Parables and Parodies: Margaret Gatty's Audiences in the Parables from Nature

Born in 1809, six months after Charles Darwin, Margaret Scott Gatty is a name now in some danger of disappearing from the annals of both literature and science.¹ Although a prominent and early writer of literature for children, including The Fairy-Godmothers (1851), she is frequently lost in the shadow of her successful and now more popular daughter Juliana Horatia Ewing. And even though her advocacy of scientific pursuits, particularly for women, was ahead of its time, cultural historians of science regard her mainly as a quaint example of Victorian botanizers. Both views, I think, sell Margaret Gatty short, and they do so in at least two ways: first, because they insist on a formulaic separation between her work in "science" and her work in "literature"; and second, because Gatty's status as a writer for children and as a scientific amateur diminishes the current critical sense of her potential impact. In the following pages I want to argue that Gatty's influence was far more significant than we have been led to believe, and that her work, falsely divided between literature and science, involved a focused effort to use children's literature as a means of confronting one of the most serious issues in Victorian scientific culture. That this effort is expressed in a series of stories for children, her Parables from Nature, should not diminish its significance at all; Gatty, as I will argue, understood that in writing for children she would reach across audiences and, she hoped, across generations. Gatty's accomplishment as a writer with multiple audiences reminds us that the idea of audience, particularly in children's literature, is still not well defined. The readership of the Parables, like most works for children, included not merely the conventional notion of "adults" and "children," but also—among other categories—children being read to, adults reading for themselves, and adults rereading the literature of their childhoods.

The enduringly successful Parables from Nature, a collection of wonderful stories drawn from natural history and published in various "series" from 1856 to 1861,² could be found on the reading list of virtually every middle-class child in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Although Gatty continued to write for children, she also published the History of British Sea-Weeds (1863), perhaps in an effort to stake a claim in the elevated discourse of serious scientific amateurs. Her Sea-Weeds is a staid, serious, and thorough work that extols the virtues of scientific knowledge and recommends algology as an appropriate pastime for both men and women who were interested in learning, as she writes in the introduction, about the "goodness of God." The remainder of the text is, for the most part, free of references to God or even natural theology; having made her point at the outset, Gatty recognizes that her readers have come to the text for facts and not for natural theology. Her willingness to set religious arguments aside may owe something to the Parables, in which she had already insisted on the necessary connection between God and nature. What Gatty's Sea-Weeds and the Parables have in common is a dedication to the notion that scientific curiosity is an essential part of the human intellect; both depend, the latter more explicitly than the former, on Gatty's strong belief that curiosity about nature can satisfy both the intellect and the soul.

The scientific curiosity that Gatty encourages in the Parables from Nature extends to both adults and children alike. Gatty, as U. C. Knoepflmacher has noted, found "adult sanction and adult purpose for the childlike wonder she extracted from nature" and in doing so was able to balance the audiences she knew would be drawn to her book (503). Recent scholars, including Knoepflmacher, Jacqueline Rose, and Peter Hunt, have reminded us that we need to tease out the complicated nexus of readers who come to children's literature. The endurance of "classics" may often be generated by the devotion of children, but it is guaranteed by the active assent of adults. And the willingness of...