Picturing the World for Children: Early Nineteenth-Century Images of Foreign Nations

Emer O’Sullivan looks at how foreign nations were represented in educational prints generated in early nineteenth-century Britain, with a special focus on two geographical prints produced for the Rudiment Box, an educational aid developed in the 1830s. Using an approach grounded in imagology, she shows how these prints reflect the social and political discourses of their time, and examines the origins of the images together with their intertextual traditions. The essay concludes with examples of recreational stories for children informed by the Enlightenment ideal of tolerance of different cultural perspectives that contests the kinds of ethnotypical images of nations based on difference presented in the Rudiment Box.