imprisoned usurpers, and famous artists. The children tour ancient caves and mines and investigate modern wonders, such as the Duke of Bridgewater’s navigable canal that supplied Manchester with coal. Compared with modern travel, museums and inns are noticeably sparse; the family relies on a network of friends and wealthy families, and they hire local guides to help them access remote places. Wakefield’s book could serve as a field guide for families, complete with practical hints on which mountain hikes are toddler-friendly and which beaches have the best seashells. The book even provides an itinerary and map with the journey marked.
With the growth of manufacturing, touring trade and industry constitutes its own subgenre, which prefigures social problem novels by Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens. Stories of families who tour Britain – such as Maria Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy (1801–1821), Mrs. Brook’s A Dialogue between a Lady and Her Pupils (ca. 1800), and Isaac Taylor’s Scenes of British Wealth (1823) – prepare children for an era when national wealth increasingly stemmed from manufacturing, commerce, and engineering. For the youngest children, such books focus on traditional artisans (e.g. John and Elizabeth Newbery’s Jack of All Trades, 1804) and picturesque country labor (e.g. Mary Elliott’s Rural Employments, 1820, or Jane Marcet’s Willy’s Rambles, 1840), offering, in the manner of Richard Scarry, comforting depictions of employment continuity across generations. By contrast, books for older youth celebrate the period’s transformative technologies, the “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” that even William Wordsworth eulogizes. George Dodd’s Days at the Factories (1843) collects essays from The Penny Magazine into a series of family daytrips with detailed technical drawings, used “extensively” in advanced classes at the “Engineering class of King’s College” (p. 16). Not to be outdone, The Boy’s Book of Industrial Information (1859) boasts 370 engravings by the Dalziel brothers, showing engineering wonders, agriculture, mining, and manufactories – a Victorian precursor to David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work (1988). Such books depict a national economy dependent on slavery, child labor, and colonial violence but do not necessarily question these practices. On a visit to Sir Richard Arkwright’s mills, Priscilla Wakefield enthusiastically announces, “our travellers had the satisfaction of seeing here a thousand children employed usefully,” a sentiment largely repeated in late Victorian descriptions of ragged schools (1804, p. 40).
On the global scene, geography books proceed like an exhibition of the trade of all nations. The fictional travelers (or narrator) gather eclectic information about each place, including habitation, family units, food and clothing, exports, and stereotypical behavior. British accounts of different geographies, manners, and governments position their country as the perfect medium between tyranny and democracy, and morally superior to other global powers (evidenced by British abolition and emancipation); likewise, American geographies, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s First Geography for Children (1855), bolster cultural similarities with Britain to suggest the United States may also succeed as a global power. In borrowing from adult scientific and geographical accounts, children’s authors taught prevailing theories about race and climate that supported European superiority and British fitness for colonial rule. When describing Africa, for example, Venning’s A Geographical Present (1817) divides the continent into four pieces by exports, then categorizes people by physical appearance, interpreting skin color or head shape as legible markers of moral strengths and weakness (Norcia 2010, pp. 40–60). Where adult travel literature conceals ideology behind a veneer of scientific objectivity, children’s books openly confess their agenda. Thus late-century classics of world geography and history, such as James Hewitt’s Geography of the British Colonies and Dependencies (1869) and Rudyard Kipling and C.R.L. Fletcher’s A School History of England (1911), prove useful for exposing the purposeful development of racist and dehumanizing rhetoric and its dissemination among children groomed for colonial posts (Mangan 1993).
These ideologies are interrogated on occasion. In Evenings with the Children; or, Travels in South America (1871), by Vienna G. Ramsey, an author from an abolitionist Baptist community, Charles questions his mother “by what right” Spanish conquistadors claimed land in Peru, insisting that the Peruvians would have just as much right to “discover” and claim Spain (pp. 60–61). They learn about Palmares, a city established by self-emancipated slaves and destroyed by the Portuguese military, which “teaches us how strong the love of freedom is in the heart of man” (p. 224). Priscilla Wakefield’s Mental Improvement (1794; 1799 American edition), published by the Quaker abolitionist firm Harvey and Darton, interrupts a visit to Liverpool’s shipyards with a lengthy tally of slavery’s evils, then asks children to join the sugar boycott (1799, vol. 1, p. 80). Such critiques most commonly appear in geographies about globally sourced domestic commodities – sugar, coffee, tea, and diamonds – although some authors (e.g. Maria Elizabeth Budden and Rev. Isaac Taylor) avoid condemning abusive practices.
Despite class conflict, racial injustice, and imperial conquest, geography books emphatically pronounce the unity of mankind. As early as William Darton’s Little Jack of All Trades (1814), division of labor and natural resources are credited for cooperation across stations and nations: “Commerce unites men of all countries, and scatters plenty and variety over the earth, … and whilst each individual works for the general good, the whole community works for him” (p. 4). With the invention of telegraphs and the steampress, this sanguine philosophy of free trade evolves to include the free flow information: “the seeds of religion and knowledge are scattered over the globe,” states The Book of Commerce by Sea and Land (1833), and “the researches and discoveries of great men of every nation are brought together for the general benefit and good of mankind” (p. 9). Such optimism may harness family metaphors. “I like looking at a map,” announces the narrator in Emily Taylor’s Glances at the Ball We Live On (1856), “because it makes me think of the number of brothers and sisters we have; for all of us should be but as one family, seeing we are all children of one great and good Parent” (p. 61). Families in geography books may cast foreign countries and colonial conquests as siblings, their conflicts adjudicated by mother Britannia. In Barbara Hofland’s Panorama of Europe (1813), the children dress up as Spain, Ireland, Scotland, etc., and step forward to represent each nation’s character and history (Norcia 2010, pp. 44–48).
Considering the close relationship between map making and world building, it may come as no surprise that many geography, travel, and history books are the seeds of modern fantasy and historical fiction. Edward Lear provides an early instance, with his mock-geography book, The Story of Four Little Children Who Went Round the World (1871). But even didactic works hint that reading about other places may stimulate free play more readily than actual travel. In Ramsey’s Evenings with the Children (1871) the two siblings “travel in imagination” by riverboat and rail from Mexico to Brazil, drawing their journey’s map as their mother details the history and wildlife of each region. Despite having no fictional frame, Peter Parley’s Universal History, on the Basis of Geography (1837), edited by Nathaniel Hawthorne, reminds children that they cannot widely travel and suggests they instead imagine how they might survey the world in a balloon. In late-Victorian accounts, the nursery tableau may replace the mother-as-guide with magic, as with Little Lucy’s Wonderful Globe (1871) by Charlotte Yonge, a prolific author of children’s histories and historical novels. Lucy lives with her parents, siblings, and great-uncle Joseph, a retired ship’s surgeon with an eclectic museum. Their approachable housekeeper, Mother Bunch, a well-traveled sailor’s widow of unknown nationality, tells the children stories and serves cookies shaped like countries. One night while Lucy is confined to the museum with scarlet fever, her curiosity (whether dream or magic) activates objects from the collection, which transport her around the globe to meet children from different cultures, before they all dance about her fireside in a “Dream of All Nations” and celebrate global trade Victorian style, using imagery from the Book of Revelation.
These authors generated the first low fantasy plots to structure their geographies, creating a genre that came to include E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906) and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) (Rahn 1991). By the early twentieth century, the imaginative tradition
