The Boy’s Playbook of Science

"Yes, and we could say it was a golden age for popular science books as well. John Henry Pepper is a fascinating guy. He not only wrote this book, which was incredibly successful for a long time, but he also used to do big science shows. People would flock to see his shows at the Royal Polytechnic, just north of Oxford Circus [in London]. He did these great shows almost like pantomimes – slightly less serious than the sorts of events at the Royal Institution in Mayfair. In fact, some of the science tricks he used to do in his show then became part of theatre. Pepper’s Ghost is the most famous, and it went on to be used in ghost rides at fairgrounds. It is a way to position mirrors to get a ghostly image to appear. If you are ever on a really old ghost train and seem to see a ghost, that was probably John Henry Pepper’s trick. He was also tapping into a history that happened before him. I thought this was a good choice because in some ways it isn’t a book for sitting down and reading, it tells you to have a go yourself. It is about hands-on science, which in some ways might be seen as the opposite of a book. It is a sort of an instruction book in many ways. I chose it because it is an early children’s book, which I think is interesting, but also because that approach to science books is popular to this day. You still see science books which are guides to so-called “experiments”, and there are loads of hands-on activities in the Horrible Science books. It is very different from a novel or something you might think of as children’s literature. As an academic, when I talk to people in children’s literature studies they sometimes turn their nose up a bit at the idea of studying children’s science books, because they are not seen as a literary or visual experience but more of an activity-based one. But I think that the big appeal for a lot of children is that they want to learn how to go and do something."