Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader, by Hannah Field, Gaming Empire in Children’s British Board Games, 1836-1860, by Megan A. Norcia

Abstract

Reviewed by: Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader by Hannah Field, and: Gaming Empire in Children's British Board Games, 1836–1860 by Megan A. Norcia Andrea Korda (bio) Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader, by Hannah Field; pp. 248. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, $120.00, $30.00 paper. Gaming Empire in Children's British Board Games, 1836–1860, by Megan A. Norcia; pp. xii + 261. New York and London: Routledge, 2019, $128.00, $39.16 paper, $39.16 ebook. Movable picture books and board games both fall along a continuum between books and toys. As Robin Bernstein explains, these types of material objects "jumble together in children's rooms, in their beds, and in their play" (qtd. in Field 9). Two recent books take up such objects and, taking Bernstein's work as a starting point, treat them as "scripts" for childhood play, showing that they "are not so much played as coauthored by the child who engages with them" (Norcia 12). By addressing the child's active role in play, the books' authors, Hannah Field and Megan A. Norcia, participate in ongoing discussions about historicism and the possibilities for accessing past experiences of childhood. Yet they differ in their ultimate emphases. While Norcia's Gaming Empire in Children's British Board Games, 1836–1860 focuses on the ideologies generated and upheld by the notion of board-game-as-script, Field's Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader considers the agency of children as they engaged the scripts of movable books. Close attention to embodied engagement and agency is a strength of Field's Playing with the Book, which attends to the format of books in order to account not only for the intellectual act of reading but also for the embodied, physical actions required of readers. Chapter 1 demonstrates Field's method through examples of movable books that include instructions on how to handle the book, considered alongside "unconventional archival traces of children's reading—coloring-in, rips, tears, and other marks of damage" (27). [End Page 144] These nontextual traces render the books' historical users visible to today's researchers, while also hinting at their agency by providing evidence that users deviated from prescribed ways of handling books. Subsequent chapters of Playing with the Book show how different movable formats shape users' reading experiences and contribute to the books' meanings. One consistent theme is that movable books prompt ways of reading that resist linear narrative unfolding, or even eschew conventional reading altogether. Chapter 2 looks at panorama picture books—constructed with folded paper that can be extended to reveal a sequence of pictures or a continuous frieze—and shows how the format disrupts conventional understandings of narrative sequence. Chapter 3 considers pop-up books, which invite the reader to investigate and manipulate an illusion of depth by looking into the illusion as well as touching its surfaces. The books therefore call attention to readers' bodily interactions as well as their agency in disrupting the illusion. Chapter 4 addresses dissolving-view books published by German publisher Ernest Nister, in which interlocking slats of paper are moved from one position to another in order to reveal two different pictures. The pictures were not always clearly connected, with the result that readers are encouraged to take an active role in filling in the gaps between the pictures. The question of agency is at the forefront of chapter 5, which focuses on mechanical books created by German illustrator Lothar Meggendorfer. Children pulled a tab to control the repetitive gestures performed by laborers, such as blacksmiths or domestic workers, thereby placing the child in "a position of power, one that inculcate[d] a number of adult types while assuring a child reader of her own mastery over the book" (180). Paying attention to the racialized as well as working-class types found within these books, which were luxury items that catered to middle- and upper-class audiences, Field demonstrates that the power afforded to the child was not only a mastery over the book but also a sense of control and superiority...