What the Victorians Learned: Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks: Introduction

Abstract

What the Victorians Learned: Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks Leslie Howsam (bio), Christopher Stray (bio), Alice Jenkins (bio), James A. Secord (bio), and Anna Vaninskaya (bio) Introduction Leslie Howsam (bio) Leslie Howsam Leslie Howsam is University Professor in the Department of History at University of Windsor (Canada); she was Lyell Reader in Bibliography at the University of Oxford for 2005–6; her most recent book is Old Books and New Histories (University of Toronto Press, 2006). Classics Christopher Stray (bio) Christopher Stray University of Wales, Swansea Christopher Stray Christopher Stray is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Classics at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is the author of Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830– 1960 (OUP, 1998) and co-founder of the Textbook Colloquium. Geometry Alice Jenkins (bio) Alice Jenkins University of Glasgow Alice Jenkins Alice Jenkins is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow and chair of the British Society for Literature and Science. Her most recent book is Space and the 'March of Mind': Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815–1850 (OUP, 2007). Science James A. Secord (bio) James A. Secord University of Cambridge James A. Secord Jim Secord teaches in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University and is director of the Darwin Correspondence Project. His edition of Darwin's evolutionary writings and autobiography is scheduled for publication by Oxford World's Classics in autumn 2008. English Literature Anna Vaninskaya (bio) Anna Vaninskaya University of Cambridge Anna Vaninskaya Anna Vaninskaya is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group Leverhulme Trust Project 'Past vs. Present in Victorian Britain' and a Junior Research Fellow in English at King's College, Cambridge. She is working on a book on the Idea of Community in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Conclusion Leslie Howsam (bio) Leslie Howsam University of Windsor Leslie Howsam Leslie Howsam is University Professor in the Department of History at University of Windsor (Canada); she was Lyell Reader in Bibliography at the University of Oxford for 2005–6; her most recent book is Old Books and New Histories (University of Toronto Press, 2006). Endnotes 1. Paradigm and the Textbook Colloquium http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/westbury/ TextCol/index.html [consulted June 29 2007]. Valerie Chancellor, History for their Masters: Opinion in the English History Textbook: 1800–1914 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970); Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000); Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836–1916 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), Chapter 5. See also John Issitt, 'Reflections on the Study of Textbooks', History of Education 33.6 (November 2004), 683–96. 2. For history see Leslie Howsam, 'Academic Discipline or Literary Genre?: The Establishment of Boundaries in Historical Writing', Victorian Literature and Culture (2004), 413–33 and 'Imperial Publishers and the Idea of Colonial History, 1870–1916', [End Page 282] History of Intellectual Culture 5.2 (2005), http://www.ucalgary.ca/hic [consulted June 29 2007]. See also Susan Walton, 'Charlotte M. Yonge and the "Historic Harem" of Edward Augustus Freeman', Journal of Victorian Culture 11.2 (2006), 226–55. 3. C.A. Stray and G. Sutherland, 'Mass Markets: Education', in Cambridge History of the Book in England: Vol. 6, 1830–1914, D.J. McKitterick (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 4. S. Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1994). 5. C.A. Stray, 'Paper Wraps Stone: The Beginnings of Educational Lithography', Journal of the Printing Historical Society n.s. 9 (2006), 13–29. 6. See A. Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 144. 7. On this topic, and on classical education in Victorian England in general, see C.A. Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 8. Classical Books: Scholarship and Publishing in England since 1800, C.A. Stray (ed.) (London 2007). 9. The careers and productions of the scholars mentioned above can be...