist and was received enthusiastically by a readership newly interested in additional imperial expansion as a means of bringing civilization to the colonial world (Regaignon 89).

Little Henry is, according to M. Nancy Cutt, the earliest example of a new genre – the Evangelical colonial tract, or missionary tract (Ministering Angels 82). The tract was a medium favored by Evangelicals, to whose work the circulation of print was vital. Cheaply produced, widely distributed, and considered readable by contrast to the eighteenth-century moral tales, tract fiction was a useful tool for the education of children and the more general dissemination of ideas. At the turn of the nineteenth century, tract fiction represented a large proportion of children's literature in the dominions. Mary Martha Sherwood, the author of Little Henry, was a great producer of tract fiction. Little Henry is an exemplary narrative tract in that it is entertaining enough to attract and retain readers without distracting them from its moral and religious lesson. It is also the earliest representation of life in India written specifically for children, and one of the earliest representations of an Anglo-Indian child protagonist in prose fiction (Ministering Angels 82).

Sherwood's missionary tracts for children emphasize the need to repent for original sin and to prepare early in life for admission into heaven. These tracts represent only one of several positions on Christianity that Sherwood occupied in the course of her life. She was the daughter of a clergyman, but her father was by no means as fervent as Sherwood would come to be in her twenties (Cutt, Mrs. Sherwood 1), when she was caught up in the “quiet revolution,” as Cutt describes it, that Evangelical thought was bringing about in England (Ministering Angels 16). Sherwood also developed a love of teaching that would later lead her to open schools in four different states in India. Many of her tracts were written with her students as the imagined readers.

Sherwood's Evangelical faith developed after 1805, when she traveled to India with her husband. Sherwood's autobiographical writing, as collected by F. J. Harvey Darton, tells us that her time in India was a time of crisis for her. Two of Sherwood's children died in India, and Cutt suggests that the Calvinistic tenets of Henry Martyn, Joseph Parson, and Daniel Corrie, Evangelical chaplains whom Sherwood met in India, helped her through the difficulties she experienced in her encounters with widespread death, corruption, and misery (Mrs. Sherwood 14).Footnote ² Sherwood's writing from this period takes on an intensity that according to Darton represents “the extreme, not the mean of her spiritual life” (xii). Her missionary tracts demonstrate the urgent need she felt not only to propagate her version of Evangelical Christianity, but also to denounce other religions as abominable and false.Footnote ³ In her later writing, however, Sherwood reverted to a softer stance on the pathway to heaven, writing that “salvation was wholly unconditional, a free gift of Divine love, that every creature was safe in the hands of his Creator” (Darton xii). As Cutt puts it, “She had cast off the Evangelical doctrine of her Indian years” (Mrs. Sherwood 4).

The term “Evangelical,” even in Sherwood's individual case, is multivalent and dependent on context.Footnote ⁴ The period with which this article is concerned is the period at which Sherwood's Evangelical fervor reached its zenith. To accept the views manifest in Little Henry as wholly representative of Sherwood's views would be to mischaracterize her; I am concerned with this period not primarily because it best represents Sherwood's views. The aim here, rather, is to show those aspects of Sherwood's work that were most influential in Victorian India, to show where her views converged with the philosophical underpinning of the Charter Act of 1813, to show those aspects of her work that diverged from the attitudes of Britons in India up to the first decade of the nineteenth century, and finally, to understand her representation of the child's role in the mission to bring non-Christians to Christ.

As noted above, the writing produced by Sherwood while her husband was stationed in India has skewed Sherwood's legacy so that she is remembered for her “uncompromisingly hell-fire message,”Footnote ⁵ and her “fiercely religious and moralistic” writing.Footnote ⁶ Even in defending Sherwood from the latter characterization, Gillian Dow admits that Sherwood's “evangelical tone has not aged well” (1). In fact, the opposite is true – although Sherwood produced more works of sentimental and domestic fiction, before and after the decade she spent in India, than she did Evangelical tracts, it is texts like Little Henry and the equally intense History of the Fairchild Family (1818) that endure and are read to this day, while her more secular work has faded into obscurity.Footnote ⁷

The ideas of the Western burden of civilizing the East and of the child as tainted by original sin are by no means defunct, but there is much in Little Henry to regale even the reader resistant to the master narratives of civilization and conversion informing Sherwood's tract.Footnote ⁸ The story is rich with details of Anglo-Indian lives in early nineteenth century India, and the tone of the work is inviting. Almost as important as repentance and conversion is the emphasis placed on unconditional love and kindness, which bind humans across race and class despite Sherwood's belief that a person's birth determined to an extent their natural superiority or inferiority – a belief that informs her contributions to conversion and colonization.Footnote ⁹

While in India, Sherwood strove to render coherent the unfamiliar environment in which she found herself. She devoted herself to children and to education. She adopted at least two regimental orphans, and found homes for several more children. As a teacher, she instructed her pupils in literacy, “bought and distributed Bibles and tracts; wrote for children, for the newly-literate, for servants and villagers” (Cutt, Mrs. Sherwood 10). The perspective of the narrator of Little Henry is that of a teacher, a perspective common in eighteenth-century moral tales as well. Little Henry's narrator, however, is distinct from her eighteenth-century forbears in that she is also maternal, and emotional, where works of rationalist didactic fiction such as “On Presence of Mind,” written in the 1790s by Dr. Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, could be chillingly free of emotion, even where relationships between mothers and their children, and matters such as mortality, were concerned (Aikin and Barbauld 216).Footnote ¹⁰

The value placed on maternal nurture is evident in Sherwood's The Recaptured Negro (1834). In this abolitionist text, the rescued slave is portrayed as inherently and happily submissive to the white missionary he calls “Massa.” Despite this by-no-means-egalitarian representation, The Recaptured Negro attempts to undo the work of othering, the ideological underpinning that allowed slavery to flourish as an institution, by emphasizing the commonalities that European Christians should feel with enslaved Africans. The othering is undone, if you will excuse the rhyme, by mothering. In Sherwood's writing, Evangelical work is inextricably intertwined with maternal care, not only for one's own young but for all children, indeed for all of humanity. The Recaptured Negro is about love and care prevailing in an environment of hate and abuse. The religious purpose of the story is not secondary – Christianity is the means of true salvation for the freed slave and for his mother – but it is bound up, inextricably, with the private world of love between individuals – the missionary and the slave, the slave and his mother – and the public world of the slave trade. Sherwood represents these worlds as not separate at all but linked, and refuses to condone what she sees as an abominable commercial practice by confining herself to domestic or spiritual matters. As I will argue in the close reading of Little Henry below, Sherwood was skilled at representing individual struggles, duties, and foibles in ways that could be extrapolated to apply to the struggles, duties, and foibles of entire nations.

Opposed though she was to slavery, Sherwood was a proponent of colonization as a means of bringing order to what she saw as the wilderness of India.Footnote ¹¹ Sherwood also believed that those of her predecessors and peers who tolerated religious difference in India were failing in their duty to bring Christ to the heathen – a responsibility she herself took very seriously, particularly during her time on the subcontinent.

Sherwood lived through a time of sweeping cultural change in India, and was in fact instrumental in advocating for an end to what she saw as the unacceptable religious neutrality of the East India Company. She petitioned the Company for permission to evangelize in the schools she opened and in the cantonments where she taught. In each region where her husband, Captain Henry Sherwood, was posted she set up school, sometimes in her own verandah, and taught “native, half-caste and Anglo-Indian children” (Cutt, Mrs. Sherwood 14). There were many children in the barracks, because while the East India Company restricted the number of wives to be accommodated to ten in each barracks, there was no restriction on native mistresses.

Dara Regaignon has suggested that Henry's conversion, which is at the heart of the plot of Little Henry, stands as synecdoche for the shift of British imperial attitudes from Orientalism to Anglicization that occurred in the first decades of the nineteenth century. “The shift from an attitude of tolerance to a policy of conversion,” Regaignon points out, “is the difference between apparent neutrality and more concerted cultural aggression” (88). The word “apparent” is crucial: many scholars contrast the cultural tolerance advocated by Warren Hastings, for example, with the push for conversion and civilization that the Charter Act sanctioned; but in reality Orientalist East India Company officials tended to restrict their tolerance and intellectual respect to upper-caste Hindus and aristocratic Muslims: the policy of non-interference in the Indian social fabric would have been expedient for a company seeking to strengthen trade relations with different kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent. Moreover, Edward Said's work has shown us the extent to which Orientalism was an Enlightenment stance that enabled the growing power of Europeans, while scholars like Gauri Viswanathan and Michael J. Franklin have shown more continuity between the eighteenth and nineteenth century policies than the understanding of the Charter Act as a pivotal moment would suggest.Footnote ¹²

While it is important to challenge the characterization of Evangelical Anglicist missionaries as the harbingers of the heightened racism of nineteenth-century colonial India, and as prim and unamusing successors to the colorful Orientalists, there is widespread agreement among historians about the gradual move away from the effort to maintain the appearance of neutrality, an effort that was slowly replaced by a conviction, codified in the Charter Act of 1813, that the only way to justify British rule in India was by representing it as a civilizing mission.Footnote ¹³ Sherwood was deeply interested in converting non-Christians to Christianity, but the question of the extent to which she would knowingly have been interested in the continuation and expansion of the British empire is a complicated one. Patrick Brantlinger has shown how idealism and authoritarian schemes could co-exist in the same works, and indeed Sherwood's ideals leant themselves quite easily to the rhetoric of British superiority that helped usher out the Orientalist age (Brantlinger 34). The moral and political nuance of the Orientalist writing of the eighteenth century was waning in popularity as British attitudes changed. Cutt points out that “To like, admire or even to understand the state of affairs that one is bent upon changing, complicates the matter unbearably, and the secret of Evangelical success was simplification” (Ministering Angels 22). Little Henry certainly simplifies and organizes the complicated colonial world. According to Regaignon, Little Henry “helped to make the conviction that English superiority to and dominance of other cultures was a matter of moral truth appealing and persuasive to generations of children” (84).

Little Henry weaves together Evangelical schemes with representations of the colony, and is rather Manichean in its organization, with good and bad, Christian and heathen, Briton and Indian arranged into useful (that is to say comprehensible and manipulable) binaries. The Manichean organization of the text, and the melodramatic schema, heightened by the colonial setting, in which good is pitted against evil, make for fairly sensational reading.Footnote ¹⁴ A firm belief in the evils of Hinduism is central to the story, as it was a central part of missionary teaching until well past the middle of the nineteenth century. Articles such as this one, published anonymously in the Edinburgh Review in 1819, opposed the fascination with Hinduism evinced by such Orientalist scholars as William Jones:

William Ward claimed of Hinduism that “A religion more shameful or indecent has never existed amongst a civilized people” (58). Charles Grant's highly influential “Observations On the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain” (1796) also portrayed the Hindu as depraved, and criticized the Orientalists for being too respectful of Indian culture and religion. As we will see in the discussion below of Sherwood's specific views, her opinion of Hinduism was similar to that expressed by Ward, Grant, and the anonymous author of the article excerpted above. The melodrama of missionary tales set in India lies partly in the pitting of virtuous, heroic, and/or suffering protagonists against the threats of the Indian social, religious, and natural environment, in which struggle the Christian virtues of endurance and sacrifice are shown to best advantage. A Christian triumph is shown in these tales to be entirely distinct from worldly triumphs. Earthly tragedies, like death and enslavement, may be understood in positive terms within a missionary tale.

Evangelicals argued that “since all souls were equal in the sight of God, throughout eternity, the inequalities of bodies here on earth, being temporary, was comparatively unimportant” (Cutt, Mrs. Sherwood 9). As Little Henry shows, corporeal suffering was not seen as a thing to avoid or alleviate, necessarily; many Evangelicals believed in resignation as the appropriate response to physical hardship. Evangelical energies were dedicated not to the making of a better world so much as to the making of better people in preparation for the next world. Unlike later writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Frances Hodgson Burnett, who set store by the physical wellbeing of the child and did not see good health as an impediment to spiritual progress, Sherwood clearly prioritizes the welfare of the soul above that of the body.

Sherwood's ideas of responsibility to the poor and oppressed as well as to the non-human environment were wonderfully compatible with laissez-faire principles as well as ideas of maximum resource exploitation. Years later, Thomas Babbington Macaulay would argue that “to trade with civilized men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages” (qtd. in Sharpe 7). Jenny Sharpe argues that this lack of distinction between humanitarian and economic aims was present in from the earliest inception of the “human-making project” of “inculcating Western tastes and values” in colonized peoples (7).

“Civilization” was a concept as central to missionary writers like Sherwood as it was to civil servants. The Biblical idea of the “wilderness” as the preserve of Satan is opposed, in Sherwood's imagination, to Christian civilization. The colonies were to Sherwood's generation of missionaries a vast wilderness – a complex of heathens and untamed nature in need of cultivation and control.

The control of nature as an earthly manifestation of divine order is evident in Sherwood's extremely popular History of the Fairchild Family, in which the family is constantly tending their land, rooting out weeds, and cultivating beautiful and useful plants. In Little Henry, the connection between earthly stewardship, as Sherwood understood it, and religion is crystallized when Henry says, “Boosy, this is a good country . . . that is, it would be a very good country if the people were Christians. Then they would not be so idle as they now are; and they would agree together, and clear the jungles, and build churches to worship God in” (56).

The first step toward clearing the jungle, then, is the conversion of the natives, and the case for conversion had to be made by the elevation of British culture and Christianity above Indian cultures and religions. The merits of Hinduism were beyond Sherwood's grasp. She wrote in her diary: “how anyone can contemplate the miserable effects of a false religion . . . and yet make no efforts whatever for the deliverance of persons who are under these horrors of darkness, would seem almost beyond belief were it not so general” (qtd. in Darton 251). She attributes the misery she perceives in the faces of Indian women to “those abominable creeds which we think it an act of charity not merely to tolerate but to patronize” – which is a reference to the eighteenth-century Orientalists’ official policy of non-interference in Indian religions (Darton 253). Little Henry's “spiritual progress” entails his movement from a belief in the equal validity of all religions to a conviction that Christianity is the only true religion, so that when his Bearer tries, passively, to resist Henry's attempts to convert him, Henry cries out, “Poor Boosy! Poor Boosy! You are going the wrong way, and will not let me set you right: there is but one way to heaven; our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the way to heaven; and no man cometh unto God but by him” (68).

At the outset of his narrative, Little Henry, a toddler of British extraction, is marooned on the subcontinent after the death of his parents. He is well cared for between Boosy, the bearer who is almost a mother figure to him, and an Anglo-Indian lady who provides for his material needs. Neither Boosy nor his foster mother is fit to undertake his spiritual instruction, however; the former is a Hindu, the latter a frivolous and worldly subscriber to older Orientalist attitudes who smokes hookahs and is by turns amused and annoyed by what she disparagingly calls the “Methodism” of her more religious acquaintances.Footnote ¹⁵ Henry's early years, in sharp contrast to those of the industrious and godly Fairchild offspring, are spent in listening to the profane tales of the servants and dressing in loose Indian garments; he is bereft of any of the discipline that was as central to Sherwood's child-rearing precepts as maternal devotion. This deficiency is corrected by a visitor to Little Henry's home, who teaches him to read and introduces him to the Bible and to a conception of himself as a sinner. She teaches him the necessity of prayer, and the concept of eternal life, so that when he is dying, Henry is able to amaze those around him by his lack of fear. When she is forced to leave him, Henry's religious teacher begs him to make a Christian of Boosy, and the boy applies himself assiduously to this task. It is only Henry's death, however, that finally convinces Boosy to take on the Christian name of John, and to give up his caste and practice his new religion with sincerity.

This story encapsulates many Anglo-Indian concerns in the early decades of the nineteenth century: the increasing disapproval of Orientalist ways, the need for education and missionary work, and the dangers, both cultural and mortal, to which children were thought to be exposed in India. Sherwood also provides us with an early portrait of a figure that would recur in Anglo-Indian writing through the Victorian era: the Indian caregiver.

The story centers on the relationship between Boosy, the bearer, and his charge, who eventually dies. The portrayal of Boosy is complex; he is portrayed as racially and culturally antithetical to the civilized characters in the text, such as Mr. Smith and Henry's young teacher, but he is devoted to Henry, is “father and mother” (125) to the boy, and shows more potential for conversion than Henry's British guardian. Despite her firm belief in the “horrors of darkness” under which non-Christians labored, however, Sherwood's portrayal of Boosy is a sympathetic one (Darton 251). Sherwood writes in her autobiographical notes of the devotion of bearers and ayahs to her own children; the servants never left the bedsides of sick children, took an earnest and genuine interest in the well being of their charges, and cared for them so much that, on the downside, children could became spoiled, indolent and easily bored from not having to do anything for themselves.Footnote ¹⁶ Sherwood represents such devotion in Little Henry in passages like this one:

So close is their bond that Boosy's influence on Henry puts the soul of the child in jeopardy, for Henry, before he is introduced to the Bible, learns from his bearer there are many gods and is lacking in the sense of divine order that underpins Sherwood's representations of the habits of the virtuous. The Evangelical intervention provides a necessary disruption of the intimacy that Boosy and Henry share, shifting Henry's primary attachment from Boosy to God.

There is a tension persistent in Sherwood's novels between a perception of fundamental difference between Britons and Indians and the simultaneous representation of the native as a worthy candidate for civilization and salvation. The bridging of the divide between those two perceptions requires an exceptional Briton and an exceptional native, Henry and Boosy in this case, and requires that these exceptional characters be treated as exemplary, in the case of the Evangelist and reproducible, in the case of the convert. Little Henry is hopeful in that resistant though Boosy is, his resistance is passive, and despite his heathen beliefs, he is at bottom more worthy, if anything, of salvation than the frivolous English guardian who caters solely to Henry's material needs. Boosy works simultaneously as an intensely individual character, and as synecdoche for all potential Indian converts.

Sherwood's focus on the individual human means that she constructs society and the environment as things to be overcome. Each is its own form of wilderness; Anglo-Indian society a series of temptations, to which Henry's guardian succumbs, and the jungles a form of waste. Wasted also are the inherently good qualities that Boosy has, which lie fallow until Henry intervenes and cultivates Boosy's gifts for the greater glory of a Christian god. Boosy is depicted as a product of nature, to be turned into a product of culture by Henry. The good qualities Sherwood identifies in Boosy promote the Evangelical cause in that, rather than an aggressive assault on an equally aggressive, recalcitrant target population, the mission is shown to be a kindness toward a “token civilizable figure” who acts as synecdoche for a subject population worthy of the ministrations of the missionary.Footnote ¹⁷

Little Henry's spiritual wellbeing is neglected by his caregivers, but his Anglo-Indian guardian is more culpable than his bearer and other servants: Sherwood's primary critique within Little Henry is directed not at Indians but at Anglo-Indians who have not embraced Evangelical Christianity. The servants, as noted, are given credit for their devotion to the young child and any shortcomings are shown to stem from ignorance on their part, whereas Henry's guardian has access to a church, but fails in her duty to attend to the religious education of the child in her care (10).

Henry's guardian “employs herself at table (when not actually eating) in smoking her hookah” (61) as well as in abusing the servants who patiently fan her with leaves. Like the nabobs (wealthy British East India merchants), she indulges in “oriental vices” and lives in a fairly feudal manner.Footnote ¹⁸ The contrast between what Sherwood sees as the worst of Anglo-Indian society, the consumerist, frivolous and worldly, with the best, the pious, austere, and salvation-bound, is made most clear when Henry and his guardian visit the Smiths of Calcutta. The narrator tells us that “Mrs. Smith, although she had the best example in her husband, had still to learn not to love the world” (83). One afternoon, observing his wife and Henry's guardian engrossed in a fashion magazine, and then happening upon Henry attempting to teach Boosy about the Bible, Mr. Smith exclaims, “Here are two persons, who have been nearly fifty years in the world, sitting together talking of their finery and painted toys; while a little creature, who eight years ago had not breathed the breath of life, is endeavouring to impart divine knowledge to the Heathen” (85–86).

While Mrs. Smith expresses astonishment at his dismissal of her interests as “toys,” Henry's guardian fixates on a different aspect of Mr. Smith's reprimand, and they debate at cross-purposes, to hilarious effect:

Sidestepping the matter of the lady's age, Mr. Smith requests permission to further Henry's religious education, to which the tolerant guardian has no objection, merely saying to Mr. Smith, “we know you are an oddity: take your own way, and let me take mine”: a conclusion unsatisfactory to the true Evangelist, but which resolves itself eventually, for soon not only Boosy, but Henry's hitherto worldly guardian, will be converted by the experience of the boy's suffering and death (93). The passage provides a fine instance of Sherwood's facility for incorporating humor into an evangelical tract with a very serious theme, a facility which partially accounts for her popularity.

Sherwood believed that morality and knowledge of Christ were inseparable – that Hinduism could not be combated with reason and philosophy, that the true faith alone could vanquish the false faith. There are instances in Little Henry that remind us of the eighteenth-century moral tale – namely the conversations on spiritual concepts that Henry engages in with his spiritual mentor and the instance where she uses logic (of a sort) to demonstrate to him that there is only one god:

It is not purely logic, however, but a combination of logic and something resembling Wordsworth's “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that leads to Henry's total conversion (Coleridge and Wordsworth 183). With Boosy, likewise, arguments are far less effectual than the emotional impact of Henry's death in convincing the bearer to change his religion.

Sherwood sets Little Henry on a path of self-mortification, although she is careful not to let the self-mortification reach what she would have seen as the indulgent excess that typified the fakirs, of whom the she deeply disapproved.Footnote ¹⁹ Henry's self-mortification is more passive –he begins to see himself as a sinner, and constantly begs forgiveness, and when death comes, he welcomes it as a portal to eternal life. Before taking on the wilderness without, Henry is made to confront what is understood as the wilderness within. The acquisition of government over the self was of central importance to Sherwood.

The individual spiritual journey is bound up in Little Henry with anxiety over the child's education and civilization, which in Sherwood's view are inextricable from Henry's religious training. In Little Henry, Sherwood combats the Anglo-Indian anxieties that arose from the high infant mortality rate and the fact that Anglo-Indian children often bonded more closely with their native caregivers than with their parents, learning Indian languages and manners, as well as ways of dressing, eating, etc., by countering the cultural influence of the servants with the civilizing influence of the child. At the outset of his story, “No one could have told by his [Henry's] behaviour or manner of speaking that he was not of Indian origin; but his delicate complexion, light hair, and blue eyes at once showed his parentage” (7). Unlike Kipling's Kim, who a century later would turn into a prime example of British manhood because of his adventurous and free colonial upbringing, Henry must fight against all his natural inclinations in order to become a good Christian, iconic in the spirituality and innocence that would serve as an inspiration to all around him, and then to convert Boosy. Boosy's conversion means that Henry's death has not been in vain, and may be viewed in the light of Christian sacrifice.

Henry's short life would have been received as a realistic depiction of the difficulties facing young British families in the colony. Anglo-Indian women's memoirs show a preoccupation with infant mortality. E. Augusta King writes: “it has always been impossible to colonize the plains of India, as the second generation, or so many as survive childhood, are weak miserable creatures, destroyed in body and mind by the heat” (ch. IX, 105) and Emma Roberts, in the early part of the nineteenth century, writes, “Infant life in the torrid zone hangs upon so fragile a thread, that the slightest ailment awakens alarm; the distrust of native attendants, sometimes but too well-founded, adds to maternal terrors, and where the society is small, the social meetings of a station are suspended, should illness, however slight, prevail among the baba logue”Footnote ²⁰ (ch. V, 121). In Little Henry, when a friend of Henry's guardian remarks that the child “was very pale, and his eyes were heavy” his guardian answers, “O, this is nothing; the child is well enough; children in India, you know, have that look” (23). These accounts bear closer examination, as there are certainly also accounts, such as Kipling's, of children thriving in India, as well as compelling analyses, such as David Arnold's Colonizing the Body (1993), that call into question the discourse of India as a place of disease and death. For colonial families who already saw themselves as sojourners in a wilderness, the infant mortality rate was a cause of anxiety that may have been disproportionate: contrary to King's prediction, one must note, the plains were certainly colonized, and generations of Britons grew sturdily into adulthood in India.

Whatever the extent of its basis in reality, the theme of child mortality recurred in missionary fiction. Even as the obituary tract of the eighteenth century, whose protagonists died before the reader ever met them, gave way to the more realistic and entertaining evangelical tracts of the early nineteenth century, death continued to be an important feature of improving fiction (Ministering Angels 19–20). A recurring pattern in Sherwood's fiction is the conversion of the child, who then becomes the means to the end of adult conversions. Boosy's conversion, in Little Henry, is represented as a rehabilitation, a new life, which comes on the heels of Henry's death. Henry learns that this life is but a preparation for death; death in turn is a portal to either eternal life or eternal damnation. The picturesque death of beautiful little Henry is a powerful sentimental and pathetic device for inspiring feeling (rather than thought) in the reader, as well as an excellent opportunity for moralizing on sacrifice, resurrection, and the call to imitate Christ.

Despite the weight of original sin, Henry is sincere in his struggle to do better on his spiritual journey, and is undoubtedly saved in the end. Sherwood thus seems to sublimate her Indian experience as she allays the anxieties of her readers, by suggesting that unwholesome as the Indian environment is, it is nothing less than the divine duty of Britons, young and old, to brave it in order to bring new followers to Christ. Sherwood saw the colonies as dangerous in many ways, but this is not a reason for retreat – on the contrary, unlike later Darwinist writers, Sherwood does not seem at all concerned for the “survival of the race”: the propagation of the faith is more important to her.

It is possible that even now, in the twenty-first century, there are some readers of The History of Little Henry and His Bearer who might be described as Sherwood's “ideal readers.” To a reader informed by Victorian and postcolonial studies, however, it takes real effort to imagine Sherwood's worldview – the intuitive reading seems to be the reading against the grain. Little Henry is intended to be didactic, but its lessons have changed over the last two centuries. For the purposes of this article, the most interesting things about Little Henry are the insights the tract provides into the agency of an Anglo-Indian woman, and the ushering out, within the story, of Orientalism, to accommodate attitudes that would define Victorian India.

One fascinating finding is how significant a part Sherwood played in the perpetuation of the Evangelical beliefs whose relation to Victorian attitudes and assumptions is described by M. Nancy Cutt as that between a root and its widely-branching tree. “Evangelicalism,” Cutt says, “was manifest in the powerful Victorian urge to teach, preach, and learn; to better oneself and to better the lot of others. It was a driving force, a motive power, as well as a way of life, a habit of thought, and a personal discipline.” Importantly for the history of children's books, “Evangelicalism helped to create the Victorian belief in the family” (Ministering Angels 7). Cutt attributes the moral training of the Victorians in part to Sherwood's work (Mrs. Sherwood 49).

Sherwood's brand of evangelicalism depended on a literal acceptance of the Bible and on the written word more generally. Sherwood was, as we have seen, a great producer of the tracts that were so essential to the propagation of the Evangelical message. Within Little Henry, the importance of the written Word is illustrated by the many scenes in which Henry and Boosy read the Holy Book. Henry's conversion begins when the visiting missionary teaches him the English alphabet: “While this young lady was taking pains, from day to day, to teach little Henry to read, she endeavoured, by word of mouth, to make him acquainted with such parts of the Christian religion as even the youngest ought to know” (10). Evangelicals emphasized the importance of Sunday Schools and the distribution of Bibles. The reverberations of this movement can be felt in works written long after the central tenets of Evangelicalism ceased to be fashionable; the Bible-wielding missionary pops up frequently in later colonial and postcolonial fiction.

Women in the colonies tend to be understood as neither the subject nor the object of colonization, which is sometimes viewed as a great game between rival European powers for world domination. Brantlinger identifies in colonial adventure fiction, for example, the representation of the colonies as offering “brilliantly charismatic realms of adventure for white heroes, usually free from the complexities of relations with white women” who are located in drawing rooms back in England, waiting, like Ulysses’ Penelope (11). Missionary fiction complicates the opposition between domestic and colonial/adventure fiction. Sherwood, for one, does not seem to recognize any such limitation. She does not merely tell the story of this time of greater British intervention in the social and religious fabric of India – she is as actively involved in bringing about change as she is in the production of prose fiction. What is more, her stories admonish even the nursery-bound child, who is often the object rather than the subject of the grand narratives of blood, state, and soul, to take action in the world. Colonialism was thus seen as a liberatory force for some: English women found new avenues for expression and action in the world, and the children of the colonial class were imbued, within missionary tracts, with the power and the responsibility to convert and civilize.

Sherwood's expressed aspiration was always to the greater glory of God, but she began to write tales and novels rather than tracts in 1825. Perhaps her decreasing evangelical fervor was attributable to the fading of the memory of the painful Indian years – heathens and dying children ceased to feature quite so strongly in her work. Sherwood's move from tracts to novels may have had something to do with changing perceptions of the reading public, as well: the novel began to be perceived as more respectable, thanks to the work of Maria Edgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, and Jane Austen. Missionary fiction in India for later generations of writers took a stealthy turn: the tone taken by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Marguerite Butler is very different from Sherwood's depiction of the onset of Christianity, in Little Henry, as effected by extreme effort – the fight for souls is literally a fight to the death. In fact as far back as 1868, after the Revolt of 1857, Mary Carpenter describes a little colony of Christian converts, who are, in her opinion, better dressed and less ornamented than Indians elsewhere, she tells us that they “live consistent lives,” and has no doubt as to the cause of this sudden perceived coherence: “This little colony appeared to me a striking instance of the natural effects of Christianity” (79). Carpenter makes the case for conversion in an indirect way that is very different from Sherwood's urgent, unequivocal protests.

Generations of Victorian missionary writers followed in Sherwood's footsteps, and the first generation of her readers grew up to shape not only Victorian India, but “the Victorian world.” Cutt recognizes in Macaulay's History of England (1848), for example, “an expression of the Evangelical view of irreconcilable good and evil operating in the world” (Ministering Angels ix). Sherwood helped set in motion a snowball of culturally-defined virtue long before Victoria took the throne, and that snowball would roll through Britain's imperial century, increasing in girth until the time when Macaulay was able to offer a toast before the Edinburgh Philosophical Society in 1846, “[T]o the literature of Britain . . . which has exercised an influence wider than that of our commerce and mightier than that of our arms . . . before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the Banks of the Ganges!” (734). Of course that smug verdict would be severely challenged thirteen years later, but that is a story for another day.