{"id":1277,"date":"2017-01-17T14:52:13","date_gmt":"2017-01-17T19:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/?page_id=1277"},"modified":"2017-01-17T15:48:11","modified_gmt":"2017-01-17T20:48:11","slug":"education-in-nineteenth-century-british-literature-exclusion-as-innovation","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/previous-issues\/impact-winter-2017\/education-in-nineteenth-century-british-literature-exclusion-as-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Cordner, Sheila. Education in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Exclusion as Innovation<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kate Holterhoff, Georgia Institute of Technology<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Only several books have been published on the history of education in nineteenth-century Britain. One thread of this inquiry has been the rise in disciplinarity in the Arts and Sciences following the Enlightenment. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente\u2019s edited volume Disciplinarity at the fin de si\u00e8cle<\/i> (Princeton UP, 2002) and more recently Jon Klancher\u2019s Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences<\/i> (Cambridge UP, 2014) have underscored the importance of determining how and why educational institutions evolve. Other scholars have taken up the issue of how education impacted the biographies of particular individuals, such as Sara Atwood\u2019s Ruskin\u2019s Educational Ideals<\/i> (Ashgate, 2011). Meanwhile, the more concerted studies of Victorian pedagogy, particularly as they relate to women and the lower classes, include Laura Green\u2019s Educating Women <\/i>(Ohio UP, 2001), Christina De Bellaigue\u2019s Educating Women <\/i>(Oxford UP, 2007), and Elizabeth Gargano\u2019s Reading Victorian Schoolrooms<\/i> (Routledge, 2008), have all explored the Victorians\u2019 habits of learning. Sheila Cordner\u2019s book, Education in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Exclusion as Innovation <\/i>(Routledge, 2016), fits most comfortably in this last category, but its broad implications touch on all of these threads in unexpected and illuminating ways.<\/p>\n

Professor Cordner of Boston University contributes to the corpus of scholarship concerning the rise of institutionalized education by studying the tradition of \u201ceducational outliers,\u201d by which she means individuals who, owing to their social class or gender, were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge. Focusing on nineteenth-century novelists, ENCBL<\/i> \u201ctells the story of how these writers\u2026imagined alternatives to educational systems\u201d (1). According to Cordner, outliers share three major concerns. First, they aim to create universally accessible pedagogies; second, they satirize pedagogies of rote memorization; and third, they emphasize the cultivation of empathy (1). Cordner makes the case that individuals excluded from the academy owing to their gender and class adopted radical pedagogies in order to educate themselves. By rejecting Whiggish narratives about the age\u2019s essentially democratic and reformist spirit, with the rise of colleges for both women and working men, Cordner draws a nuanced picture of the past that suggests exclusion was more common than equality, and self-betterment was necessary and sometimes preferable to the Oxbridge culture of \u201ccramming\u201d for exams.<\/p>\n

The scope of Cordner\u2019s monograph encompasses the nineteenth-century in its entirety. Arranged by author and major moments in education reform, the chapters of ENCBL<\/i> move readers from the early nineteenth century, with Jane Austen, through the middle of the period, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to the fin de si\u00e8cle<\/i>, with George Gissing. Cordner argues that Austen\u2019s ironical fictions use plot and style to \u201cunteach\u201d readers the morally suspect lessons they learned through rote memorization. Next, she studies Browning\u2019s Aurora Leigh<\/i>, explaining that while the eponymous heroine unteaches herself all of the lessons of femininity propounded by conduct manuals, the character Marian permits Browning to explore the educational experience of the working class by drawing parallels between factory labor and rote memorization. Cordner traces Thomas Hardy\u2019s deliberate rejection of Oxbridge in order to embrace his ideal of autodidacticism\u2014an attitude that appears in his several self-educated characters such as Jude Fawley and Angel Clare. Next, Cordner explains how Gissing\u2019s fraught experience with education, his expulsion from Owens College and his tutoring work in Boston and Chicago, appears in his fictions by way of the promotion of an individualized and democratic pedagogy. The concluding chapter of ENCBL <\/i>exposes the legacy of educational outliers in higher education today. Using Virginia Woolf\u2019s own identification on the margins of the academy, as well as a discussion of the first women\u2019s college writers, Cordner argues that the outliers continue to exist and still respond to the models established by some of the nineteenth-century\u2019s most prominent cultural voices.<\/p>\n

Although Cordner focuses almost entirely on the realist mode, the decision to include Browning\u2019s \u201cnovel poem\u201d unshackles her study of British fiction from a rigidly single-mode framework. Each chapter provides an in-depth summary of the education of these canonical authors\u2014a perennially fascinating section of literary biography\u2014at the same time it also provides structure and meaning to these histories within the context of educational outliers. For instance, Cordner exposes how Thomas Hardy\u2019s conscientious rejection of an Oxbridge education was intertwined with his decision to embrace the ideal promoted by publications like The Popular Educator<\/i>, which encouraged audiences \u201cnot to focus on memorizing facts but to think critically about what they read\u201d (64). Uniquely, ENCBL <\/i>also incorporates two primary sources taken from the history of education as appendices. Firstly, an excerpt from The Loiterer<\/i>, a periodical created by Jane Austen\u2019s brothers while at university, recounts the youthful missteps of a now debt-ridden and remorseful rector. The second appendix is an excerpt from the popular science periodical The\u00a0 Educator<\/i>, and specifically a physiology lesson about the body. In addition to their historical interest, these primary source examples add useful and concrete textual evidence to support Cordner\u2019s overarching claims.<\/p>\n

ENCBL<\/i> looks hard at the paths individuals excluded from Oxbridge took to achieve their intellectual and professional goals. For instance, Cordner\u2019s insight into the complex and important role of reading illuminates the topic of educational history in unexpected ways, and is at its freshest when clarifying how nineteenth-century students encountered the act of reading. Specialists interested in the role of educational institutions in nineteenth-century Britain, and the novelists and poets who struggled against them, will find much to interest them in Cordner\u2019s book. Likewise, scholars focused on the biography and context surrounding some of the era\u2019s most significant and enduring figures will take much from this study. ENCBL <\/i>is a lucid exploration of pedagogy writ large, and yet this study shines when discussing the intersections between nineteenth-century culture and the arts. Scholars concerned with the history and dissemination of science will find Cordner\u2019s research less appealing. Cordner seems to have purposely positioned the \u201cknowledge of applied science,\u201d as Thomas Henry Huxley termed it in \u201cScience and Culture\u201d (1880), on the margins (and often in the footnotes) of her research. Considering the fact that Matthew Arnold is a touchstone in ENCBL<\/i>, perhaps the complaints of Huxley and his fellows against Oxbridge-trained classical scholars are best left alone. The role of applied science is simply too complex and nuanced to undertake beside the important issues of exams and cramming.<\/p>\n

I learned much about the history of education from Cordner\u2019s lucid and erudite monograph. In fact, I found myself frequently blindsided by her novel and compelling interpretations of well-known nineteenth-century texts. I suspect that ENCBL <\/i>will come to exert a considerable influence on the field of education and disciplinary studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kate Holterhoff, Georgia Institute of Technology Only several books have been published on the history of education in nineteenth-century Britain. One thread of this inquiry has been the rise in disciplinarity in the Arts and Sciences following the Enlightenment. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente\u2019s edited volume Disciplinarity at the fin de si\u00e8cle (Princeton UP, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9762,"featured_media":0,"parent":1207,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1277"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1290,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1277\/revisions\/1290"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}