Lucy Lyttelton Cameron was a British magazine editor and a writer for children with religious themes.
Background
Lucy Lyttelton Cameron was born in Stanford-on-Teme, taking her name from her godmother Lady Lucy Fortescue Lyttelton. Her mother was born Martha Sherwood and her father George Butt was the vicar in Stanford at her birth and a minor poet. Her father was well connected and he became George III"s Chaplain-in-Ordinary in 1783.
Her father took positions at several different churches, although he died in 1795 having returned to Stanford.
Education
Between 1792 and 1797 she attended a school in Reading but before she joined that school she had already studied French, Italian and Greek.
Career
By this time she was living with her mother in Bridgnorth. Both of the daughters taught at Sunday School which is where their writings were targeted. Butt married in 1806 taking the name of the evangelical Reverend Charles Richard Cameron and together they moved to Snedshill where he was the first curate at Street Michaels Church at Donington Wood at Lilleshall in Shropshire where they had twelve children.
The Camerons stayed in Shropshire for twenty five years before they took "the living of" Swaby in Lincolnshire, but they still lived at Snedshill.
The Cameron family grew further in 1818 when her only brother"s wife died. The extra expense was offset by a £50 a year allowance given to her by the industrialist, Isaac Hawkins Browne, when he died that same year.
Cameron"s best known work might be The Raven and the Dove, The Nosegay of Honeysuckles, Martin and his Two Sunday Scholars or The Pink Tippet. This was in addition to serving as the editor of Nursery and Infants" Schools Magazine, a role she performed from 1831 to 1852.
She was published in America too.
Both sisters do seem to have been controlled by their publishers. Some of their work was written around existing illustrations rather than the other way round. Previously fiction would concentrate on moral and religious themes whose purpose was to teach conformity that would benefit society.
Cameron and her sister"s stories gave more emphasis to the individual and their objectives.
This led to their fiction being popular not only in Sunday schools but as childhood fiction in general. They both received wide recognition.
However around 1870 the fashion again moved on and their books were generally only found in Sunday schools. Cameron died in 1856 and was buried in Swaby.