Animal Things, Human Language, and Children’s Education

In this article, I analyze the animal materials incorporated into eighteenth-century educational products that were intended to teach children to read. I begin with an ivory alphabet toy and then extend my analysis to children’s books by Sarah Trimmer, John Aikin, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Working at the intersection of material culture studies and animal studies enables new readings of this collection of familiar didactic texts by connecting the animals represented in them to the animal products used to make children’s textual toys. In both toys and books, linguistic systems are made from animal parts so that human subjects can be distinguished from animal objects. While animal life and meaning are emptied out in this process of objectification, the animal thing persistently asserts itself, revealing the beauty of rational order to be the disordered remains of another, animal form. By attending to these animal things, we can recognize and reread eighteenth-century texts as animal relics.