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at Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis, Minnesota
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The Rams flew to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to take on the Minnesota Vikings. In the first quarter, St. Louis got off to a fast start as free safety Ronald Bartell returned an interception 38 yards for a touchdown. Afterwards, kicker Jeff Wilkins made a 42-yard field goal. After that, the Vikings responded with QB Tarvaris Jackson getting a 1-yard TD run. In the second quarter, the Rams' domination began with RB Stephen Jackson getting a 4-yard TD run and a 10-yard TD pass from QB Marc Bulger. In the third quarter, Wilkins kicked a 53-yard field goal, while Stephen Jackson got a 3-yard TD run. In the fourth quarter, Stephen Jackson wrapped up the game for St. Louis with a 59-yard TD run. Afterwards, Minnesota got their remaining points with RB Chester Taylor getting a 1-yard TD run, while Tarvaris Jackson completed a 3-yard TD pass to WR Travis Taylor. Afterwards, the Rams ended the game with a victory to end their season at 8–8.
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Season record RB Steven Jackson, who was elected to his first Pro Bowl at the conclusion of the season, led the NFL in 2006 with 2,334 total yards from scrimmage. His 90 pass receptions and 806 receiving yards were also NFL records amongst all running backs that year. Jackson was named the St. Louis Rams MVP and also received one vote for NFL Offensive Player of the Year. Although the Rams did not make the playoffs in 2006, they did finish the season with an offense which produced a 4,000-yard passer in QB Marc Bulger, a 1,500-yard rusher in RB Steven Jackson, and two 1,000-yard receivers, one of only four offenses in NFL history to accomplish the feat. Notes and references St. Louis Rams St. Louis Rams seasons St Louis
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Sarah Trimmer (née Kirby; 6 January 1741 – 15 December 1810) was a writer and critic of 18th-century British children's literature, as well as an educational reformer. Her periodical, The Guardian of Education, helped to define the emerging genre by seriously reviewing children's literature for the first time; it also provided the first history of children's literature, establishing a canon of the early landmarks of the genre that scholars still use today. Trimmer's most popular children's book, Fabulous Histories, inspired numerous children's animal stories and remained in print for over a century. Trimmer was also an active philanthropist. She founded several Sunday schools and charity schools in her parish. To further these educational projects, she wrote textbooks and manuals for women interested in starting their own schools. Trimmer's efforts inspired other women, such as Hannah More, to establish Sunday school programs and to write for children and the poor.
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Trimmer's works are dedicated to maintaining many aspects of the social and political status quo. As a high church Anglican, she was intent on promoting the established Church of England and on teaching young children and the poor the doctrines of Christianity. Her writings outlined the benefits of social hierarchy, arguing that each class should remain in its God-given position. Yet, while supporting many of the traditional political and social ideologies of her time, Trimmer questioned others, such as those surrounding gender and the family.
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Early life
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Sarah Trimmer was born on 6 January 1741 in Ipswich, England to Joshua Kirby and Sarah (née Bull); her father was a noted artist and served as President of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. Trimmer had one younger brother, William; she was apparently the better writer, for she would sometimes compose his school essays for him. As a young girl, Trimmer attended Mrs. Justiner's boarding school in Ipswich, an experience she always remembered fondly. In 1755, the family moved to London when her father, who had written several important works on perspective, became the tutor of perspective to the Prince of Wales. Because of her father's connections within the artistic community, Trimmer was able to meet the painters William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough as well as the by-then legendary writer and critic Samuel Johnson. She made a favourable impression on Johnson when she immediately produced her pocket copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) to help settle a dispute between her
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father and Johnson over a particular passage. Johnson, delighted that she admired Milton enough to carry his works with her at all times, "subsequently invited her to his house and presented her with a volume of his famous periodical The Rambler". In 1759, at the urging of his former pupil the Prince of Wales (soon to be George III), her father was made Clerk of the Works to the Royal Household at Kew Palace and the family moved to Kew. There she met James Trimmer, whom she married on 21 September 1762; after their marriage, the couple moved to Old Brentford.
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Motherhood and philanthropy Trimmer was close to her parents; after her marriage, she walked to visit her father every day, later accompanied by her eldest children. She and her husband had 12 children in all—six boys and six girls. Trimmer was responsible for her children's education and it was the combination of her duties as a mother and a teacher that initially sparked her interest in education.
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Inspired by Robert Raikes, Trimmer also became active in the Sunday school movement, founding the first Sunday school for poor children in Old Brentford in 1786. She and two of the ministers in her parish, Charles Sturgess and Charles Coates, organized a fund drive and established several schools for the poor children of the neighborhood. Initially, five hundred boys and girls wanted to attend Trimmer's Sunday school; unable to accommodate such numbers, she decided to exclude those under five years of age and restricted each family to one pupil. The parish set up three schools, each with about thirty students—one for older boys, one for younger boys and one for girls. While some other educational reformers of the period such as Mary Wollstonecraft argued for co-educational instruction, Trimmer was opposed to such pedagogical changes; she believed in educating the sexes separately. The students were taught to read, with the aim of teaching them to read the Bible. The students were also
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encouraged to keep clean—"a present of a brush and comb was given to all who desired them". Trimmer's schools became so well known and admired that Raikes, Trimmer's initial inspiration, recommended those who needed assistance organizing a Sunday school to turn to Trimmer; even Queen Charlotte asked Trimmer's advice on founding a Sunday school at Windsor.
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After her visit to the queen, Trimmer was inspired to write The Œconomy of Charity, which describes how readers, specifically women, can establish Sunday schools in their own communities. However, her book accomplished much more than this. While proponents of Sunday schools such as Raikes and Trimmer claimed that the schools would help control the growing social unrest of the poor, critics claimed that these schools would only encourage the social upheaval they were trying to quell. The Hon. John Byng, for example, issued the dire warning that "not only would education 'teach them to read seditious pamphlets, books and publications against Christianity'… but it would render them unfit for 'the laborious employment to which their rank in society had destined them'". Trimmer agreed that the poor were "destined" by God to be poor but would argue that her schools reinforced that divine social hierarchy. The Sunday school debate was waged in churches, in Parliament and in print; in
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publishing The Œconomy of Charity, Trimmer was entering this vigorous debate.
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As scholar Deborah Wills has argued: "[The Œconomy of Charity] is actually informed by a highly politicized subtext which anticipates, subverts, and counters anti-Sunday School arguments. [Trimmer] outlines a programme through which the Sunday School, when properly administered, can serve as a means of instituting social control and intensifying hierarchy. …Trimmer's carefully modest and unassuming text is thus revealed as a middle-class manifesto for the appropriation of social, political, and religious power in the name of moral instruction."
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For example, Trimmer contends that Sunday schools teach their pupils not merely to read the Bible but how to draw the proper theological and political conclusions from it. Furthermore, Trimmer argues that the responsibility for educating the poor rests on the shoulders of the middle class alone. By eliminating the aristocracy from an active role in her philanthropic programs, "Trimmer ensures that those who actually regulate the Sunday School curriculum are those who will both embody and perpetuate bourgeois culture". As Wills points out, this distinguishes her from other philanthropists of the time such as Hannah More.
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Trimmer also founded and oversaw charity schools in her neighborhood. She directed promising students from her Sunday schools, which met only once a week, to these charity schools, which met several times a week. As she wrote in her journal, these schools seemed to her to "afford a happy prospect of rescuing many poor children from vice and profligacy". While the Sunday schools were funded by subscription, that is, donations from people 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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 subversive. An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature
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Trimmer's first book was An easy introduction to the knowledge of nature, and reading the holy scriptures, adapted to the capacities of children (1780), which built on the revolution in children's literature begun by Anna Laetitia Barbauld. In the "Preface", Trimmer writes that Isaac Watts's Treatise on Education was the inspiration for the work and that "a book containing a kind of general survey of the works of Nature would be very useful, as a means to open the mind by gradual steps to the knowledge of the SUPREME BEING, preparatory to their reading the holy scriptures". In the text, the reader follows a mother and her two children, Charlotte and Henry (perhaps named after two of Trimmer's own children), on a series of nature walks during which the mother describes the wonders of God's creation. In 1793, a version of this book was added to the catalogue of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge; after 77 years, it had sold over 750,000 copies.
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Aileen Fyfe, a historian interested in the relationship between science and religion, has argued that Trimmer's text, although inspired by Barbauld's books, differs dramatically from Barbauld's in its religious orientation. Barbauld was a Dissenter and more inclined, according to Fyfe, to "encourage curiosity, observation, and reasoning". In contrast, Trimmer, as a high church Anglican, depicted nature as "awe-inspiring" and as a reflection not only of God's divinity but also of his goodness. These beliefs are reflected even in the structure of the text; Trimmer's aim was to convey a sense of the awe, therefore her text does not progress in an orderly fashion through a study of the natural world. Barbauld's texts, however, emphasize the slow accumulation of knowledge as well as logical thinking. Thus Evenings at Home, which she co-wrote with her brother, John Aikin, has a "systematic structure". Another difference between the two writers lies in the role of authority: whereas
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Barbauld's texts and those she wrote with her brother, emphasize dialogues between teacher and pupil, Trimmer's textual conversations, Fyfe notes, were "controlled by the parent".
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However, Donelle Ruwe, a scholar of 18th-century children's literature, has pointed out that An Easy Introduction is not entirely a conservative text—it challenges 18th-century notions of the proper roles for women laid out in conduct manuals such as those written by John Gregory and James Fordyce. The mother in Trimmer's text acts as a "spiritual leader" and demonstrates that a woman is capable of "theological reasoning". Such depictions challenge Jean-Jacques Rousseau's claims that women are capable only of memorizing religious dogma and not of sophisticated reasoning. Furthermore, Trimmer's mother tries to educate her children in a straightforward manner instead of employing the "manipulative" tricks of the tutor in Rousseau's Emile.
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A few years later, inspired by Madame de Genlis's Adèle et Théodore (1782), Trimmer commissioned sets of illustrations of the Bible for which she provided the commentary; she also published print/commentary sets of ancient history and British history. These various sets were very popular and could be purchased together (commentary and prints) or individually. The prints were usually hung on walls or bound into books.
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Relations with John Marshall
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The children's publisher John Marshall & Co. produced The footstep to Mrs. Trimmer's Sacred history: for the instruction and amusement of little children in 1785. Trimmer had always advocated the use of pictorial material in books for children, and the publisher, who was experienced in producing cheap popular prints, was in a good position to publish them for her. In May 1786 Marshall published A series of prints of scripture history, "designed as ornaments for those apartments in which children receive the first rudiments of their education." The prints were sold "pasted on boards, for hanging up in nurseries" at 1s 6d, in sheets for 8d, sewed in marbled paper 'for the pocket,' for 10d. or else neatly bound in read leather at 1s 2d. They were also published with an accompanying small book entitled, A description of a set of prints of scripture history, which was also available in different bindings. The venture proved to be successful and these two works were quickly followed by the
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publication of five similar 'Series of Prints' together with accompanying 'Descriptions', compiled by Mrs Trimmer, on the subjects of Ancient history (1786), Roman history (1789), English history (1789), the New Testament (1790) and the Old Testament (1797). These were hugely popular and were reprinted by the Marshalls and their successors at regular intervals over the next thirty years.
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In January (1788) Mrs Trimmer and John Marshall announced a new joint venture, The family magazine; or a repository of religious instruction and rational amusement. It was a monthly periodical "designed to counteract the pernicious tendency of immoral books &c. which have circulated of late years among the inferior classes of people," and usually included one engraved plate. The content consisted of 'religious tales for Sunday evenings' and 'moral tales for weekdays'; advice on the management of infants and on childrearing was given together with a comparative view of other nations to demonstrate that 'the poor in England possess privileges, and enjoy many comforts, which persons of their rank ... in other countries cannot enjoy.' Descriptions of animals were also included, 'in order to check the practice of cruelty to brute creation.' The final section of the magazine contained 'a selection of Ballads, Songs &c., both ancient and modern, of a Moral Tendency.' Thus, in both its
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objects and content, this publication introduced many of the ideas which would later bear fruit in Hannah More's more ambitious and well-known scheme for Cheap Repository Tracts of 1795.
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The family magazine survived for eighteen months with Trimmer as both the editor and the principal contributor, but eventually she had to give it up seemingly through exhaustion.
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Books for charity schools
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Because, in Trimmer's opinion, there was a dearth of good educational material to use in charity schools, she decided to write her own. The series of books she produced between 1786 and 1798 were used in Britain and its colonies well into the 19th century. Trimmer was an able promoter of her materials; she knew that her books would not reach large numbers of poor children in charity schools unless they were funded and publicized by the SPCK. She wrote in her journal "my scheme without its aid, will fall to the ground". Thus, she joined the society in 1787. In 1793, she sent 12 copies of her treatise Reflections upon the Education in Charity Schools with the Outlines of a Plan Appropriate Instruction for the Children of the Poor to the subcommittee that chose the books funded by the organization. In the treatise, she argued that the current charity school curriculum was outdated (it was over 100 years old) and needed to be replaced. She suggested a list of seven books that she herself
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would write:
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A Spelling Book in two Parts Scripture Lessons from the Old Testament Scripture Lessons from the New Testament Moral Instructions from the Scriptures Lessons on the Liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer Exemplary Tales The Teacher's Assistant The committee largely accepted her proposal. The Charity School Spelling Book was printed first and was the most widely used. It was one of the first children's books for the poor that was small but still had large type and large margins (features often considered appropriate only for books for more privileged readers). The stories themselves were also innovative: they emphasized the ordinary lives of ordinary children—"these children climbed trees, played with fire, threw cricket bats at sheep and begged in the streets". The book was adopted by Andrew Bell around 1800 for his Madras system of education and by various educational societies throughout Britain and its colonies; it was even used to educate slaves in Antigua and Jamaica.
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The proposed "Scripture Lessons" became Trimmer's An Abridgement of Scripture History, consisting of Lessons selected from the Old Testament, for the Use of Schools and Families which was an anthology of selections from the Bible. Like the Charity School Spelling Book, it was adopted throughout the British educational system and was part of school life well into the mid-19th century. In 1798 SPCK published Scripture Catechisms, Part I and II; these works were intended to aid the teacher while the Abridgements (a shorthand name for the Scripture Histories of both the Old and New Testament that Trimmer eventually published) were intended to aid the pupil. The "Exemplary Tales" seem not to have been written exactly as planned but Trimmer's Servant's Friend and Two Farmers fulfilled the purpose she outlined in her plan of publishing pleasurable moral tales. These two books served as Sunday school prizes as well. The Teacher's Assistant was an instruction aid and was also widely adopted
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throughout British schools. The only texts not published by the SPCK were Trimmer's adaptations and commentaries on the Book of Common Prayer, which she had printed elsewhere.
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Fabulous Histories
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Fabulous Histories (later known as The Story of the Robins), Trimmer's most popular work, was first published in 1786, and remained in print until the beginning of the 20th century. It tells the story of two families, a robin family and a human family, who learn to live together congenially. Most importantly, the human children and the baby robins must 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 18th-century children's literature, "in its depiction of 18th-century attitudes toward animals, Mrs. Trimmer's Fabulous Histories was the most representative children's book of the period". The text expresses most of the themes that would come to 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
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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 18th and 19th centuries, places these themes in a larger historical context, arguing that "the fears of the author and her class about an industrial revolution in ascendance 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." A second overarching theme in the text is rationality; Trimmer expresses the common fear of the power of fiction in her preface, explaining to her childish
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readers that her fable is not real and that animals cannot really speak. Like many social critics during the 18th century, Trimmer was concerned about fiction's potentially damaging impact on young readers. With the rise of the novel and its concomitant private reading, there was a great fear that young people and especially women would read racy and adventurous stories without the knowledge of their parents and, perhaps even more worrisome, interpret the books as they pleased. Trimmer therefore always referred to her text as Fabulous Histories and never as The Story of the Robins in order to emphasize its reality; moreover, she did not allow the book to be illustrated within her lifetime—pictures of talking birds would only have reinforced the paradox of the book (it was fiction parading as a history). Yarde has also speculated that most of the characters in the text are drawn from Trimmer's own acquaintances and family.
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The Guardian of Education Later in her life, Trimmer published the influential Guardian of Education (June 1802 – September 1806), which included ideas for instructing children and reviews of contemporary children's books. Although one previous attempt had been made to regularly review children's books in Britain, according to Matthew Grenby, "it was a far less substantial and sustained enterprise than Trimmer's". The Guardian included not only reviews of children's books but also extracts from texts Trimmer thought would edify her adult readers. She aimed "to assess the current state of educational policy and praxis in Britain and to shape its future direction". To do so, she evaluated the educational theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Madame de Genlis, Joseph Lancaster, and Andrew Bell, among others. In her "Essay on Christian Education," also published separately later, she proposed her own comprehensive educational program.
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Trimmer took her reviewing very seriously and her over 400 reviews constitute a set of distinct values. As Grenby puts it, "her initial questions of any children's books that came before her were always first, was it damaging to religion and second, was it damaging to political loyalty and the established social hierarchy". Religion was always Trimmer's first priority and her emphasis on Biblical inerrancy illustrates her fundamentalism. She criticized books that included scenes of death, characters who were insane, and representations of sexuality, as well as books that might frighten children. She typically praised books that encouraged intellectual instruction, such as Anna Barbauld's Lessons for Children (1778–79).
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Trimmer's fundamentalism, Grenby argues, does not necessarily mark her as the rigid thinker that many critics have presumed her to be. Grenby points out that Trimmer, like Rousseau, believed children were naturally good; in this, she was arguing against centuries of tradition, particularly Puritanical attitudes towards raising children. She also agreed with "Rousseau's key idea [while ironically attacking Rousseau's works themselves], later taken up by the Romantics, that children should not be forced to become adults too early". The Guardian of Education established children's literature as a genre with her reviews. Moreover, in one of her early essays, "Observations on the Changes which have taken place in Books for Children and Young Persons", Trimmer wrote the first history of children's literature, setting out the first canon of children's literature. Its landmark books are still cited today by scholars as important in the development of the genre.
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Fairy tales
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Trimmer is perhaps most famous now for her condemnation of fairy tales, such as the various translations of Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé (originally published in 1697), because they endorsed an irrational view of the world and suggested that children could become successful too easily (in other words, they did not have to work). Chapbooks were the literature of the poor and Trimmer was attempting to separate children's literature from texts she associated with the lower classes; she also feared that children might gain access to this cheap literature without their parents' knowledge. Trimmer criticized the values associated with fairy tales, accusing them of perpetuating superstition and unfavourable images of stepparents. Rather than seeing Trimmer as a censor of fairy tales, therefore, Nicholas Tucker has argued, "by considering fairy tales as fair game for criticism rather than unthinking worship, Mrs Trimmer is at one with scholars today who have also
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written critically about the ideologies found in some individual stories".
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One of the reasons Trimmer believed fairy tales were dangerous was because they led child readers into a fantasy world where adults could not follow and control their exposure to harmful experiences. She was just as horrified by the graphic illustrations included with some fairy tale collections, complaining that "little children, whose minds are susceptible of every impression; and who from the liveliness of their imaginations are apt to convert into realities whatever forcibly strikes their fancy" should not be allowed to see such scenes as Blue Beard hacking his wife's head off.
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French revolution and religion
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In the pages of The Guardian of Education, Trimmer denounced the French revolution and the philosophers whose works she believed underpinned it, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She argued that there was a vast conspiracy, organized by the atheistic and democratic revolutionaries of France, to overthrow the legitimate governments of Europe. These conspirators were attempting to overturn traditional society by "endeavouring to infect the minds of the rising generation, through the medium of Books of Education and Children's Books" (emphasis Trimmer's). Her views were shaped by Abbé Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–98) (she extracted large sections from this text into the Guardian itself) but also by her fears of the ongoing wars between France and Britain during the 1790s. Trimmer emphasized Christianity above all in her writings and maintained that one should turn to God in times of trial. As M. Nancy Cutt argues in her book on children's literature,
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Trimmer and writers like her "claimed emphatically that the degree of human happiness was in direct proportion to the degree of submission to the divine Will. Thus they repudiated the moralists' view that learning should exalt reason and work to the temporal happiness of the individual, which was governed by the best interests of society". Trimmer and her allies contended that French pedagogical theories led to an immoral nation, specifically, "deism, infidelity and revolution".
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Bell vs. Lancasterian school system debate
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In 1789, Andrew Bell invented the Madras system of education to order to instruct British subjects in India; it was a disciplinary system which employed a hierarchy of student monitors and very few teachers (economical for the colonies, Bell argued). He published a book, Experiment in Education (1797), in order to explain his system, one that he thought could be adapted for the poor in England (in it he endorsed many of Trimmer's own books). A year after reading the Experiment, an English Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, adopted many of its principles for his school in London and then published his own book, Improvements in Education (1803), which repeated many of Bell's ideas. Because of his Quaker sympathies, Lancaster did not encourage the teaching of the doctrines of the Established Church. Trimmer, appalled by the suggestion that British children did not need to be brought up within the Established Church, wrote and published her Comparative View of the two systems in 1805, creating a
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schism between two very similar systems. According to F. J. Harvey Darton, an early scholar of children's literature, "her effect upon English education… was very considerable, even extraordinary. The two rival systems, Bell's and Lancaster's, were hotly debated all over the country, and the war between Bell and the Dragon, as a cartoonist labelled it, raged in all the magazines, even in the Edinburgh Review." Out of the debate "arose the two great societies – the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Children of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, and the British and Foreign School Society – upon whose work, fundamentally, the whole of [Britain's] later elementary school system was based".
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Death Trimmer's husband died in 1792; this affected her quite deeply, as is evidenced in her journal. In 1800, she and some of her daughters were forced to move to another house in Brentford. This was painful for Trimmer, who wrote in her diary: She died in Brentford on 15 December 1810, and was buried at St Mary's, Ealing. There is a plaque memorializing her at St. George's, Brentford:
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Reception and legacy Trimmer's most popular book, Fabulous Histories, was reprinted for at least 133 years and had a profound impact on generations of readers and writers. In 1877, when the firm of Griffith and Farran published it as part of their "Original Juvenile Library," they advertised it as "the delicious story of Dicksy, Flapsy, and Pecksy, who can have forgotten it? It is as fresh today as it was half a century ago." Tess Cosslett has also suggested that the names of Trimmer's birds—Dicksy, Pecksy, Flapsy and Robin—bear a striking resemblance to the rabbits—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter—in Beatrix Potter's children's books.
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Trimmer also influenced the children's writers of her own age; William Godwin's Fables, Ancient and Modern (1805), for example, imitates Trimmer's Ladder to Learning. Among her contemporary admirers was Frances Burney, who remarked in a letter to her sister Esther about the education of the latter's 10-year-old daughter, "Mrs. Trimmer I should suppose admirable for a girl" (as an introduction to the Scriptures).
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While Trimmer was highly respected for her charity work during her lifetime and for her books long after her death, her reputation began to wane at the end of the 19th century and plummeted during the 20th century. One reason for this is that her textbooks, so widely used during the first half of the century, were replaced by secular books in the second half of the century. The tone of her books was no longer seen as consonant with British society. An early scholar of children's literature, Geoffrey Summerfield, describes her this way: "Of all the morally shrill women active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, she was probably the shrillest. Unbalanced, frenetic, paranoid, she may have been, but no one could deny her energy and perseverance in defending the souls of the children of England from the assaults of the devil." Recently, however, children's literature scholars have attempted to view 18th-century children's literature within its historical context rather than judge it
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against modern tastes; scholars such as Grenby, Ruwe, Ferguson, Fyfe and Cosslett have reassessed Trimmer's work. Because Trimmer does not fit the mold of 20th-century feminism—that is, since she did not rebel against the social mores of her society as did Mary Wollstonecraft—she did not attract the attention of early feminist scholars. However, as Ruwe points out, "by the confluence of political, historical, and pedagogical events at the turn of the century, a woman such as Trimmer was able to gain a greater visibility in the realm of public letters than was perhaps typical before or after"; Trimmer was a "role model for other women authors", and these later authors often acknowledged their debt explicitly, as did the author of The Footsteps to Mrs. Trimmer's Sacred History.
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Trimmer's children Trimmer and her husband had twelve children.
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List of works This list of works has been taken from Deborah Wills' entry on Trimmer in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Other entries have been added if they appear in other academic articles or database collections under Trimmer's name. An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, and Reading the Holy Scriptures, adapted to the Capacities of Children (1780) Sacred History (1782–85) (6 volumes) The Œconomy of Charity (1786) Fabulous Histories; Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting their Treatment of Animals (1786) A Description of a Set of Prints of Scripture History: Contained in a Set of Easy Lessons (1786) A Description of a Set of Prints of Ancient History: Contained in a Set of Easy Lessons. In Two Parts (1786) The Servant's Friend (1786) The Two Farmers (1787) The Œconomy of Charity (1787) The Sunday-School Catechist, Consisting of Familiar Lectures, with Questions (1788) The Sunday-scholar's Manual (1788) The Family Magazine (1788–89) (periodical)
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A Comment on Dr. Watts's Divine Songs for Children with Questions (1789) A Description of a Set of Prints of Roman History, Contained in a Set of Easy Lessons (1789) The Ladder of Learning, Step the First (1789) A Description of a Set of Prints Taken from the New Testament, Contained in a Set of Easy Lessons (1790) Easy Lessons for Young Children (c.1790) [not on Wills' list] Sunday School Dialogues (1790) (edited by Trimmer) A Companion to the Book of Common Prayer (1791) An Explanation of the Office for the Public Baptism of Infants (1791) An Attempt to Familiarize the Catechism of the Church of England (1791) The Little Spelling Book for Young Children (4th ed., 1791) [not on Wills' list] Reflections upon the Education of Children in Charity Schools (1792) A Friendly Remonstrance, concerning the Christian Covenant and the Sabbath Day; Intended for the Good of the Poor (1792) The Ladder of Learning, Step the Second (1792)
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A Description of a Set of Prints of English History, Contained in a Set of Easy Lessons (1792) An Abridgement of Scripture History; Consisting of Lessons Selected from the Old Testament (1792) A Scriptures Catechism (1797) (2 parts) [not on Wills' list] A Description of a Set of Prints Taken from the Old Testament (c.1797) [not on Willis' list] The Silver Thimble (1799) An Address to Heads of Schools and Families (1799?) The Charity School Spelling Book (c.1799) (2 parts) The Teacher's Assistant: Consisting of Lectures in the Catechised Form (1800) A Geographical Companion to Mrs. Trimmer's Scripture, Antient, and English Abridged Histories, with Prints (1802) A Help to the Unlearned in the Study of the Holy Scriptures (1805) An Abridgement of the New Testament (1805?) A Comparative View of the New Plan of Education Promulgated by Mr. Joseph Lancaster (1805) The Guardian of Education (1802–06) (periodical)
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A New Series of Prints, Accompanied by Easy Lessons; Being an Improved Edition of the First Set of Scripture Prints from the Old Testament (1808) A Concise History of England (1808) Instructive Tales: Collected from the Family Magazine (1810) Sermons, for Family Reading (1811) (posthumous) An Essay on Christian Education (1812) (posthumous) Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer (1814) (posthumous) A Description of a Set of Prints of the History of France, Contained in a Set of Easy Lessons (1815) (posthumous) A Selection from Mrs. Trimmer's Instructive Tales; The Good Nurse... (1815) (posthumous) Miscellaneous Pieces, Selected from the Family Magazine (1818) (posthumous) Prayers and Meditations Extracted from the Journal of the Late Mrs. Trimmer (1818) (posthumous) A Selection from Mrs. Trimmer's Instructive Tales; The Rural Economists... (1819) (posthumous)
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Notes
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Bibliography There is no good biography of Trimmer. Many of the same details of her life, drawn primarily from the account of her life attached to her journal, written by one of her children, are repeated in Balfour, Grenby, Rodgers, Schnorrenberg, Wills and Yarde. Avery, Gillian. Childhood's Pattern: A study of the heroes and heroines of children's fiction 1770–1950. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975. . Balfour, Clara Lucas. "Mrs. Trimmer." Working Women of the Last Half Century: The Lesson of their Lives. London: W. and F. G. Cash, 1856. Cosslett, Tess. "Fabulous Histories and Papillonades." Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. . Cutt, Margaret Nancy. Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth-century Evangelical Writing for Children. Wormley: Five Owls Press, 1979. Darton, F. J. Harvey. Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. 3rd ed. Revised by Brian Alderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. .
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Ferguson, Moira. "Sarah Trimmer's Warring Worlds." Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900: Patriots, Nation, and Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. . Fyfe, Aileen. "Reading Children's Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families." The Historical Journal 43.2 (2000): 453–473. Grenby, M.O. "'A Conservative Woman Doing Radical Things': Sarah Trimmer and The Guardian of Education." Culturing the Child, 1690–1914. Ed. Donelle Ruwe. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. . Grenby, Matthew. "Introduction." The Guardian of Education. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002. . Heath, Pauline. "Mrs Trimmer's Plan of Appropriate Instruction: a revisionist view of her textbooks." History of Education 32.4 (2003): 385–400. Heath, Pauline. The Works of Mrs. Trimmer. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010. .
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Immel, Andrea. Revolutionary Reviewing: Sarah Trimmer's Guardian of Education and the Cultural Political of Juvenile Literature. An Index to The Guardian. Los Angeles: Dept. of Special Collections, UCLA, 1990. . Jackson, Mary V. Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children's Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. . Keutsch, Wilfried. "Teaching the Poor: Sarah Trimmer, God's Own Handmaiden." Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 76.3 (1994): 43–57. Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. . Pickering, Jr., Samuel F. John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981. . Rodgers, Betsy. "Schools of Industry: Mrs. Trimmer." Cloak of Charity: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philanthropy. London: Methuen and Co., 1949.
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Rowe, Karen E. "Virtue in the Guise of Vice: The Making and Unmaking of Morality from Fairy Tale Fantasy." Culturing the Child, 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers. Ed. Donelle Ruwe. Lanham, MD: The Children's Literature Association and the Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2005. . Ruwe, Donelle. "Guarding the British Bible from Rousseau: Sarah Trimmer, William Godwin, and the Pedagogical Periodical." Children's Literature 29 (2001): 1–17. Schnorrenberg, Barbara Brandon. "Sarah Trimmer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved on 21 February 2007. (by subscription only) Summerfield, Geoffrey. Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984. . Trimmer, Sarah. The Guardian of Education. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002. . Trimmer, Sarah. Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer. [Ed. Henry Scott Trimmer.] 3rd ed. London: C. & J. Rivington, 1825. Retrieved on 19 April 2007.
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Tucker, Nicholas. "Fairy Tales and Their Early Opponents: In Defence of Mrs Trimmer." Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood, 1600–1900. Eds. Mary Hilton, Morag Styles and Victor Watson. London: Routledge, 1997. . Wills, Deborah. "Sarah Trimmer." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 158: 340–348. Wills, Deborah. "Sarah Trimmer's Œconomy of Charity: Politics and Morality in the Sunday School State." Lumen 12 (1993): 157–66. Yarde, D.M. The Life and Works of Sarah Trimmer, a Lady of Brentford. Middlesex: The Hounslow District Historical Society, 1972. A 1971 printing has the . Yarde, D.M. Sarah Trimmer of Brentford and Her Children with Some of Her Early Writings, 1780–1786. Middlesex: Hounslow and District Historical Society, 1990.
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External links Fabulous Histories (1798, 6th edition) Fabulous Histories (History of the Robins) (1869 edition) A Description of a set of prints of Scripture History (c.1790) A New Series of Prints ... An Improved Edition of the First Set of Scripture Prints from the Old Testament (1808 edition) The Ladder to Learning (1832 edition) The Teacher's Assistant (1812, 7th edition), vol. 1 Leading-Strings to Knowledge; Thirty-two Easy Stories (1859) The Œconomy of Charity (1801 edition), vol. 2 1741 births 1810 deaths 18th-century English non-fiction writers 19th-century English non-fiction writers 18th-century British women writers 19th-century English women writers Children's literature criticism English children's writers English non-fiction writers English religious writers English women non-fiction writers People from Ipswich Women religious writers 18th-century English women 18th-century English people
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is a fictional character from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, created by Gainax. Within the series, she is designated as the Second Child and the pilot of a giant mecha named Evangelion Unit 02, to fight against enemies known as Angels for the special agency Nerv. Because of childhood trauma, she has developed a competitive and outgoing character, to get noticed by other people and affirm her own self. She appears in the franchise's animated feature films and related media, video games, the original net animation Petit Eva: Evangelion@School, the Rebuild of Evangelion films, and the manga adaptation by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. In the Rebuild of Evangelion films, her Japanese surname is changed to . Yūko Miyamura voices Asuka in Japanese in all her animated appearances and merchandise. In English, Tiffany Grant voices her in the ADV Films dub, while Stephanie McKeon voices her in the Netflix dub.
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Series creator and director Hideaki Anno originally proposed her as the main protagonist of the series. Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto asked Anno to include a male main character instead, downgrading her to the role of co-protagonist with Shinji Ikari. Anno based her psychology on his personality, bringing his moods into the character, acting instinctively and without having thought about how the character would evolve. During the first broadcast of the series, he changed his plans, creating an evolutionary parable in which Asuka becomes more dramatic and suffers, intentionally going against the expectations of the fans. The Japanese voice actress Miyamura was also influential, deciding some details and some of Asuka's lines.
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Asuka maintained a high ranking in every popularity poll of the series and has appeared in surveys to decide the most popular anime characters in Japan. Merchandising based on her has also been released, particularly action figures, which became highly popular. Some critics took issue with her hubris and her personality, judging these as tiresome and arrogant; others appreciated the series's realism and her complex psychological introspection. Asuka is also one of the most successful and influential examples of the tsundere stereotype, characteristic of grumpy and arrogant characters with a fragile hidden side, helping to define its characteristics. Conception
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In the early design stages of the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime, creator and director Hideaki Anno proposed including a girl similar to Asuka as the protagonist. Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto proved reluctant to accept the idea of a female character in the lead role after Gainax's previous works like Gunbuster and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water; he said: "A robot should be piloted by a trained person, whether it is a woman or not makes no difference, but I cannot understand why a girl should pilot a robot". He thus asked the director to use a boy in the role of main character, downgrading Asuka to the role of female co-protagonist. He modeled the relationship between her and the male protagonist Shinji Ikari taking inspiration from Nadia and Jean from The Secret of Blue Water. Asuka should have represented "[Shinji's] desire for the female sex", as opposed to Rei Ayanami's "motherhood", and should have been the idol of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Anno also thought of her as
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Nadia Arwol from The Secret of Blue Water with a different hairstyle. In the initial project, she was described as "a determined girl" who adapts to the situation in which she finds herself, passionate about video games and "aspires to become like Ryoji Kaji". In the nineteenth episode, she would have had to be seriously injured in her attempt to protect Shinji, who would have thus "proved his worth" trying to save her.
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For the character's name, Anno took inspiration from , the protagonist of the manga , written by Shinji Wada; for the surname, he merged the names of two ships used in the Second World War, the Japanese World War II aircraft carrier Soryu and the American aircraft carrier Langley. Despite her multi-ethnic origins, the staff made Asuka's skin the same color as that of Rei Ayanami. For the German terms used in the scenes with Asuka, staff asked for help from an American employee of Gainax, Michael House, who exploited his basic knowledge of the language, acquired in high school, and a Japanese-German dictionary from a local library. According to Anime News Network's May Callum, Gainax did not pay attention to the dialogue's German grammar, believing the series would never be successful enough to be watched by native German speakers. For Asuka's psychology, Anno relied on his personality, as with the other characters in the series. Staff originally inserted her after the first six
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episodes to lighten the tones of the series. She was presented with an exhilarating personality without foreshadowing her eventual depressing moments in the latter half. Anno said that he didn't intend to go "that far" at first and that he didn't completely grasp the character of Asuka until he made her "Are you stupid?" (あんたバカ?, Anta baka?) catchphrase, with which the character was definitively born.
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During the series's first airing, the director began to criticize otaku, Japanese obsessed animation fans, accusing them of being excessively closed and introverted; therefore, he changed the atmosphere of the second half of the series, making the plot darker, violent, and introspective. Asuka's story reflected the changes: although she had been introduced in an essentially positive role, her character became increasingly dramatic and introverted, going against the expectations and the pleasure principle of anime fans. In the twenty-second episode, Anno focused on Asuka's emotional situation, harassed by her first menstrual cycle, but not considering himself capable of exploring such a feminine theme, he condensed everything into a single scene. Miyamura's interpretation was also important. During the production of the last episodes he inserted scenes in which he represented Asuka with simple hand-drawn sketches, remaining satisfied with the result, saying: "After having drawn Asuka
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with a marker, as soon as Yuko Miyamura gave it her voice, it was more Asuka than ever". Furthermore, the author's original intent was a long live action segment for the film The End of Evangelion (1997), with different content than the final version. The original segment focused on the character of Asuka, who would wake up in an apartment after drinking and spend the night with Tōji Suzuhara, with whom she would embark on a sexual and sentimental relationship. Misato Katsuragi would have been the roommate in the apartment next to her; Rei Ayanami would have been her colleague and her senpai. In the alternate universe of live action, Shinji would never have existed; walking the streets of Tokyo-2, however, Asuka would hear his voice calling her.
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Voice Neon Genesis Evangelion
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Yūko Miyamura voices Asuka's character in all her appearances in the original series, and the later films, spin-offs, video games, and the new Rebuild of Evangelion film series. The only exception is an introspective scene from the twenty-second episode, when other female members of the cast replace the character's voice during a metaphysical sequence. She had originally auditioned for the role of Rei, but staff felt her voice was too energetic, so she was offered Asuka instead. According to Miyamura, Asuka's dubbing proved difficult. She said she wished to "erase Evangelion" and forget her experience with it. Towards the end of the first broadcast, Miyamura suffered from bulimia and found herself in a disastrous psychic state, similar to that of Asuka's character. After the release of the movie The End of Evangelion (1997) she said, "I think I had a kamikaze feeling during the voice-over". The voice actress identified herself so much with the character she took a conversation course
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in German, decided some of the character's lines, and Asuka's details, such as the cloth puppet in the shape of a monkey featured in her childhood flashbacks. One of her ideas was the German sentences Asuka utters in the twenty-second episode of the series in a telephone conversation with her stepmother.
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When dubbing the last scene of The End of Evangelion, in which Shinji strangles Asuka, Shinji's voice actress Megumi Ogata physically imitated his gesture and strangled her colleague. Because of her agitation, Ogata squeezed her neck too hard, risking having her not properly recite the rest of the film's lines. With Ogata's gesture, Miyamura could finally produce realistic sounds of strangulation and thanked her colleague for her availability. Anno based the scene on an incident that happened to one of his female friends. She was strangled by a malicious man, but when she was about to be killed, she stroked him for no reason. When the man stopped squeezing her neck, the woman regained a cold attitude, speaking the words that Asuka would have said to Shinji in the original script: . Dissatisfied with Miyamura's interpretation, Anno asked her to imagine a stranger sneaking into her room, who could rape her at any time, but who prefers to masturbate by watching her sleep. The director
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asked her what she would say about this if she woke up suddenly, noticing what had happened. Miyamura, disgusted by the scene, replied saying . After the conversation, Anno changed the line by echoing the voice actress's reaction.
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Rebuild of Evangelion
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Further difficulties arose during the dubbing sessions for the film Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012), the third installment of the Rebuild saga, set fourteen years after the previous movies. According to Miyamura, the scenario gave her "very confused feelings" and "a constant feeling of light-headedness". Hideaki Anno did not explain the plot and setting of the film to her, complicating her work. At the beginning, however, she didn't want to go back to dubbing the Rebuild and she was scared, given the suffering caused by The End of Evangelion. Even after finishing the final film of the saga, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021), Miyamura stated: "I felt like a mother to Asuka at times. I cannot watch End of Evangelion even now because it's too painful." Recording for Thrice Upon a Time was less stressful, but also taxing due to the many delays and revisions in production. At the end of the recording, Anno thanked her for playing the role of Asuka for twenty-five
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years; Miyamura furthermore noted Anno and Kazuya Tsurumaki orientated her far more than before.
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During the recording of the feature film, she had to dub a scene in which Asuka screams in pain as she pulls an anti-Angel seal from her eye. When she recorded, the drawings for the sequence had not yet been completed, so she imagined the scenes involved, listening to the director's explanations and trying to do her best to feel the required sensations. Screaming, she tried to use all her imagination and pretended to stab herself, as if flesh were being torn from her. The support of Megumi Ogata, Shinji's voice actress who was already used to screaming in other Evangelion scenes, also helped her in the process. The last thing asked of her was to write the character's full name in cursive herself to be used in the film. She had lived in Australia for the past two decades, but was still unsure of how to write "Langley". Miyamura also played Soryu and Shikinami as two different people, but both with a strong desire to be better. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, her sessions were already
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finished; later, some points were resumed and re-recorded, so there was no precise prediction as to when the work would be finished. She still had difficulties in understanding the story, and had taken the habit of reading fan-made analysis.
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English dub Asuka is voiced by Tiffany Grant in English in the ADV films dub, and Stephanie McKeon the Netflix dub. Grant felt playing Asuka was "refreshing", as "she says the most horrible things to people, things that you'd like to say to people and can't get away with". Grant says she greatly identified with the character, to the point of Asuka becoming a part of her: "She's kinda like my kid sister, which is why I feel the need to stick up for her". Grant met Miyamura in conventions in the early 2000s and, discussing their experiences portraying Asuka, Miyamura rekindled their shared love and concern for the character's happiness. Appearances
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Neon Genesis Evangelion
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Asuka Langley Soryu was born on December 4, 2001. She is the daughter of Dr. Soryu Kyoko Zeppelin, an employee of a research center named Gehirn. She has German and Japanese blood and US citizenship. In 2005, her mother participated in a failed contact experiment with Unit 02, but because of an accident, suffered a severe mental breakdown, becoming permanently hospitalized. These injuries render her unable to recognize her child. Asuka is deeply hurt by her mother's behavior. She now speaks to a doll believing it to be her daughter. After some time, Asuka is chosen as the Second Child and Eva-02's official pilot. Hoping that her selection could lead her mother to pay attention to her again, she excitedly runs to her room to announce the news, only to find her mother's corpse hanging from the ceiling. Shocked and traumatized by her mother's suicide, Asuka adopts self-affirmation as the only reason to be, participating in training sessions to become a pilot and meet other people's
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expectations.
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Her custody is assigned to Ryoji Kaji, towards whom she is infatuated. At fourteen, after graduating from a German university, Asuka leaves there, accompanied by Kaji and Unit 02, on board a United Nations aircraft carrier escorted by numerous warships to protect the Eva. During the trip, she meets Shinji Ikari, Third Child and pilot of Unit 01, and her new classmates Tōji and Kensuke. The United Nations fleet is then attacked by Gaghiel, the sixth Angel. Recognizing this event as a good chance to demonstrate her skills, Asuka independently activates her Eva, coercing Shinji into joining her in the cockpit. Despite struggling to work together, and the Eva not yet being equipped to operate underwater, the two children destroy the enemy. She is later placed in class 2-A of Tokyo-3 first municipal middle school., living with Shinji under Misato Katsuragi's care. She teases Shinji continuously about his passivity and perceived lack of manliness, but gradually comes to respect and like him
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as they fight Angels together. She is rarely able to express these feelings. However, following a series of Angel battles where Shinji outperforms her, she grows increasingly unable to continue to suppress her traumatized psyche, drastically lowering her pilot skills. This comes to a head when the Angel Arael attacks; Asuka, burdened by her continually worsening performance in tests, tries to attack the Angel alone, but is overwhelmed by the Angel's attack, a beam that penetrates her mental barrier and forces her to relive her darkest memories. In the battle with the next Angel, Armisael, she cannot activate the Evangelion. As a result of this, Asuka loses all will to live, goes to the home of her classmate Hikari Horaki, spending time aimlessly roaming the streets of Tokyo-3. She is eventually found by Nerv personnel, naked and starving in the bathtub of a ruined building. The main series ends with her lying in a hospital bed in a catatonic state.
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The End of Evangelion
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In the movie The End of Evangelion (1997), as the Japanese Strategic Self-Defense Force invades Nerv headquarters, Asuka is placed inside Unit 02, which is then submerged in a lake for her protection. As she is bombarded by depth charges, Asuka wakes up, declares she does not want to die, and, in a moment of clarity, feels her mother within the Eva. Her self-identity regained, she emerges and defeats the JSSDF, before encountering nine mechas named Mass-Production Evas. Though she successfully disables all nine opponents, Eva-02's power runs out; the power of the mass-produced Evas allows them to eviscerate and dismember Unit 02. Seeing Asuka's destroyed Evangelion makes Shinji go into a frenzy, which eventually culminates in him starting a catastrophic event named the Third Impact. Shinji and Asuka have an extended dream-like sequence inside Instrumentality, a process in which the soul of humanity merges into one collective consciousness; Asuka claims she can not stand the sight of
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him, but Shinji responds that this is because he is just like her. Shinji claims he wants to understand her, but she refuses. He is furious at her rejection and lashes out by choking her. After Shinji rejects Instrumentality, she returns after him in the new world; in the film's final scene, Shinji begins strangling Asuka, but stops when she caresses his face.
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Rebuild of Evangelion