Also available in hardcover version (ISBN 978-0-9666084-7-2).
Color photographs, illustrations, and reproductions. Taking as its starting point the set of sixteen dissected maps belonging to the children of George III , this work examines the new trends in education exemplified by the practices of the royal nursery and its governess, Lady Charlotte Finch.
The author establishes a relationship between Lady Charlotte and Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, the French governess and author of the Magasin des Enfans (1756). Le Prince de Beaumont is newly identified as the first person to be selling dissected maps, or cartographical jigsaw puzzles, several years before the map seller John Spilsbury. The educational environment in which the royal children played with their educational toys is recreated from a wide range of contemporary sources. Locating these dissected maps within the domestic context of the royal household allows a re-examination of the historiography of the use and development of educational toys. The discussion ranges over new trends in educational theory and practice including the evolution of rational domesticity and the increasing involvement of aristocratic mothers in the care and education of their children. The influence of Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, and Lady Charlotte's upbringing and her place within a circle of intellectual women are examined. A bibliographical history of the individual puzzles is included, as is the delightful text of the Prologues and Epilogues to the 1732 children's performance of Dryden's Indian Emperor, in which Lady Charlotte and her siblings performed and which was recorded by William Hogarth in his painting of The Conquest of Mexico, Act IV, Scene IV, from Dryden's Indian Emperor. The text is reproduced, together with the painting, at the end of the work.

Volume editor: Colin Clair