Didactic, scientifically oriented children's literature crisscrossed the Atlantic in the eighteen... more Didactic, scientifically oriented children's literature crisscrossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finding wide popularity in Great Britain and the United States; yet the genre has since suffered from a reputation for being dull and pedantic and has been neglected by scholars. Challenging this scholarly devaluation, "Science and Imagination in Anglo-American Children's Books, 1760-1855" argues that didactic, scientifically oriented children's books play upon and encourage the use of the imagination. Three significant Anglo-American children's authors-Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and Nathaniel Hawthorne-infuse their writings with the wonders of science and the clear message that an active imagination is a necessary component of a moral upbringing. Indeed, these authors' books, most particularly Sandford and Merton (1783-1789), Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825), and A Wonder-Book fo r Girls and Boys (1852), are more than mere lessons: they are didactic fantasies intended to spark creativity within their readers. These didactic fantasies are best understood in the context of the emerging industrial revolution and the height of the Atlantic slave trade. These phenomena, combined with the entrenchment of classicism in Anglo-American culture and the lesserknown transatlantic botany craze, shaped the ways in which Day, Edgeworth, and Hawthorne crafted their children's stories. Certainly dramatic changes on both sides of the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced the differences in the texts. More important to this study, however, are the vital connections among these stories. Each author draws heavily upon Rousseau's ubiquitous childrearing treatise Emile and upon her or his literary predecessor to create children's books that encourage exploring nature through scientific experimentation and imaginative enterprise. Yet these writers do not encourage the imagination run amok. Rather, they see the need for morally grounded scientific endeavor, for which they rely primarily on classicism and on gender ideology. Incorporating tales of the ancient world to inculcate the ideal of a virtuous, disinterested, and learned citizen responsible to the larger body politic, the three children's authors-but most notably and explicitly Hawthorne-tie a romanticized, classical past to the emerging industrial world. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. That eighteenth-and nineteenth-century genteel juvenile audiences in Great Britain and the United States shared similar tastes is a function of the transatlantic nature of early American children's literature. Lacking well into the nineteenth century an English-language literary marketplace that would sustain native industry beyond sermons, almanacs, newspapers, and hornbooks, American booksellers and readers turned primarily to British imports for the latest in the arts and sciences for adults and for children (Avery 2). Thus Sandford and Merton, while written by an Englishman, also can legitimately be considered an early American children's book by virtue of its transatlantic market and audience. Recognizing this "transatlantic dimension" of American literary history, argues Michael Winship, is essential to forming "a broader, international perspective" of American literature and culture (99, 107-108)-particularly in an era when globalization and the electronic highway challenge national boundaries rigidly conceived. Thus in the nineteenth-century transatlantic book trade of American publishing firm Ticknor and Fields, whose lists included texts by Thoreau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Emerson, as well as Dickens, Scott, Tennyson, and Kingsley, Winship urges scholars to recognize a vital fostering of "an international, Anglo-American literary culture" (108, 107) shaped by the same transatlantic trade that so marks early American children's books. A Wonder-Book fo r Girls and Boys (1852), Hawthorne's resoundingly popular and highly praised collection of Greek myths for children, exemplifies an Americanproduced transatlantic counterpart to D ay's and Edgeworth's books for young people. Never out of print since its publication, A Wonder-Book spawned a cottage industry that generated hundreds of editions, imprints, and adaptations, including translations into Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Braille, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Urdu; an equally successful sequel entitled Tanglewood Tales fo r Girls and Boys; Being a Second Wonder-Book (1853); special editions illustrated by renowned artists W alter Crane, Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, and Arthur Rackham, among others; dramatizations of the various stories from both A Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales', a 1915 vocal score with piano for a three-act operetta inspired by A Wonder-Book's "Paradise of Children"; a symphonic poem based on A W onder-Books "The Chimera," which served as a master's thesis in 1931; filmstrips with sound cassettes and a teacher's guide issued in 1981; books on tape published in 1969 and 1982; a VHS school video produced in 1989; and juvenile operas of A W onder-Book s "Paradise of Children" and Tanglewood Tales' "Circe's Palace" pressed into CDs in 1998 and 2002, respectively.11 Critics unanimously supported Hawthorne's foray into "old classical legends," noting how amiable and agreeable they found the "vein of airy gayety" running through the volume in place of the "stem, though irresistibly fascinating horrors, which he wields with such terrific mastery in his recent productions," namely, The Scarlet Letter and The 12 House o f the Seven Gables. "Child and man will love this work equally well," predicted H arper's New Monthly Magazine (138). The Living Age agreed, noting that "the child and the man, gentle or simple, equally imbibe [Hawthorne's] meaning," making A Wonder-Book "the beau ideal of a Christmas gift for the approaching season" (48). Not to be outdone, the critic with New Englander and Yale Review "place[d] this child's book among the best works which [Hawthorne] has written," having read "nothing of his which either more displays the easy and graceful workings of genius, or more captivates every faculty of the mind of the reader" (156). In 1869 the same journal Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was that they couldn't recommend Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm, or Hans Christian Andersen since everyone already knew about fairy tales and nursery rhymes." When the results were published in the January 1903 issue, Hawthorne's Wonder-Book placed third, missing out only to Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy, which came in first, "followed very closely" by Lewis' Alice in Wonderland (pars. 2, 3). By 2004, many home-schooling mothers would agree with the high marks that children a century ago gave Hawthorne's text. Ranking A Wonder-Book a "not-to-be-missed read aloud[...] for young children" in its list of " 1000 Good Books," the Classical Christian Homeschooling website electronically advocates a historically vital transatlantic response to this mid-nineteenth-century publication.14 Whereas twenty-first-century home-schoolers eagerly meet on the Internet to improve upon their pedagogical models, the nineteenth-century Hawthorne was content with breathing the rarified air of cultural reform that swept through his native Massachusetts. After he married Sophia Peabody in the early 1840s and moved into the Old Manse in Concord, he found himself surrounded by what Michael J. Colacurcio has dubbed "the newspaper of the age" (30): Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Each time the Hawthornes moved the list would grow, until by 1851 it had swollen to include Catharine
While traditionally considered the first creative American children's book to value childhood... more While traditionally considered the first creative American children's book to value childhood imagination over didacticism, Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, published in 1852, may be explored more usefully as a key text in the history of science education. (1) That notion may sound peculiar to those familiar with Wonder-Book, a collection of stories that appear to be simple, cheerful retellings of the Greek myths of Perseus and Medusa, King Midas, Pandora's Box, Hercules' eleventh labor, Philemon and Baucis, and Bellerophon and Pegasus. Yet Hawthorne uses these classical myths in a pedagogically innovative way--to promote a scientific mode of thinking among girls and boys at a time when scientific training for youth in the United States was haphazard at best. Today's readers often miss the dense layers of science in the book because they have lost interest in botany and classicism, popular transatlantic subjects in the mid-nineteenth century. In Wonder-Book, Hawthorne trades upon botany's pedagogical reputation as a moral restorative and an excellent intellectual, spiritual, and emotional self-cultivator. His choice dovetails well with his use of Greek myths, which offered connotations of purity, morality, and pedagogical probity by virtue of their place in nineteenth-century Anglo-American classicism. (2) Hus Wonder-Book stands as a pedagogical specimen doubly strengthened by the nineteenth-century elite's appreciation for the civic and personal virtue that botany as well as Greek culture could propagate. Rousseau's influence on Wonder-Book adds another resonant layer. The protective countryside that in Emile forms the ideal sphere in which to raise a well-born child emerges in Wonder-Book's framing devices, which surround each myth, as a hortus conclusus, or inviolate garden, where twelve children named after wild flowers safely nourish their budding imaginations with healthful doses of Greek myths, as told to them by visiting college student Eustace Bright. By creating this Edenic kindergarten, (3) Hawthorne reminds us that the imagination's organic qualities must be carefully cultivated for meaningful cultural advancement. Thus Eustace's stories, which are themselves experiments in recasting Greek myths, suggest to readers that the imagination is the visionary power that leads to wholesome self-cultivation and cultural progress, an idea that Quicksilver, Hawthorne's version of Hermes, subtly conveys. Mental machinery, in other words, trumps metal machinery because its ingenuity, teamed with farsighted perspective, is the most fertile tool with which humans work. The fictive children's imaginations, supported with what today we would call a scientific demeanor--that is, one that respects and uses observation, objectivity, critical thinking, and teamwork--promises a morally advanced and highly able next generation capable of raising the young nation to new heights. By relying so heavily upon botanical discourse, Hawthorne creates a world in which morality, pedagogy, and science emerge as imaginative play, exploiting what John Keith Limon calls "the possibilities of science" at a time when the boundaries between magic and natural philosophy were still porous. As Limon says, "it requires an insistent ahistoricity to assert that the differences between scientific quackery and scientific respectability could have been neatly defined in the nineteenth century, as the reader of the respected 'Silliman's Journal' (in which one can read about unicorns and self-moving rocks) well knows. Where science philosophy left off and pseudo-philosophy began was unclear." Indeed, he continues, there were "so many versions of science available to the writer (so many possible alliances) between 1798 and 1859 that it is not far-fetched to conclude that, whatever personal or intellectual or aesthetic problem the litterateur may have run into, there must have existed a 'science' that responded to it" (12, 6, 14). …
Each year, CHILDREN\u27S LITERATURE honors Dissertations of Note within the field of children\u27... more Each year, CHILDREN\u27S LITERATURE honors Dissertations of Note within the field of children\u27s literary history and criticism. The 2006 issue (volume 34) lists the names, dissertation titles, and brief dissertation synopses of those selected for this recognition
Didactic, scientifically oriented children's literature crisscrossed the Atlantic in the eighteen... more Didactic, scientifically oriented children's literature crisscrossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finding wide popularity in Great Britain and the United States; yet the genre has since suffered from a reputation for being dull and pedantic and has been neglected by scholars. Challenging this scholarly devaluation, "Science and Imagination in Anglo-American Children's Books, 1760-1855" argues that didactic, scientifically oriented children's books play upon and encourage the use of the imagination. Three significant Anglo-American children's authors-Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and Nathaniel Hawthorne-infuse their writings with the wonders of science and the clear message that an active imagination is a necessary component of a moral upbringing. Indeed, these authors' books, most particularly Sandford and Merton (1783-1789), Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825), and A Wonder-Book fo r Girls and Boys (1852), are more than mere lessons: they are didactic fantasies intended to spark creativity within their readers. These didactic fantasies are best understood in the context of the emerging industrial revolution and the height of the Atlantic slave trade. These phenomena, combined with the entrenchment of classicism in Anglo-American culture and the lesserknown transatlantic botany craze, shaped the ways in which Day, Edgeworth, and Hawthorne crafted their children's stories. Certainly dramatic changes on both sides of the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced the differences in the texts. More important to this study, however, are the vital connections among these stories. Each author draws heavily upon Rousseau's ubiquitous childrearing treatise Emile and upon her or his literary predecessor to create children's books that encourage exploring nature through scientific experimentation and imaginative enterprise. Yet these writers do not encourage the imagination run amok. Rather, they see the need for morally grounded scientific endeavor, for which they rely primarily on classicism and on gender ideology. Incorporating tales of the ancient world to inculcate the ideal of a virtuous, disinterested, and learned citizen responsible to the larger body politic, the three children's authors-but most notably and explicitly Hawthorne-tie a romanticized, classical past to the emerging industrial world. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. That eighteenth-and nineteenth-century genteel juvenile audiences in Great Britain and the United States shared similar tastes is a function of the transatlantic nature of early American children's literature. Lacking well into the nineteenth century an English-language literary marketplace that would sustain native industry beyond sermons, almanacs, newspapers, and hornbooks, American booksellers and readers turned primarily to British imports for the latest in the arts and sciences for adults and for children (Avery 2). Thus Sandford and Merton, while written by an Englishman, also can legitimately be considered an early American children's book by virtue of its transatlantic market and audience. Recognizing this "transatlantic dimension" of American literary history, argues Michael Winship, is essential to forming "a broader, international perspective" of American literature and culture (99, 107-108)-particularly in an era when globalization and the electronic highway challenge national boundaries rigidly conceived. Thus in the nineteenth-century transatlantic book trade of American publishing firm Ticknor and Fields, whose lists included texts by Thoreau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Emerson, as well as Dickens, Scott, Tennyson, and Kingsley, Winship urges scholars to recognize a vital fostering of "an international, Anglo-American literary culture" (108, 107) shaped by the same transatlantic trade that so marks early American children's books. A Wonder-Book fo r Girls and Boys (1852), Hawthorne's resoundingly popular and highly praised collection of Greek myths for children, exemplifies an Americanproduced transatlantic counterpart to D ay's and Edgeworth's books for young people. Never out of print since its publication, A Wonder-Book spawned a cottage industry that generated hundreds of editions, imprints, and adaptations, including translations into Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Braille, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Urdu; an equally successful sequel entitled Tanglewood Tales fo r Girls and Boys; Being a Second Wonder-Book (1853); special editions illustrated by renowned artists W alter Crane, Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, and Arthur Rackham, among others; dramatizations of the various stories from both A Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales', a 1915 vocal score with piano for a three-act operetta inspired by A Wonder-Book's "Paradise of Children"; a symphonic poem based on A W onder-Books "The Chimera," which served as a master's thesis in 1931; filmstrips with sound cassettes and a teacher's guide issued in 1981; books on tape published in 1969 and 1982; a VHS school video produced in 1989; and juvenile operas of A W onder-Book s "Paradise of Children" and Tanglewood Tales' "Circe's Palace" pressed into CDs in 1998 and 2002, respectively.11 Critics unanimously supported Hawthorne's foray into "old classical legends," noting how amiable and agreeable they found the "vein of airy gayety" running through the volume in place of the "stem, though irresistibly fascinating horrors, which he wields with such terrific mastery in his recent productions," namely, The Scarlet Letter and The 12 House o f the Seven Gables. "Child and man will love this work equally well," predicted H arper's New Monthly Magazine (138). The Living Age agreed, noting that "the child and the man, gentle or simple, equally imbibe [Hawthorne's] meaning," making A Wonder-Book "the beau ideal of a Christmas gift for the approaching season" (48). Not to be outdone, the critic with New Englander and Yale Review "place[d] this child's book among the best works which [Hawthorne] has written," having read "nothing of his which either more displays the easy and graceful workings of genius, or more captivates every faculty of the mind of the reader" (156). In 1869 the same journal Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was that they couldn't recommend Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm, or Hans Christian Andersen since everyone already knew about fairy tales and nursery rhymes." When the results were published in the January 1903 issue, Hawthorne's Wonder-Book placed third, missing out only to Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy, which came in first, "followed very closely" by Lewis' Alice in Wonderland (pars. 2, 3). By 2004, many home-schooling mothers would agree with the high marks that children a century ago gave Hawthorne's text. Ranking A Wonder-Book a "not-to-be-missed read aloud[...] for young children" in its list of " 1000 Good Books," the Classical Christian Homeschooling website electronically advocates a historically vital transatlantic response to this mid-nineteenth-century publication.14 Whereas twenty-first-century home-schoolers eagerly meet on the Internet to improve upon their pedagogical models, the nineteenth-century Hawthorne was content with breathing the rarified air of cultural reform that swept through his native Massachusetts. After he married Sophia Peabody in the early 1840s and moved into the Old Manse in Concord, he found himself surrounded by what Michael J. Colacurcio has dubbed "the newspaper of the age" (30): Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Each time the Hawthornes moved the list would grow, until by 1851 it had swollen to include Catharine
While traditionally considered the first creative American children's book to value childhood... more While traditionally considered the first creative American children's book to value childhood imagination over didacticism, Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, published in 1852, may be explored more usefully as a key text in the history of science education. (1) That notion may sound peculiar to those familiar with Wonder-Book, a collection of stories that appear to be simple, cheerful retellings of the Greek myths of Perseus and Medusa, King Midas, Pandora's Box, Hercules' eleventh labor, Philemon and Baucis, and Bellerophon and Pegasus. Yet Hawthorne uses these classical myths in a pedagogically innovative way--to promote a scientific mode of thinking among girls and boys at a time when scientific training for youth in the United States was haphazard at best. Today's readers often miss the dense layers of science in the book because they have lost interest in botany and classicism, popular transatlantic subjects in the mid-nineteenth century. In Wonder-Book, Hawthorne trades upon botany's pedagogical reputation as a moral restorative and an excellent intellectual, spiritual, and emotional self-cultivator. His choice dovetails well with his use of Greek myths, which offered connotations of purity, morality, and pedagogical probity by virtue of their place in nineteenth-century Anglo-American classicism. (2) Hus Wonder-Book stands as a pedagogical specimen doubly strengthened by the nineteenth-century elite's appreciation for the civic and personal virtue that botany as well as Greek culture could propagate. Rousseau's influence on Wonder-Book adds another resonant layer. The protective countryside that in Emile forms the ideal sphere in which to raise a well-born child emerges in Wonder-Book's framing devices, which surround each myth, as a hortus conclusus, or inviolate garden, where twelve children named after wild flowers safely nourish their budding imaginations with healthful doses of Greek myths, as told to them by visiting college student Eustace Bright. By creating this Edenic kindergarten, (3) Hawthorne reminds us that the imagination's organic qualities must be carefully cultivated for meaningful cultural advancement. Thus Eustace's stories, which are themselves experiments in recasting Greek myths, suggest to readers that the imagination is the visionary power that leads to wholesome self-cultivation and cultural progress, an idea that Quicksilver, Hawthorne's version of Hermes, subtly conveys. Mental machinery, in other words, trumps metal machinery because its ingenuity, teamed with farsighted perspective, is the most fertile tool with which humans work. The fictive children's imaginations, supported with what today we would call a scientific demeanor--that is, one that respects and uses observation, objectivity, critical thinking, and teamwork--promises a morally advanced and highly able next generation capable of raising the young nation to new heights. By relying so heavily upon botanical discourse, Hawthorne creates a world in which morality, pedagogy, and science emerge as imaginative play, exploiting what John Keith Limon calls "the possibilities of science" at a time when the boundaries between magic and natural philosophy were still porous. As Limon says, "it requires an insistent ahistoricity to assert that the differences between scientific quackery and scientific respectability could have been neatly defined in the nineteenth century, as the reader of the respected 'Silliman's Journal' (in which one can read about unicorns and self-moving rocks) well knows. Where science philosophy left off and pseudo-philosophy began was unclear." Indeed, he continues, there were "so many versions of science available to the writer (so many possible alliances) between 1798 and 1859 that it is not far-fetched to conclude that, whatever personal or intellectual or aesthetic problem the litterateur may have run into, there must have existed a 'science' that responded to it" (12, 6, 14). …
Each year, CHILDREN\u27S LITERATURE honors Dissertations of Note within the field of children\u27... more Each year, CHILDREN\u27S LITERATURE honors Dissertations of Note within the field of children\u27s literary history and criticism. The 2006 issue (volume 34) lists the names, dissertation titles, and brief dissertation synopses of those selected for this recognition
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