Representations of Schools and Schooling in British Children's Fiction

DOCTORAL THESIS Storybook Schools: representations of schools and schooling in British children’s fiction 1820-1880 Bainbridge, Judith Award date: 2015 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 Introduction Aims and rationale According to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature (on-line edition, 2006), the term ‘school story’ refers to a distinct literary genre in which ‘school is not just a backdrop but rather is the raison d’être of the novel’. It is a genre with a long pedigree. The first text of its kind is generally held to be Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, Little Female Academy (1749), a book which was very favourably received and which provided a model for a significant number of the children’s stories produced during the century following its publication. Sue Sims and Hilary Clare (2000) have identified over thirty such books for girls which appeared between 1749 and 1857, while Robert Kirkpatrick (2006) estimates that over a hundred stories set in boys’ schools were written during the same period. The genre was therefore relatively well-established when Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days was published in 1857, to be followed by Frederic Farrar’s Eric; or, Little by Little in 1858. More ambitious than anything that had gone before, and attracting reviews in the periodical press,1 these two books did much to popularise the boys’ school story during the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond. Epitomised in the work of such writers as Charles Hamilton, Harold Avery, Hylton Cleaver and Gunby Hadath, as well as in the story papers, the genre experienced its heyday between 1900 and 1940. The girls’ school story gained prominence rather later, probably as a result of the slow growth in the development of female education. Nevertheless, by the 1930s its popularity had reached its height, with Angela Brazil, Elsie Oxenham, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elinor Brent Dyer all contributing to its success. 1 See for example ‘School and College Life: Its Romance and Reality.’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 89 (1861): 131-147. 1 Following the Second World War (WW2), the genre began to lose some currency, perhaps because in its traditional form it had become formulaic and no longer resonated with either the aspirations or the experiences of readers. Nevertheless, reports of its demise have proved to be exaggerated. The girls’ boarding school story has shown itself to be particularly resilient, as Anne Digby’s Trebizon series (1978-1994) and Ann Bryant’s twelve stories set at Silver Spires (2008 onwards) indicate. At the same time, as well as reissuing many books from the 1930s and 1940s, publishers such as Girls Gone By have commissioned fan fiction which continues the sagas of Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School and Antonia Forest’s Kingscote. The genre has also diversified both to include more stories set in co-educational and day schools, and to incorporate features of fantasy and time-slip fiction, demonstrated most successfully in the work of J.K. Rowling. My decision to research the nineteenth-century school story has its roots in two personal enthusiasms. A working life spent mainly in and around schools has fostered a fascination with their characteristics as social entities as well as a lasting professional interest in questions of educational policy and practice. On a more personal level, a taste for girls’ school stories acquired in childhood has remained with me, and I have continued to read and collect twentieth-century century school fiction as an adult. While studying for the MA in Children’s Literature, I was able to pursue this interest further, first through work on Brazil and Oxenham, and later through writing my dissertation on the novels of Forest. More importantly, perhaps, I was able to extend it historically. My reading of such early texts as Fielding’s The Governess; or, Little Female Academy (1749) and Dorothy Kilner’s Anecdotes of a Boarding School; or, An Antidote to the Vices of those Useful Seminaries (1790) made me aware of the origins of the school story and helped me to appreciate its significant place in the history of education more generally. In particular, I saw 2 how by placing a school at the centre of their narratives, these writers exploited fiction not only to entertain and teach young readers, but also to address broader issues of educational theory and practice, often directly addressing parents, teachers and policy-makers on issues as diverse as the curriculum, discipline, and the inspection and regulation of schools. Their immediate successors continued to use the school story in this way, developing it as a vehicle for both the promotion of an ideal and for the exposure of perceived shortcomings in contemporary models of schooling. This seriousness of purpose was sustained by many later writers, yet it has received little critical recognition. Apart from Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), few nineteenth-century texts were considered by the reviewers to portray schools with any accuracy, and George Eliot found even that work to be ‘unveracious’ (1988: 81). Edward Monro’s Basil the Schoolboy (1854) was deemed ‘preposterous’ and a ‘specimen of extravagance’ by The Quarterly Review (108:216, October1860: 401), while Blackwood’s considered Farrar’s Eric; or, Little by Little (1858) to be an ‘utter failure’ and ‘painful to read’ (No. DVLIV, February 1861: 137). Subsequently the school story has continued to be held in low esteem by commentators who have judged it to be unrealistic, formulaic and élitist, and despite its origins, its contribution to educational thought has been given little serious attention. The historian John Chandos, for instance, dismissed school fiction written for children as imitating ‘supposed reality’ and of inventing ‘a never-never-land pastiche, compounded of garbled fragments of anecdote related at second or third hand, agreeable to the mawkish fancies of readers without the faintest knowledge or experience of the reality’ (1984: 279). Yet my reading indicated that the school story grew out of authorial concern with educational issues, and has demonstrated an ability to respond to changing social and political circumstances over a period of nearly 300 years. It was this discrepancy between the writers’ engagement with contemporary developments in 3 education and the response of critics and reviewers to their work that led me to undertake the research which forms the basis for my thesis. In this study, my purpose is to explore the ways in which a discrete corpus of pre- twentieth-century fictional narratives set in schools represents and interprets contemporary educational concerns, drawing particularly on the critical perspectives of New Historicism to examine its relationship to extra-literary discourse. Far from reflecting ‘supposed reality’, I argue that these stories were deeply embedded in the educational culture of the time, and that their writers consciously interacted with it either to endorse the status quo, or to offer a critique of current practice and thinking. For example, in Recollections of Mrs Anderson’s School (1851), a text discussed in some detail in Chapter 3, Jane Hooper makes an explicit defense of the young ladies’ seminary which had become the focus of considerable public criticism.2 Similarly, in School Experiences of a Fag at a Private and a Public School (1854), another book I shall consider later, George Melly describes how widespread concerns about conditions in boys’ schools3 prompted him to contrast two models of education in order to promote ‘the reform of proved abuse’ (311) in private schools, and to restore confidence in the monitorial system in the public schools. While it is not possible to measure the precise impact of such texts on current policy and practice, it is clear that some achieved a very wide circulation and would almost certainly have contributed to the contemporary awareness of educational issues already stimulated by mainstream novelists such as Charles Dickens, and by numerous extra-literary discourses including articles in newspapers and periodicals. 2 See for example ‘An Inquiry into the State of Girls’ Fashionable Schools’. Fraser’s Magazine of Town and Country 31 (1854): 703-12. 3 See ‘A Wykehamist’. ‘Flogging and Fagging at Winchester’. Quarterly Journal of Education IX: XVII (1834): 84-90. 4 Hughes’ Tom Brown ran into six editions within a year of first publication, for instance, while Farrar’s Eric was reprinted more than 30 times in the author’s lifetime. Even when critics questioned the literary merits of these stories, it is evident that they used review articles as a springboard for drawing attention to a range of educational issues raised in the fictional texts, and so for initiating wider debate. For example, an article entitled ‘Public School Education’ in the Quarterly Review of October 1860 begins with a critique of stories by Farrar, Monro and Melly, but quickly moves on to a discussion of the relative merits of formal schooling versus home education. There is evidence too that the reading public expected the school story to promote a specific agenda for reform.

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