Enfilade

From the University of Massachusetts Press:

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1625347565 (hardback), $99 / ISBN: 978-1625347558 (paperback), $31.

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.

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem is assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Preface

Introduction
1  What Children Grasp: The Tangible Properties of Objects
2  Moving Bodies: Manual Labor and Children’s Play in Mechanical Philosophy Books
3  ‘The Empire of Man over Material Things’: Children’s Books on Manufacturing and Trade
4  Self-Governing Machines: Automata and Autonomy in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction
5  ‘Knowledge That Shall Be Power in Their Hands’: Radical Grammars for Working-Class Readers
Conclusion: William Lovett’s Case of Moveable Type

Notes
Index