Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (review)
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Elizabeth Gargano's Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction is a major contribution to the field of children's literature studies as well as to Victorian studies and the scholarship on pedagogy. This book shows how a wide range of nineteenth-century texts question the increasing institutionalization of education and contrast this phenomenon with the declining rates of domestic education. Gargano compellingly demonstrates that the struggle between the institutionalized and the domestic is central to the construction of childhood in the Victorian period: as she puts it in the introduction, by depicting "the space of school as a divisive, segmented, and conflicted site, numerous novelists also portrayed this problematic territory as analogous to the culturally defined terrain of modern childhood" (1).
This book has a complex argument, involving as it does the simultaneous examination of culturally weighty abstractions such as education, institutionalization, domesticity, and childhood. Gargano's decision to ground her argument by examining the representation of particular educational spaces—the schoolroom itself, the teacher's room, the playing field and garden, the school sickroom—is inspired. Doing so not only solidifies what could become, in a lesser writer's hands, an investigation of amorphous conceptualizations; Gargano also gets at the fact that the Victorians thought of institutionalization, domesticity, and the like in emphatically spatial terms. Thus, the first chapter, "'The Idea of a Wall': Toward a New Architecture of School and Mind," begins by examining the origins of the notion, in Victorian pedagogical theory, that the best shape for a classroom is rectangular (a notion probably shared by the architects who designed the academic buildings at the universities where readers of this review have studied and taught). Through analyses of writings on school architecture and of literary works by Thomas Carlyle, James Mill, Charles Dickens, and John Henry Newman, among others, Gargano offers a valuable history lesson, showing us how the intersection of architecture and pedagogy, educational theory and institutional practice provided our modernity not only with a normative design for educational spaces but also with a "science of mind" (30) that sought to map human interiority and ascertain the normative functioning of mental constructions. Finally, the chapter shows that the development of such a "scientific pedagogical [End Page 443] method" (45) is not, in the period, a disciplinary fait accompli but is, rather, a battle: if the architects of the rectilinear have had their victory with the shape of the classroom, the novels of Dickens, as Gargano demonstrates in the conclusion to this chapter, provide many of their most memorable scenes (those in Gradgrind's model school, at once hilarious and terrifying, for instance) in the service of a sustained, and influential, critique of the standardization of education and intellect. The individual contests in this cultural battle are detailed, with equal historical sensitivity and analytic grace, in succeeding chapters organized around the spaces of which Victorian schools are commonly made. Thus, the second chapter examines how the teacher's room (such as Miss Temple's sanctum in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre [1847]) is a "schoolroom that defies the conventions of institutionalized schooling," even as it reveals "the germs of institutionality located at the very heart of home" (49). The third chapter examines the playing field of boys' school stories (on the one hand) and the role of the school garden in girls' educational narratives (on the other), and this chapter details how these spaces reinforce normative ideologies of gender, even as Gargano complicates this reading with a sharp analysis of the role of nature and play in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Finally, in a particularly inventive chapter, Gargano examines the depiction of the infirmary or school sickroom and its encapsulation of the ambivalence with which the Victorians approached institutionalized education: through a careful analysis of zymotic disease theory, its circulation in Victorian writings about health and education, and texts on "school ventilation" (135), Gargano shows how in the depiction of the sickroom "institutionality, which casts itself...
