The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch

The School, the Prison, and the Museum

Sensations of a New Age 171 Influenced by the SalvationArmy,evangelical members of the Church of England started their own “ChurchArmy.” In a typical group:“Sundays began with a drill at seven,then an open-air meeting at ten,which was followed by a church service at eleven.There was an afternoon Bible class and in the evening a band and army banner would lead a procession to the mission hall” (Hylson-Smith 1988: 180). These military methods seemed to many to be the most effective and engaging way to inculcate a sense of Christian discipline in the dissolute masses. The School, the Prison, and the Museum With the institution of compulsory education in the nineteenth century (the eighteenth century in Prussia), the drill extended its reach. One trait the school had in common with the army and the factory (to which it was sometimes attached) was a strict adherence to a standardized set of bodily practices.Indeed,for many of its proponents,the greatest advantage of schooling the working classes was not the mental attainments that would result from it—for these might lead students to desire further education rather than a future in manual labor—but rather the inculcation of values of “duty, self-restraint, order, punctuality, and obedience.” Public schooling was intended to provide a moral and physical training more than a cultivation of the intellect (Van Horn Melton 1988: 119). The lower orders had a widespread reputation for laziness. It was stated time and again that laborers only worked as hard as was necessary to make a bare living. In his social satire Fable of the Bees, Bernard de Mandeville declared that “Every Body knows that there is a vast number of Journey-MenWeavers,Tailors, Clothworkers, and twenty other Handicrafts; who, if by four Days Labour in a Week can maintain themselves, will hardly be persuaded to work the fifth; and that there areThousands of labouring Men of all sorts, who will, tho’ they can hardly subsist, put themselves to fifty Inconveniences, disoblige their Masters, pinch their Bellies, and run in Debt, to make Holidays” (cited by S. Jordan 2003: 37). Such on-and-off habits of work would not do in the factory, which required continuous, repetitive effort, day after day. “This penchant for idleness,” complained one German administrator, “is certainly a cause for the failure of many manufacturing establishments” (Van Horn Melton 1988: 127).Writing in support of the factory system,Andrew Ure pronounced,“When the handicraftsman exchanges hard work with fluctuating employment and pay,for continuous labour of a lighter kind with steady wages [in a factory], he must necessarily renounce his old prerogative of stopping when he pleases,because he would thereby throw the whole establishment into disorder” (1967: 279). Another impediment to the making of a good industrial worker according to contemporary views was an engrained willfulness.The worker, like the peasant Classen_Text.indd 171 3/15/12 2:48 PM 172 chapter eight of old,was regarded as a wild animal requiring breaking in.“No animal,whether on four legs or two, however he may enjoy life, can be of any use in the workshop of man until he has been sufficiently divested of that portion of his natural inheritance commonly called‘a will of his own’”(cited in Chadwick 1861:148). Schools aimed to correct these two social problems of modernity—indolence and idiosyncracity—by transforming idle, willful children into disciplined, obedient pupils.Within the school, time was rigidly ordered by bells, and space by lines of bodies and benches.There was to be no stepping out of line, no failure to perform the correct action at the correct time, no attempt to deviate from established routine in even minor ways. As in the army and in the factory, any infraction of the regulations met with a stern reprimand if not with physical punishment. As in the army and the factory, maximum attention, compliance, and efficiency were demanded. To forward the creation of a disciplined student body many schools introduced the drill or related exercises as an addition to the routine. In a mid-nineteenthcentury report on the subject,English social reformer Edwin Chadwick concluded that the practice of drill in schools not only constituted useful training for future soldiers, but also contributed “to the eficiency and productive value of pupils as labourers . . . in afterlife” (144). In Chadwick’s report the drill was described as a kind of breaking in of boys, similar to that of horses,which would...