within the parish, the charity schools were largely funded by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which had funded the first charity schools around a century earlier. Trimmer criticized the rote learning that went on in traditional charity schools and tried to institute a more dynamic catechetical method in her own schools that would stimulate students to ask questions. She wrote in her journal, "my earnest desire is to compose a course of teaching for Charity Schools, by which the children may learn in reality, and not by rote, the principles of the Christian Religion, as taught in the Scriptures". Trimmer also established schools of industry to which she directed her less promising pupils. These schools would teach girls, for example, how to knit and spin. Initially, Trimmer believed that the schools would turn a profit since the girls would spin and knit all day long; however, the girls were unskilled and turned out poor products that could not be sold. Trimmer viewed this project as a failure. Wilfried Keutsch, a modern scholar of the 18th century, has criticized Trimmer's projects as naive and moralistic: Although Sunday schools such as the ones established by Trimmer have often been characterized by modern scholars as a repressive device used by the middle class to impose their morality on the lower classes, Thomas Laqueur has argued that the poor embraced this opportunity to obtain literacy and disregarded many of the moral lessons forced upon them. Literary career In a literary career that spanned more than a quarter of a century, Trimmer authored somewhere between 33 and 44 texts. She wrote in a wide range of genres: textbooks, teaching manuals, children's literature, political pamphlets and critical periodicals. While many of her texts were for children, some of her works, such as The Œconomy of Charity, were also for specific adult audiences. Still others were written for both children and adults, such as The Servant's Friend (1786–87), which was meant to instruct servants of all ages. Throughout her career, Trimmer worked with four different publishers—John Marshall, T.N. Longman, G. Robinson, and Joseph Johnson—and, by 1800, she had the most works of any author in the Newbery catalogue, the catalogue that sold the most children's literature. Eventually, Trimmer stopped publishing with Joseph Johnson, because she disagreed with his politics—he was a supporter of the French Revolution and was publishing works that she considered