Fabulous Histories

Fabulous Histories (later known as The Story of the Robins), is the best-known work of Sarah Trimmer. Originally published in 1786, it remained in print until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Fabulous Histories tells the story of two families—one of robins and one of humans—who learn to live together congenially. The children and baby robins learn to adopt virtue and to shun vice. For Trimmer, practising kindness to animals as a child would hopefully lead one to "universal benevolence" as an adult. According to Samuel Pickering Jr., a scholar of eighteenth-century children's literature, "in its depiction of eighteenth-century attitudes toward animals, Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories was the most representative children’s book of the period."

The text expresses several themes that would dominate Trimmer's later works, such as her emphasis on retaining social hierarchies; as Tess Cosslett, a scholar of children's literature explains: "the notion of hierarchy that underpins Fabulous Histories is relatively stable and fixed. Parents are above children in terms of authority, and humans above animals, in terms both of dominion and compassion: poor people should be fed before hungry animals ... [but] the hierarchical relation of men and women is not so clearly enforced."

Moira Ferguson, a scholar of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, places these themes in a larger historical context, arguing that "the fears of the author and her class about an industrial revolution in ascendancy and its repercussions are evident. Hence, [the] text attacks cruelty to birds and animals while affirming British aggression abroad. ... The text subtly opts for conservative solutions: maintenance of order and established values, resignation and compliance from the poor at home, expatriation for foreigners who do not assimilate easily."

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