Hesba Stretton (1832–1911) was the pen name of Sarah Smith, an English novelist and children's writer, best known for evangelical fiction addressing urban poverty. She was born on 27 July 1832 in Wellington, Shropshire, to a bookseller and publisher father, and was largely self-educated in his shop. Her pen name combines Hesba, an acronym formed from the initials of Sarah and her siblings — Hannah, Elizabeth, Sarah, Bryan, and Anna — with Stretton, from All Stretton, a Shropshire village the family visited. She began publishing short fiction in Charles Dickens's magazines Household Words and All the Year Round in the 1860s, and wrote prolifically for the Religious Tract Society and other evangelical publishers. Her signature work is Jessica's First Prayer (1867), a tract-style novella about a poor waif's spiritual conversion, one of the best-selling children's books of the Victorian era — reportedly more than 1.5 million copies — and translated into multiple languages. Her other notable titles include The Children of Cloverley (1866), Pilgrim Street (1867), Little Meg's Children (1868), and Alone in London (1869). Her recurring themes of child poverty, slum life, evangelical redemption, and social conscience place her within the waif fiction genre popular in Victorian Britain. In 1884 she co-founded the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a forerunner of the NSPCC. She never married, and lived much of her later life with her sister. She died on 8 October 1911 at Ham, Surrey.
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