Patrick G. Scott

Culture and Education in Victorian England

The critics in Culture and Education in Victorian England share Matthew Arnolds belief that culture and education are powerful instruments for transmitting values, but they do not always see that power as benign. They show how art, literature, the British Museum, and formal education could all be used to inculcate the values of the ruling classes.

Flowers in the Path of Science: Teaching Composition Through Traditional High Literature

MY PURPOSE IN THIS PAPER IS THREEFOLD-hiStoriCal, descriptive, and also, alas, nowadays contentious. After a brief historical excursus on the changed relation between composition and literature teaching, I want to describe what is, for the 1980s, a rather unusual kind of freshman writing program, one that combines intensive work in composition with an old-fashioned literary survey. Through this description I shall argue that modern, professionalized writing specialists have become unnecessarily suspicious of traditional literary reading assignments; that the educational functions of reading assignments have often been misunderstood; and that those functions can, at least for some students, better be fulfilled by traditional, substantive literary texts, than by the more commonly used collections of modern controversial, expressive, and affective prose. Finally, I hope to suggest, from our experience at the University of South Carolina with a special traditionally-oriented freshman program, that the ideas of freshman rhetoric can help in designing useful reading and writing assignments in other undergraduate literature courses. When the first-ever professorship of English was established, by the patronage of

The Business of Belief: The Emergence of "Religious" Publishing

In 1863, when a London printer, called Collingridge, produced a handbook for the aspiring author, he made it clear that one particular class of aspiring author was of dominant commercial importance: We may venture to assert that no other profession produces so many works as the clergy. This is no more than might be expected from a body of gentlemen having the advantages of sound learning and well-regulated minds . . . there are thousands of clergy who neither know, nor desire to know, the toils, the anxieties, or the pleasures of authorship; yet even they, if in active duty, require the services of the printer. Special sermons, schools, and other local institutions in the parish or district, necessitate an outlet for printing.

A. H. Clough: a case study in Victorian doubt

In 1868, F. W. Farrar addressed the Church Congress in Dublin on the reasons why young men were increasingly alienated from the church: ‘the alienation of the most highly educated’, he declared, ‘is as much an intellectual as the alienation of the uneducated is a moral and social phenomenon’. The emphasis we have inherited on the intellectual difficulties in religious belief felt by Victorian doubters of the upper-middle classes has obscured the extent to which their alienation, like that of the uneducated, was part of a broader shift in attitudes. This change of attitudes could precede disengagement from institutional religious allegiance by many years, and had little to do with specific intellectual difficulties. Discussion in terms of ‘difficulties’ caused by geology, biblical criticism, and so on, may be the way doubters chose to explain their detachment from the Church, and only one cause among many of that detachment.