History of Reading News. Vol.XXIV No.1 (2000:Fall)
by Lucille M. Schultz

In a word, this little book is a “must read” for anyone interested in the history of literacy instruction among school-age children. It is brief, it is clearly arranged, it is packed with rich sources and even richer commentary, and, perhaps most importantly, it is the first and thus far the only book that traces the production and rise of what author Ian Michael calls the “school-directed literary text” in the 18th century. While Michael’s primary interest is the teaching of literature, his project has reverberations for scholars interested in other textbooks as well—in rhetorics, readers, and spellers, for example—because as he points out, in all of these texts appear evidence that using literary texts in school was increasingly popular.

Working with 388 texts that were used in British schools from 1700 to 1830, Michael organizes his project chrono-logically (1700-1750, 1751-1785, 1786-1830), and then, within each time period, by a taxonomy that includes what he deems “principal school texts,” “incidental school texts,” “home texts,” “rhetorical texts,” “elocutionary texts,” and “students’ writing.”

After two introductory notes, one detailing the lack of scholars’ attention to these school books and the other arguing that English literature itself received little attention in 16th- and 17th-century British schools, Michael begins with the longest section of his book, that covering 1700-1750. As in the sections that follow, he first lists, by category, all of the literature textbooks used during this period. Then, in an elaboration of each category, he comments on selected texts that stand out for one reason or another. So, for example, Michael comments at length on James Greenwood’s 1717 The Virgin Muse, written “for the use of gentlemen and ladies, at schools,” because, Michael argues, it is the earliest book of its kind to make a direct statement about teaching literature: Greenwood explained in his preface that he “endeavoured to make it a compleat Book for the Teaching to Read Poetry” (p. 9). Another book that stood out for two reasons during this time frame, Michael reports, was Francis Fox’s 1741 An Introduction to Spelling and Reading. Not only did Fox note in his preface the very unusual news that a copy would be available to every child (Michael suggests that a subsidy probably would have made this possible), but Fox also argues that children’s reading should not be limited to the Bible.

So Michael is serving us, his readers, in a number of ways: (a) by providing the broad categories and the texts that comprise those categories and (b) by singling out books that we as readers might turn to for examples of specialized phenomena without having to make our way through all of the books that he has catalogued. Behind the brief pages of this book, in other words, are countless hours of archival search and study.

A third way in which Michael serves us is by pointing to the growth of teaching apparatus in these school-directed literary texts. Although not presented in a single section, the

teaching commentary runs through Michael’s text and is particularly important to readers interested in the ripple effects that occur when pedagogy informs an edition of a text—when a literary text, that is, becomes a piece of a textbook that a compiler creates for schools. The textbook apparatus in the earliest of the periods that Michael surveys was very limited; it might have included a preface or an author’s introductory note about the use of the book. With the increasing popularity of anthologies for schools, the pedagogical apparatus expanded significantly. It included, for example, a gloss of difficult words or phrases, explanatory notes, and questions asking students to paraphrase the meaning of a line of text or to analyze the poetic devices a text deploys. In addition, in a section of his book he calls “Opinions,” Michael traces the growing number of entire books devoted to educational commentary, books that provide a window on the history of approaches to teaching the literary text.

Finally, Michael’s text provides us with a range of insights into the authors and texts that were considered important for schools to teach, for children to read. A number of factors are of particular interest to a contemporary readership. Consider, for example, that during the period 1751-1785, recommended authors were Milton, Pope, Addison, Thomson, and Fenelon, and that Shakespeare was not on every list (p. 26); that some writers compiled anthologies or wrote lessons especially “for young ladies”; and that other writers, especially in the period 1786-1830, cautioned of the dangers of novel reading for young people. While this point is not new—that some early 19th-century educators considered novel reading dangerous for young people, especially for girls—Michael articulates the thinking that led to this attitude. He explains that the beginning of the 19th century, a time of reform, was also “an anxious period” and this anxiety was often expressed as concern about the dangers of the imagination. Educators argued, in Michael’s words, that because literature “expresses and may evoke, strong feeling”; because “Violence is the product of strong feeling”; and because “Fear of social unrest makes one fear the violence which accompanies it,” students should be shielded from fiction. These educators further believed that exposure to fictions (“untruths”) might encourage readers toward irrational behaviors (p. 55). While Michael does not offer lengthy commentary on educational pheno-mena in his text, what he does offer—like this elaboration about fiction reading—is invaluable.

As Mariolina Salvatori argues in Pedagogy: Disturbing History, 1819-1929 (Pittsburgh University Press, 1996), the direction of a pedagogy reflects a culture’s understanding of an educated person. Michael's work points to that era in history when for English-speaking peoples a knowledge of literature written in their own language became a sign of an educated person. Those of us who teach English literary texts as part of our work today are of course heirs to that tradition, and we are indebted to Michael for helping us to understand its beginnings. To be sure, Michael’s text is also a beginning. It is rich with many sources that he mentions only by name, that he catalogues but doesn’t discuss. It should therefore be read in conjunction with his The Teaching of English from the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), which often provides

such discussion. Using Michael’s text as a springboard, other scholars will no doubt take up individual books, or groups of books, and tease out their further relevance to the teaching of the literary text in the 18th and early 19th centuries; others may track how many of these books, if any, were used in the United States; and still others may elaborate or disagree with Michael’s suggestion that the early teachers of literature, those who presented the literary texts without analytic and taxonomic procedures, without invoking the authority of moral and utilitarian criteria, were, in fact, “wiser than their successors” (p. 60). While Michael’s project purports to be a “guide,” not an argument, it is, in fact, layered with positions that invite further conversation about the history of teaching the belletristic text. And no better place to begin those conversations, I would suggest, than with Literature in School: A Guide to the Early Sources 1700-1830.