In the early nineteenth century, when education in Britain took what we would now call a “pictorial turn”, a substantial market for educational prints and aids was generated. Looking at how foreign nations were represented in recreational and educational material for children on foreign countries at that time, this paper will pay special attention to prints produced for one of the new educational aids developed in the 1830s, the so-called Rudiment Box. As Jill Shefrin shows in her magisterial volume The Dartons (2009), William Darton became one of the first to specialize in educational prints, and his Rudiment Box with its glass-paneled doors and moveable rolls of prints displayed a veritable curriculum in pictures. One of the ten subjects covered by them was ‘Geography’, and the material, beyond being part of the educational arena, reflects the social and political discourses of its time. In the centre of my deliberations is the print “Costumes of Nations for Infant Schools” which presents the costumed representatives of 12 nations.

My approach is founded in Image studies, or Imagology, which investigates the ways in which an image and its historical context are expressed in texts rather than its pretended reference to empirical reality. Observing the context of contemporary history as well as conventions of discourse such as intertextuality, I will look at “Costumes of Nations” as a whole, probing the criteria for selection of these 12 nations rather than any others, at individual images and the traditions of representation of that specific nation, and at pairs of pictures, considering the principle of contrast behind the portrayals. My analysis is of the material itself; how it might have been presented by teachers in the classroom - taken at face value to teach about differences between foreign nations or used as an entertaining and exotic diversion or (most likely) a mixture of both - or how the children responded to them we do not know.

The paper will conclude with two examples of stories for children from a different educational tradition which contested these kinds of images and perspectives on ‘foreignness’. The tale "Travellers' Wonders" from John Aikin and Anna Barbauld's Evenings at Home (1792-1796) and The Little Enquirer. or, Instructive Conversations for Children from Five to Six Years of Age, (Anon 1830) illustrate how children’s literature informed by the Enlightenment ideal of tolerance of different cultural perspectives challenges stereotypical images of nations based on difference.