History of Reading News. Vol.XXIII No.1 (1999:Fall)
by Jane M. Bingham

Reading Lives: Reconstructing Childhood, Books, and Schools in Britain, 1870-1920 by Gretchen R. Galbraith. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Pp. 184. Hard cover. $39.95.

Galbraith's gem of a book proves that good things can come in small packages. The author puts a tremendous amount of information into a well written text that unobtrusively includes 584 footnotes that reflect careful research.

Her introduction neatly sets forth how she intends to piece together the politics surrounding child literacy in Britain from histories of childhood, education, children's literature, and unpublished Board School records, as well as autobiographies of lower, middle, and upper class British readers who tell how reading influenced their lives.

In the first section she culls tidbits from autobiographies (five unpublished) of Britons who were children between 1860 and 1914; their remarks are used to illustrate the role of class differences in early reading, education, work, and family. Galbraith shows how class differences played out politically, particularly in the creation of free schooling for the poor.

In the second section she looks at how children's litera­ture helped to forge and maintain a middle-class consensus that childhood was a uniquely innocent, imaginative stage of life and how that led to a major controversy which created powerful tensions over whether childhood represented a unique stage of human development, and whether it should be unified or divided by class and gender.

The author draws extensively on the history of Little Folks, a popular children's magazine that frequently revised its editorial policy in order to respond to societal pressures and the growing business of publishing for children. (Curiously, Little Folks is omitted from Galbraith's listing of newspapers and periodicals in her extensive bibliography.) She also uses the examples of how Andrew Lang, Mrs. Molesworth, and E. Nesbit used their writing for children to put forth their respective romantic, didactic, and socialist visions of what they thought British society should aspire to. Other writers, such as Oscar Wilde, de-emphasized elements of social reform and championed art for art's sake.

In the third part the author focuses on elementary education in London. After providing an overview of the social, political and educational history of the School Board for London and the Board Schools it oversaw, she devotes an entire chapter to The Board School Act of 1870, which established the free schools that so affected London's large population of poor children. She goes on to describe the controversies over what these children should read and how they should be taught.

The wrangling over the evaluation of children's literacy resulted in intense political and social stress over how children's reading skills and theories of children's cognitive development were to be assessed, especially if factors of class, gender, and social mobility were, or were not, to be taken into consideration.

Galbraith maintains that "the issue of the power of reading, far from trivial, is a key means by which a society

defines itself" (p. 5). She shows that British educators and historians were keenly aware of this. They were sorely divided between those who considered Board schooling (free education for the lower class) an example of social progress, and those who saw it as promoting social control and caretaking.

There were tensions between the Board School members who sought to carry out their mandate of efficient and suitable elementary education for poor children by maintaining gender and class boundaries (through what they read and what they were taught), military drill (favored by the Anglican Church), and lessons in domestic and social economy (such as teaching needlework and other trades that would be of use to the middle and upper classes), versus the Board members who argued for a version of a more democratic educational system. These tensions came to a head in the "overpressure" crisis of 1884, when the government and the press became embroiled in arguments over whether or not working-class children were dying from educational stress.

Galbraith documents the collision of the Moderates and Progressives over this issue, which subsequently challenged the School Board for London, as well as the British nation, to reexamine Board practices and forced them to decide who was responsible for the poorest children. (It is a dilemma that persists today.)

The overpressure debate was so heated because this "was a moment when notions about the appropriateness of state intervention into children's lives--and about the possible benefits of such intervention--were being reimagined" (p. 102). But more important than the overpressure issue was the gravest difficulty that the Board encountered: hunger. Although poor children's hunger was supposedly assuaged with free "penny dinners," the matter was generally considered to be outside of the educational system and best left to philanthropy and legislation.

In her final chapter, "A Power of Reading: The Key to All Knowledge," Galbraith uses Jacqueline Rose's study of how J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy was made into an ele-mentary school reader (actually two readers), one with more concrete, non-literary language deemed appropriate for work­ing-class children, and another more cultural, literary version for upper class children--to point out that the material chil­dren were given to read reinforced their class status.

The author also traces how the teaching of reading becomes the center of the battle over whether elementary education should provide working-class children with "basic skills" only, or provide them with the critical skills and imaginative powers traditionally reserved for the upper-classes (which had the potential of turning the poor against a political and economic system built on class and gender divisions). Galbraith asserts that the reading lessons debate was not entirely academic, but closely related to other controversies over fee collection, school meals, overpressure, and state intervention. Even today, in the late 1990s, children in London's poorest areas are at the center of

controversy: is it poor teaching or poor social conditions that are to blame for "disappointing" examination results?

The author helps us to make sense of the history of Brit­ish education after 1870 by urging us to keep in mind the

significant events that affected earlier educational initiatives, such as the French Revolution, English radicalism and industrialization--all of which led to sharp divisions in upper-class opinions "as to whether the ability to read was a dangerous tool in the hands of the masses or an instrument that could be used to shape their morals and thus their actions" (p. 86). The fact that the middle and lower classes also had opinions about reading did not begin to be recognized until the late 1800s.

Galbraith's book is a fascinating reconstruction of a significant time in British education which compels us to think more creatively "about the meaning of child literacy at a time when both Britain and the United States are again reworking the state's role in children's lives and the content and structure of public education" (p. 5).