Background
Sarah Smith was the daughter of a bookseller, Benjamin Smith (1793–1878) of Wellington, Shropshire and his wife Anne Bakewell Smith (1798–1842), a noted Methodist.
novelist writer children"s writer
Sarah Smith was the daughter of a bookseller, Benjamin Smith (1793–1878) of Wellington, Shropshire and his wife Anne Bakewell Smith (1798–1842), a noted Methodist.
She and her elder sister attended the Old Hall, a school in the town, but were self-educated to a great extent.
About 1867, she moved south and lived at Snaresbrook and Loughton near Epping Forest and at Ham, near Richmond, Surrey. Altogether she wrote more than 40 novels. By the end of the 19th century it had sold at least a million and a half copies.
Brian Alderson (children"s book critic) notes that its sales were "nearly ten times as many as those of Alice in Wonderland." The book gave rise to a genre of stories about homeless children "that successfully combined elements of the sensational novel and the religious tract and helped introduce the image of the poor, urban child into the Victorian social conscious." A sequel, Jessica"s Mother, was published in Sunday at Home in 1866 and as a book in 1904.
She appears as a child actress, but when she becomes too big for such parts, she is beaten by her mother, receives little to eat, and wanders London. The act of humanity by Standring, a chapel keeper in a Methodist chapel, helps him too by re-evaluating his concept of religion and respectability.
Smith became the chief writer for the Religious Tract Society. Her experience of working with slum children in Manchester in the 1860s gave her books a greater sense of authenticity, for Stretton"s books "drive home the abject state of the poor with almost brutal force." She became one of the co-founders in 1894 of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (created in 1894), which combined with similar societies in other cities such as Manchester to form the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children some five years later.
However, she resigned after a decade in protest against what she saw as financial mismanagement.
In retirement in Richmond, Surrey, the Smith sisters ran a branch of the Popular Book Club for working-class readers.