Nieuw letterspel voor kleine kinderen / Nouveau jeu de lettres pour petits enfants 1866 - 1902

Editor: So, this is "Nieuw letterspel voor kleine kinderen / Nouveau jeu de lettres pour petits enfants," which translates to “New alphabet game for young children,” created sometime between 1866 and 1902 by Franciscus Antonius Beersmans. It appears to be a print, a colorful yet slightly unsettling ABC chart. What's your initial impression? Curator: Unsettling, you say? That's a curious choice of words! Perhaps because, to my eye, it hums with a kind of naive earnestness, the sort of well-meaning adult effort to capture a child's imagination which maybe, *just maybe*, misses the mark by a mile. Like trying to explain quantum physics with puppets. Look at the colors – a bit garish, no? Editor: A bit! So what do you make of the overall composition? It is trying to be educational... Curator: Oh, education! A heavy crown indeed. To me, it's like a snapshot into a 19th-century worldview filtered through a child’s primer. Notice the choices of animals. Is that a ‘zebra’ under ‘d’? It speaks volumes. Were real zebras really known? Do we really have *accurate* knowledge in the modern era with access to much better zoological information? Consider the colonial undertones in such presentations of exotic wildlife. Editor: Colonial undertones? That's something I hadn't considered. Curator: Indeed! It is ever present! Each image is neatly boxed; a contained world. The colors – think of them as whispers of newfound chemical dyes. Everything feels…intentionally innocent. Look, a "crocodil" for 'C' ... almost charming in its simplicity. It screams, "LEARN, LITTLE ONES!" And do it in both languages, thank you very much. Editor: I never thought of a children’s alphabet book as holding such complex ideas! I mean it’s educational, of course, but… Curator: (laughing) Ah, but darling, isn't everything? It reminds me of a half-remembered dream of what someone *thought* childhood *should* be like.