and visible end of a spiritual bond running up to the very throne of God". Demers has referred to this "consciously double vision" as the quintessentially Romantic element of Sherwood's writing. Of all Sherwood's evangelically themed books, The History of the Fairchild Family was the most popular. It was published by John Hatchard of Piccadilly, which gave it and the other ten other books published with him a "social distinction" not attached to her other publications. The Fairchild Family tells the story of a family striving towards godliness and consists of a series of lessons taught by the Fairchild parents to their three children (Emily, Lucy and Henry) regarding not only the proper orientation of their souls towards Heaven but also the right earthly morality (envy, greed, lying, disobedience, and fighting are immoral). The overarching narrative of the tale includes a series of tract-like stories that illustrate these moral lessons. For example, stories of the deaths of two neighbourhood children, Charles Trueman and Miss Augusta Noble, help the Fairchild children to understand how and why they need to look to the state of their own hearts. The faithful and "true" Charles has a transcendent deathbed experience, suggesting he is saved; by contrast, the heedless, disobedient Augusta burns up while playing with candles and is presumably damned. Unlike previous allegorical literature with these themes, such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Sherwood domesticated her story with actions in the children's day-to-day lives, such as stealing fruit. These are important because they relate directly to their salvation. Each chapter includes thematically linked prayers and hymns, by Philip Doddridge, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Cowper, Ann and Jane Taylor, and others. The Fairchild Family remained in print until 1913, despite the increasingly popular Wordsworthian image of childhood innocence. Dickensian scholar Lois E. Chaney has suggested that it "influenced Dickens's depictions of Pip's fears of the convict, the gibbet, and 'the horrible young man' at the close of Chapter 1" in Great Expectations (1860–1861). The children's literature scholar Gillian Avery has argued that The Fairchild Family was "as much a part of English childhood as Alice was later to become". Although the book was popular, some scraps of evidence have survived suggesting that readers did not always interpret it as Sherwood would have wanted. Lord Frederic Hamilton writes, for instance, that "there was plenty about eating and drinking; one could always skip the prayers, and there