Death by Learning: Zymosis and the Perils of School in E. J. May's Dashwood Priory

I

"How many of children's epidemics," Florence Nightingale lamented in Notes on Nursing (1859), "originate" in "all [the] national and other schools throughout the kingdom" (114). Nightingale's remark reflects widespread nineteenth-century concerns about the progressive institutionalization of British education, as schooling increasingly took place outside the home. Throughout the century, a diverse array of nationally funded, charitably endowed, and private institutions proliferated, bringing large numbers of children together, often in crowded and poorly ventilated buildings. Beginning in the 1830s, Lancastrian monitorial schools, designed on factory principles to create a mass-market education with maximum efficiency, sometimes housed as many as four hundred pupils in a single vast schoolroom under the supervision of one schoolmaster. Although parish schools conducted under the auspices of the Church of England were smaller, their conditions could be just as onerous. Parish school logbooks—records kept by teachers for the clergymen who employed and supervised them—paint a grim picture of cold, damp, and unhealthy schoolrooms, and the contagious fevers they nurtured.¹ If schools seemed to pose a threat to children's health, it was not only because of their physical conditions; in Florence Nightingale's words, children "are much more susceptible than grown people to all noxious influences" (106). Nightingale's assertion reflects the stark reality of contemporary statistics. The lives of children, particularly poor children, were often short. As Eric Hopkins records in Childhood Transformed, "In 1843, the average yearly deaths under ten in London were about 25,000" (114).

In addition to such grim statistics, Nightingale's vision of the hypersensitive child also evokes an iconographic image frequently utilized by the writers of mid-century school fictions: the child's sensitive body as the testing ground for the health or toxicity of the institutions and social arrangements established by adults. To be sure, child invalids and dying children abound in nineteenth-century fictions on both sides of the Atlantic. From "little Nell" in Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop to "little Eva" in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the dying child functioned as a reliable trigger of intense emotions, which could then be channeled in a variety of directions. Nevertheless, in a striking number of cases, the child invalid serves to dramatize social injustices too often ignored by adults. The physical frailty of a vagrant boy in Dickens's Bleak House serves as an indictment of the debilitating slums at the heart of London, while the death of a young chimney sweep in Kingsley's Water Babies throws into stark relief the inequities of the class system in England. Given the emotional charge evoked by the fictive child invalid, it is hardly surprising that writers of early school fictions, often deeply ambivalent about the rise of institutionalized education, also turned to the child invalid to dramatize the potential dangers of school. In numerous school narratives throughout the 1830s, '40s, and '50s—from Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) to Jane Eyre (1847)—the bodies of injured, enfeebled, or dying children serve as iconic emblems reflecting the dangers of consigning the work of childraising to institutions that, for better or for worse, would forever shape their inmates.

Far from shying away from monitory depictions of the perils of school illnesses, mid-century writers of children's fiction exploited these images for their dramatic and instructive potential. Such diverse schoolboy narratives for children as Harriet Martineau's The Crofton Boys (1841),² E. J. May's Dashwood Priory, or Mortimer's College Life (1855), and Thomas Hughes's famous Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) depict frightening or even horrific sickroom scenes. While Martineau paints in grim detail the amputation of a young boy's foot after a preventable schoolyard accident, Hughes explores the terror of fever epidemics at boarding school. In its quiet way, however, May's work offers perhaps the most insidiously frightening portrait of illness at school. In Dashwood Priory, two schoolboy protagonists become gravely ill, not as a result of accidents or epidemics, but simply because of their scholastic diligence and intellectual ambition. Thus May warns her young readers of...