The History of Sandford and Merton (review)

The History of Sandford and Merton is a useful addition to eighteenth-century British texts in contemporary editions, and Broadview Press has done its usual excellent job of producing a reasonably priced, beautifully printed book. The novel itself is worth reading and worth teaching; in it we find some of the most discussed issues of its day: education, class, and, most importantly, how these combine to form the human being. The book is very much a product of its time; its unquestioning belief that education can be used to shape and repair any individual, no matter how initially misguided he might be, is at the core of innumerable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts. It is not just the obvious writers, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who come to mind, but also people such as William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Elizabeth Inchbald.

Sandford and Merton is the story of two children, Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, and their preceptor, Reverend Barlow. Harry is the son of a farmer; Tommy is the child of a very rich family. Harry is almost a perfect human being, even before he is engaged in Reverend Barlow's educational program. He is physically sturdy, morally admirable, and essentially self-sufficient. Tommy, coming from a rich family, has been raised to be helpless in virtually all areas of life. Tommy is removed from his family to be reshaped by Reverend Barlow into all the things the farmer's son already is. The boys are educated both by active physical exercise and instructional stories, most often followed by a question and answer session on the story or incident led by Reverend Barlow.

The most important point here is that the rich child is removed from his parents in order to be properly educated in what Thomas Day essentially perceives as middle-class values. Although the editors devote virtually no attention to this model, it is a central structure of novels contemporary with Sandford and Merton, the most important of which in this context are The Fool of Quality by Henry Brooke and Nature and Art by Elizabeth Inchbald. While the editors Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave devote two paragraphs to Nature and Art, they mention The Fool of Quality only in a footnote citation. Yet The History of Sandford and Merton is essentially a retelling of The Fool of Quality, with precisely the same plot: the re-education of an aristocratic child by a kindly, middle-class mentor who removes the child from his unwholesome aristocratic parent in order to reform him into a healthy, productive member of society.

The editors of Sandford and Merton present the novel as a new thing altogether. They do not place it in its context as a response to the economic conditions created by the rise of the middle class in this period (along with the attendant frictions of this newly moneyed class against the older, privileged but corrupt aristocracy), but try to fit the novel into twenty-first-century critical concerns. One example will suffice of the way this approach can skew a reader's understanding of the novel. Tommy has been brought by his father from the family's estate in Jamaica to live in England. In the very first paragraph of the novel, Day introduces "Tommy Merton, who at the time he came from Jamaica, was only six years old, was naturally a very good-natured boy, but unfortunately had been spoiled by too much indulgence. While he lived in Jamaica, he had several black servants to wait upon him, who were forbidden on any account to contradict him" (49). The phrase "while he lived in Jamaica" in this edition comes with a footnote: "Britain had taken Jamaica from Spain in 1655 and expanded the already established sugar plantations by importing African slaves to work them—there were around 45,000 slaves there in 1700, and 300,000 by 1800. Revolts followed in Jamaica and...