Sarah Trimmer was a children's writer; educator; Sunday school founder and apologist; and, although she would disclaim the word, polemicist. She shared the emerging late-eighteenth-century conception of children as locus and agent of social change; the young were considered a national resource belonging as much to the public as to their parents, and in their education lay the hope of the country. Trimmer's mandate was thus to ensure that the children of the lower classes were educated enough to ensure their personal salvation; to allow them to understand and fulfill their social role; and, by redeeming them from the profligacy natural to their class, to help them earn divine approval by elevating the general piety of the nation. Trimmer was a reform writer not by virtue of radical or heterodox policy-indeed, much of her polemical writing denounces the lack of sufficient religious orthodoxy in other contemporary educational programs...