Megan A. Norcia. X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790-1895. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8214-1907-6. Price: US$49.95

Megan Norcia’s book is a well-researched and highly informative study of geography primers written by women writers in the span of the long nineteenth century. The authors she features, such as Priscilla Wakefield, Barbara Hofland, Mary Anne Venning, Favell Lee Mortimer or Mary Helena Cornwall Legh, include names most scholars of nineteenth-century literature will not recognize, but Norcia’s arguments for why their works deserve attention are compelling. Whether one wishes to gain knowledge about one of the few socially acceptable outlets available to nineteenth-century women passionate about social sciences such as geography but discouraged from scientific careers, or whether one aspires to get a better understanding of the process through which imperial dogmas were popularized, the geography primers Norcia has recovered constitute a rich, even if hitherto overlooked, field for study. Norcia does a fine job showcasing the various uses to which these textbooks can be put by both scholars of nineteenth-century Britain and feminist geographers. Sharing the fate of many women-authored popular texts, the primers featured in this monograph are long out of circulation, and many of them have barely survived in national library collections. At the time of their original appearance, however, many of these works generated considerable attention, going through numerous reprints and decades of considerable sales. For instance, E[lizabeth] R[oberts]’ Geography and History, Selected by a Lady, for the Use of Her Own Children (1790), went through twenty-two editions and continued to be reprinted and sold until 1859. According to Norcia, the reasons behind these books’ disappearance from historical notice include, 1) the disdain, still prevailing to this day, for didactic literature, initiated by the male Romantics resentful of the commercial success of their female counterparts; 2) the general academic disregard of children’s literature; and 3) the conventional view of geography as a masculine and male domain. It is characteristic of the recent changes disciplines like geography have been undergoing, and is also a tribute to the increasing interdisciplinary scope of literary studies, that monographs like Norcia’s are appearing. The publication of these interdisciplinary studies contributes new knowledge to a range of academic fields. In her book, Norcia reminds us that ideologies such as imperialism do not become hegemonic overnight; before they come to be viewed as natural and taken for granted, substantial political and pedagogical work is required. Reading and analyzing nineteenth-century novels, essays and periodicals, scholars have gleaned much about the process of dissemination of the ideas of imperialism among the Victorian adult populations. But unless Victorianists turn their attention also to texts written for children, including textbooks, a substantial piece will remain missing from our understanding of how the machinery of British imperialism was buttressed and sustained. Here, Norcia’s monograph has much to offer by focusing on the rhetorical strategies nineteenth-century geography primers employed to plant the seeds of ideas such as Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy or the need for a British civilizing mission in the minds of the Victorian youth. By using familial figures like the “Family of Man” or the “Imperial Dinner Party,” the writers of these books were able both to explain complex, abstract concepts such as the nation and the empire in familiar terms, and to represent unequal power relations among different nations, with Britain at the top, of course. Furthermore, adding to our understanding of the gendered dimensions of British imperialism, Norcia notes that employing these kinds of domestic metaphors helped the primers’ women authors to legitimate their roles as writers in this field. While, perhaps predictably, the nineteenth-century primers’ overall message was supportive of the British imperial mission, and while these texts disseminated appropriately gendered lessons about the …