were three or four very brightly written accounts of funerals in it". Although The Fairchild Family has gained a reputation in the twentieth century as didactic, in the early nineteenth century it was viewed as delightfully realistic. Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901), a critic who also wrote children's literature, praised "the gusto with which [Sherwood] dwells on new dolls" and "the absolutely sensational naughtiness" of the children. Most twentieth-century critics, including George Orwell, who called it "an evil book", have condemned the book's harshness, pointing to the Fairchilds' moral-filled visit to a gibbet with a rotting corpse swinging from it; but Cutt and others argue that the positive depiction of the nuclear family in the text, particularly Sherwood's emphasis on parents' responsibility to educate their own children, was important to the book's appeal. She argues that Sherwood's "influence", through books such as the Fairchild Family, "upon the domestic pattern of Victorian life can hardly be overestimated". The Fairchild Family was so successful that Sherwood wrote two sequels, in 1842 and 1847. These reflected her changing values as well as those of the Victorian period. Significantly, the servants in PartI, "who are almost part of the family, are pushed aside in PartIII by their gossiping, flattering counterparts in the fine manor-house." The most extensive thematic change in the series was the disappearance of evangelicalism. Whereas all the lessons in PartI highlight the children's "human depravity" and encourage the reader to think in terms of the afterlife, in Parts IIand III, other Victorian values such as "respectability" and filial obedience come to the fore. Dawson describes the difference in terms of parental indulgence; in Parts II and III, the Fairchild parents employ softer disciplinary tactics than in PartI. Evangelical tract literature in the 1820s and 1830s During the 1820s and 1830s, Sherwood wrote a great many tracts for the poor. Like her novels for the middle class, they "taught the lessons of personal endurance, reliance on Providence, and acceptance of one's earthly status". Emphasizing individual experience and one's personal relationship with God, they discouraged readers from attributing their successes or failures to "larger economic and political forces". In this, they resembled the Cheap Repository Tracts, many written by Hannah More. As Linda Peterson, a scholar of nineteenth-century women's literature, argues, Sherwood's tracts use a Biblical "interpretative frame" to highlight the fleetingness of earthly things. For example, in A Drive in the Coach through