ABSTRACT
We all remember Alice’s questioning the use of a book without pictures or conversations. Conversations were indeed a way of getting people into science: Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry were a classic of this genre, as were Jeremiah Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues. No doubt others beside the young John Stuart Mill enjoyed this little book (whatever stern and ambitious fathers thought about it), and other schoolchildren learned it by rote, like the uncomprehending pupils Bishop Heber found in India.1 It did indeed make science more attractive than blocks of prose would have done. Both these books had pictures too: Joyce’s title page depicts the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to make a point about Galileo, while opposite is a frontispiece of a bewigged dominie conducting a lesson for three boys (though in some of the dialogues an Emma appears). Jane Marcet’s more significant work had an all-female cast, with a governess and two bright charges.2 There, the illustrations are grander, engravings occupying a whole page, and show apparatus and how to use it – disembodied hands hold pieces the right way round. While the chemistry she got across was quite austere (no gendered concessions to cookery or needlework), the text’s attractiveness was undoubtedly increased by the pictures.
