Mary Proctor
Today, astronomy for children. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Mary Proctor was born in 1862, in Dublin – the daughter of astronomer Richard Proctor. And I have here, the first of her many books about astronomy, meant for children: Stories of Starland. In fact, people called her, The Children’s Astronomer.
Mary Proctor (Image courtesy of Wikimedia)
A lot went on in late nineteenth-century science. Telescopes had once been rarefied tools. Now smaller, even homemade, ones began appearing in the hands of amateurs. The public started taking a strong interest in planets, stars, comets.
And, as eyes turned to the night skies, some astronomers began engaging the public. Including Mary’s father, Richard. He established himself as an astronomer with his study of Mars – its rotation and other features. But he quickly found footing in writing about astronomy for the general public.
Then, when Mary was just twenty, she and her father moved here, to Missouri. She’d already been helping him. So, when he died six years later, she’d found her own footing as a writer.
And a curious footing it was. She took a special interest in the mythology of the stars. Mythology offered means for cementing a child’s understanding of reality. At age thirty-one, she lectured on that very subject at our Columbian Exposition – America’s great World Fair. She’d been writing articles about the night sky for some time, by then. Now, she was poised to become a noted lecturer as well as a writer.
Stories of Starland (Image courtesy of Wikimedia)
So, we turn to pages in this book – the first of many that she’d write. She goes on at length, telling the legends we’ve built around the stars. And I’m struck by a section where she’s been telling a boy and his sister about the Great and Little Dippers. So the boy asks, “Is this only like a fairy story, then?” and his sister replies, “All these stories are fairy stories.”
And we realize that learning is a complex business. The legends cement the realities. Later she tells us that “Our little universe is an island in space.” She tells us that our Sun will one day die. Elsewhere in the book, she gives us a remarkable way to think about the Sun’s immensity: Imagine that it’s hollow, she says. Then our Earth with its orbiting moon would fit comfortably inside it.
Mary Proctor’s image of the Earth and orbiting Moon inside the Sun. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia)
And we learn that New York City’s Board of education adopted this, her first of some sixteen books. The last of these, The Romance of Comets is still available online today. Of course, it tells of all the comet legends. But then it explains the underlying reality. We no longer teach with fairy stories. That seems so primitive. And yet -– and yet, I wonder. Could it be that we are the poorer for that?
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Richard A. Proctor - Wikipedia
More on Mary Proctor by the Royal Society.
The Linda Hall Library account of Mary Proctor.
The Romance of Comets (Classic Reprint): Mary Proctor: 9780282640187: Amazon.com: Books
The Frontispiece of Mary Proctor’s book displays her father’s picture, not her own. See here. Sexism of the period? Or just honoring her recently deceased father? Possibly some of both.
This episode first aired on November 26, 2025.