I. and Opie, P. (1997). The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (new ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.42 Paul, L. (2011). The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge.
43 Queen Mab; or, The Tricks of Harlequin. (1771). London: Robert Sayer.
44 Reid-Walsh, J. (2017). Interactive Books: Playful Media before Pop-Ups. New York: Routledge.
45 Reid-Walsh, J. (ed.) (2019). Learning as play: An animated, interactive archive of 17th- to 19th-century narrative media for and by children. Pennsylvania State University. https://sites.psu.edu/play (accessed December 7, 2021).
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47 Schiller, J.G. (1973). Artistic awareness in early children’s books. Children’s Literature 3: 177–185.
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5 The Child-Centered Universe of Nineteenth-Century Children’s Nonfiction
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem
Children’s nonfiction on a broad spectrum of topics often positions child readers at the center of their universe, then guides readers outward, as active investigators who observe and ask questions, then inward, as reflective recorders who generate new knowledge. Consider, for example, the similarities between three texts on sublime wonders of scale: Dutch educator Kees Boeke’s Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (1957) begins with the photo of a schoolgirl holding a cat, then zooms out beyond our galaxy, before returning inward to the atomic level, where empty space and charged particles visually echo the far reaches of outer space; a century earlier, Mary Ward’s A World of Wonders Revealed by the Microscope (1858, p. 54) declares that looking through microscopes and telescopes is “like seeing a faint glimpse of the meaning of ‘Infinite Power’”; earlier still, Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) explains love, eternity, and forgiveness in 12 successive hymns that anticipate readers’ cognitive development from infants who grasp their mothers’ hands to youths who grasp a cosmic order. The continuities between these three books published in three different centuries is possible because they adhere to conventions of children’s nonfiction established during the period covered by this chapter. Surveying natural history to geography and biography, I show how this formula – outward exploration, inward reflection – provides a practical way to draw connections across the diverse genre we now call nonfiction or information texts. By organizing knowledge cognitively and spatially in relation to readers, children’s nonfiction was literally child-centered.
There are two essential strategies that nineteenth-century books commonly use to present information to children. First, nonfiction books send children out into the world; they involve children in the process of discovery by signaling beyond the book, using what I call “interlocutor gestures.” I borrow this term from art history, where it refers to a figure in Renaissance painting who directs viewers toward the central scene or locks gaze with the audience, breaking the fourth wall. In these self-referential moments, nonfiction books suggest actions to readers in the second person or direct children how to perform experiments using fictional families. Thus books may cover their subjects through a series of fortunate discoveries made by child picaro protagonists, who encounter lessons while moving from place to place – what Ellenor Fenn advocates as “education of each moment” and Claude Adrien Helvétius called “education by chance.”1 Alternatively, books may facilitate chance discoveries in readers who peruse encyclopedic catalogs or exhaustive catechisms.2
Second, nonfiction books anticipate and represent for children their own biological development. Responding to contemporary beliefs about child development, they narrate their subject matter with graduating sophistication to match readers’ growth. These “developmental gestures” include increasingly technical language, or transitions from local settings and direct observation to unfamiliar places and abstract ideas. More explicitly, nonfiction books may feature child characters who, like Bildungsroman protagonists, grow up over the course of several volumes, implying that readers may take several years to pursue the book’s lessons. Even shorter time periods (a single day) may prove a metonym for a child’s entire youth trajectory or recapitulate the history of humankind.
Interlocutor and developmental gestures build connections between children’s material surroundings and their interior growth. Children travel outward in order to construct interiority; they build specimen cabinets in order to stock their minds. Thus nineteenth-century nonfiction values both the practical, real-life activities that readers perform when they put down their books (actually doing an experiment, collecting specimens, journaling), and the immersive, imaginative work of reader identification with fictional characters (who themselves travel, experiment, observe). By representing the learning process itself, nonfiction teaches metacognition (i.e. thinking about thinking) – or what John Locke calls “reflection,” a higher order of thought that transforms “sensation” (the mere mechanics of sensory perception) into human consciousness (Pickering 1977).
Before proceeding, I want to address the fact that reading older nonfiction books can be frustrating. Occasional dense prose and relentless catechism summon visions of authoritarian teacher-ancestors equipped with birch and rod, forcing facts down children’s throats. Even their attempts to enliven learning by introducing fictional families can seem rigid or preachy. Yet children’s nonfiction is full of invectives against memorization and authoritarianism in favor of direct experimentation and debate. “Children are busy observers of natural objects, and have many questions,”
