What the Victorian Empire Learned: A Perspective on History, Reading and Print in Nineteenth-Century Textbooks

Abstract

Abstract This essay draws upon trends in cultural historiography as well as the methodologies of book history to argue that Victorian school histories articulated and reinforced three persistent myths of modernity (all of which have been thoroughly discredited by scholarship but persist in popular historical understanding). These are the notion that literacy is necessary to progress, the idea that the advent of printing with moveable type was a harbinger of enlightenment, and the tenet of historians’ practice that written records are a necessary precondition for the discipline to function. Each of these ideologies is concerned with the practices of reading and writing, print culture, and documentation, which are intrinsic to the scholarship of book history. To identify the connections, we should read the texts of school books alongside the bibliographical and archival evidence of their materiality and mobility. The texts conveyed a lesson of European superiority indirectly by retelling the Whig narrative of English liberty. Colonial editions and other iterations were widely circulated. The article offers five examples of schoolbooks to demonstrate how they worked and how they travelled, then proposes a digital humanities solution to the historiographical and bibliographical challenges that arise. A complex relational database connecting three sets of data: about the attributes of books in their multiple versions, about the people associated with their authorship and publishing, and about the institutions that supported them.