When nineteenth-century nonfiction lays aside its voice of authority, these texts show what Joe Sutliff Sanders describes in A Literature of Questions as a willingness to “invite readers to the work of inquiry” (2018, p. 20). Sanders examines moments when nonfiction books encourage readers’ critical engagement, by generating multiple perspectives and ideas in partnership with the reader. Quality nonfiction allows readers to rest on a momentary “consensus” they can reexamine, returning to ask more questions and to draw new conclusions (p. 22). My theory of interlocutor and developmental gestures identifies one way that nineteenth-century nonfiction opens up space for critical inquiry, despite the written word’s strong association with authority – by gesturing outside the book.
Extemporized lessons and practical experiments equipped children to teach themselves throughout their lives. This mode of teaching gained ground over memorization during a century of rapid socioeconomic changes stemming from industrialization, imperial conquest, emancipation, and expanding male suffrage, not to mention new scientific discoveries and youth institutions. These changes, in turn, impacted the form and accessibility of nonfiction books. By the twentieth century, increased access to primary education and library collections allowed more children to read nonfiction, while new industrial processes (e.g. manufactured wood pulp paper, linotype printing, and color lithography) made attractive nonfiction books affordable to more families. Yet twentieth-century nonfiction sustains many generic conventions established during the previous century.
Natural Philosophy, Science, and Religion
Often skeptical of book learning, science writers tell children to put down their books and explore their world. Their title pages favor epigrams from Francis Bacon, whose iconoclastic scientific method overturned classical authorities in favor of observation, and they represent children as ideal scientists who love experimental inquiry. Daniel Cooper’s The Little Book of Botany (1839) cautions children “not to rest satisfied with the description and places given in these pages, but seek and examine the several structures and organs for themselves” (p. vii), while the father in The Young Philosophers (Flint 1827) advises his son and daughter, “Never let any thing pass your observation, without reminding you of its cause… . you must use the powers of your mind, … as philosophers do, and try to discover the reason of it” (p. 31). Some authors even celebrate misbehavior as a reasonable response to bad teachers. In Fireside Philosophy (ca. 1841), “Peter Parley” author William Martin praises the “intelligent mother” who says, “I dislike ‘good children’” who are “stupidly quiet” (p. viii), while Maria and Richard Edgeworth’s opening chapter in Practical Education (1798) praises toddlers who dismantle their toys. When adults fail to feed hungry minds, intelligent children destroy things. In Abbott’s The Little Philosopher, a mother directs her older children to imitate their troublesome baby brother, who “is tearing the newspaper all to pieces.” Mother insists, “It is not for mischief. A piece of paper is something new and curious” and “he is learning the nature of it” (1835, p. vi). By transforming catechism into inquiry, these early science books prepare the way for modern textbooks and school science labs.
Interlocutor gestures in science writing are intimately interwoven with developmental gestures: exploration stimulates growth. Authors organize scientific subjects developmentally, beginning with directly observable subjects, before proceeding to invisible or spiritual forces (magnetism, gravity, souls). The American physician Worthington Hooker, Vice President of the American Medical Association and a Yale professor of medicine, wrote a three-volume natural history collection, The Child’s Book of Nature (1857), whose narrative strategies, though not original, exemplify the best of nineteenth-century science writing for children. Hooker’s volume one, on plants, targets young children, opening with a lesson on “flower friends” that motivates learning through familial love: “If you love flowers, you will like to know all that you can about them” (1864, p. 22). Chapters on color, odor, and shape, accompanied by small illustrations, call attention to everyday things. Hooker uses the second-person narrative voice to address young readers as fellow scientists and suggests experiments they might perform: “If you were blindfolded, and a pink, a rose, an apple blossom, a pond lily, an orange blossom, and a clover-head, were put up to your nose, one after the other, you would know each of them by its smell” (p. 29). Hooker frequently exclaims in wonder, or describes curious phenomena, then poses questions for readers to ponder.
In volume two, Hooker uses animal life to mirror the child’s body. Integrating animal and human anatomy, Hooker begins with the houses that animals build, then explains, “The body is the house or habitation of the soul… . The bones are its timbers. The skin is its covering. The hair is its thatched roof. The eyes are its windows. It is a house that can be easily moved about, just as the soul wishes” (1864, p. 11). These metaphors align the activities of animals, who build special homes or prepare foods, with those of humans, while human inventions are similar to divine creation. This stratified world progressively develops children’s instinctual play into purposeful making. Such developmental organization is widespread in science writing by authors such as William Martin and Selina Bower, who draw parallels between the child’s interiority and the observable world. Anne Bullar’s Every-Day Wonders of Bodily Life (1862) compares human veins to leaves, the skull to a box, nerves to telegraph wires, joints to hinges, and glands to little bags. A mother in Village Science (1851) illustrates the “laws of motion” using God’s “own works,” for example, the human arm is “a most powerful lever,” while teeth “are a complete set of chisels, wedges, and saws” (pp. 40–42). Hooker refers to plants as “perfume factories,” and the nervous system as “a telegraph,” while “The brain is the mind’s office” (1864, p. 35), while Victorians wax rhapsodic about fire-burning steam engines and oxygen-burning human lungs. Supported by Cartesian dualism, which regards the human body as a machine controlled by an active mind, these metaphors help children understand their inner anatomy, which they cannot see, using familiar material objects they can hold in their hands. Children therefore build/explore in order to fashion/know themselves.
Leaving behind concrete subjects, Hooker’s final volume covers air, water, heat, optics, electricity, magnetism, gravitation, and the motion of the Earth – things children infer by their effects. “I have placed these subjects last,” Hooker explains, because they require “training in observation and reasoning” to understand (1864, p. iii). For instance, “you can not see air,” but only “what it does when it is in motion” (p. 11). Together, Hooker’s three volumes progress from visible to invisible: the world at the child’s backdoor, to the body’s hidden anatomy, to the child’s soul and the cosmological forces of the universe. This developmental trajectory anticipates a child reader who slowly adds abstract thinking to observation and manual dexterity. Readers acquire these abilities mentored by a world designed by God to anticipate children’s biological development and transform humanity in a Transcendental progression, popular among Hooker’s New England literary contemporaries.
Another developmental gesture common across science writing is the power of the small. Hooker tenderly points out the humble features of plants, and draws parallels between children, who seem insignificant yet are capable of important discoveries, and plant ecosystems, which perform amazing feats in aggregation. “Every child, in doing little kind things, may, like the small leaf, do its part of the good that is to be done in the world (1864, p. 79). Buckley’s Fairy-Land