Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Evocation to Wonder in A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys

This essay presents Nathaniel Hawthorne’s children’s book A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys as an overlooked but timely resource for environmental humanists invested in wonder. While Hawthorne adapts classical myths to lead child readers to wonder about heroes, gods, and monsters, he also presents nature—for example plants, pets, and seasonal phenomena—as equally wondrous. That is, he depicts nature as a complex presence that both reassures yet disrupts human expectations, thereby inviting further inquiry. By examining how Wonder Book both cultivates a disposition to wonder and portrays nature as wondrous, I conclude that Hawthorne should be considered as not only a theorist of wonder, but one who was ahead of his time. Anticipating recent scholarship that views wonder as an active, learned orientation rather than a passive, childlike instinct, Hawthorne sets out to teach children how to wonder, including about nature.