Instructive books for children in Georgian England
p. 277-300
Texte intégral
‘Goody Two Shoes’ is almost out of print. Mrs Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs B’s and Mrs Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant & vapid as Mrs B’s books convey, it seems, must come to the child in the shape of knowledge… Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
Hang them! – I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.1
1As the poet and essayist Charles Lamb wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1802, by the turn of the nineteenth century, old wives’ tales and fables had vanished from the nursery, replaced by piles of more didactic books offering children geography and natural history instead. The emphasis upon knowledge that Lamb denounces here, clearly separating children’s literature into instructive and more imaginative texts, and condemning science for children, reveals how children’s books in the eighteenth century played ‘a significant role in disseminating information about the principles and practical advances of the Enlightenment’, as Mary Jackson contends.2 Indeed, as ‘science’ succeeded ‘poetry’, Lamb suggested early children’s literature certainly reflected new educational trends, highlighting in so doing what was deemed essential for (middle-class) children to master. However, as this chapter will show, the reality was more complex than Lamb’s dichotomy suggests. The dualistic model (‘reason’ versus ‘imagination’), often emphasised in accounts of English children’s literature, fails to take into consideration the way in which late Georgian texts for juvenile audiences developed new educational strategies which challenged such dichotomy between imagination and reason, or literature and science. Such texts therefore offer a significant prism through which to examine both the complex changes in the ordering or definition of knowledge and the impact of such changes on the moral and social order.
Inventing children’s literature: the case of John Newbery
2Children’s literature emerged over a long period as a fully distinct genre. It is generally believed that in the eighteenth century, children’s literature had been designed to purvey religious lessons and that the children’s book industry was mostly limited to such books as conformed to prevailing moral standards. Though more and more chapbooks suggested that literature for children could be entertaining, books such as Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs, Attempted in Easie Language for the Use of Children (1715) still prominently figured on the bookshelves of the nursery.3 In the earlier part of the eighteenth century, education and amusement had been seen as occupying quite distinct roles in the life of a child. Pedagogical texts tended to be characterized by dry didacticism and moralizing, whilst imaginative reading was banned, most particularly fairy tales.4 Throughout the century, moreover, as accounts of English children’s literature have often suggested, children were nurtured by didactic stories in the vein of Maria Edgeworth’s narratives and sermons,5 and protected from the dangers of the imagination so as to become industrious and responsible citizens. However, studies by Mitzi Myers, Alan Richardson, or Donelle Ruwe have since revised these conceptions of eighteenth-century English children’s literature, proposing a much more nuanced view of early Georgian educationalists.6
3The market for children’s literature was launched when John Newbery (1713–1767) started to merge amusement and instruction in his publications for children.7 Between 1744 and 1802, Newbery’s firm and its successors published 400 titles, most of which were ‘original’, as Robert Bator has it.8 Though Newbery’s Lilliputian Magazine (1751–52) was a failed commercial venture, many of his books sold well, illustrating the expansion of the market for children’s literature.9 Newbury’s first Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two letters from Jack the Giant Killer (1744), undoubtedly marked the invention of the children’s book industry. Yet, the book was perhaps, as Mary Hilton argues, less influential than Newbery’s The Philosophy of Tops and Balls; or, The Newtonian System of Philosophy, adapted to the capacities of young gentlemen and ladies, and familiarized and made entertaining by objects with which they are intimately acquainted: being the substance of six lectures read to the Lilliputian Society, by Tom Telescope, A. M. and collected and methodized for the benefit of the youth of these kingdoms, by their old friend, Mr Newbery, in St Paul’s Church Yard (1761).10
4The Philosophy of Tops and Balls was an adaptation of Locke’s Elements of Natural Philosophy,11 a treatise which was not originally intended for publication but written for Locke’s twelve-year old pupil, Francis Masham.12 The book was certainly inspired by Francesco Algarotti’s Neutonianismo per le dame (Newtonianism for the Ladies, or dialogues on light and colours (1737)), made up of six dialogues which present ‘Newton’s theory of gravity and the structure of light’.13 It popularised eighteenth-century natural philosophy, exemplifying the way in which children’s literature was informed by Enlightenment science. The main character, Tom Telescope, delivers a series of scientific lectures to the ‘Lilliputian Society’, discussing subjects ranging from physics, astronomy and geology to natural history and human physiology, under several chapter headings which very much resembled Locke’s.14
5Highly popular, Newbery’s Philosophy of Tops and Balls was regularly reprinted into the middle of the nineteenth century. As Jim Secord notes, nine editions of Newbery’s text were published in the eighteenth century, and the text was revised successively in 1794, 1806, 1827, and 1838, thus over eight decades. Irish printings, Dutch translations (in 1768 and 1783), Swedish ones (in 1782 and 1786), American editions (in 1803 and 1808), and even an Italian version by ‘Tommaso Telescopio’ (in 1832) were also published;15 it is believed that around twenty-five to thirty thousand copies were issued during the eighteenth century in England alone,16 ‘the actual figure may be far higher’.17 The popularity of Newbery’s text points up several issues regarding Georgian children’s literature. On the one hand, it highlights the influence of Lockean pedagogy; on the other, it shows how the emergence of the children’s book industry, and of children’s literature as a fully distinct genre, were inextricably linked to scientific knowledge and its popularisation – Enlightenment science (or, more precisely, natural philosophy) both becoming part of a ‘public culture’18 and central to children’s education.
6Tom Telescope’s lectures, designed as both instructive and entertaining, fully exploited the pattern of the conversation between teacher and child still to be found in mid-nineteenth-century popular science books such as Charles Kingsley’s Madam How and Lady Why (1869) or John Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust (1865).19 Moreover, each new version of The Philosophy of Tops and Balls published in the first decades of the nineteenth century mapped out the evolution of scientific knowledge. According to Secord, ‘the most important discoveries that had taken place since the middle of the eighteenth century’ were added in the 1794 edition, such as Benjamin Franklin’s electrical explanation of lightning. A section on the growth of metals underground was removed, and in the 1820s, James Mitchell (a popular science writer) ‘revised the original Lockean structure of the book to the breaking point’.20 New subjects such as geology, as well as lectures ‘on magnetism, electricity, and other topics central to the birth of physics’ appeared as well.21
7The revisions reflected the gradual reordering of the natural world, marked by an emphasis upon classification, which rendered older views both of the natural world and of its arrangement more and more obsolete. The reasons for these regular adaptations may not have been exclusively scientific, but also commercial, with the publishers striving to maintain the visibility of The Philosophy of Tops and Balls in the face of growing competition from rival titles. Indeed, Georgian publishers quickly realised that pedagogical science for juvenile audiences had a huge market potential, with natural histories proving a particular favourite.
8According to Mary V. Jackson, printed natural histories became accessible to a wide audience between 1600 and 1770. Edward Topsell’s Historie of Four-Footed Beasts (vol. I, 1607; vol. II, 1608), an early example written especially for children, is ‘thought to have influenced the first “modern” children’s natural histories’:22 Thomas Boreman’s Description of Three Hundred Animals; viz. Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Serpents and Insects (1730) and Description of a Great Variety of Animals and Vegetables… Extracted from the most considerable writers of natural history (1736). Sometimes heavily moralising and in line with the religious tone of earlier bestiaries and animal fables,23 or placing side by side animals with mythical creatures, such as griffins, manticores, mermaids or unicorns, these books nonetheless paved the way for later natural histories which served as manuals to instruct children. A major natural history published around the same time, A Short and Easie Method to give Children an Idea or True Notion of Celestial and Terrestrial Beings (1710), seems to have been an early example of a science book for children,24 whilst the adaptation of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle for children or the publication of Oliver Goldsmith’s (1728–1774) eight-volume A History of the Earth and Animated Nature further demonstrated the rise of natural histories for juvenile audiences. Aesop’s fables, still in vogue at the end of the eighteenth century, increasingly bound up natural histories with children’s literature: when Thomas Bewick illustrated Select Fables, In Three Parts (1784), published by Thomas Saint, his use of the white-line engraving technique ‘that revolutionized children’s book illustrations’,25 in Jackson’s terms, revamped classical fables and paved the way for Bewick’s own General History of Quadrupeds (1790) and A History of British Birds (1797–1804), as well as other illustrated popular science books for children.
9In addition, as Jessica Straley explains, the boom in the number of schools established in the early nineteenth century (many of them created by religious societies) opened education to a new population of pupils for whom new subjects had to be designed. Hence, ‘[e]ducators sought lessons based on everyday objects and practical skills, and the natural sciences suggested a profitable supplement to the traditional curriculum.’26
10As a consequence, the natural sciences permeated many a children’s book, informing textbooks as much as imaginative fiction. In the seminal History of Little Goody Two-Shoes above mentioned by Charles Lamb, for instance, the moral story revolves around the learning of practical knowledge, in particular related to animals, both domestic and exotic. Published anonymously in 1765 by Newbery, Little Goody Two-Shoes relates the story of Margery Meanwell, an orphan girl who walks with ‘the Raven on one Shoulder, the Pigeon on the Other, the Lark on her Hand, and the Lamb and the Dog by her side’,27 and whose kindness to animals is rewarded at the end of the tale: she becomes a teacher, further educating children to avoid cruelty to animals,28 and marries a rich man. Echoing Margery’s story but providing an exotic counterpart to the main narrative, the end of the volume includes the story of Tom Two-Shoes, Margery’s brother, a young adventurer who travels through Africa and hunts with a lion he has tamed. As this classic of eighteenth-century children’s literature illustrates, Newbery’s publications for children, even when conceived as imaginative fiction, often drew upon the world of natural knowledge.
11The same emphasis upon natural history, and the natural world more generally, marked the books published by John Harris when he took over Newbery’s firm at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sarah Catherine Martin’s The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog (1805), William Roscoe’s The Butterfly’s Ball (1807) or Catherine Dorset’s Peacock ‘At Home’ (1807) – a few of them collected in John Harris’s Harris’s Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction (1807–1809) – figured animals, birds or insects, and anthropomorphized them humorously. Roscoe’s poem, The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, describes a party for insects and a few other small animals (a dormouse, a mole, etc.). It mentions a variety of insects and sometimes gives a little information on some of them, mainly through the adjectives used to describe them (for example, the beetle and the mole are blind).29 Likewise, The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog is essentially amusing, providing no zoological information; yet by playfully comparing humans and animals through the figure of the dog, the narrative confuses boundaries between species (the dog smokes a pipe, sits in a chair and is given beer to drink, for instance), thus revealing the evolution of the relation between humans and animals at a time of global expansion and discovery of new creatures.
12This is even more clearly illustrated in other children’s books published by Harris which refer to less familiar animals which nevertheless behave (and stand) like humans. A monkey shaves a bear in William Roscoe’s The Butterfly’s Ball; Catherine Dorset’s The Lion’s Masquerade30 (1807) features wild and exotic creatures, such as lions, a jackal, orangutans, a baboon, a monkey, a camel, an elephant and a tiger; and W. B.’s The Elephant’s ball and Grand Fete Champetre (1808) contains over twenty wild beasts (elephant, buffalo, bison, elk, antelope, lion, jackal, leopard, tiger, rhinoceros, hyaena, wolf, bear, panther, lynx, glutton, camel, sloth, monkey, orangutan, etc.), mixed up with more familiar varieties (dogs, cats, rats, mice, asses, squirrels, etc.) and imaginary ones (a pard and a unicorn are mentioned).31
13Dorset’s Peacock ‘At Home’ is interesting as well in the way in which later editions of the book build upon the subtle balance between instruction and entertainment which informed the first edition. Peacock ‘At Home’ deals with a peacock which decides to organise a ball and sends Valentine’s cards to all the birds. Though primarily intended to amuse, the tale does nonetheless mention over seventy species of birds with their geographical origin or migration patterns, and provides information in footnotes for two of them in the 1807 edition: the Greater Honeyguide, from Africa, and the Numidian Crane.32 By 1841, John Harris’s twenty-first edition of Peacock ‘At Home’, which included The Butterfly’s Ball and The Fancy Fair; or Grand Gala at the Zoological Gardens, had seventeen more footnotes on some of the less known species of birds, an addition which effectively transformed Dorset’s original text into a popular science book.
Polite Learning: The Barbauld Crew
14Such a stress on science, patent in later editions or rewritings of many Georgian books for children, needs to be a little more nuanced, however, so as to understand what kind of science juvenile readers absorbed, how and why. Indeed, as Alan Richardson contends, the emphasis on rationality in children’s literature inspired ‘a revaluation of…traditional “imaginative” forms for children’.33 As we will see, some members of the ‘Barbauld Crew’ denounced by Lamb produced texts whose novelty consisted not in presenting ‘science’ as a new sort of concern in new sorts of texts, but in the innovative capacity to integrate scientific subject matter into existing narrative modes.
15The ‘Barbauld Crew’ were the many women writers who were then leaders in the educational market. As Mary Hilton has shown, most textbooks and guides dealing with natural philosophy published in the period were written by women and aimed at girls and women.34 Defining themselves as the ‘nation’s teachers’, they ‘reached out from the literary world to construct a variety of intellectual and pedagogical practices, propagating culture through a variety of educational formats, from treatises and popular guides, to conduct books, stories and handbooks’.35 Among the most famous children’s writers of the period, Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810) and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) stand out. But many of their contemporaries also authored works of science popularisation which revealed in very similar ways the influence of Lockean pedagogy and Enlightenment science more generally. Priscilla Bell Wakefield (1751–1832), known for her Introduction to Botany, in a Series of Familiar Letters (1796) and Domestic Recreation: Or, Dialogues Illustrative of Natural and Scientific Subjects (1805), wrote for instance in her 1816 Introduction to the Natural History and Classification of Insects in a Series of Familiar Letters:
Amongst the beneficial improvements of modern times, few deserve higher estimation, than the increased attention to the education of children of all ranks; which is greatly facilitated by the number and variety of judicious books that have been written for their instruction and amusement. Nonsense has given way to reason; and useful knowledge, under an agreeable form, has usurped the place of the Histories of Tom Thumb, and Woglog the Giant. No branch of science seems better adapted to this important purpose, than natural history.36
16Wakefield’s emphasis on reason – describing as ‘nonsense’ the very books Lamb regarded as most suitable for children, as Melanie Keene remarks37 – illustrates once again how science was promoted as an essential subject-matter for young readers. Figures such as Margaret Bryan (1780–1818), who wrote on physics, magnetism or astronomy, and Jane Marcet (1769–1858), whose Conversations on Chemistry (1805) inspired Michael Faraday, are other significant examples of women writers who brought science into the world of educational publishing. It has been estimated that in the early nineteenth century around thirty to forty popular science books were being published each decade, rising to ninety by the middle of the century.38
17Moreover, these Georgian pedagogues’ introduction to the natural world was a means for them to reiterate Locke’s anti-cruelty messages, as developed in Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693.39 Indeed, following as they did Locke’s pedagogical principles, many children’s books of the period which sought to educate juvenile audiences about the natural world aimed above all at developing sympathy and empathy in children – ideas that matched the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. For Richardson, furthermore, many of the children’s authors who began publishing in the 1780s ‘improv[ed] on Newbery’s trade and plum-cake morality’ and ‘sought to instruct their child readers in such “progressive” issues as kindness to animals, the anti-slavery cause… and toleration of those who are physically different from oneself’.40 Science was thus often invoked more to mould children’s minds to bourgeois standards of behaviour than to actually transmit knowledge.
18This is notably the case in Sarah Trimmer’s children’s books. As Peter Hunt has it, Trimmer was one of the women writers ‘who dominated the children’s market at this time’ and who was herself ‘heavily involved in education’,41 like Hannah Moore, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Sherwood, or Mary Pilkington, who either managed schools or were governesses. Trimmer launched the Family Magazine; or a repository of religious instruction and rational amusement (1788–1789) which contained moral tales and sermons. As an influential children’s book reformer, she also wrote on education: her Guardian of Education (1802–1806) directly addressed parents and governesses and told them about the qualities or dangers of newly-published children’s literature. Deeply involved in education, Trimmer founded several Sunday schools and charity schools, and wrote textbooks and manuals for women intending to start their own schools. Her methods and tastes were poles apart from those of educationalists advocating Rousseauian approaches to children’s literature. Moreover, Trimmer remains most famous today for her strict condemnation of the use of imagination in children’s literature, such as fairy stories – the very ‘tales and old wives’ fables’ much missed by Lamb. Like the Edgeworths, who also distrusted imaginative literature and favoured ‘useful knowledge’, Trimmer thus belonged to the didactic tradition; her works for children were informative (yet entertaining), and were often characteristic instances of the mid-eighteenth-century enthusiasm for natural history. Still, her writings closely tied science to revealed religion, rather than seeking to develop rational faculties in children’s minds.
19Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories: Designed for the Instruction of Children Respecting Their Treatment of Animals (1786) (later published as The History of the Robins) is a case in point. The narrative placed side by side a family of humans and a family of robins, the robins standing as a representation of proper human behaviour. Although mainly metaphorical, the narrative is at times informed by natural historical knowledge,42 whilst the scientific world and contemporary modes of study of the natural world are recurrently alluded to, especially in references to the collecting of animals and their exhibition. However, as Trimmer’s book highlights, Georgian pedagogues focused on the social and moral meanings of science as distinct from merely factual content. The book opens with a preface which encourages Christian benevolence towards the natural world: Trimmer condemns children for ‘tormenting inferior creatures’, and remarks that ‘[i]t certainly comes within the compass of Christian benevolence to shew compassion to the Animal Creation’.43 Like many other contemporary women educators, Trimmer uses talking animals to teach children about social mores. Aileen Fyfe similarly argues that Trimmer’s books are ‘more concerned with nature than with the sciences … as part of [her] programme of theological education’,44 hence the difficulty of accurately interpreting her use of animals, their characteristics and habits, and natural historical knowledge more generally.
20For Fyfe, Trimmer ‘did not believe that the sciences were suitable for young children’, a belief shared, in part, by many other Georgian pedagogues, who proposed a nuanced view of science and of the means of acquiring scientific knowledge. For example, in A Father’s Instruction; Consisting of Moral Tales, Fables, and Reflections Designed to Promote the Love of Virtue, a Taste for Knowledge, and an Early Acquaintance with the Works of Nature (1776), penned by the English physician Thomas Percival, the making of learned citizens (with a ‘taste for knowledge’ and an ‘acquaintance with the works of nature’) is weighed, as the title suggests, against the making of sensible citizens (with a ‘love of virtue’).45 The book contains a series of articles covering a range of subjects and themes many of which are aimed at extolling sympathy with regard to animals, and merging (natural) science and sensibility to this end. The focus on sensibility permeates many of the articles, several of them denouncing the imprisonment of animals. Whilst some of the creatures are used allegorically, often to represent character (sloths are not industrious, tigers represent ferocity more than courage, etc.), Percival also dwells on their feelings in order to provoke our sympathy for them.
21The variety of discourses on science that Percival’s A Father’s Instruction proposes is telling, for it shows how Georgian pedagogues increasingly addressed knowledge for children through narrative formats which astutely combined scientific instruction with more literary or imaginative dynamics. In fact, as Melissa Bailes has shown, Thomas Percival was one of the critics, together with Edward Young, Oliver Goldsmith, and Percival Stockdale, who ‘gestured towards melding literature and science as a means to poetic originality’.46 This trend, she contends, was particularly followed and developed by women writers, in particular Anna Lætitia Barbauld, whose brother, John Aikin, had espoused the combination of literature and science in his Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777).47 Producing ‘hybrid forms of originality’,48 women’s ‘scientific appropriations established such strong associations between women and natural history in the public imagination that not only did [male Romantics] actively seek to separate their verse from this movement of scientific literature but also, by the early nineteenth century, male scientific professionals diligently labored to reinstate the masculinity of studying the natural sciences’.49 This, I argue, became especially patent in their children’s literature, and could explain contemporary reactions such as Charles Lamb’s diatribe against the ‘cursed Barbauld crew’.
22Indeed, children’s literature scholars have shown that although Georgian educational writings for children retained moralising ‘catechistic elements’,50 as in the case of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, and seemed to condemn imaginative literature, the reality was otherwise. For instance, these women’s moral and rational tales never truly banished fairy-tale plots and patterns but often adapted them instead, especially using their moralization potential.51 For Bailes, moreover, Barbauld’s encouragement of ‘rational inquiry into the natural sciences … facilitated a more complicated negotiation of literature and science’ than what Lamb suggested.52 Thus, the ‘disciplinary approach to children’s fiction’53 (science versus literature, or ‘reason’ versus ‘imagination’) has frequently misread the rationalist tradition, as represented by Richard and Maria Edgeworth, John Aikin, Mary Wollstonecraft, or Anna Lætitia Barbauld. The last was another key Georgian educator, who taught natural sciences and founded the Palgrave School with her husband.54 She is best known for her ‘Petition for a Mouse’, written in 1771 (and published in 1773), which uses a speaking mouse kept prisoner in a cage to denounce scientific experiments on live animals.55 More significantly, perhaps, Barbauld’s children’s literature toned down the (Anglican) religious orientation typically found in Trimmer’s children’s books. As a Dissenter (unlike Trimmer, who was a High-Church Anglican), Barbauld proposed texts aimed at developing children’s reasoning in more scientific than theological terms, and as Fyfe contends, the absence of religious matter in the volumes did not adversely affect the popularity of her Evenings at Home; or, the juvenile budget opened (1792–96).56
23Evenings at Home was written by Barbauld in collaboration with her brother John Aikin. Barbauld and her brother were the children of the theology tutor at the dissenting academy at Warrington. They both came to know members of the academy, of the Lunar Society and the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, including Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Thomas Percival, and Richard and Maria Edgeworth.57 Aikin was also trained as a surgeon and taught chemistry and anatomy at Warrington for a time. During the Georgian period, Evenings at Home was very successful, counting thirteen editions in London alone, and the series was reprinted and pirated many times ‘on both sides of the Atlantic into the twentieth century.’58 Barbauld’s actual contribution – fourteen pieces out of the ninety-nine that appeared in the six volumes59 – was in fact much smaller than what readers tended to believe at the time of its publication. In addition, her pieces appeared only in the first two volumes of the series.60
24Fyfe contends that Barbauld and Aikin, unlike Trimmer, ‘were willing to teach scientific details to children, including girls, while orthodox Anglican parents would have regarded such complex natural philosophy as unsuitable.’61 Yet, as will be seen, Aikin and Barbauld dealt with this tension by presenting their scientific themes in literary forms and settings, illustrating Barbauld’s attempts to ‘respond…to science through literature.’62 In fact, later editions of Evenings at Home, which reshuffled the order of the articles, sometimes grouping together the scientific articles, separating them from the fables (published in earlier volumes) and the moral stories (more characteristic of the last volumes, as we will see), confirm the idea that Barbauld and Aikin were conceiving knowledge for children in disciplinary ways, whilst at the same time aiming at reconciling science and literature in their conception of education. They were therefore effectively combatting the Romantic opposition between ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’ and its concomitant dualistic model of disciplinary differentiation – an attitude which nevertheless continues to inform ‘most accounts of children’s literature’ in their tendency systematically to contrast ‘didacticism and imagination, instruction and delight, reason and fantasy’.63
25McCarthy argues, furthermore, that Barbauld had been much inspired by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (1686), which provided her early introduction to science (astronomy) in French.64 Like him, she believed that imagination and science could work in tandem, trusting to the ‘visions as much poetic as scientific’ offered by the philosopher.65 Similarly for Bailes, Barbauld, as a poet, ‘explor[ed] the extent to which natural history could stimulate poetic novelty.’66 As a children’s writer, she played upon the motley character of Evenings at Home, proposing a collection of pieces which combined natural history and ‘scientific’ topics, such as chemistry or astronomy, with poetry and moral stories without any unifying story line.67 The variety of texts and articles included in Evenings at Home was fairly similar to Percival’s A Father’s Instruction, as Fyfe notes, certainly because he too was a Unitarian.68 But the collection also blended subjects within the pieces themselves, making it patent that ‘Barbauld’s project [was] not to dichotomise [poetry from science], but to reconcile’ them, as Tess Cosslett suggests.69 Moreover, the construction of knowledge Barbauld and Aikin proposed to children evolved throughout the six volumes, the collection gradually gaining shape and structure.
26The first volume, comprising twenty different pieces, featured one moral story, one play, five or six lessons in natural history (botany and ornithology), geography, physics (on magnets) and technology (‘On the Oak’, ‘On the Pine and Fir Tribe’, ‘The Rookery’, ‘The Mask of Nature’, ‘On the Marten’, ‘The Ship’) and nine texts (fables, stories or poetry) dealing with animals or travel, that is, more or less related to natural history, its practice and its collections (‘The Young Mouse’, ‘The Wasp and Bee’, ‘Travellers’ Wonders’, ‘The Discontented Squirrel’, ‘Goldfish and Linnet’, ‘Mouse, Lapdog, and Monkey’, ‘Animals and their Countries’, ‘The History and Adventures of a Cat’, ‘The Little Dog’). Seventy per cent of the volume was thus devoted to scientific and/or technological subjects appearing in a variety of formats. In the second volume, two pieces were lessons in natural history (‘The Grass-Tribe’, ‘A Lesson in the Art of Distinguishing’); one dealt with chemistry introduced through the theme of tea (‘A Tea-Lecture’); natural history and/or animals were the subject of five texts (some perhaps aimed at younger readers: ‘The Transmigrations of Indur’, ‘The Swallow and Tortoise’, ‘The Goose and Horse’, ‘The Flying-Fish’, ‘The Phenix and Dove’); two tackled more technological subjects (‘On Manufactures’, ‘The Manufacture of Paper’). Out of a total of fifteen pieces altogether, scientific subjects represented approximately sixty per cent of the volume.
27A more radical change marked the third volume, which Aikin authored alone: natural history (botany), chemistry, physics as well as mathematics appeared in only seven out of the seventeen pieces, be they stories, plays, fables, poetry, or popular science articles (‘On Man’, ‘On Wines and Spirits’, ‘Half a Crown’s Worth’, ‘The Rat with a Bell’, ‘The Leguminous Plants’, ‘Why an Apple falls’). Scientific subjects were thus reduced to forty per cent of the pieces, while sixty per cent dealt with law and justice (‘Trial’), philosophy (‘The Little Philosopher’), or were stories about education (‘The Boy without a Genius’, ‘The Female Choice’). In the fourth volume, five pieces dealt with natural history, from geology and mineralogy to botany (including ‘The Umbelliferous Plants’, ‘Eyes and No Eyes’, ‘On Metals’), one text approached astronomy (‘Earth and Sun’); three tackled animals through various formats (‘What Animals are Made for’, ‘The Kid’, ‘The Dog balked of his Dinner’); and four moral or imaginative stories (which had hardly appeared before) were included, making up thirty per cent of the volume versus the sixty per cent or more science-related related content.
28The fifth volume included two pieces on natural history (‘On Earths and Stones’, ‘The Cruciform-Flowered Plants’) and two texts on animals (‘The Dog and his Relations’, ‘The Travelled Ant’) which read as natural history lessons, while five pieces were imaginative and/or moral stories, out of a total of thirteen pieces. In other words, the balance between scientific topics (thirty per cent of the volume) and stories (around thirty-eight per cent) shifted in favour of the latter. This trend was confirmed in the final volume, comprising sixteen pieces: two dealing with natural history, astronomy and/or geography (‘The Compound-Flowered Plants’, ‘Earth and her Children’, ‘A Globe-Lecture’), three featuring animals (including ‘The Bullies’, ‘The Hog and other Animals’) or were marginally related to natural history (‘The Power of Habit’), the rest being stories which did not revolve around scientific objects or themes. Thus, a third of the last volume was devoted to science, whilst another third contained more imaginative or/and moral stories.
29Although such a classification of Barbauld and Aikin’s texts remains relative, especially because they did not always use animals as the basis for lessons in natural history and because some pieces may be read differently according to the age of the readers, the variations in the contents of the collection nonetheless indicate some interesting trends which typify Barbauld and Aikin’s grasping of the challenges presented by disciplinary specialisation. The most marked of these was the gradual disappearance of fables, especially those involving animals, and the emergence of more and more specialized articles on science (botany, mineralogy, astronomy, chemistry, physics) which competed with moral tales, represented in almost equal numbers in the later volumes. Fables had been associated with children’s reading even before the advent of children’s literature: they had played, alongside bestiaries,70 an important part in monastic education during the Middle Ages,71 as already suggested, and in the eighteenth century, they still offered rich materials for Georgian pedagogues eager to mould children into responsible citizens whilst providing young audiences with a little knowledge in natural history. Aesop’s Fables, in particular, first translated into English in 1484,72 had been considered as ‘tailored for children’s reading’73 and promoted by John Locke. Hence, Barbauld and Aikin’s move away from fables might be interpreted as a move away from earlier forms of literature for children. Furthermore, as Barbauld and Aikin increasingly separated ‘science’ from ‘literature’ (fables, which appeared much more in the earlier volumes merged them more), the volumes made more and more room for stories, thus promoting a type of knowledge that could take many forms which were inseparable from one another.
30On the one hand, therefore, the emphasis on stories, more and more separated from more ‘scientific’ material, suggests an increasingly disciplinary way of thinking about knowledge, and a growing categorical differentiation. On the other, however, the merging of various texts and articles, the combination of popular science and more imaginative fiction, even if still rather instructive and repressive of fancy, as well as the use of different modes of narration to teach science, points up Barbauld and Aikin’s refusal to merely equate ‘reason’ and ‘science’ and their preference, on the contrary, for the admixture of moral lessons carried by literary means. In so doing, Barbauld and Aikin were effectively suggesting that material and moral forms of knowledge could be both useful and improving, and that their parallel deployment was the best or the only way of producing a rounded education.
31This more nuanced portrait of Barbauld and Aikin’s project illuminates the damage done to ‘the reputations of early female pedagogical writers’ by an ‘anti-feminine and anti-eighteenth-century metanarrative of children’s literary history’, propagated by the ‘Romantic ideology of childhood’,74 as represented by Charles Lamb’s harangue against the ‘cursed Barbauld crew’. For William McCarthy, indeed, Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778–9) offers ‘the rudiments of an entire school curriculum, or what John Newbery called “The Circle of the Sciences”’ (botany, zoology, chemistry, geography, geology, astronomy, agriculture, etc.), but the text nevertheless encourages the main character ‘to think metaphorically’, initiating him ‘into the fictive, allegorical, animistic discourse often associated with poetry, and into tropes and symbols that are staples of poetry.’75 This, I would argue, might also be applied to Evenings at Home through the collection’s original ambition to bring together literary and more scientific matter, foregrounding ‘the increasingly central role of imaginative reading within late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British culture.’76
32As a matter of fact, Barbauld and Aikin’s collection, emblematic of Georgian pedagogues’ experiments with a newly developing children’s literature, paved the way for Victorian children’s literature. This is notable in the way in which they invited children to practice science and natural history, to make collections, and to constantly observe the world around them. Indeed for Bailes, Barbauld ‘facilitated the beginning of this era’s movement of women merging literature and natural history.’77 A few decades later, the children’s periodicals which blossomed during the Victorian period were much indebted to the works of the female writers of the Enlightenment, many of them playing with the very same variety of texts as Evenings at Home and continuing to exemplify the Lockean pedagogical ideal.78 By writing both popular science works and imaginative fiction, these innovative pedagogues secured (some) economic independence, and therefore ensured that their voice be heard and passed on from generation to generation. Although these women writers were, of course, not all natural philosophers, they were nonetheless on the front line in the combat against the growing divide between the scientific and literary cultures, making their writings for children even more important to understanding the complexities of the ordering of knowledge of the age.
Notes de bas de page
1 Thomas Noon Talfourd, ed., The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of his Life (London: Edward Moxon, 1849), 144 (emphasis in original).
2 Mary V. Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 9.
3 Peter Hunt, ed., Children’s Literature: an Illustrated History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 26.
4 As James Holt MacGavran contends, the fairy tale was ‘never truly banished’ although it remained ‘outside the mainstream of acceptable children’s literature’; James Holt MacGavran, ed., Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, [1991] 2009), 17.
5 Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) was regarded as a classic writer for children. She was very much involved in educational issues.
6 Mitzi Meyers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books,’ Children’s Literature 14 (1986): 31–59; Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism. Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Donelle Ruwe, ed., Culturing the Child, 1690–1914. Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers (Lanham, Toronto, Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005); see also MacGavran, Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England.
7 Hunt, Children’s Literature, 35–7. See also Sidney Roscoe, John Newbery and His Successors, 1740–1814: a Bibliography (Wormsley: Five Owls Press, 1973). As Mary V. Jackson argues, Thomas Boreman and Mary Cooper also contributed to establishing children’s books as a separate genre. Boreman published seven books for children, including natural histories, such as A Description of Three Hundred Animals (1730) and A Description of a Great Variety of Animals and Vegetables (1736), as will be seen. Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic, 71–5.
8 Robert Bator, ed., Masterworks of Children’s Literature (New York: The Stonehill Publishing Co., 1983), xiv.
9 Hunt, Children’s Literature, 35–7.
10 Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 117.
11 The following treatment of Newbery’s The Philosophy of Tops and Balls, especially the study of its revisions over several decades, draws upon James Secord’s article: James A. Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery: Tom Telescope and the Philosophy of Tops and Balls, 1761–1838,’ Journal of History of Science 23 (1985): 127–51, republished in Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, ed, Science in the Nursery: the Popularisation of Science in Britain and France, 1761–1901 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 69–90.
12 James L. Axtell, ‘Locke, Newton, and “The Elements of Natural Philosophy”,’ Pedagogica Europaea 1 (1965): 235–45, p. 239.
13 Lydia Kokkola, ‘“Instruction with delight”: the Narrator’s Voice in John Newbery’s early English Children’s Books,’ in Instructional Writing in English. Studies in honour of Risto Hiltunen, ed. Matti Peikola, Janne Skaffari, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009), 161–86, p. 179.
14 Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery,’ 39. Chapters 1 and 2, on matter, motion, the universe and the solar system, echoed Locke’s first chapters (Chapter I. Of Matter and Motion; Chapter II. Of the Universe; Chapter III. Of our Solar System); the third chapter, ‘Of the Air, Atmosphere, and Meteors’, covered Locke’s Chapters 5 and 6 (Chapter V. Of the Air and Atmosphere; Chapter VI. Of Meteors in general); Chapter 4 was identical to Locke’s seventh chapter heading (Chapter VII. Of Springs, Rivers, and the Sea); Chapter 5, ‘Of Minerals, Vegetables, and Animals’, comprised Locke’s Chapters 8, 9 and 10 (Chapter VIII. Of several sorts of Earth, Stones, Metals, Minerals, and other Fossils; Chapter IX. Of Vegetables or Plants; Chapter X. Of Animals) whilst Chapter 6 covered Locke’s last two chapters (Chapter XI. Of the Five Senses; Chapter XII. Of the Understanding of Man).
15 Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery,’ 47.
16 J. H. Plumb, ‘The First Flourishing of Children’s Books,’ in Gerald Gottlieb, Early Children’s Books and their Illustration (New York: The Piermont Morgan Library, 1975), xvii–xxx, p. xxii, qtd. in Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery,’ 48.
17 Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery,’ 48.
18 Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), qtd. in Aileen Fyfe, ‘Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families,’ The Historical Journal 43, no 2 (2000): 453–73, p. 453.
19 The fictional dialogue followed the conventions set by Galileo’s Discourses Concerning the Two New Sciences (1638) or Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chemist (1661); Bernard Lightman, ‘“The Voices of Nature”: Popularizing Victorian Science,’ in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 187–211, p. 192.
20 Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery,’ 49.
21 Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery,’ 50.
22 Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic, 35.
23 As Jackson contends, the earliest forms of bestiaries and animal fables were controlled by medieval monks, ‘jealous guardians of learning, who added their levy of religious and moral freight’; Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic, 34–5. ‘Dame’ schools or ‘charity schools’ provided education for poor children, many of them founded by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (founded in 1699); see Victor E. Neuburg, Popular Education in Eighteenth-Century England (London: The Woburn Press, 1971), 2.
24 Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic, 36.
25 Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic, 50.
26 Jessica Straley, Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 59.
27 [Anon], The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes; otherwise called, Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes: with the Means by which she acquired her Learning and Wisdome, and in Consequence thereof her Estate (London: T. Carnan and F. Newberry, 1772), 123.
28 ‘Mrs. Margery, you must know, was very humane and compassionate; and her Tenderness extended not only to all Mankind, but even to all Animals that were not noxious; as your’s [sic] ought to do if you would be happy here, and go to Heaven hereafter. These are God Almighty’s Creatures as well as we. He made both them and us; and for wise Purposes, best known to himself, placed them in this World to live among us; so that they are our fellow Tenants of the Globe. How then can People dare to torture and wantonly destroy God Almighty’s Creatures? They as well as you are capable of feeling Pain, and of receiving Pleasure, and how can you, who want to be made happy yourself, delight in making your fellow Creatures miserable? Do you think the poor Birds, whose Nest and young Ones that wicked Boy Dick Wilson ran away with Yesterday, do not feel as much Pain as your Father and Mother would have felt, had any one pulled down their House, and ran away with you? To be sure they do. Mrs. Two-Shoes used to speak of those Thinks, and of naughty Boys throwing at Cocks, torturing Flies, and whipping Horses and Dogs, with Tears in her Eyes, and would never suffer any one to come to her School who did so’; The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, 68–9.
29 William Roscoe, The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (London: Newbery, [1807] 1808). F. J. Harvey Darton underlines that despite being ‘an accomplished botanist’, Roscoe did not aim at popularising science; F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 205–6.
30 The lion, jealous of the Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast gives a ‘grand masquerade’ (p. 5) where all types of quadrupeds are invited; Catherine Dorset, The Lion’s Masquerade (London: J. Harris & B. Tabart, 1807). The Lioness’s Ball; being a Companion to the Lion’s Masquerade (London: C. Chapple, B. Tabart, J. Harris, Darton & Harvey, c. 1808) is another similar example.
31 [W. B.], The Elephant’s ball and Grand Fete Champetre (London: J. Harris, 1808). In the illustrations, all the beasts are bipeds, however.
32 [Catherine Dorset], The Peacock ‘At Home’ (London: Newbery, 1807).
33 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, 31.
34 Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young, 110.
35 Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young, 2.
36 Priscilla Wakefield, An Introduction to the Natural History and Classification of Insects, in a series of familiar letters with illustrative engravings (London: Darton, Harvey, and Darton, 1816), iii.
37 Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: the Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 10.
38 Aileen Fyfe, ‘Tracts, Classics and Brands: Science for Children in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Popular Children’s Literature in Britain, ed. Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts and M. O. Grenby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 209–28, p. 212.
39 ‘One thing I have frequently observed in Children, that when they have got Possession of any poor Creature, they are apt to use it ill: They often torment, and treat very roughly young Birds, Butterflies and such other poor Animals…with a seeming kind of Pleasure. This I think should be watched in them…they who delight in the Suffering and Destruction of inferiour Creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind…Children should from the beginning be bred up in an Abhorrence of killing, or tormenting any living Creature’; John Locke, ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education,’ in The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 13, 225–6.
40 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, 127.
41 Hunt, Children’s Literature, 54–5. See also Fyfe, ‘Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families’.
42 Natural historical details are mentioned marginally as when Trimmer introduces a Mock-Bird but adds in a footnote that ‘[t]he mock-bird is a native of America but is introduced here for the sake of the moral’; Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories: Designed for the Instruction of Children Respecting Their Treatment of Animals, in two volumes comprised in one, 10th ed (London: John Sharpe, 1815), II, 54.
43 Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, x. Trimmer’s History of the Robins encapsulates Lockean pedagogy through its moral stance on the treatment of animals. The book was not only reprinted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but also cited in other educational books advocating kindness to animals, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788, second edn. illustrated in 1791).
44 Fyfe, ‘Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families,’ 460.
45 Thomas Percival, A Father’s Instruction; Consisting of Moral Tales, Fables, and Reflections Designed to Promote the Love of Virtue, a Taste for Knowledge, and an Early Acquaintance with the Works of Nature, 8th ed., 2 vol. (London: Warrington, 1793).
46 Melissa Bailes, Questioning Nature: British Women’s Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750–1830 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 7.
47 According to Melissa Bailes, moreover, Aikin also helped to revise Thomas Pennant’s British Zoology (1768–70), ‘the preface of which encourages descriptive poet’s knowledge of natural history’; Bailes, Questioning Nature, 26.
48 Bailes, Questioning Nature, 2.
49 Bailes, Questioning Nature, 4.
50 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, 66.
51 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, 117.
52 Bailes, Questioning Nature, 23.
53 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, 127.
54 Mary Ellen Bellanca, ‘Science, Animal Sympathy and Anna Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition”,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no 1 (Fall 2003): 47–67, p. 50.
55 The poem was written as a reaction against Dr Priestley’s use of live mice in his experiments on air. See Bellanca, ‘Science, Animal Sympathy, and Anna Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition”,’ and Julia Saunders, ‘“The Mouse’s Petition”: Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Scientific Revolution,’ The Review of English Studies 53, no 212 (Nov. 2002): 500–16. Bellanca ultimately argues however that ‘[i]n the end, “The Mouse’s Petition” is neither a definitive pronouncement on animal experiments nor a broadside attack on science’ (p. 61).
56 Fyfe’s study shows how Evenings at Home, initially aimed at the limited market of nonconformist families, was eventually accepted outside this limited circle and came to be widely read by children in Anglican and Methodist families too; Fyfe, ‘Tracts, Classics and Brands,’ 220.
57 Fyfe, ‘Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families,’ 455.
58 McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld, 324. Fyfe also states that the series remained in print until 1915 and was ‘regularly reprinted by several different publishers’ until the 1880s; Fyfe, ‘Tracts, Classics and Brands,’ 220.
59 William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 324; McCarthy refers to Barbauld’s niece, Lucy Aikin, who named the fourteen pieces written by her aunt in 1825; see also Daniel E. White, ‘The “Joinerina”: Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Dissenting Public Sphere,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no 4 (Summer 1999): 511–33, p. 516.
60 Fyfe contends that Barbauld wrote two-thirds of the first two volumes, but this would make a total of twenty-three to twenty-four pieces contributed by Barbauld; Fyfe, ‘Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families,’ 455.
61 Fyfe, ‘Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families,’ 471–2.
62 Bailes, Questioning Nature, 13.
63 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, 114.
64 McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld, 44.
65 Qtd. in McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld, 44.
66 Bailes, Questioning Nature, 3.
67 This is particularly the case in ‘The Young Mouse, A Fable’ (I, 18–20), ‘The Discontented Squirrel’ (I, 43–8), ‘The History and Adventures of a Cat’ (I, 105–19), ‘The Little Dog, A Fable’ (I, 119–24) and ‘The Travelled Ant’ (V, 101–16). Dr Aikin and Mrs Barbauld, Evenings at Home; or, the Juvenile Budget Opened. Consisting of a Variety of Miscellaneous Pieces, for the Instruction and Amusement of Young Persons (London: J. Johnson, 1792).
68 Fyfe, ‘Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families,’ 457.
69 Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 29.
70 Both developed contemporaneously, as Carolynn Van Dyke argues; Carolynn Van Dyke, ‘Entities in the World: Intertextuality in Medieval Bestiaries and Fables,’ in Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture, ed. Jane Spencer, Derek Ryan and Karen L. Edwards (New York: Routledge, 2019), 13–28, p. 22.
71 Elizabeth Carson Pastan, ‘Fables, Bestiaries, and the Bayeux Embroidery: Man’s Best Friend Meets the “Animal Turn”,’ in Our Dogs, Our Selves. Dogs in Medieval and Early Modern Art, Literature, and Society, ed. Laura D. Gelfand (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 97–126, p. 118.
72 See Hunt, Children’s Literature, 13.
73 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, 113.
74 Donelle Ruwe, ‘Introduction,’ in Culturing the Child, 1690–1914, ed. Donelle Ruwe, x.
75 William McCarthy, ‘Mother of All Discourses: Anna Barbauld’s Lessons for Children,’ in Culturing the Child, 1690–1914, ed. Donelle Ruwe, 85–111, pp. 101–102.
76 Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism, xiv.
77 Bailes, Questioning Nature, 46.
78 The example of Aunt Judy’s Magazine (1866–1885), edited by the naturalists Margaret Gatty (famous for her children’s stories, Parables from Nature [1855–71]) and her daughter, Juliana Horatia Ewing, is a case in point.
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