The Laughing Mrs. Churchill

Although published in book form from the beginning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh (Boston 1849) participated in the community-based exchange of knowledge and entertainment that characterized mid-century Anglo-American serial circulation. In order to investigate the details of this participation, the present article focuses on one of Longfellow’s main characters, the fictitious Mary Churchill – especially on three points of Kavanagh ’s plot at which Mary demands access to recreational mathematics. With her inquisitive behavior, Mary first initiates a dialogue in the service of scientific education, thus echoing the question-and-answer setting of the earliest Anglo-American mathematics journals. Female contributors to these real-life journals may have inspired Longfellow to depict Mary’s suggestion to pose one’s own mathematical problems. The journals’ many geometry examples, finally, are mirrored in Mary’s insistence on probing solutions and thus establishing the pencil as a critical tool for problem solving, mathematical and other. 1

Historical and Literary Studies · History · History and Theory of Mathematics · Publishing and Scholarly Communication