Our Victorian Education

As Victorian philanthropy evolved into public policy, a cultural unease developed between attempts to assimilate the fractured legacies of Romanticism and Christianity with the push for education. For some, education represented a denial of the autonomous ‘inner life’ that so richly defined Romantic and Christian thought. This troubling divergence between ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ shaped attitudes towards education throughout the nineteenth century.

This groundbreaking volume combines an historical interpretation of Victorian debates on teaching and learning with a fresh overview of contemporary educational thought. Written for a diverse audience, the book explores the roots of modern educational anxieties in nineteenth–century thinking and reflects on questions of social class, religion and gender in relation to Victorian educational ideals.

Preface.

Acknowledgements.

1 Defining Knowledge.

The Spread of Education.

Conflicts in Learning.

Poetry and Teaching: William Wordsworth.

Imagination and Fact.

Poetry and Schooling: Matthew Arnold.

Fiction and Memory: Charles Dickens.

2 Religious Learning.

Changing Balances.

Evangelical Seriousness.

Educating Clergymen.

A Complete Education.

The Uses of Ignorance: John Ruskin.

3 Teaching Women.

Gender and Education.

A Generation of Schoolmistresses.

Literary Case Studies.

The Educated Heart: Charlotte Bronte.

Teaching Independence: Ellen Wood.

Practical Faith: Elizabeth Sewell.

“School–Time”: George Eliot.

Finding the Way.

4 New Conversations.

Education, Education, Education.

False Distinctions.

“To School and Intelligence and Make it a Soul”.

The Mechanics of Learning.

Admiration, Hope and Love.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Index

Dinah Birch is a Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. Her work on Victorian literature includes Ruskin’s Myths (1988), Ruskin on Turner (1990), and John Ruskin: Selected Writings (2004). She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, and is General Editor of a forthcoming revised edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature.

"Dinah Birch′s aims, in this recent addition to the Blackwell Manifestos series, are bold ... .Birch has performed not only a scholarly but also a civic service." ( Brontë Studies, November 2009)