Astronomical Education

In Evenings at Home, the conversations on astronomy are widely interspersed among other topics, thereby playing out difficult and abstract concepts gradually, which build on one another. On the fourteenth evening, a dialogue between Papa and Lucy, “Why an Apple Falls”, investigates the force of gravitation on small objects and then scales up to the forces commanding the earth as a “vast ball . . . continually spinning around”, which “is the cause why the sun and stars seem to rise and set”. The dialogue ends by asking “why the earth does not fall into the sun”. Apropos, preceding the dialogue, the topic of falling celestial objects is comically anticipated by a ballad, “Phaeton Junior; or, The Gig Demolished”, a homely version of the myth of Phaeton who begged his father, Apollo, to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun, nearly resulting in universal disaster (Aikin and Barbauld, Evenings at Home, 3:127–28, 129, 115–21).

The question of how the earth maintains its orbit is revived on the nineteenth evening in “Why the Earth Moves Round the Sun”, which, after describing centrifugal and centripetal forces using illustrations drawn everyday experiences, praises “the wonderful skill of the Creator [whereby] these two forces were made exactly to counterbalance each other; so that just as much as the earth . . . tends to fly forwards, just so much the sun draws it to the centre”. Finally, on the thirtieth evening, in “A Globe Lecture”, Papa and Lucy resume the topic of the planetsʼ movements in the solar system, but Papa delays this topic in favor of lesson in using a globe to understand the worldʼs differences in climate and the influence on vegetation, animals, and human cultures. An explanation of the planetsʼ orbits is deferred to another day when he will “take you to the lecture of an ingenious philosopher who has contrived a machine that will give you a better notion” of the planetary movements—that is, an orrery (Aikin and Barbauld, Evenings at Home, 4:117–18; 6:123).

Deference to visual aids such a celestial globe or the theatrical productions known as Lenten Lectures on Astronomy is a typical feature of educational dialogues as well as childrenʼs primers on astronomy. See also Joyce, Scientific Dialogues and Day, The History of Sandford and Merton and Maria Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel.

While Ruskin can be presumed to have gained an introduction to astronomy in Aikin and Barbauldʼs Evenings at Home, which he knew well, Ruskin himself gives direct evidence of his engagement with scientific dialogues on astronomy by Jeremiah Joyce and Thomas Day. In his own astronomical works of 1827–28, Ruskin focused primarily on the constellations, a topic beyond the scope of the three conversations on astronomy in Evenings at Home. In “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol 2”, Ruskinʼs Harry offers to “give . . . [Lucy] a drawing of [the constellation] charlesʼs wain as an introduction to astronomy” (7). The diagram, which Ruskin illustrates with his own drawing in the text, reproduces a figure in volume 2, “Of Astronomy”, of Jeremiah Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues; and the conceptual lesson of schematizing observations of the stars on paper is a topic in both Joyceʼs dialogues and in Dayʼs Sandford and Merton. In Thomas Dayʼs History of Sandford and Merton, the boys ask their tutor to procure a paper globe so they can draw their own observations of the constellations in the sky on the corresponding segment of the globe (Day, History of Sandford and Merton, 165, 187). Edgeworthʼs Frank and Mary attempt to cover a stone ball with paper in order to plot lines of longitude and latitude of the earth, but they encounter practical difficulties (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 156, 165–67).

In Joyceʼs dialogue, “Of the Fixed Stars”, the diagram that Ruskin reproduces as Harryʼs presentation to Lucy is likewise presented by Joyceʼs Tutor to his pupils, Charles and James; and just so, in Joyceʼs dialogue, the drawing serves as a first step in astronomy, teaching the boys “‘how to distinguish the stars, and . . . call them by their proper names’”. The Tutor points out Charlesʼ Wain in the night sky, and then describes the formation using the diagram—four stars forming a wagon, and three stars making the horses (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, vol. 2, “Of Astronomy”, Coversation 2, “Of the Fixed Stars”, 12, 15–16, 250 opp. [pl. 1, fig. 1]). Basic as it is, this seven‐starred constellation is not officially recognized in the star atlases, being subsumed within Ursa Major (the Great Bear); as characterized in Jamieson, it is “the country people” who know Ursa Major “by the title of Charlesʼs Wain: in some places it is called the Plough, an agricultural machine, which it certainly resembles” (Celestial Atlas, 24). Nevertheless, whether by its common or “proper name”, Charlesʼs Wain is used repeatedly in educational dialogues as an introduction to the practical uses of astronomy as well as to the science.

As Joyceʼs Tutor explains, Charlesʼs Wain can serve as a compass for finding oneʼs bearings at night, when the sunʼs position is unavailable to define east and west. As a northern, circumpolar constellation, Ursa Major or Charlesʼ Wain is always visible on a clear night; and as the Tutorʼs diagram shows, the constellation points to Polaris (the North Star) if one traces a line upward through the two stars forming the rear end of the wagon. From this first point of reference, the Tutor proceeds to instruct Charles and James in the names and locations of other stars, constellations, and planets (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, vol. 2, “Of Astronomy”, Coversation 2, “Of the Fixed Stars”, 16–18).

The practical use of plotting the stars is explained in what Ruskin identifies in “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol 2” as his “favourite” book, the “history of sandford and merton” (20). In Thomas Dayʼs Sandford and Merton, the tutor, Mr. Barlow, prompts the farmerʼs boy, Harry Sandford, to relate the story of how knowledge of the stars results in self‐preservation. Harry tells Tommy, the gentlemanʼs son, how he found his way home, when lost on the moor between his uncleʼs and fatherʼs house, by using Charlesʼs Wain to find the North Star and thereby orient himself in the right direction (Day, The History of Sandford and Merton, 165–69).

While Harryʼs story places emphasis on the practical uses of astronomy, Mr. Barlow also encourages study of astronomy as an appreciation of natural beauty:

In Ruskinʼs poem, “Glen of Glenfarg” [“Glen of Glenfarg thy beauteous rill”], the lesson of the stars is practical (and sociological) as the “cottager” is exhorted to “look on charlesʼs wain / right above the grassy hills” where the “pole star guides thee on thy way / when in dark nights thou art”. The cottager (and the reader) is also taught beauty and wonder, however, when told to “look at the stars about thee tost”. In Ruskinʼs catalog poem, “The Constellations”, aesthetic appreciation is the primary purpose of his poetic epithets, which he adds to animate each of the constellation names.

Science is always near to beauty throughout Joyceʼs dialogues, as well, the Tutor frequently quoting poetry to dwell, for instance, on the beauty of the moon (“The Forty‐third Chapter of Ecclesiasticus: A Paraphrase”, lines 28–45, by William Broome, lines which also recited by Edgeworthʼs Frank and Mary); to express wonderment at the power of the sunʼs gravitation over the orbiting planets (“Summer”, lines 93–105, from The Seasons, by James Thomson; and “The Copernican System” by Thomas Chatterton); and to rhapsodize about the vast number of visible stars in the dome of the night sky (“Night IX, The Consolation”, lines 727–48, from The Complaint; or Night‐Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality by Edward Young) (Joyce, , 2:42–43, 54, 58, 91, 246; Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 2:258–59). While often emphasizing the aesthetic side of astronomy, Ruskin does not often rise to a rhapsodic mode. When he approaches that strain, as in “The Sun”, a favorite model is the hymn to the morning in book 5 of Miltonʼs Paradise Lost (lines 153–208). Joyce likewise draws most frequently on Paradise Lost in the astronomy dialogues, followed by quotations from The Seasons by Thomson, and The Excursion by David Mallet. Other sources include eighteenth‐century scientific poems such as The Botanical Garden by Erasmus Darwin, and Eudosia by Capel Lofft—works that Ruskin also imitated (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, e.g., 2:103–4, 149, 152, 167, 198 (Milton); 190, 230–31, 235–36, 237–38, 250 (Thomson); 196, 202, 217, 219, 224, 239 (Mallet); 129, 145 (Darwin); 183 (Lofft).

In Frank: A Sequel, a late addition (1822) to Maria Edgeworthʼs Early Lessons series, and a tale that in Ruskinʼs copy was well worn from the years when Ruskin was engaged with astronomy (circa 1827–28; see Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth: Physical Descriptions—Beinecke), the dialogues that compose the tale are aimed less at information about astronomy per se than at an ethical framework for learning. The purpose of the tale, according to Edgeworthʼs preface, is to instill the “habit of self‐control . . . by inspiring [a boy] in his own mind the wish to control himself”. By this means, when a youth leaves home for school, parents can rely on their sonʼs self‐discipline to guard against temptations to dissipation (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 1:xi).

Thus, in volume 2 of Frank: A Sequel, the progress of the heroʼs self‐control is traced in how Frank engages with astronomical learning, citing texts with which Ruskin was either already familiar or becoming so. Frankʼs vanity gets the better of him as he holds forth with his knowledge, embarrassing his family:

Always candid, if vain, Frank admits to knowing less than he boasts, so an acquaintance of his parents, the Engineer, assigns him passages on astronomy in another text known to Ruskin, Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues. The point of the challenge, of course, is less to improve Frankʼs understanding of the stars than to test his self‐command.

Frank soon neglects this moderated and supervised assignment, however, distracted by reading the life of “a self‐taught genius”, James Ferguson (1710–76), who from boyhood devised his own means to chart the constellations on paper (perhaps the inspiration of the exercise devised by Dayʼs Tutor) and invented and constructed astronomical and other instruments, although some of his inventions already existed. Admiration of this biography deranges Frankʼs more modest and systematic lessons with his mother, who warns him that “not . . . one in ten of these self‐taught persons ever distinguish themselves in the world, or excite that wonder, or obtain that glory, of which you are so desirous”. Nonetheless, Frank is ambitious to imitate Fergusonʼs “projects”, first attempting and failing with Mary to make their own paper‐covered globe. “But still as one scheme failed, another rose in Frankʼs imagination; and he went on from one to another, pleased always with the last new idea, yet finishing few; for some he found impossible, some not sufficiently surprising, and almost all were too tiresome, he said, to be worth completing”. Finally, enchanted by an engraving of an orrery in Fergusonʼs book—a mechanical model of the solar system, which Ferguson had also devised on his own system, without investigating the mechanisms of existing orreries—Frank himself ventures on this “‘very ingenious thing, exceedingly ingenious’”. Although he sets forth without learning even “half . . . [of the planetsʼ] motions”, having neglected the Engineerʼs assignment of readings in Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues, he believes he could teach himself, like Ferguson, “as he went on with his work”; and his mother, unaware of the extent of Frankʼs ambitions, allows him to proceed, so that he “will soon find out, by your own experience, what you can, and what you cannot do”. While he at least sticks to a single project, the complexity of the orrery soon exceeds Frankʼs abilities, and he nearly disgraces himself in reciting his appointed studies. His father counsels him: “‘I would rather, . . . as your father and friend, . . that you had the power of keeping to your resolutions, than that you made the most ingenious thing that ever was thought of by a boy of your age’” (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 2:162, 163, 174, 168–69, 180–81; and see Rothman, “Ferguson, James [1710–1776]”; and Ferguson, “A Short Account of the Life of the Author”).

The dialogue recognizes that learning complex sciences calls on abilites and virtues that can conflict with one another—ingenuity and resolution, enthusiasm and steadiness. As Mamma admits to Mary: “‘It is rather hard, I allow, . . . to reproach poor Frank at the same moment with two seemingly opposite faults, with his not finishing any thing, and with his being too eager to finish one thing’”. In the taleʼs primary mission to instruct a childʼs self‐command, however, the point of an episode of conflict is less to resolve competing virtues philosophically than for the child to internalize regulation of feeling. As Frank promises in future to portion his time judiciously between fundamental lessons and ingenious projects, his stirred “feelings of this moment would have inclined him to do too much, and to fix upon too many hours for useful studies; but his mother advised him to attempt little, and engage but for few, that he might be more likely to keep to his intentions”. Because the aim is self‐regulation of feeling, Frankʼs mother considers but one virtue to be paramount in the jostling of abilities: candour, the want of which she expects “‘never [to] reproach him’”, since a misleading expression of feeling deranges the aim. The contrary example of frank expresion in the tale is the dishonest boy, Tom, whose lying vies with his spontaneous emotion, and his silly mother, whose vanity and flightiness prevents her reading her childʼs expression insightfully (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 2:183, 193–94, 183).