History of Reading News. Vol.XX No.2 (1997:Spring)
by Kate Levin

Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780-1832, by Alan Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 327. $57.95.

In a 1986 article about the rise of literacy in early modern England, Keith Thomas offered conflicting interpretations of the effect of increased literacy on a society. ¹ In the first interpretation, broader access to education and greater literacy could precipitate unrest and possibly even incite revolution. The second interpretation, which Thomas favors, suggests that increased literacy might actually produce greater compliance in a population. In his view, literacy in early modern England was less a disrupter of authority than a propagator of values that encouraged social conformity: "[w]ritten literacy was the literacy of the educated classes; it was almost impossible to acquire it without also absorbing the values and social attitudes of polite metropolitan culture. . . . The printed word thus either educated an imitative audience in accepted views or confirmed a passive one in a position of cultural inferiority."

In his recent book on the interaction of Romanticism and education in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, Alan Richardson sides with critics like Thomas. He uses Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish as a framework to analyze how increased literacy and more widespread access to education at the end of the eighteenth century actually served to "discipline" and thus continue to subordinate various already subordinated groups, in particular, women, children, and the lower classes. ² And the literature of the period not only reflected but participated in this process: "[l]iterature . . . from `high' to `low,' from epic poems to Sunday-school prize books, played a key role in shaping and effecting transformations in schooling and in the social function of reading" (p. xiv); "literary texts help constitute the educational discourses and practices of their time as well as critically addressing them" (p. 32). Whether representing new definitions of childhood, endorsing innovative educational methods or appealing to female and lower-class reading publics, literature was increasingly enlisted in a project of social control.

Richardson's account of the period may surprise some scholars of Romanticism As a result of the "Romantic `exaltation of the individual'" (p. 268), one might expect Romantic writers to encourage and even celebrate the spread of literacy. Instead, Richardson finds in their poems and other written works "a deep-lying anxiety regarding the undirected (or misdirected) spread of written material among multitudes of relatively untrained readers" (p. 267). Their writing does not simply reflect a conservative reaction to social change, but also tries at times to contain the perceived threat. For example, both Wordworth and Coleridge participated in the popularization of the Madras system, an educational method distinguished by its use of student monitors. Richardson asks, "[w]hy did the Lake poets, usually seen as defenders of the child's freedom and imagination, give such vocal and, for a time, unqualified support to a system which has been described as marking `perhaps the most coercive and negative moment in the whole history of schooling'? . . . [because] [i]t represented for them a radical cure for England's social ills and political unrest, a means for facilitating and justifying colonial expansion, and . . . a prop for that great edifice of stability, the Established Church" (p. 95).

Although Richardson represents the literature of the period as endorsing a largely disciplinary and sometimes coercive vision of education, he also allows for the possibility of opposition. He does so in part by broadening the definition of Romanticism to include previously marginalized genres and writers. In his account, Romantic literature encompasses not just the poems of canonical male writers but also children's books, domestic novels, religious tracts and popular tales, which "all play a material role in education" (p. 33). This inclusiveness allows him to search for exceptions to the disciplinary rule, and his most detailed close readings are of literary works that resist it. In his chapter on "Women, Education, and the Novel," he describes how Mary Shelley uses portrayals of education in Frankenstein to rebel against the social strictures that confined women, the colonized and the nascent proletariat, and he closes a discussion of children's literature by detailing how William Blake's poem "The Little Black Boy" makes literacy a potentially revolutionary tool in the hands of a young slave.

Richardson has provided a convincing and at times fascinating account of the relationship between education and literature in a period of "cultural revolution" (p. xiii). His book is clearly written, covers an impressive amount of material and makes productive use of literary and theoretical texts. It should interest scholars of Romanticism as well as educational historians (the latter will be intrigued by Richardson's challenge to reassess the Romantic contribution to so-called democratic educational practices), along with anyone wishing to study the relationship between literature and history in a given period.

NOTES: ¹ Keith Thomas, "The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England," The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 121.

² See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

Kate Levin received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in December 1995 with a dissertation about the relationship of the novel to its female readers in eighteenth-century England. Her essay about the development of Charlotte Lennox's career was published recently in Women's Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period, 2 (1995): 271-90.