with its episodic descriptions of family activities, rational mother figure, child observer, and adventuresome father storyteller – recognizably adhere to what was once, 50 years earlier, a nonfiction form. Interplay across this genre divide informs the work of Maud and Miska Petersham, illustrators whose Mikki picturebook trilogy (1929) follows a traveling child – while their extensive schoolbook series (e.g. The Story Book of Earth’s Treasures: Gold, Coal, Oil, Iron and Steel [1935]) conforms to the commerce tour formula established a century earlier by Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Elliott, and Jane Marcet.
The award-wining picturebooks of Holling C. Holling likewise have their roots in fantastical “it-narrative” histories, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1841), which relates the “authentic history” of New England as witnessed by that venerable furniture: “On sturdy oaken legs it trudges diligently from one scene to another, and seems always to thrust itself in the way, with most benign complacency, whenever an historical personage happens to be looking round for a seat.” The trilogy concludes with the grandson, Laurence, who exclaims, “Oh, how I wish that the chair could speak!” (1887, pp. iii, 207), triggering a dream sequence, wherein that Puritan rood enunciates its final wisdom. Equally irresistible, Annie Carey’s Autobiographies of a Lump of Coal; a Grain of Salt; a Drop of Water; a Bit of Old Iron; a Piece of Flint (1870) commences narration by a coal, who interrupts the child about to thump it with a fire poker with a history of its past life as a tree and its geological formation underground, before self-immolating into carbonic afterlife.
Returning to my initial formula – travel outward, reflection inward – I would argue that continuities across the century include a reciprocal relationship between exploration and psychological depth, whereby travel outward symbolizes developmental growth. Consider, for example, the recapitulation theory that overlays geographical movement in Holling’s Paddle-to-the-Sea (1941). The story follows the wooden figure of an American Indian in a canoe, who travels the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, revealing the history, ecology, cultures, technologies, and commerce of the Great Lakes. Paddle’s journey follows a geographical timeline that progresses toward European culture, its past represented by the American Indian child who carved Paddle, and who reappears as a man at the story’s conclusion. Like many it-narratives, Paddle-to-the-Sea uses an object’s adventures to expose objectification, yet its conflation of geographic space with historical time supports a longstanding white settler mythology about Indians retreating into the sunset (literally pictured on the final spread). American Indian life along the Great Lakes occurs in the past, as when Paddle passes the copper mines: “Indians, long ago, had mined this copper to make knives and arrowheads, trading it as far away as Mexico. Now-a-days, copper is made into such things as pennies, cooking pots, and electric cables” (ch. 13). From arrowheads to pennies – money and hydroelectricity now govern the lakes. Consistent with Victorian ideology, this overlay between time and space suggests ways that twentieth-century nonfiction owes a significant debt to the previous century.
Exemplary Lives and Biography
Correspondence between interlocutor and developmental gestures is most explicit in children’s genres concerned with self-fashioning. A descendant of Plutarch’s Lives, exemplary biography evolved in the nineteenth century to include such specialized compendiums as Biblical figures, Shakespearean characters, or women’s lives. Biographies of men who rise to prominence, such as engineers James Watt and Robert Stevenson, frequently appear in children’s periodicals, setting the stage for Ragged Dick and Tom Swift, while biographers Jacob Abbott and Mason Locke Weems invented American national mythologies, including the cherry tree episode from Life of Washington (1806 edition). Exemplary lives are generally traditionalist, but the exceptions prove remarkable. In deciding how to represent Benjamin Franklin’s disobedience or Admiral Lord Nelson’s disability, authors contended with complicated figures who challenged established norms (Stabell 2013). Moreover, cautionary and exemplary lives were essential to every social reform movement of the century, from abolition, to animal rights, to temperance, offering children on the margins the concrete political arguments and literacy instruction necessary to fight for their education, livelihoods, and enfranchisement.
Through life writing, children witness how eminent figures gain power by representing their lives to the public, and how later generations might reinterpret those lives to imagine new virtues. In Female Biography (1803), for instance, Mary Hays, novelist and friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, subtly alters the account of Anne Askew from Fox’s Book of Martyrs (1563) by foregrounding Askew’s rational arguments under torture and her fortitude in dissolving her forced marriage with an abusive husband. If women authors made such adaptations, what about their readers? Citing the surviving juvenile notebooks of Jane Austen, Marjory Fleming, and Princess Victoria, Lynne Vallone (2008) suggests that the conventionality of female biographies challenged these dissatisfied girl readers to pen their own versions, as they discovered sympathies with persecuted historical figures such as Mary, Queen of Scots. And according to Mary Niall Mitchell, children of color educated at the Couvent School in New Orleans during the later nineteenth century acted as “historians,” who recorded events through autobiographical letters (Capshaw and Duane 2017, pp. 61–74). Thus life writing is a peculiarly participatory genre; authors who compile and adapt biographies also transmit that power to their readers.
Similar to Priscilla Wakefield’s geographies, children’s biographies contain interlocutor gestures; they model how to write history through the author’s process of compilation, retelling, reprinting, and repurposing of life stories for adults. Valentine K. Tikoff shows, for instance, that when Abigail Field Mott adapted Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) into a short children’s edition in 1829 for the New York African Free School pupils, she transformed Equiano from sympathetic “other” to “a role model, the exemplar of what a young African American reader could and should become,” in order to be “successful economic actors” and “responsible citizens” (Capshaw and Duane 2017, pp. 95, 96), thereby preparing Black children to become leaders in the more radical abolitionist movement of the next decade. Following emancipation, inspirational stories of resistance by the enslaved appeared in school readers like Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book (1865) and the American Tract Society’s The Freedman’s primers and readers, again preparing children for political activism that included public reading, recitation, and essay writing in literary societies (Capshaw and Duane 2017, pp. 44–53; McHenry 2002, pp. 187–250).
This invitation to write back is especially powerful when the biographical subject uses literacy to effect social change. British Radicals William Cobbett and William Lovett reinforced their autobiographical accounts of self-education through journalism and political activism. Cobbett’s many self-help books include a grammar that invites working-class youth to correct the king’s speeches. In America, Ihanktonwan (Yankton Sioux) author Zitkala-Ša began her lifelong advocacy of self-determination in Indian education with her autobiographical essay “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900) published in The Atlantic and later anthologized with Old Indian Legends in children’s school readers (Suhr-Sytsma 2014). In such cases, life writing has proved the first step in producing culturally responsive literacy materials that enable children to see themselves in what they read.
Life writing thus reproduces itself through intergenerational cycles of emulation that retell history in order to change the future. The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921) showcases this generative exemplarity. A periodical produced by W.E.B. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset for children of color, Brownies interweaves essays and photographs of praiseworthy children (e.g. musicians, graduates) with exemplary biographies (e.g. Toussaint L’Ouverture, Phillis Wheatley), and positions letters from young readers against editorial replies. These exchanges make exemplarity alive even while rewriting Black history.6 While Brownies supported the early career of poet Langston Hughes (who later wrote children’s histories), the periodical is indebted to prior generations of children’s life writing by Ann Plato, Susan Paul, and Abigail Field Mott (Capshaw and Duane 2017, pp. 75–144). Radical nineteenth-century biographies use
