Conclusion

Conclusion

All four of my colleagues' contributions reinforce the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group focus upon attitudes to the past in nineteenth-century Britain. In an age that celebrated progress and anticipated the future with complacency, the classical, geological, disciplinary, biblical and constitutional pasts were nevertheless pervasive. In schoolbooks these pasts were introduced to susceptible young minds, sometimes in separate strands marked out as new scientific knowledge, and other times braided together in narratives where competing values andidentities criss-crossed each other.

We are dealing with a corpus of materials that is massive, and massively significant. Three themes, it seems to me, emerge from these preliminary perspectives. Studying the way that schoolbooks worked to produce knowledge is intrinsic to the history of education, and more broadly to cultural history. But we need to know which books were used, in which schools, and for how long. Who wrote and compiled them, who selected and authorized them, and how did teachers use them? Where did schoolbooks function as sites of conflict? How did pub-lishers benefit from the enormous commercial potential of the schoolbook market? Which titles and series were adopted abroad, in the British Empire and in the United States? Research on all these and further questions will require collaboration, the transnational and cross-disciplinary pooling of resources as well as dedicated individual scholarship. Secondly, the history of the Victorian schoolbook is also part of the history of the book in Britain and the English-speaking world. All four contributions refer to the changing technologies of book production and distribution that produced vast quantities of increasingly cheaper material objects embellished with better visual aids. Each facet of the book historian's concern with reading, libraries, bookselling, publishing and authorship is brought to bear on the making and use of schoolbooks. The archives of publishers, as wellas those of educational authorities, contain the documents that will underpin further studies. And thirdly, the question arises of keeping track of the books themselves, of bibliographical control. Many schoolbooks made their way into copyright library collections, even if they were catalogued with less rigour than other works, but many more did not. It is in the nature of schoolbooks to be worn out and cast aside by the children who learned from them; one of the crucial projects of research will be to discover a method by which the authors, titles, dates and edition sequences of vanished schoolbooks, as well as those which survive, can reliably be identified.