Mary Butt Sherwood was not a Romantic. She was, however, one of that school of Evangelical writers and educationalists which achieved popularity and influence during the period. It was in relation to this school that the Romantics defined themselves when discussing morally improving literature in general, and missionary work in particular. Sherwood's Little Henry and his Bearer, an educational children's story set in India, where she lived for years as an officer's wife, was one of the era's most popular tales of colonial life. It is not principally, however, Sherwood's representation of India and its colonial servants that I wish to discuss in this essay but the story she wrote after briefly visiting Africa, Dazee, The Re-captured Negro (1821). This story, set in Sierra Leone, exhibits both the spiritual viewpoint and the colonialist attitudes, which Sherwood had acquired in India, where she had become an Evangelical missionary, called ‘the most intense moralist of them all’. Yet it also, I shall argue, briefly casts doubt upon the values it seeks to uphold, as it puts words into the mouth of the liberated slave, whose conversion to Christianity it narrates.

I begin with an examination of Sherwood's development in India of the religious principles which shaped her representations of indigenous peoples there and, later, in Africa. By the turn of the century, Mary Butt Sherwood was publishing short stories that inculcated religious principles.