Julia Maitland

Julia Charlotte Maitland (21 October 1808 – 29 January 1864), née Barrett, first married name Thomas, Julia was a favourite with the elderly Fanny, who remarked on her "very good sense, & a truly blyth juvenile love of humour". She and her sister Hetty (died 1833) suffered from tuberculosis and their mother took them to France and then Italy, where they came in touch with Fanny's sister Sarah Burney. Sarah Burney wrote of them in her correspondence and regularly described Julia as a beauty. Julia made a full recovery in 1834. The school she and her husband ran in Rajahmundry accepted boys of different castes and taught in both English and the local language ("Gentoo"). Controversially, it was strongly Christian. She also set up a multilingual reading room and assisted in starting other schools nearby. The book ends with a plea for a national system of education in India, as the route to modernization: "If every civilian up the country were to have a poor little school like ours, it would do something in time." She also made strong efforts to learn local languages, helped with famine relief, and investigated and condemned the South Indian slave trade.

Maitland later wrote three books for children, all popular in their day: Historical Acting Charades (1847); The Doll and Her Friends, or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina, illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne (1852); and Cat and Dog, or Memoirs of Puss and the Captain, illustrated by Harrison Weir (1854). These were both humorous and didactic, promoting politeness, benevolence and generosity. She commented at the end of Cat and Dog, "I would propose Puss and Captain as an example of a new and better method of 'Living Like Cat and Dog'."