​    Substance and Shadow opens with a genteel lady watching a storm blow in to the shore at Brighton, then a fashionable watering place patronized by the Prince of Wales. Mrs. Elwyn is amused by the rhapsodies of another young lady gamboling along on the beach, exclaiming over the tremendous crashing of the waves. We have here the same dichotomy Jane Austen used in Sense and Sensibility. Clara Elwyn “knew that romance and enthusiasm were the leading features of the day, and that those feelings were nurtured and indulged, at the hazard of running counter to all the forms and usages of society, and the good old way in which she had been taught to walk.”
    But Mrs. Elwyn is concerned because she knows that a fisherman and his wife had gone out to sea that morning, and have not returned. The following morning brings the sad news that they are drowned, and Mrs. Elwyn benevolently visits the humble cottage where their twin infant daughters are being cared for by a neighbor woman. The babies will now become the responsibility of the parish and their prospects are bleak. Suddenly, the excitable young lady, also drawn to the news of the catastrophe, swoops in and carries off one of the babies. Mrs. Elwyn decides to give a home to the other. It will give her someone to care for, since she is childless and her husband is polite but remote and often absent...

     In my previous post, I looked at two books for children, published by two different authors, both featuring a spoiled young West Indian heiress coming to England and correcting her behaviour after receiving judicious instruction from her host family. These two books are examples of a then-popular genre for children's books, which combined morally improving narratives with inset fables, scientific discourses, dialogue, and history lectures. As I mentioned, a book by Thomas Day, Sandford and Merton, was an outstandingly popular exemplar of this genre. 
​   According to scholar ​Peter Rowland, Sandford and Merton was published in three volumes in 1783, 1786 and 1789 and quickly gained such popularity that “the next instalment was eagerly and impatiently awaited by a legion of small readers.” The book was reprinted for over a hundred years but it is now largely forgotten.
     As Rowland describes the premise, "rebellious Tommy Merton, the spoilt son of a wealthy plantation owner from Jamaica, and his friend Harry Sandford, the poor but worthy son of a local farmer, are patiently educated by the Reverend Mr. Barlow... Master Tommy is brought, by precept and self-discovery, to see the error of this ways. A host of interpolated stories [are included], providing introductions to ancient history, astronomy, biology, science, exploration and geography” to which I would add the book includes moral fables in which kindness is always rewarded and cruelty is punished.
    Rowland points out that Thomas Day based Sandford and Merton on the educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; for example, Tommy’s tutor starts teaching him to read only after Tommy himself requests to be taught. Letting the child take the lead seems rather peculiar when we consider that it was routine to beat an education into boys at this time. Reverend Barlow is nothing like the typical switch-wielding schoolmaster, and many school boys must have wished they could have been educated along the lines depicted in Sandford and Merton.

     I recently received a digital copy of a rare and obscure children’s book by Eliza Kirkham Mathews (EKM), generously supplied to me by the University of Iowa. Now that I have a copy of The West Indian, I think I have succeeded in tracking down all of EKM’s books, so I can put together a definitive list of attributions and clear up some mistaken attributions.
     The West Indian was published in 1821 in Derby and attributed to “Mrs. C. Mathews,” 19 years after EKM's death. The most logical explanation for the appearance of this title after EKM's death in 1802 is that her husband Charles sought out publishers for the manuscripts Eliza left behind--even though he and his second wife had no great opinion of her writing abilities. The second Mrs. Mathews was also an author who compiled and wrote her husband's memoir after his death. Her effusive, breezy style is very different from EKM's. ​Anne Jackson Mathews said of her predecessor: “She knew nothing of society or of the world. Her reading had been slender, and confined to the generally mawkish style of the novels of that day. From them she gave faint impressions of nature; and no publisher thought them worth much more than the cost of printing. Disappointment followed disappointment.”
    I like to think Charles Mathews worked to find publishers for EKM’s manuscripts out of affection and respect for her, knowing that it would have been something that she wanted.

    I've uncovered more information about the life and family of obscure writer Eliza Kirkham Mathews (referred to in this blog as EKM). Her aunt Sarah Strong lost her husband Richard in 1786, when her children were still young. But he seems to have left her financially secure, as compared to EKM's mother Mary, whose husband George was also an apothecary. Although raised in genteel circumstances, EKM was poverty=stricken and alone in the world, receiving very little help from her better-off relatives. EKM left her native Devon and ended up in Wales, working as a teacher. There she met the youthful comic actor Charles Mathews who was struggling to make a name for himself on the theatre circuit. They married in September, 1797. That same month, Eliza got heart-wrenching news from her aunt Sarah; her teenage cousins, Sarah Amelia and Maria, had both died within a few days of each other, in an inexplicable fashion.
   EKM’s writing contains many autobiographical elements, and this tragic tale found expression in one her elegies (quoted below) and was narrated in one of her children's books.
    Ellinor, or, the Young Governess was published in 1802—the year EKM died--by the York publisher, Thomas Wilson & Son, who also published  more children’s books posthumously. This suggests that EKM approached this local publisher in the final years of her life with some of her novel manuscripts,  and was encouraged to write some children’s books instead. Her earnings, if any, would have been meagre, but it was better than nothing.