The Reading Body

Fig 1.

"A Reading Lesson." Illustration from Little Folks (1 Nov. 1877). By permission of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK.

"Areading lesson" (fig. 1), published in Little Folks in 1877, is one of many magazine illustrations depicting children learning to read produced in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Such illustrations are so common in magazines and primers that it is easy to miss the significance of their visual composition, particularly the potential for physical intimacy they locate in literacy acquisition and the statements they make about the importance of bodies in Victorian education. Here, little "Harry" sits on his mother's knee, his head nestled against her shoulder as they sound out the longer words; the boy's fingers follow the text of the book that they hold together, and both appear to gaze at the same spot, though Harry's eyes are more clearly open. So close together are they that no part of his body extends beyond the outlines of his mother. The image conveys ease, comfort, and quiet. This is the "reading without tears" offered hopefully by Victorian reading primers, and the downcast eyes of both mother and son reaffirm the serene atmosphere.¹

Depicting an idealized model of learning to read and one important definition of the body's role in education, "A Reading Lesson" is representative of what Friedrich Kittler calls "maternal instruction … [,] the input component of elementary acculturation techniques," which he identifies as the basis of the nineteenth-century discourse network (27). However, not all children who learned to read in the second half of the nineteenth century did so on the knee of a mother. As central as such scenes are to Victorian definitions of reading, they are not representative of the process of literacy acquisition experienced by most of the nation's children, for whom the relationship between books and bodies was vastly different. Indeed, concerned Victorian educators and journalists argued that for some children, those educated in the nation's Board Schools in particular, learning to read was not comforting and intimate but potentially dangerous.

These physical and mental dangers were the product of a misunderstanding of the body's role in education. While landmark studies of Victorian reading have uncovered the diverse ways in which readers' bodies were understood to impact and be impacted by reading, historians of education have had less to say about the role of bodies in elementary education. Gretchen R. Galbraith and Sally Shuttleworth have made important contributions to this discussion, but the larger critical oversight of educated bodies repeats the attitudes of Victorian educators, who (according to Richard A. Armstrong, a Victorian critic of elementary education) devoted themselves exclusively to the mind of the child and left the body to "shift for itself unconsidered and untended" (316). This push for intellectual instruction above other forms of education, critics argued, could lead to physical defects, insanity, suicide, and even sudden death in young working-class children, as was the case in the "overpressure" crisis of the early 1880s. While popular concerns about physically straining forms of education can be traced to mid-century pedagogy and the expectations outlined in regulatory codes for education beginning in the 1860s, some educators and schoolbook authors began to acknowledge a healthy role for the body in reading instruction in the midst of this perceived crisis, incorporating physicality into the teaching of reading and into elementary education more generally.

Armstrong's 1883 article "The Overstrain in Education" expresses common concerns about the physical effects of elementary education more plainly than most. Quick to point out elementary education's role in the "enormous diffusion of the primary arts of civilization" and the "vast conversion of savagery into decorum" (282), Armstrong also wonders about education's "dark side" (283), namely the "enfeebled bodies and shattered brains" of those "push[ed] through" the state-run elementary system (285). J.H. Gladstone echoes these concerns in "Over-Pressure in Elementary Schools" (1884), maintaining that "the bodies of our scholars are being systematically sacrificed to an abnormal development of their minds, and...