A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Trimmer, Sarah
TRIMMER, SARAH,
The daughter of Mr. Kirby, who wrote on Perspective, was born at Ipswich, in 1741. She prepared several useful works to promote the diffusion of education, at a period when for a woman to devote herself to such a task was uncommon and unpopular. Mrs. Hannah More was, it is true, in the field of literature; but she had gained powerful friends and supporters; nor did she aim so much at opening and clearing the sources of education for the young and ignorant, as in interesting and improving those who were already educated, or giving a moral direction to minds which could not be kept quiet in their ignorance But Hannah More could not do everything which was then needed in literature for her sex and for children; she, probably, effected more good than any one writer of her time; and among her kind feelings and noble acts, was the regard she manifested for Mrs. Trimmer, and the efforts she used to serve this more humble, but useful literary contemporary.