From Orbis Pictus to Topophilia: The World in a Book

To capture the world of nature and to satisfy the public's desire to know about the world we inhabit is the aim of every encyclopedia. To do the same for children was the goal of Johannes Amos Comenius in the first printed picture book for children, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), translated into English by Charles Hoole as Visible World: or, A Picture and Nomenclature of all the chief Things that are in the World; and of Men's Employment therein (1672). The urge to order the world into a place that can be presented in a book is still with us. For example, Yi-Fu Tuan explores our love of place exhaustively in his Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (1974). Like Comenius, he appreciates that our response to place is a physical as well as an aesthetic one: "Perception [of place] is an activity, a reaching out to the world" (12). Between the twentieth-century perception of place and the seventeenth-century approach to place lies Dr. John Trusler's rationalist reinterpretation of Orbis Pictus for a late-eighteenth-century child, The Progress of Man and Society (1791). An examination of Comenius's work in its assorted incarnations may help to illumine how our sense of place has changed over the past three centuries, particularly between the 1777 reprint of Hoole's translation and the 1791 reworking.

Comenius, Hoole, and Truster display their understanding of visual images in a print-oriented culture by using woodcuts and wood engravings to augment their texts. They know that we cannot separate our visually oriented culture from our perception of place. As Tuan explains:

Although all human beings have similar sense organs, how their capacities are used and developed begin to diverge at an early age. As a result, not only do attitudes to environment differ but the actualized capacity of the senses differs, so that people in one culture may acquire sharp noses for scent while those in another acquire deep stereoscopic vision. Both worlds are predominantly visual: one will be enriched by fragrances, the other by the acute three-dimensionality of objects and spaces.

(12)

Comenius, Hoole, and Truster all emphasize the need to explore visual images when using the visual medium of print. And all relate the depth of cognitive learning to the sensual perception available to the reader.

In his Preface to his 1672 translation, Visible World, Hoole emphasizes that sensual perception is the basis of knowledge and, indeed, of a sound life. He tells us that "to exercise the senses well about the right perceiving the differences of things, will be to lay the grounds for all wisdom, and all wise discourse, and all discreet actions in one's course of life" (3). Thus Hoole, patterning his work on that of Comenius, produces a book which will orient a child to his place in the world:

And if we had Books, wherein are the Pictures of all Creatures, Herbs, Beasts, Fish, Fowles, they would stand us in great stead. For pictures are the most intelligible books, that Children can look upon. They come closest to nature; nay, saith Scaliger, Art exceeds her.

(Conclusion to Preface)

With these attitudes, Hoole follows Comenius in creating an ordered view of a world that is perceived by the senses. Such perceptions, in turn, create cultural values in child readers.

Comenius and Hoole use the same woodcuts. But in 1727 (reissued 1777) the illustrations to Hoole's translation were updated, changing the pictured clothing from the seventeenth-century large collars and caps (for girls and women) and knee-length trousers and capes (for boys and men) to draped gowns, hats with feathers, wigs, naval hats, and coats.

Figure 1.

Comenius, "The Master and the Boy," Orbis Sensualium Pictus translated by Hoole as Visible World (1672)

One thing is constant: all editions begin and end with a woodcut of a teacher and a pupil (Figure 1). In the seventeenth-century editions the teacher and his pupil stand in the foreground facing the reader.

Their bodies turn to one another in...