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The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762-1860
Paperback
Series: Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children and Y
Literary CriticismBritish HistoryWomen's Studies
ISBN13: 9781625347558
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: Jan 29 2024
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.87 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
Finalist for the 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize
Winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for Bibliographical Work on Children's Books from The Bibliographical Society of America By the close of the eighteenth century, learning to read and write became closely associated with learning about the material world, and a vast array of games and books from the era taught children how to comprehend the physical world of things. Examining a diverse archive of popular science books, primers, grammars, toys, manufacturing books, automata, and literature from Maria Edgeworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Education of Things attests that material culture has long been central to children's literature.Elizabeth Massa Hoiem argues that the combination of reading and writing with manual tinkering and scientific observation promoted in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain produced new forms of mechanical literacy, competencies that were essential in an industrial era. As work was repositioned as play, wealthy children were encouraged to do tasks in the classroom that poor children performed for wages, while working-class children honed skills that would be crucial to their social advancement as adults.
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