Ann and Jane Taylor were the daughters of Isaac Taylor (1759-1824), a copperplate engraver and Congregational minister, and his wife Ann Martin Taylor (1757-1830). The sisters were the eldest of six surviving children in a devout dissenting family that became a literary dynasty. “The Taylors of Ongar,” as the family came to be known, published nearly a hundred books among them (Stewart xv). “[S]ocially isolated and somewhat cut off from their families of origin by their fervent religious commitment and from their neighbours by their superior education,” as Davidoff and Hall have assessed (68), the Taylor family became a self-sustaining unit preoccupied by the spiritual health and moral welfare of all the children. The parents led the way in their conscious decision to educate their children with kindness, as Isaac Taylor Jr. (brother of Ann and Jane) recalled their mother stating in The Family Pen:

So, it was the parents who first sought a new, more generous approach to education. That their children became as keenly engaged in the issue of child-rearing—becoming disciples spreading the example of compassionate teaching that their parents had established—is indicated by the fact that all the Taylor authors wrote for children.

Ann and Jane Taylor displayed their imaginative powers early. A poem composed by Jane at about the age of nine is recorded in her posthumously published memoirs, and, in her autobiography, Ann Taylor Gilbert recalls composing her first poems at around the age of seven in imitation of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs:

Two observations are worth drawing out from this passage: firstly, Ann turned to verse for solace at a time of childhood insecurity, and, secondly, Watts’s Divine Songs was the formative poetic influence on the Taylor children. In fact, a connection may be drawn between these two points with information supplied later in the same autobiography. Ann writes of “a legend in our family … that one of our great grandmothers was, when a child, taken on the knee of Dr. Watts and presented with a copy of his ‘Divine Songs for Children’” (Gilbert 1:170). This incident was clearly a matter of family pride and honor; Isaac Watts was a dissenting hero, an Independent minister (much like Congregational minister Isaac Taylor, who may even have been named after him) who defended religious dissent and was a key figure in the development of the English hymn for congregational worship – to this date, he is known as the Father of English hymnody. For the Taylor children, Watts’s poems were evidently self-defining both in terms of their peculiar – by which I mean set part – family identity and personal sustaining faith.

Watts’s Divine Songs, which emerged at the time when “children began to be recognized as distinct and separate creatures, with particular needs and tastes, and as consumers of reading matter, commercially speaking” (Briggs 67), was a foundational text of moral and religious education for children in England. In his preface addressed “To all that are concerned in the Education of Children” (15), he made a case for the aptness of poetry as a medium for children’s religious education, asserting that verse was “designed for the Service of God” pointing out that the “Children of Israel were commanded to learn the Words of the Song of Moses, Deut. xxxi. 19, 30” (16). Watts identified four advantages of verse as a medium for children’s religious instruction: first, the diverting and amusing nature of rhymes and meter; second, its mnemonic quality; third, related to the second point, that memorized, it “will be a constant Furniture for the Minds of Children” encouraging religious thought and piety; and, finally, that, written in the commonest psalm meters, it could be sung in family worship to “the most usual Psalm Tunes” (16-18). Ann’s memories intimate that, in the Taylor family, Watts’s Divine Songs fully realized their potential.

In light of Watts’s widely-acknowledged virtuosity, Ann and Jane Taylor took pains to present themselves as extending his practice rather than countering or replacing it in their advertisement to the first edition of Hymns for Infant Minds:

The fact that Hymns for Infant Minds so explicitly follows Watts’s model, which shaped their childhoods and literary development, indicates that it was an especially ambitious and meaningful project for the Taylor sisters, more so perhaps than their earlier, less specifically religious productions including Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804-5) by several young persons and Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), “the book that awoke the nurseries of England, and those in charge of them” (Darton 181). Indeed, the complexity of their feelings regarding this work is evident in their apology above: they exhibit authorial anxiety for the “temerity” to emulate Watts and seek to deflect potential accusations of pride by stressing that they publish as an act of service; yet, they also draw attention to the limited scope of Divine Songs in order to make room for their own work and intimate that they seek a fresh, more generous pedagogic approach in their Hymns for Infant Minds. At this point, it is necessary examine the methods and patterns that Watts established in Divine Songs, which the Taylor sisters were responding to.

Watts published Divine Songs eight years after his first hymnic collection, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707). Although he never had children of his own, the songs were written for real children, the three daughters of Sir Thomas and Lady Abney, at whose country estate he stayed during a period of ill health. Divine Songs was later published with the view of encouraging children’s piety more widely. The collection remained a ubiquitous nursery classic in English-speaking countries for nearly two centuries. In 1868, Isabella L. Bird claimed in The Sunday Magazine that the “sale of these in England and America is from 80,000 to 100,000 copies annually” (430). However, critics today view the work as being pedagogically problematic. Although significantly more understanding and less Puritanical than earlier moral writing for children, such as James Janeway’s notorious A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671), many of Watt’s Divine Songs were still written, as J. R. Watson discerns, within a “culture of fear” that “seems to us now to be highly damaging psychologically” (Watson, “The Child’s Christian Year” 22). One of Watts’s most notorious works, “Obedience to Parents” preaches that wayward children will meet terrible divine retribution:

Although some attempts have been made to address children suitably (Watts has selected simple lexicon, utilized the easily chantable iambic metrical pattern: “The Ravens shall pick out his Eyes, / And Eagles eat the same,” and attempted to capture the child’s attention with the use of animal imagery), ultimately, the hymn’s stance is not sympathetic towards the young. The assumption is that children must be threatened and rebuked into good behavior. The work is actually a paraphrase of Proverbs 30:17: “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.” Watts’s use of this source reveals his Puritan heritage. Independent churches followed a modified Calvinism and Watts himself was proud of this identity, urging in 1731, “let us not be ashamed to distinguish ourselves as the offspring of the Puritans, and as Protestant Dissenters, who have learned of our fathers to pay a religious reverence to all that is holy” (quoted in Spurr 103). In Protestant traditions, the Bible has been “elevated above all authorities as supreme in the church” since Luther (Hendrix 46). It is, therefore, not surprising that Watts looked to illuminate the topic with the divine authority of the Bible –indeed, hymns in the eighteenth-century were often paraphrases of the scriptures (Watson, “Eighteenth-Century Hymn Writers” 329-344) –but his privileging of the Proverbs 30:17 in particular out of the whole Bible to teach about filial submission reveals that his understanding of children was fundamentally shaped by the doctrine of Original Sin. In fact, Watts captured his views about this doctrine in Hymn 57 of his Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707):

The authoritarian adults in “Obedience to Parents” communicate their shared view of children’s innate postlapsarian wickedness. They admonish their young charges because they are understood as delinquents whose rebellious flesh must be mortified. In Lacanian terms, the Law of the Father is laid down to the individual child-reader by bigger, older, multiple teachers. Child readers may well infer that they are inherently corrupt through being indoctrinated in this Puritan view of humanity as “shapen in iniquity” and conceived in sin in the mother’s womb (Psalm 51:5).

In fact, Watts was also capable of writing gentler and more-nurturing children’s verse influenced by Locke’s pedagogical principles. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke visualized the mind of the newborn child as a smooth waxen tablet upon which impressions would be made with experience. Believing that the child must be treated as a rational being, his philosophy of discipline, rewards, and punishments was to be, in Edgar Bradshaw Castle’s words, “associated with sentiments of esteem and shame, with approval of their virtuous behavior and disapproval of their faults, in the background of a family life where sympathy and understanding have secured their confidence” (129). In Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth, Watts agreed with Locke, asserting that “[c]hildren should be instructed in the art of self-government. They should be taught, as far as possible, to govern their thoughts: To use their wills to be determined by the Light of their understandings, and not by headstrong and foolish humour” (Watts, Discourses 368). Indeed, it has already been outlined that his hymns were written with the purpose of initiating piety and training moral behavior early, and Katherine Wakely-Mulroney has further specified that the “‘easy language’ of the Divine Songs grows out of Locke’s stricture that instruction ought to be suited to the ‘Capacity and Notions’ of its intended audience” (3). Although “Obedience to Parents” displayed little evidence of the author’s belief in childhood innocence or self-governance, Watts did also write hymns in which Lockean ideas are manifest.

“Cradle Hymn,” published as the ultimate hymn in the eighth edition of 1727, may be viewed as the culmination of Locke’s pedagogical thinking in Watts’s Divine Songs. From the very first verse, the hostile voice of rebuke encountered in “Obedience to Parents” is replaced by an intimate and familiar speaker who values the child as a sacred being:

As the title clarifies, this hymn is also a lullaby and it utilizes the situation of bedtime to plant religious knowledge. The quiet soothing sounds of the first line, opening with the lingering onomatopoeic “Hush” and sibilant “still” and “slumber,” simultaneously evoke the silent sleep being invoked by the speaker and function to calm the imagined infant in her cradle. Instead of the unsympathetic voices of stern teachers who expect the worst of their charges, Watts replicates the mother’s voice of assurance. This point is clarified in the seventh verse, which contains the lines “Soft, my Child! I did not chide thee, / … / ’Tis thy Mother sits beside thee, / And her Arm shall be thy Guard” (25, 27-28). The reader easily discerns that innumerable blessings descend “gently” because the child is beatified, cherished, and requiring of special care and attention. The implication is that the child is profoundly precious.

Significantly, Watts points out analogues between the child of the hymn and the infant Jesus throughout the hymn:

Although a shift has occurred in this verse, the lullaby having moved into the didactic mode with the teaching of the theology of the incarnation, the instruction is conveyed in a manner that does not undermine the child’s confidence. Rather, the child’s condition of being little, weak, and unknowing is identified as being shared by God. In this way, the child’s self-image is strengthened. In “Obedience to Parents,” children were viewed as inclined to ungodliness, and, thus, far from God’s holy character. However, in “Cradle Hymn,” the infant Christ is identified as resembling the child in the cradle. Here, Watts is writing about the divine in humanity in a manner resonant of Blake in his “The Lamb,” albeit seven decades before the publication of Songs of Innocence (1789), as observed by several critics (England and Sparrow, Pinto, Hilton). Indeed, Watts’s child in the cradle is not a sinful being that must be chastened but a sanctified one that must be shielded from harm:

So, Watts did produce some gentler verse for children, setting precedents for the Taylors to follow. Yet, as Castle has observed, he “can seldom refrain from concluding even his mildest verses with reference to a hell of whose reality he was convinced and from whose torments he was so concerned to steer sinful childhood” (166). This characteristic is demonstrated all too well in the last verses of “Cradle Hymn”:

Evidently, Watts’s pastoral responsibility persistently pushed even his most tender works to become terrifying didactic warnings. As such, although devoting the majority of the poem to teaching about God in benevolent terms of love and protection, Watts ends “Cradle Hymn” by preaching a similar message to that of “Obedience to Parents,” namely, that there are dire eternal penalties for neglecting God.

Hymns for Infant Minds and Nineteenth-Century Hymn Culture

Although Ann and Jane Taylor’s Hymns for Infant Minds (1810) was published almost a century after Divine Songs (1715), they were among the earliest to follow Watts’s pattern of hymn-writing for children. As Ann Taylor observed in her autobiography:

The first edition contained seventy hymns on diverse subjects including: God’s Creation (“About God, who made the Sun and the Moon”), personal and moral behavior (“Against Anger and Impatience”), the care of siblings (“To A little Sister, on Her Birthday”), God’s character (“Though the Lord be High, Yet hath He Respect Unto the Lowly”), worship (“On Attending Public Worship”), death (“A Child’s Lamentation for the Death of a Dear Mother”), the importance of the scriptures (“The Bible”), sickness and recovery (For a Very Little Child, Upon Getting Well”), and eschatology (“Time and Eternity”). As was normal practice for the time, Hymns for Infant Minds was published without prescribed music. Written in common meters, like ballads, the hymns could be sung to any number of appropriate tunes. For instance, the first work entitled “A Child’s Hymn of Praise,” written in common meter, could be sung to the music of “Greensleeves,” “Yankee Doodle,” or “Amazing Grace”:

This in-built versatility, which would have allowed children to sing poems to their favorite tunes, no doubt contributed to their popularity and endurance throughout the nineteenth century, the golden age of hymn-singing in Britain.

Indeed, Hymns for Infant Minds became a publishing phenomenon of nineteenth-century children’s literature. In 1845, the thirty-sixth edition was printed with an additional previously unpublished twenty-three hymns. Further revisions were made in the fiftieth edition of 1886: the editor, Josiah Gilbert (Ann Taylor’s son), removed ten hymns from the 1845 version, but added twenty-one works from later hymnbooks including Ann and Jane Taylors’ Original Hymns for Sunday Schools (1812) and Ann Taylor’s Hymns for Infant Schools (1827). This edition is most significant for ascribing the authorship of each hymn.

The collection’s success is further indicated by the inclusion of individual works in church hymnals. In 1892, John Julian listed twenty-four works by the elder sister and fourteen by the younger as having been included in hymnbooks (1116-17). In fact, as the Taylors’ hymns were often included in Sunday school anthologies, often without attribution (Feldman 732), the circulation of their work is likely to have been broader. As Ian Bradley has observed, hymns were a ubiquitous part of nineteenth-century British material culture; they appeared “on postcards and tombstones, on framed posters to be hung at home and in school reading books. Their tunes were played by brass bands and barrel organs and formed the largest single category of subject matter for pianola rolls” (xiii-xiv). It is likely that the hymns would have been memorized too. The practice of memorizing hymns, especially on the Sabbath, was a common feature of nineteenth-century childhood experience, as illustrated in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) when Graham Bretton asks little Polly Home to recite a hymn:

This fictional depiction of hymn recitation was mimetic of Victorian culture. For instance, as a child, Thomas Hardy, faithfully recited Watts’s “An Evening Song” from Watt’s Divine Songs at every sunset (Tomalin 23).

Like Isaac Watts, Ann and Jane Taylor were also preoccupied by the issue of how to teach good moral behavior. Yet, their writings display a divergence in the way they sustain their image of the child as innocent and deserving of dignity throughout their works. Their pedagogical approach was imbued with Romantic-era sympathy for the child, which led them to imagine a different audience of children to Watts. Ann recalled in her autobiography:

This excerpt suggests that, in contrast to Watts’s one-directional didacticism, Jane imagined interaction with a rational being worthy of respect. Ann’s remembrance of her sister’s imaginative relationship with her child audience—particularly her intimate address of the child as “love”—is revealing of the sisters’ emotional investment in their project. This extract is especially fascinating in terms of Jane Taylor’s purposeful discarding of male-gendered language and worldview; at a time when the everyman and every-child would have been referred to as male, it seems that Jane consciously envisaged her child-reader as female. The infant girl, occupying one the lowest positions in society— lacking strength, status, and knowledge—is treated as one whose opinions and feelings matter. This approach was new in children’s verse, and, in reflecting on this aspect of their writing, Harvey Darton suggested, “That was perhaps the secret of the Taylors’ freshness, which still lingers in the best of their children’s verse, though the mode is nearly outworn” (184).

On the subject of filial obedience, it has been demonstrated that Watts attempted to chastise his child audience into submission. As the title signals, Jane Taylor’s hymn on the same theme, “Love and Duty to Parents,” utilized an altered pedagogical approach developed from a more generous view of children’s rational capabilities. Here, duty is united with love and, more than this, love is the precursor of filial submission:

In striking contrast to Watts’s speakers, who are condescending adults or transgressive youths, Jane Taylor’s speaker is a well-intentioned child, whose words are affectionate and persuasive. The child’s own voice is valorized and used as the instrument of reason. The tenderness of Watts’s mother in “Cradle Hymn” may well be an influence, but, in this work, the gentle and lucid thoughts belong to the young not their caretakers.

Utilizing this child-centered educational technique, Jane Taylor is able to communicate complex ideas in an accessible way. For instance, in the verses above, the ventriloquized “good” child speaker persuades readers that parents deserve to be loved and obeyed because they cared for us first. This beautifully simple logic of reciprocity actually replicates a principle argument of St. John’s gospel and the Johannine epistles that “We love him because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Jane’s seemingly facile children’s hymn thus teaches about the profound Christian theology of the “debt of love.” Thus, through their vision of the innocent and intelligent child, the Taylors managed to extend Watts’s discussions in several directions.

In “Love and Duty to Parents,” another departure from Watt’s portrayal of obedience is the idea that learning moral behavior is an ongoing, self-governed process:

Importantly in terms of child psychology, “Love and Duty to Parents” educates that loving parents may be approached for mercy if one does transgress in a moment of weakness. The penitent soul will not be cast out irrevocably from their love. Thus, Jane Taylor’s more generous perception of the child’s mental capacity means that, as religious poetry, her work is more intricate in its Christian theology.

As moral literature, “Love and Duty to Parents” is also more developed than Watts’s “Obedience to Parents.” Specifically, Jane Taylor is able to masterfully manipulate the formal constraints of the hymn to lay stress on key principles relating to inter-personal behavior. In the third verse, through her use of the tetrameter scheme in long meter, she creates the line “Be naughty, and give you such pain,” which isolates the crucial principle that iniquitous behavior causes suffering to those who love the offender. In other words, the idea that individual actions have social consequences is accentuated in a way that it could not be in prose. That Jane purposefully constructed such succinct and cogent lines is supported by Isaac Taylor Jr’s observations that: “If one might judge by the appearance of the manuscript copy of these hymns—its intricate interlineations, and multiplied revisions, it would seem that, many of them cost the author more labour than any other of her writings” (1:116). Through the refined force of this line, Jane Taylor appeals to the child’s sense of guilt – regret about wrongdoing –not only to encourage good behavior but to develop empathy and, by extension, social responsibility. In fact, this is a technique which modern child psychologists advocate regarding the enforcement of moral behavior. Whereas shame is understood as a devastating emotion upon the child’s core self-image, guilt is seen, in Adam Grant’s words, as “a negative judgment about an action, which can be repaired by good behavior” (“Raising a Moral Child”). In fact, it is noteworthy that, in these terms, Watts’s “Obedience to Parents,” in which adults express wrath and threaten with irreparable punishment, would be deemed far more harmful in shaming the child and potentially creating a damaged, negative self-image (Eisenberg 667-69). Writing from the perspective of children, who they understood as benign and rational beings, the Taylors carefully extended Watts’s discussion of obedience to parents in multiple significant ways: first, they taught that, rather than slavish submission, filial duty is a fruit of love; secondly, that, even when children make mistakes, a contrite heart provides a way back to love and acceptance; and thirdly, that individual actions have interpersonal consequences.

Repeatedly in the Taylors’ hymns, children’s voices are valorized and their thought-lives are empathetically imagined. The sisters’ mindfulness of infant speech and inner life suggests that they sympathized with the Romantic vision of childhood as articulated, for instance, by William Wordsworth in his poems about children’s fresh perceptions of the world such as “Anecdote for Fathers” and “We are Seven.” Indeed, these works, first published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), attempted to represent the language and thought-processes of real children over a decade earlier than the Taylors. Wordsworth’s earlier attempts to capture childish tones is recorded in “We Are Seven:”

In fact, however, the Taylor sisters’ admiration for Wordsworth is difficult to establish. Ann’s autobiography contains five verse epigraphs taken from his poetic corpus, but these may have been added by her posthumous editor, Josiah Gilbert, as they are extraneous to the body of the text. While no direct reference is made to Wordsworth in either sister’s life accounts, Isaac Taylor Jr. does state in Jane’s memoirs that, until the composition of Hymns for Infant Minds , “Jane had written chiefly as an expression of spontaneous feeling” (113). This remark suggests that she was influenced by Wordsworth’s theory that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as expounded in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800).

The sisters may also have been influenced by William Blake. Jane Taylor’s “The Beggar Boy,” for instance, first published in the Minor’s Pocket Book (1804), seems to borrow from the social conditions and milieu of Blake’s Songs of Experience:

Here, Blake’s sensitivity to, and advocacy of, the vulnerable young, who live in the urbanized capitalist world, is reflected in Jane’s composition. In fact, the Taylor sisters are commonly acknowledged to be significant as early disseminators of Blake’s work, as they reproduced “Holy Thursday” in their City Scenes; Or, A Peep into London (1818). They may have encountered his work through the family’s movement in metropolitan, non-conformist engraving circles, or, as Haggarty and Mee suggest, from Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs of His Child (1806), in which four of Blake’s songs were reproduced (25).

One Romantic-era author, who is known to have been admired by the Taylor sisters, is Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825). Ann even met the author on a visit to London in 1807:

Like Wordsworth and Blake, Barbauld believed in the innocence of children. Although, significantly for the Taylors, also a dissenter, Barbauld offered a different theological model to Watts’s Calvinist Puritanism. Growing up in the progressive educational environment of the Warrington Academy—one of the educational institutions established for religious dissenters, who were barred from Oxford and Cambridge—where her father was a teacher, her beliefs were shaped by a range of Enlightenment thinkers including John Locke (1632-1704), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). In particular, she developed benign religious views from the benevolist philosophical ethics of Hutcheson, who held a hopeful view of humanity built on the understanding that people are the worthy creatures of a loving creator (Barbauld 235). This sympathetic belief shaped her understanding of children and pressed upon her the importance of educating through nurture. From this standpoint, she authored a number of sympathetic works for children’s education, many of them stressing the social significance of the mother as educator in the formation of future citizens.

The most significant work by Barbauld to have influenced the Taylor sisters is Hymns in Prose for Children (1781). From “Hymn I,” Barbauld voices a gracious child:

I will praise God with my voice; for I may praise him, though I am but a little child.

Although written in prose, Barbauld’s child, like the Taylors’, speaks with reason and grateful reciprocity for God’s kindness. In “Hymn VI,” where Barbauld utilizes a catechistic dialogue form between a mother who asks probing theological questions and her sensitive child cognizant of natural beauty:

Barbauld’s influence is most evident in Ann Taylor’s hymn “About God, who made the Sun and the Moon.” Its stimulus seems to have been the opening lines of Barbauld’s “Hymn I” about God’s Creation: “Come, let us praise God, for he is exceedingly great; let us bless God, for he is very good. / He made all things; the sun to rule the day, the moon to shine by night” (238). This hypothesis is supported by the fact that Ann Taylor’s hymn is written in the mode of a conversation between “Mamma” and “Child,” which replicates Barbauld’s formal construction in “Hymn I”:

Like Barbauld’s “Child of reason”, Ann Taylor’s child speaker is sentient and attuned to the wonders of nature. Thus, in terms of literary influence on the Taylors, Barbauld offered, in prose, examples of a benevolent, intelligent, and rational child’s voice being used for religious and moral education. The Taylors drew from Barbauld’s sympathetic view and pedagogic application of the intelligent child presented in Hymns in Prose for Children and applied it successfully to their verses. At this point, Donelle Ruwe’s comments about Wordsworth’s extraordinary influence in the history of children’s poetry seems applicable; “his influence derives not from whatever children’s poetry he might have written but rather than from the Romantic ideology of the child that he fostered” (9-10). While Ann and Jane Taylor did not originate the Romantic view of the precious and innocent child of wonder, they were the ones, not “the visionary company” (Bloom), who spread this concept in literature that children actually read.

Ann and Jane Taylor’s phenomenal triumph in their own time is evidenced by the fact “Hymns for Infant Minds brought in £150 in 1810, more than most curates and country schoolmasters could command in a year” (Davidoff and Hall 67). Despite their popularity throughout the nineteenth century, they are now largely unknown literary figures. The hymns’ disappearance from literary history and popular culture may be elucidated by William McCarthy’s insights that literary survival depends on key factors including gender, genre, religion, and advocacy (165-91). Firstly, like many female productions, the works were neglected by the male academics who established the canon of English literature; secondly, as simple verse writings for infants, they were not considered great literature; and thirdly, during the increasingly secular twentieth century, religious and didactic poetry in general disappeared from popular children’s literature. Indeed, the Taylors’ hymns have not even survived in the church’s core repertoire of devotional songs, perhaps because none were included in the “most important and influential hymn book of the Victorian age, and arguably of all time, Hymns Ancient and Modern, published in 1861” (Bradley, Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers 65). The fact that the sisters were dissenters may also be significant. Several of Cecil Frances Alexander’s (1818-1895) Hymns for Little Children (1848) are among the best-loved hymns in Britain today, but she was the wife of an Anglican bishop, and, therefore, an establishment figure with the most powerful advocates in British religious culture.

In their original advertisement, Ann and Jane Taylor apologized for their “temerity” to follow Watts; yet, moving beyond the restrictive moralism of Watts and echoing the Romantic-era view of innocent childhood experience, they were able to produce children’s literature that was progressive in learner-centered education and healthy psychological development. Their greatest achievements were in their attempts to privilege the “good” child’s voice, replicate the tones of childish loquacity, and reason with loving encouragement rather than frighten with disturbing threats. Remarkably, considering their early-nineteenth-century origins, these practices remain sound pedagogically today. Consciously imagining a benevolent and rational child audience, Ann and Jane Taylor were able to make huge advances in writing moral and religious verse for children. The pervasiveness of their influence on the religious culture of nineteenth-century Britain as may be evidenced in two quotations printed in the advertisement to the forty-seventh edition of Hymns for Infant Minds (1868):

Remarkably, in these quotations from two great Anglican clergymen who were immensely influential in British educational terms during the nineteenth century—Arnold was a great reformer of the English public school system (the beloved headmaster as depicted in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays [1857]) and Whately was himself an educational innovator in devising a scheme for non-sectarian religious instruction in Ireland during his tenure as Archbishop of Dublin—identify the hymns of non-conformist women as exemplary religious pedagogic models. Given the fact that both men were members of the established Anglican church and that women were officially excluded from theological teaching in their time in accordance with St. Paul’s prescription in 1 Timothy 2:12 that “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man,” these pronouncements are extraordinary. The sisters’ enduring success in articulating “truths to the wants and feelings of childhood, in language which it understands” is indicated by the way new editions continued to appear throughout the nineteenth century not only in Britain, but also in America. Their greatest achievement, however, was their creation of the affectionate and receptive child’s voice through which they disseminated their sympathetic Romantic-era perception of the child in poetry that children actually read. Utilizing this effective child-centered pedagogic instrument, they taught children that their voices are valuable and that their thoughts are worth listening to.