Reading Victorian Schoolrooms

Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Elizabeth Gargano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135861223
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children's writers such as Dickens, Brontë, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction.

As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontë, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space.

Drawing on the bildungsroman's traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project.

1

“The Idea of a Wall”

Toward a New Architecture of School and Mind

The best shape for the school-room is an oblong, about twice as long as it is broad.

—James Currie, The Principles and Practice of Common School Education

In Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844), Pecksniff, that famously incompetent instructor of architecture, advises his pupil Martin to try his hand at designing a school: “Come! as you’re ambitious, and are a very neat draughtsman, you shall—ha ha! —you shall try your hand on these proposals for a grammar-school: regulating your plan, of course, by the printed particulars” (87). Unlike the other more pedestrian projects that Pecksniff has suggested, this one instantly fires Martin’s imagination. In fact, not only would-be architects like Martin, but a diverse array of persons and organizations dreamed of drafting a plan for the ideal school. For a society facing the prospect of national education for the first time, the invocation of a standardized pedagogy, embodied in a new professionalized schoolroom, seemed both visionary and supremely practical. E. R. Robson, the official architect for the London Board Schools, celebrated the “great change” taking place in English education and strove to construct efficient, functionalist school spaces that reflected the scientific principles of the new pedagogy (321). Like Robson, numerous nineteenth-century observers of an increasingly inclusive system of education felt themselves to be standing at the threshold of a new world—one that might turn out to be a paradise or a fallen Eden. The prospect of a universal pedagogical method, then, demanded a reevaluation of the past and a wish for a specific kind of future.

In this chapter I explore the dream of a scientific pedagogy that might radically reshape Victorian childhood. Focusing on the debate over implementing a national, governmentally regulated school system, I examine how supposedly scientific teaching methods and changing conceptions of school architecture meshed with a new idea of the child’s mind. Proponents (and opponents) of the new pedagogy built their case not just with logical arguments, but also through emotionally freighted images of school space.

Underlying the call for modern educational structures and an innovative pedagogy was a novel conception of the child’s developing mind; building on Hume’s theory of mental associations, nineteenth-century association psychology painted a linear, highly schematized picture of childhood learning, and of the human mind in general. This chapter points up connections among three phenomena that might at first appear distinct and isolated: a new scientific pedagogy with characteristic spatial practices, innovative, functionalist architectural spaces, and an increasingly schematized and rational conception of mental space.

In the discourse of educational professionalism, the fraught territory of school serves as a nexus connecting these three spatial dimensions. A site, a system, and a theory were necessary to reconstruct elementary and secondary teaching as a profession combining clear and measurable goals with scientific methods. Furthermore, the contest between the new scientific education and more traditional educational approaches became linked with the Victorians’ century-long debate about the relative values of utility versus ornament in art, architecture, and daily life. Thus, proponents of the new pedagogy cast their arguments in terms of efficiency and functionalism, deploring the useless ornamentation associated with older educational sites. In contrast, defenders of a traditional liberal arts education often allied themselves with the Gothic structures of the past.

Foregrounding the centrality of space within the education debates, Dickens’s controversial Hard Times (1854) draws on, and seeks to answer, contemporary assumptions about school architecture and classroom management, as well as philosophical arguments for a modern pedagogy. Written before the 1870 Education Act codified a sometimes-conflicting set of government regulations, Hard Times presents standardized education as an unsettling and even dangerous prospect, giving voice to widespread fears that schooling would forever alter the supposedly untrammeled territory of childhood experience. Ultimately, however, the novel’s virtuoso accomplishment is to deconstruct oppositional arguments about utility and ornament, showing how utilitarianism itself is simply yet another style, partaking of its own ornamental pleasures. Clearly, Dickens positions his fictions as key texts in the defense of an imperiled view of childhood under attack in an increasingly standardized society. Yet my aim here is not to celebrate Dickens as the protector of an essentialized view of childhood, but rather to show how his rearguard attack on institutionalized education is central to his conception of his fiction’s cultural work.

Finally, in explicating the connections among pedagogy, architecture, and psychology, which Victorians largely took for granted, I aim not merely to recover historical and rhetorical assumptions, illuminating as these may be. Instead, my goal is to highlight sociohistorical, cultural practices that helped to change the social construction of childhood, in small and subtle ways as well as on the large scale. To take a down-to-earth example: as schoolchildren were organized into forms or standards on the basis of age and accomplishment (a division not taken for granted in the early nineteenth century), the very trajectory of childhood development was regularized and normalized. Childhood could no longer be viewed as an erratic, mysterious period whose contours were relatively undefined, metaphorically misty around the edges. Instead, childhood itself became spatialized as a series of discrete sequences, orderly in a new and radical way. As Foucault asserts in Discipline and Punish, “The normal is established as a principle of coercion in teaching with the introduction of a standardized education” (184). Foucault analyzes four aspects of disciplinary space that would increasingly shape our collective experience: (1) enclosure, (2) partitioning, (3) the development of useful or functional sites within public and private structures, and (4) the increasing tendency to hierarchize and rank spatial components. Such disciplinary spatial practices exist to train and restrain the “docile” bodies that inhabit them, and school space would increasingly manifest all these elements as it strove to partition childhood experience.¹ The appeal of the Dickensian narrative line is that it allows the docile body to push back against this constricting architecture of modernity, staging a contest in which the child-pupils sometimes win, if only within the consolatory structures of school fictions.

Carlyle’s Question: Toward an Architecture of Education

Lamenting the dismal state of contemporary education in Sartor Resartus (1836), Carlyle’s Teufelsdröchk, original genius and founder of a philosophy both profound and absurd, cries out that society needs a new architect of the spirit: “Alas, so it is everywhere, so it will ever be; till the Hodman is discharged, or reduced to Hodbearing; and an Architect is hired, and on all hands fitly encouraged” (82). The unimaginative teachers who attempt to mold Teufelsdröchk—first in secondary school and later at his representative but nameless university—aspire to be architects of the intellect; the narrative of Teufeldrochk’s education, however, unmasks them as hodmen, menial workers who cart stones to a building site with no sense of how such building materials might fit together. In Teufelsdröchk’s narrative, the conventional school architecture perpetrated by unimaginative hodmen is an oppressively limiting enterprise. Described as “a square enclosure” that “wall[s] in” over a thousand “striplings,” the ironically described “High Seminary” allows its immured pupils to “tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years” (85). Within such an educational architecture, chaotic adolescent energies find no fitting home, but are merely temporarily constrained.

Published during a period of extensive school building, and of fierce debates about the form and function of new school structures, Carlyle’s meditation on educational architecture takes on even greater resonance. If, as Carlyle suggests, school architecture is a problem that calls for a new solution and new builders, who is to be the new architect? There was certainly no shortage of applicants for the position, understood both literally and metaphorically. The British and Foreign School Society, founded by Joseph Lancaster in the early 1800s, rushed to create schools where religious dissenters would feel at home. The early history of the society is a chronicle of ferocious building.² Lancaster trained young schoolmasters, who then proceeded to organize schools on the Lancastrian plan, erecting vast, barnlike schoolrooms where a single master sometimes instructed as many as four hundred pupils with the help of student monitors. An 1811 article from Allen’s Philanthropist describes the progress of one of Lancaster’s protégés in glowing terms: “in the space of only eight months a boy scarcely seventeen has lately organized schools … for above one thousand children.”³

The National Society, a bastion of Anglicanism, responded with their own building campaign, generally emphasizing traditional Gothic structures. Under its auspices, the humanist educator Derwent Coleridge designed Gothic buildings for the teacher training school where he served as principal. For Coleridge, the Gothic style symbolized the liberal tradition in education, an education that was supposedly spacious and anti-utilitarian. Finally, legislators and the growing educational bureaucracy they created, aimed to shape both educational architecture and the architecture of education according to diverse purposes and agendas. In Hard Times, which Dickens dedicated to Carlyle, the utilitarian Gradgrind strives to shape a mass-producible, functional, and efficient education, repeatedly identified with a hyper-rational, constrictive architectural space. Thus, architectural styles took on a symbolic resonance as embodiments of pedagogical styles; as suggested above, the century’s contest between ornament and utility played out in the struggle between classical education, linked with traditional Gothic structures, and a new scientific pedagogy associated with a modern rectilinear architecture.

Set against this jumbled architectural skyline, Teufelsdröchk’s jeremiad on contemporary educational practices and architecture issues not only an invitation but also a warning. Teufelsdröchk urgently demands a master architect to replace the bumbling hodmen who have attempted to educate him. Yet it is difficult to imagine how this new architect of the mind and spirit might foster Teufelsdröchk’s own intellectual development. Although he suffers through three successive schools, Teufelsdröchk is triumphantly self-educated; his solitary reading and musings constitute a liminal self-education outside the walls, savored in an idyllic natural landscape. Teufelsdröchk soon surpasses his schoolmasters, who at best can only recognize his unique educational requirements and abilities. Thus, the work of the new educational architect is clearly far from simple; urgently needed, such an architect of education is also implicitly beside the point, at least in Teufelsdröchk’s case. To the degree that it can be portrayed at all, the new architect’s work is evoked as a negative quantity, as an escape from conventional social architecture that involves the demolition (or unbuilding) of the square enclosure.

Teufelsdröchk’s eccentric bildung, it might be objected, can tell us little about the education of lesser mortals. A young prodigy, Teufelsdröchk remains, in Carlyle’s depiction, a law unto himself. The translator of Goethe’s seminal bildungsroman, William Meister’s Apprenticeship, Carlyle clearly celebrates the individualized processes of bildung rather than the standards of an externally defined curriculum. At the same time, like that of other prophetic visionaries of individualism, Teufelsdröchk’s rhetoric functions in part as a portal through which his readers supposedly glimpse their own recalcitrant individuality, a motive central to the subtly educative project of the bildungsroman. To the extent that we understand Teufelsdröchk, we allegedly become like him; we too are meant to resist the conventional architectural and educational structures that confine us. If, in one sense bildung and architecture (undefined and transcendent) are at one, in another sense bildung and building (historical and specific) are at odds. Carlyle’s monitory parable typifies both a mid-century fascination with, and a concomitant ambivalence toward, an emerging architecture of education and its emblematic educational architecture.

Organizing the developing child’s psychic space around the physical structures that contain and constrain his growing body, Carlyle traces a trajectory whereby the talented boy retains his “genius” only by escaping or repudiating the space of school, and positioning himself within a romanticized natural landscape. While his narrative appears to advocate a childhood outside the walls, Carlyle nevertheless finds himself in the position of calling for an educational architect to build new walls to define childhood experience. Carlyle’s ambivalence helped to shape the contemporary commentary on literal and metaphorical educational architecture, and on the space of school and its pedagogy.

The Historical Background: Perspectives on the Emergence of School Space

In 1850, in his first edition of Social Statics, Herbert Spencer attacks the proponents of state education for attempting to usurp the natural role of parents. Casting the development of a national school system as an institutional incursion into domestic territory, Spencer denounces the specter of a state educational bureaucracy as an appalling and unstoppable factory, whose product is a mechanized and standardized form of human consciousness. “[L]egislators,” Spencer writes,

exhibit to us the design and specification of a state machine, made up of masters, ushers, inspectors, and councils … to be plentifully supplied with raw material, in the shape of little boys and girls, out of which it is to grind a population of well-trained men and women who shall be ‘useful members of the community!’ (299)

When Spencer denounced the prospect of state-run education, the great Education Act of 1870 was still two decades away, but extensive legislation had already attempted to standardize and regulate the voluntary schools. In 1833 the government had established grants for the building of schools, though such grants were available only to the National Society (founded 1811) and the British and Foreign School Society (founded 1808). By 1846, other voluntary schools were eligible for per capita student grants as well as stipends for certified teachers and their pupil-teachers, advanced students who assisted teachers in the classroom.⁴ In 1862 the new Revised Code attempted to guard against the relative subjectivity of inspectors’ reports by correlating school grants to pupils’ scores on standardized examinations.

At the same time, the government set standards indirectly by regulating teacher education. In 1846 it allocated grant money for normal schools to train teachers, dividing the funds equally between the National and the British and Foreign School Societies. Monies distributed to teacher training schools were dependent on pupils’ examination scores, and after 1853 money was withheld unless prospective teachers stayed at the schools for more than one year. The Queen’s Scholarships for future teachers, instituted in 1852, also encouraged attendance at the teacher training colleges.⁵

Although in hindsight the process of standardization may appear as an inevitable evolution, it naturally seemed far from inevitable at the time. Supporters of church-affiliated schools objected to government support of secular training schools for teachers. Bitter disputes between the British and Foreign School Society, established to protect the interests of dissenters, and the National Society, a fervently Anglican organization, also delayed the disbursement of monies to training schools. University-educated inspectors like Matthew Arnold were dismayed by what they perceived as schoolteachers’ attempts to structure curricula solely to pass the necessary government inspections. Particularly after the institution of the Revised Code, schoolteachers were frequently accused of teaching for the examinations, repetitively training students, for instance, to offer rote readings of required passages. While the inspectors were often well intentioned and sometimes deeply concerned about students’ progress, they also wielded the power to close or slowly destroy a school by withholding funds. From the schoolmasters’ point of view, the inspectors could be guilty of bureaucratic tyranny and class arrogance. Thus, at every level, members of the burgeoning, increasingly regulated bureaucracy found grounds for objection to what they regarded as the bureaucratic interference and incompetence of others.

In part, what is at stake in the struggle toward (and against) school standardization is a new definition of school space. The mid-century saw the crucial transition from school space defined as a subset of a particular institutional or domestic realm to a new concept of professionalized school space. Exceptions to this general trend, the universities and public schools (which had not so much separated from, as wreathed themselves around, their church roots) occupied a unique and privileged position on the margins of the nineteenth-century education debates. Since medieval times their walls and towers had set apart their consecrated grounds, affirming a distinct school identity hardly found elsewhere. Thus, the educational storm that darkened the sky over Dickens’s Coketown in Hard Times dissipated in the more serene weather of Winchester and Eton. To be sure, classical education at the elite schools could be regimented in the extreme. Nevertheless, it continued to pay lip service to individual differences in a way that the national schools rarely did. As parish schools and small private schools for poor and working-class children became increasingly absorbed into the state system, the elite schools thrived and expanded. Serving to institutionalize class differences, educating members of the aristocratic and governing classes, such institutions evoked images of a traditional society, just as the new national schools served as an emblem of unsettling social changes. At the same time, it is worth noting that new conceptions of teaching and learning in the national schools for poor and working-class children prefigured changes that would later spread to the teaching of middle-class and privileged children. The situation is analogous to changes in the profession of medicine described by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic (1963). As Foucault documents, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physicians tending the poor at charity hospitals eventually developed a rigorous, standardized medical practice that would ultimately revolutionize medicine for all classes. So too, the standardized pedagogy of the nine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “The Idea of a Wall”: Toward a New Architecture of School and Mind
• Chapter 2. From Felix’s Cottage to Miss Temple’s Parlor: Domestic Instruction and the Paradox of the Teacher’s Room
• Chapter 3. Level Playing Fields and Locked Gardens: Nature at School
• Chapter 4. The View from the Sickroom Window: Zymosis, Brain Fever, and the Dangers of Institutional Education
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index