Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature

Straley's thesis is a corrective one, and it depends on an understanding of the ways in which evolution's impact on Victorian culture-and, more specifically, on the elementary school curriculum-and the increasing standardization and secularization of the educational system shaped children's literature and the understanding of childhood from 1860 to 1920. Evolution and Imagination begins with a contextualizing consideration of pre-Darwinian children's literature, specifically the primers of natural theology by writers including Sarah Trimmer and Charlotte Smith-which followed Isaac Watts's injunction to parents to teach their children to "observe the various occurrences of Nature and Providence" and "that the GREAT GOD made all these, and that his providence governs them"-and a sustained analysis of Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature (1855-71), which critics have similarly classified (Watts qtd. in Straley 34). In her detailed analysis of Parables, Straley compellingly sets the stage for her analysis of the Golden Age classics and their cultural contexts that follows, and she also, just as importantly, reminds us of "Gatty's importance in both the formation of the children's canon and the intersection between scientific theory and literary technique" (55).