English Literature

English Literature

Late-Victorian textbooks have been a favourite subject with critics interested in the inculcation of national, racial, imperial, class, and gender identities, but those wishing to study ideological manipulation have not turned to English literature readers as often as to their counterparts in history, geography, or civics. After all, literature readers could not tell the student to be a good citizen, uphold the Empire, and be proud of his Anglo-Saxon origins, they had to rely on the wordsof Scott, Dickens, or at best Henty. When the author's directcontribution was limited to prefaces, head notes, and exercises, tothe choosing and editing of excerpts, social, moral, or religious prescription became more a matter of canon formation than outright propaganda. The teaching of patriotism, or anything else, via selections of national literature was in any case not genuinely possible until English literature was fully integrated into the elementary school curriculum – something that did not happen until very late in the century, though the subject had been introduced shortly after Forster's Act.

Throughout the Victorian period, pupils had been taught to read with the aid of general-purpose readers, and after 1870 these were the first books that the majority of working-class children in the Board Schools would have come across. The new mass and captive audience (compulsory attendance was introduced by 1880) had very little access to the more expensive formal textbooks written mainly for the secondary and public schools attended by a minority of the population. Readers, however, were another story. They were indispensable, and their primary aim remained, as it had always been, the teaching of basic literacy, and in the higher standards (there were seven altogether after 1882) reading fluency. As one Preface put it, 'the Reading-Books in this Series … aim not only at teaching the art of reading, but at training the pupils to a love of reading', though how far they achieved this – given that the emphasis was usually on parsing and mindless memorisation – is open to question.³⁹ Specially prepared passages or excerpts from newspapers had been deemed sufficient for the purposes of the three Rs system, but in the 1880s things began to change. The number of 'class' and 'specific' subjects was extended, and official specifications on the content and format of reading books were issued in order to improve their quality. A.J. Mundella's revised education code began the move away from payment by exam results and encouraged curriculum reform, emphasising the importance of English history and literature, and specifically 'mandat[ing] the use of historical, geographical, and literary readers'.⁴⁰ There was resistance to increasing the number of subjects, especially during the 'overpressure' scare of the mid 1880s,⁴¹ which attributed child death and insanity to overwork in the lower class Board Schools. But despite the opposition, novels began making their way into the lesson plan, sometimes as self-contained texts but more often as part of the contents of the readers,⁴² ten times as many of which were published as formal textbooks. Literary outlines and crammers had long been used in preparation for various local and civil service exams, but the late-Victorian period experienced a boom in the publication of readers designed expressly for the new mass education market, and as the codes issued by the Department of Education changed, so new books were issued to meet the demands of the changing syllabus.⁴³ Longmans' New Reader for Standard I was typicalin announcing that it was 'Written to meet the requirements of theNew Code of 1885 and in accordance with the Instructions to HM Inspectors'.⁴⁴

The literary 'subject' readers offered linear chronological narratives or were structured by genre, containing sections on, for instance, historical and descriptive prose, fiction, oratory, poetry, dialogue, the drama, and comic pieces. The so-called 'general' readers, on the other hand, were random miscellanies or multidisciplinary collages, and most post-Education Act working...