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Victorian Studies 46.1 (2003) 161-164



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Pedagogical Economies: The Examination and the Victorian Literary Man, by Cathy Shuman; pp. i + 255. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, $49.50.
Educating Women: Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature, by Laura Morgan Green; pp. vii + 153. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001, $42.95, $16.95 paper.
The Victorian Governess Novel, by Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros; pp. xiii + 308. Lund: Lund University Press, 2001, $62.50.

In 1837 the schoolmaster and writer of pedagogical manuals Henry Dunn summed up a common Victorian view about the social effects of education: "Whatever others may think, the teacher must be satisfied, that any great moral change in the community, will be mainly effected by the instrumentality of the schools" (qtd. in David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914 [1989]: 85). Each of the three admirable books under review here investigates different aspects of Victorian schooling's "instrumentality": in relation to the ideological reproduction of categories of class and gender, social mobility, the shaping of subjectivity, and the construction of literary figures and plots.

Pedagogical Economies: The Examination and the Victorian Literary Man, Cathy Shuman's superb study of the professionalization of Victorian authorship, combines theoretically informed historical analysis of the growing role of the examination as a "central ritual of nineteenth-century subject formation and value" (4) in Victorian schooling and bureaucracy with astute readings of the variable cultural and subjective effects of pedagogical exchange in Matthew Arnold's Reports on Elementary Schools (1852- 82), Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (1865) and The Ethics of the Dust (1866), and Anthony Trollope's The Three Clerks (1857). Drawing on both Pierre Bourdieu's and Michel Foucault's formulations of the pedagogical rationality of the modern state, Shuman's term "pedagogical economies" describes the ways that the exchange values of intellectual labor, academic assessments, and certifications, particularly those assigned through the mechanism of the examination, are determined within a given society. However, Shuman questions the theory that such pedagogical economies somehow mask the power of the state, arguing that during the mid-Victorian period "the examination's advocates as well as its detractors were fully aware of its range of repressive social functions" (8).

In addition, Shuman shows that pedagogical economies function both materially and subjectively. Institutional developments of the examination following the reorganization of qualifications for entry into the Civil Service (spurred by the Northcote- Trevelyan Report of 1855) reveal both the subjective and social "meanings and drama" (3) of pedagogical inculcation, evaluation, and the exchange of knowledge, as do novelistic versions of the examination as trope, topos, and plot structure. The category of gender is as important to Shuman's analyses as that of class; Dickens and Ruskin both develop a conception of the reproduction of knowledge associated with femininity as an alternative to pedagogies that treat knowledge as a commodity within masculine economic competition.

Shuman argues that Victorian literary men developed the capacity of the examination "to make intellectual labor visible, to remap institutional power relations, and to endow cultural capital with exchange value" (5). For example, Arnold's defense of the [End Page 161] invigilating labor of the Inspector of Schools transfers the role of the examination as the vehicle for the transmission of state ideology directly to the literary curriculum itself, in an attempt to measure the adoption of literary taste as a replacement for cruder means of evaluating the effectiveness of working-class schools in imparting literacy and numeracy. Trollope and Dickens both treat the examination more ambivalently. In his fiction and autobiographical writings, Trollope attacks the examination's tendency to abstract the subject of labor and ultimately refuses to distinguish intellectual labor from any other kind of work. Dickens criticizes the coercive and mechanical effects of the examination within the school, but inserts its invigilating function into the home instead, in the form of the woman as essential standard and monitor of moral value. Shuman argues that Our Mutual...

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