Brown cloth binding with embossed gilt fairies and title on the front board. Similar on the spine. All edges gilt.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feel and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Science lectures for children. Includes one anonymous engraving, and many others supervised by English engraver James Davis Cooper (1823-1904)

Arabella Burton Buckley (24 October 1840 – 9 February 1929)  was a writer and science educator. She championed Darwinian evolution with particular emphasis on the mind and morals, in contrast to the prevailing emphasis on competition and physical survival. Charles Darwin described her as being able to ‘treat evolution with much dexterity and truthfulness’.

Arabella Buckley’s writing was predominantly aimed at children and young people, but was popular and greatly respected by all ages. She communicated science through enchantment and metaphorical language that was attractive to younger readers. Like many writers in her time, she was trying to distance science from the mechanistic and materialistic philosophies it was sometimes connected to, and promoted it in moralistic terms: learning is presented as a means to become not only knowledgeable, but morally good. This places it in the tradition of books such as Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus or the Wonders of the Shore (1855) which ignited the Victorian craze for the popular pursuit of the natural world, seen in a framework of what has been called ‘muscular Christianity’.

However, Buckley veered away from this hyper-masculinised narrative of nature and science. She tended to avoid technical language, such as the mechanisms of natural selection, and instead use narrative and metaphor to reach a wide audience.  This made her work accessible and ‘barrier crossing’.