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Correspondence between interlocutor and developmental gestures is most explicit in children’s genres concerned with self-fashioning. A descendant of Plutarch’s Lives, exemplary biography evolved in the nineteenth century to include such specialized compendiums as Biblical figures, Shakespearean characters, or women’s lives. Biographies of men who rise to prominence, such as engineers James Watt and Robert Stevenson, frequently appear in children’s periodicals, setting the stage for Ragged Dick and Tom Swift, while biographers Jacob Abbott and Mason Locke Weems invented American national mythologies, including the cherry tree episode from Life of Washington (1806 edition). Exemplary lives are generally traditionalist, but the exceptions prove remarkable. In deciding how to represent Benjamin Franklin’s disobedience or Admiral Lord Nelson’s disability, authors contended with complicated figures who challenged established norms (Stabell 2013). Moreover, cautionary and exemplary lives were essential to every social reform movement of the century, from abolition, to animal rights, to temperance, offering children on the margins the concrete political arguments and literacy instruction necessary to fight for their education, livelihoods, and enfranchisement.

Through life writing, children witness how eminent figures gain power by representing their lives to the public, and how later generations might reinterpret those lives to imagine new virtues. In Female Biography (1803), for instance, Mary Hays, novelist and friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, subtly alters the account of Anne Askew from Fox’s Book of Martyrs (1563) by foregrounding Askew’s rational arguments under torture and her fortitude in dissolving her forced marriage with an abusive husband. If women authors made such adaptations, what about their readers? Citing the surviving juvenile notebooks of Jane Austen, Marjory Fleming, and Princess Victoria, Lynne Vallone (2008) suggests that the conventionality of female biographies challenged these dissatisfied girl readers to pen their own versions, as they discovered sympathies with persecuted historical figures such as Mary, Queen of Scots. And according to Mary Niall Mitchell, children of color educated at the Couvent School in New Orleans during the later nineteenth century acted as “historians,” who recorded events through autobiographical letters (Capshaw and Duane 2017, pp. 61–74). Thus life writing is a peculiarly participatory genre; authors who compile and adapt biographies also transmit that power to their readers.

Similar to Priscilla Wakefield’s geographies, children’s biographies contain interlocutor gestures; they model how to write history through the author’s process of compilation, retelling, reprinting, and repurposing of life stories for adults. Valentine K. Tikoff shows, for instance, that when Abigail Field Mott adapted Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) into a short children’s edition in 1829 for the New York African Free School pupils, she transformed Equiano from sympathetic “other” to “a role model, the exemplar of what a young African American reader could and should become,” in order to be “successful economic actors” and “responsible citizens” (Capshaw and Duane 2017, pp. 95, 96), thereby preparing Black children to become leaders in the more radical abolitionist movement of the next decade. Following emancipation, inspirational stories of resistance by the enslaved appeared in school readers like Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book (1865) and the American Tract Society’s The Freedman’s primers and readers, again preparing children for political activism that included public reading, recitation, and essay writing in literary societies (Capshaw and Duane 2017, pp. 44–53; McHenry 2002, pp. 187–250).

This invitation to write back is especially powerful when the biographical subject uses literacy to effect social change. British Radicals William Cobbett and William Lovett reinforced their autobiographical accounts of self-education through journalism and political activism. Cobbett’s many self-help books include a grammar that invites working-class youth to correct the king’s speeches. In America, Ihanktonwan (Yankton Sioux) author Zitkala-Ša began her lifelong advocacy of self-determination in Indian education with her autobiographical essay “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900) published in The Atlantic and later anthologized with Old Indian Legends in children’s school readers (Suhr-Sytsma 2014). In such cases, life writing has proved the first step in producing culturally responsive literacy materials that enable children to see themselves in what they read.

Life writing thus reproduces itself through intergenerational cycles of emulation that retell history in order to change the future. The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921) showcases this generative exemplarity. A periodical produced by W.E.B. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset for children of color, Brownies interweaves essays and photographs of praiseworthy children (e.g. musicians, graduates) with exemplary biographies (e.g. Toussaint L’Ouverture, Phillis Wheatley), and positions letters from young readers against editorial replies. These exchanges make exemplarity alive even while rewriting Black history.⁶ While Brownies supported the early career of poet Langston Hughes (who later wrote children’s histories), the periodical is indebted to prior generations of children’s life writing by Ann Plato, Susan Paul, and Abigail Field Mott (Capshaw and Duane 2017, pp. 75–144). Radical nineteenth-century biographies use exemplarity to gesture outward to build interiority, then redirect contemplative readers outward again, calling forth the next generation of author activists. Nonfiction’s metacognitive strategies thus awaken consciousness for both individual children and their communities.