Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762-1860 (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) 328 pp. $30.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781625347558
Winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for the best bibliographic study of pre-1951 children’s literature.
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem’s winning of this influential award is completely warranted. To quote from the prize committee: ‘Hoiem’s study provides an excellent in-depth analysis of the technology texts written for children and youth in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Using children’s print culture in the form of books, object lesson kits, and pedagogical ephemera like wall posters, Hoiem deftly charts the development of mechanical learning texts across classes from child factory workers in Lancasterian monitorial schools to wealthy children engaging in experiments using material found in their well-appointed mansions.’ https://bibsocamer.org/news/2025-schiller-prize
The committee considers the book to be ground-breaking. Indeed, it educates a reader in several fields not usually grouped together: scientific theory with applied technological knowledge, through a well-done analysis of the intersection of class, gender and race in Britain and its empire. Hoiems does this by engaging in parallel analysis: by discussing well-known middle-class female and male thinkers of the period in relation to working class writers and radicals.
Hoiem engages in object analysis or ‘thing theory’ from below. She argues that with the rise of manufacturing, skillsets such as tinkering or experimentation became essential new literacies for an industrial economy. She deftly upends the common valuation of play and work in terms of children and the classes they occupy. Wealthy families incorporated artisanal practices into their private teaching by having their children play at the work of making things and so acquire mechanical literacies by handling books, games, crafts, and so on.
By contrast working class author-educators taught mechanical literacy by situating manual labor as a valuable source of knowledge. They created manipulable learning aids to teach working youth not only mechanical literacy but how to engage in critical analysis. Since manipulating toys with texts held different meanings for different classes, Hoeim exposes the class assumptions about which children are capable of rational thought and political participation.
The book consists of a preface, introduction, five substantial chapters, and a brief conclusion. Each are excellent for their purpose and fit together well. The preface provides personal context, the introduction cogently describes her scope and approach: applying ‘thing theory’ from below enables her to investigate marginalized voices (mothers, children, working-class) to generate new theoretical insights about labor and play. In this way she can interrogate established pedagogical authorities (Pestalozzi, Rousseau) and re-examine canonical authors. Each chapter is cleverly and aptly titled to exploit multiple meanings. The organization is not chronological but she proceeds thematically and typologically through the period.
In Chapter 1, ‘What children grasp: the tangible properties of objects’, Hoiem examines materials produced to enable haptic learning. These include toys and games and prints. She is inspired by the ‘interlocutor glossary’ in the novel Practical Education (1780) by Honora Sneyd Edgeworth where the book begins with instructions for use; asterisks in the text refer to a separate Glossary where terms are defined and the teacher encouraged to show the object and let the children touch and examine it (34). ‘Interlocutor gesture’ is a key pedagogical concept for the device draws attention outside the text to show connections to other manipulable objects in the child’s environment (36). Hoeim adroitly uses the excellent selection of images in each chapter and so invites a reader to do the same with her book.
Chapter 2, ‘Moving bodies manual labor and children’s play in mechanical philosophy books’, is a nuanced reading of materials designed to teach ‘mechanical philosophy’, whereby the concept of the universe and its components can be understood as mechanisms. She focuses on the class and gender politics of these textbooks whereby mechanical philosophy was a framework for an ideological philosophy of learning. Here, Hoeim outlines a main theme: contrasting educational approaches for the middle classes and the laboring classes encapsulated in the distinction between rational and practical mechanics respectively.
Chapter 3, ‘The empire of man over material things: children’s books on manufacturing and trade’, addresses ‘production stories,’ about how everyday things are made. As Hoiem states, they were the most common narrative form in children’s industrial media of the period and
continue today. She interrogates several genres like children’s maps, games, books, including movable books, where commodities and goods are framed as ideologically neutral – yet encouraging consumerism. She states how the actions of the movable books evoke a sense of superiority for the player. Slavery was presented as positive and child labor working with machines presented as educational.
Chapter 4, ‘Self-governing machines: automata and autonomy in Maria Edgeworth’s fiction’, presents Hoiem’s argument about automata as mechanical miniatures of humans. Focusing on the work of Edgeworth in relation to her father she argues thatin writing about machines, the Edgeworths both relied on and contributed to the widespread cultural mythology about the inspirational power of automata. Here she analyzes some of Edgeworth’s most famous girl-centered stories which still feature on university courses today.
In Chapter 5, ‘Knowledge which shall be power in their hands: radical grammars for working-class readers’, Hoiem focuses on the opposite group of learners. With the rise in literacy rates, grammar became a new class marker; therefore, teaching grammar to laborers was a radical act. Methods for teaching grammar to middle class children and laboring classes were similar (object lessons, games, and manipulatives, in addition to texts). However, grammar education for adults, produced by author-educators like William Cobbet and others, included carefully selected passages by radical thinkers, particularly those associated with cooperative movements. Hoiem states that understanding the principles governing how material objects are created, exchanged, and distributed, or ‘mechanical literacy’, was essential to the cooperative movement,
In the short conclusion, ‘William Lovett’s case of moveable types’, Hoiem explains that while the design and contents of this case feature adult-oriented practical instruction, it may enhance children’s agency. It does not provide opportunities for interactivity or imaginative play but rather gives the useful knowledge they need to challenge economic and political systems. Hoiem provides a short background of Lovett, a schoolteacher and cabinet-maker, who while in Warwick jail, created a classroom learning aid of his own design, that creates ‘a closer connection of words and things’. A microcosm of his political beliefs, a case of moveable types resembles a typesetter’s printing press block, stored in a wooden box, which can be posted on classroom ‘reading stands’. The specifications provided by Lovett enable anyone to build it inexpensively and integrate it into existing classrooms, where young children gathered around learning stations to share the visual aids, including object lessons stored in a drawer (266-267). Unlike the miniature toys for elite children who play at work, this functional working case provides new avenues for thinking and doing mechanical literacy. Hoiem provides clear details about the case but no image. Making one would be a good critical-creative project in a contemporary class.
This book would be excellent for senior undergraduate or graduate courses in literature, library science, book history, or the history of childhood. The illustrations with their ‘interlocuter gestures’ provide one a way to approach the book. The thorough index is essential for a reader since it covers primary and secondary sources and has apt subdivisions. It efficiently provides a means for an instructor and student to navigate the rich, dense material.
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Professor Curriculum and Instruction and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University
