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.

“Reading and learning about the physical world go hand in hand in Hoiem’s fascinating archive, and her focus on working-class children as well as middle-class ones redresses the bias toward the latter in much children’s literature criticism.”—Hannah Field, author of Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader

“The Education of Things is an important contribution to the study of children’s literature and the history of education—as well as to histories of object-based knowledge. Hoiem’s creative, multidisciplinary approach makes connections among fields that are often considered separately, making this a particularly exciting and novel intervention.”—Sarah Anne Carter, author of Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World