 The Fairchild Family continued to be a bestseller despite the increasingly popular Wordsworthian image of childhood innocence and the sentimental picture of childhood presented in novels such as Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837 – 39). One scholar 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 – 61). 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." As late as the 1900s, Lord Frederic Hamilton states that he attended a party at which each guest dressed up as a character from the book. 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 Hamilton writes, for instance, that "there was plenty about eating and drinking; one could always skip the prayers, and there were three or four very brightly written accounts of funerals in it."
