Englishness in Retrospect: Rewriting the National Past for the Children of the English Working Classes, c. 1880-1919

Abstract

Historians who have sought to measure the domestic impact of British imperialism have positioned late nineteenth-century History teaching as central to the promotion of imperial propaganda. The English, many have argued, were instructed in British imperialism and its attendant values via a carefully prescribed History curriculum. There are, however, a number of significant issues omitted in this formulation. Teaching resources were not the lavish History textbooks which frequent many past studies of History teaching, but inexpensive mass-produced literacy primers. Educationists of the time, the views of whom constitute the predominant source-base for this essay, had clearly defined ideas of how these historical stories could be used to promote a sense of Englishness, especially amongst the children of the working class. Their emphasis on the narrative structure of storytelling aimed to mobilise the emotions and concentrated more on the medieval than the modern, in the belief that the more mythic and remote the taught past, the greater the likelihood that children would identify with nation and empire.