Note: In 2003 I started a PhD in English at the University of South Carolina. I never finished the dissertation. In 2012 I switched careers to IT, and eventually all my coursework expired. In 2020, after a job change brought us back to Columbia, I decided to try and finish. One of the first steps was revalidating all my old coursework. For one class, I had to write an essay. The essay prompt was defined by me in concert with the English faculty examiner. I submitted the finished essay this last weekend. (DL, Dec. 7, 2021)

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Original Course Description:
Survey of the development of the novel form, with study of major and lesser-known figures, in relation to social change and publishing conditions; authors include Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy.

Instructions:
Write an essay in response to the prompt below. Essay length is at the discretion of the student but may be considered by the reader as part of the evaluation. This is a take-home exam. Expectations in regards to proofreading and source citation may accordingly be high.

Writing Prompt:
Assess the value of “The English Novel of the Victorian Period” as a pedagogical focus.

Why build a class focused specifically on:

• British writings (as distinct from American or other regional sources),
• The novel form (as distinct from other forms of writing), and
• The Victorian period (as distinct from other historical time periods)?

Your answer should:

1. Focus on the potential benefit to the student or to society,
2. Include historical, literary, cultural, and sociological considerations as appropriate, and
3. Demonstrate graduate-level knowledge of the subject matter and the texts associated with it.

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The traditional university education model is under pressure, and university instructional staffing is not faring well. A confluence of destructive factors, from “attacks on . . . tenure, and public funding,” to  “stagnant faculty salaries, . . . and the winnowing away of faculty governance have collectively produced an environment in which adjuncts outnumbering tenure-stream faculty nearly three to one is the norm.” ¹ To put it bluntly, in a time of market pressure, universities are saving money by getting rid of tenured professors. In this uncomfortable environment, the question posed by the exam prompt is exceedingly timely—not just for a class on the Victorian novel—but for every class a university educator might want to teach and for every research project they might want to pursue. “What is the value of what I’m doing? Why should society pay for what I offer?” University educators must be able to answer these questions with clarity and power if they are to maintain any hope of preserving for themselves and their disciplines a place of respect and influence in society. This exam paper, in its own small way, takes up that challenge. Its scope is limited to a single class on a single topic, but it aims by extension to speak to the wider domain of literary studies and the liberal arts, and in so doing to recover the core principles of an apologia for liberal education which is critically needed at this moment in American educational history and but too often faintly remembered.

The scope of this essay is the following question: What is the value of a class on the English Novel of the Victorian Period? Or more clearly, Why should people (individual students, university departments, society as a whole) pay for a specialist to teach such a class?

The answer to this question will be developed systematically in two parts:

1. An explication of the value of literary education and this class in particular
2. A demonstration of how the subject matter of this particular class delivers that value

The thesis of this paper is that the class in question does—or can if properly executed—deliver on the value being pursued and is thus well worth paying for. But what exactly that means and how exactly it does so will only become clear as the argument progresses.

The Value of Literary Education ²

Although pressures on the traditional university model have been growing, the question of the value of this or that piece of the curriculum is not a new one. There has always been less money and time to teach all the things that one might want to teach, and there have often been external constraints on education and on the act of teaching that have caused outsiders to question the value of an activity that bears (particularly where the arts and humanities are concerned) many external similarities to leisure when compared to other forms of work. In the 1930s, when Latin was beginning to lose its long-held compulsory place in secondary schools, an entire book-length study asked the question of the place and value of Latin in education.³ In 1939 shortly after the outbreak of World War II, C. S. Lewis explored the value of the “placid occupations” of university learning when “the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance. Is it not,” he asked, “like fiddling while Rome burns?” These are but two examples of a near constant theme. In the face of environmental crisis, social injustice, outright war, the mundane realities of earning a living, and the dopamine-fueled attraction of video games or other diversion, why bother with schoolwork?

While a tiring question for the educator and specialist to continually face (I speak from experience), the question is just, and the answer must always be renewed, for no matter how convincingly it has been answered in the past, each new generation of humans is born without the knowledge of that answer; and if the answer is lost, educational effort will be misdirected or neglected, to the determinant of all.

What, then, is the value of literary education?

Cardinal Newman ⁴ called literature “thoughts expressed in language,”⁵ and therein lies the key to understanding the value of its study. The quintessentially human ability is the ability to formulate thoughts into words and communicate those thoughts to others. This ability to formulate the contents of the mind and share them with others distinguishes humans from all other earthly creatures and is the very foundation stone of all human learning and accomplishments. It is what allows minds to collaborate in creative undertaking: to explore together, to imagine, to work together to create something new. Many species of animal and insect collaborate in the execution of work and the building of things. But only humans are able to collaborate creatively at scale, to learn and grow together as a species, and to share that learning in any other form than through gradual updates to their raw, instinctive DNA. “Thoughts expressed in language” is the great enabler of all human progress, the beating heart of all human communities.

Missing from Newman’s definition above (though implicit in its original context) is the additional component of textuality: “thoughts expressed in written language.” If verbal language is the foundation of all human learning and accomplishment, literacy is the massive accelerant that multiples the power of verbal language many-fold. Literacy enables human connection horizontally across geographical space as well as longitudinally through time. It enables the contents of human thought and the power of human problem solving to transcend the limits of what can be held in memory alone. Details that would have been lost without a written record—even to the originating mind—are retained and can be reused. Ideas that would have influenced but a small community are vastly amplified in their power of influence. Nowhere is this more immediately evident than in the fact that all of the world’s major religions—the shared ideas of billions across millennia—are rooted in ancient texts that have successfully seeded and reseeded the same ideas again and again across space and through time. It is also seen in the unparalleled explosion of human development in the centuries since the invention of the moveable-type printing press. The marvels of modern science—based as they are on the concerted collaboration of generations of specialist minds—would have been simply impossible without the written word.

It is in this unequaled power of written language to enable and to shape human thought (and thus human emotion and human action) that the value of literary study finds its root. The benefits offered by texts can only be enjoyed by those who are skilled at consuming texts; they are not automatically received. Cardinal Newman said it this way:

If by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated,—if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other,—if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and prophets of the human family,—it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study; rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others.⁶

We shall ourselves become the recipients of these benefits and be enabled to share them with the rest of our community if and only if we ourselves have the skills required to unlock the thoughts captured on the page. And those skills can be acquired only through the study of literature. Of the much more that could be said in this vein, a summary will suffice.

The value of a literary education lies chiefly in its enabling students with the following:

1. Facility with words and thereby facility with formulating, sharing, receiving, and understanding thought.
2. Exposure to the gamut of human conditions, experiences, and emotions that transcend any one particular life, and from that exposure opportunities for greater understanding for and empathy towards others. In a word, a potential for greater wisdom.
3. Exposure to and a greater ability to appreciate the beauty achieved by humanity’s greatest verbal artists. The beauty of fitly crafted words is a uniquely human beauty, and the ability to unlock and appreciate that beauty is a uniquely human gift. The study of literature is humanizing.

How a Course in the Victorian Novel Delivers the Value of Literary Education

Despite the undeniable pressures of the crowded curriculum time-table, a course in the Victorian Novel is easily justified for virtually all university students (regardless of their area of major study) because the Victorian novel is an almost ideal subject of study for inculcating in students the humanizing benefits of a literary education described above. What makes the Victorian novel so well suited for this purpose is the fact that the Victorian novel is the pinnacle of democratized literary art.

The Novel

The novel unlike many verbal art forms that pre-date it is distinctly literary. It is an art form that must be read. The lyric, the drama, the hymn, the epic poem—all of these were oral art forms before they were ever committed to the page. The novel as the child of the printing press and the bookshop benefits from the freedom that unlimited length and memory offer. It dispenses with metrical forms that support a reciter’s memory or the pure dialog of the stage and unleashes instead fulsome prose, complex syntax, and vibrant description. The novelist is free to provide commentary, dialog, observation, and minute description as they see fit. They use real human language in an unconstrained manner that the poet or dramatist simply cannot due to the constraints of their particular forms. The novel thus presents the reader with a fertile field for exercising and developing their facility with receiving and interpreting the written word and developing their concentration and ability to focus on text—even in the purely physical terms of dragging ones eyes across the page line after line—for extended periods of time.

The Victorian Novel.

The case for building a literary curriculum on novels has been made. But why Victorian novels in particular? Two considerations of Victorianism are relevant: the time period and the British cultural milieu.

1. Temporal Considerations (1837-1901)

Several key historical developments that came to fruition during the reign of Queen Victoria led to the novels of that period achieving a level of mastery that stands very high in the history of English writing. The best novels of the Victorian period are apex examples of English literary art; they are also democratic art, attainable by the vast bulk of educated English speakers, not merely specialists.

Developments in education, logistics, industrial production, and book distribution that culminated in the Victorian period meant more demand for and consumption of novels (and indeed all forms of writing) in the that time than had ever previously existed. The populace of the Victorian anglosphere was distinctly and uniquely literary compared to all human populations before and since. Literacy (especially among women) rose throughout the period, and access to books increased. Steam-powered mass production of paper and books and distribution of books through publicly-available and cost-accessible means such as the lending library (Mudie began lending books via subscription in 1842) meant a wider reading public than ever before, and an utter lack of both electronic mass media such as radio, TV, film, streaming-media, or video games as well as of electronic communications such as telephone, e-mail, text messaging, and social media meant that the public in general invested significantly more time and energy to both extended reading and extended writing than does the 20^th and 21^st-century public. A single example will demonstrate the point.

In 1850, the future Christian missionary to China Hudson Taylor wrote one of many letters to his younger sister, Amelia. He was 18. She was several years younger.

My dear Amelia—I have to write to you at sundry times and in divers places, here a little and there a little. . . . In your last note you suggest that it might be a good plan to write to the Chinese Association and ask whether they could send me out as a married man. You must excuse my differing from you in opinion. I think that to do so would be to effectually prevent them. They would naturally conclude that I wanted to get married without means, and that I hope they would insure me from the consequences of such conduct. It would not do to write to them at all at present.⁹

In short, novels of the Victorian period should be a fertile field for those searching for material with which to inculcate in English-speaking students with the essential humane skill of proficiency with the written word.

It is appropriate to support that assertion with an example from the actual texts of the period and compare it with a popular text of our latter day. We will compare depictions of darkly-attired, grimly unfeeling educators with cavernous eyes who publicly humiliate students by interrogation.

First we have Dickens’ ironic characterization of superintendent Thomas Gradgrind in the first chapter of Hard Times.

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside.  The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.¹⁰

Dickens technique is immediately obvious to the trained reader. His use of repetition, parallelism, ordered sequence, and figurative language are all easily discerned. It’s one paragraph of work produced for a non-specialist audience by a prolific writer who produced many thousands of paragraphs, yet it evinces a high level of literary skill and polish.

By comparison, J. K. Rowling’s introduction of potions master Severus Snape in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (a modern classic) requires less reading patience from and offers less literary depth to the reader.

Potions lessons took place down in one of the dungeons. It was colder here than up in the main castle and would have been quite creepy enough without the pickled animals floating in glass jars all around the walls. Snape . . . started the class by taking the register. . . . Snape finished calling the names and looked up at the class. His eyes were black like Hagrid’s, but they had none of Hagrid’s warmth. They were cold and empty and made you think of dark tunnels. ‘You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-marking,’ he began. He spoke in barely more than a whisper, but they caught every word. . . . Snape had the gift of keeping a class silent with little effort. . . . ‘I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses … I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death—if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.’¹¹

Rowling’s writing is not less skillful, but her audience is different than Dickens’ was, and her style is adapted accordingly. The Hard Times passage has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (as measured with freely available online tools) of nearly 13. Rowling’s is 6.5.

This purpose of this analysis is illustrative, not scientific, and many qualifiers could be added (such as whether or not Rowling was writing for younger readers than Dickens). The point being illustrated however is clear, and it is well summarized in Readable.com’s explanation of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale. “Many of the classics of English Literature were written in the 18th and 19th centuries. During this time, the average sentence was a lot longer than it is now. . . . [B]ecause the average length of a sentence has decreased with time, so has our attention span. We no longer have the tolerance for lengthy, meandering prose.”¹² In other words, the average person’s facility with long-form prose has decreased. Using texts from an earlier, more proficient age makes sense as a means of developing or recovering that skill in students.

1. Cultural Considerations (Victorian England)

If the preceding argument has been successful, it has established the rationale for using 19^th century novels as material for a college class designed to promote literary education. But why restrict the material to the novels of Victorian England? Why not include American 19^th-century classics such as Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter? Presumably their intended audience was similarly dedicated to and proficient with reading long-form prose. Would they not serve as well to develop literary facility with modern students? Budgets and students schedules are limited. Surely a “classic novels” or “19^th-century novels” class is enough? Why specifically Victorian Novels of England?

The answer to that question lies in the second value proposition of a literary education given at the start of this essay: “exposure to the gamut of human conditions, experiences, and emotions that transcend any one particular life.”

It can fairly be said that all novels expose readers to human conditions, experience, and emotions that differ from their own. Indeed, it was the malleability of fiction which allows a writer to call to life whatever scenes they will that inspired Sir Philip Sidney’s highest accolades in his Defence of Poesie (1595).¹³ But while it is true that a reader can—if they will—grow in wisdom from exposure to any human conditions, experience, and emotions, it must be asserted that some conditions and experiences are especially relevant to the modern reader as a source of wisdom and empathy. One of those is without question the experience and conditions of oppressed and underrepresented peoples. Works such as slave narratives and novels by underrepresented authors are absolutely critical for broadening student experience in the aftermath of so many centuries of European (and particularly Anglo) oppression and must have a place in the curriculum. But also critical is the cultural baseline against which those works react, which they resist, in which they suffer. The suffering of the oppressed and underrepresented can only be fully understood if the conditions in which it took place are understood. And students are not born with an innate knowledge of history. It must be learned, and to be learned it must be taught. This is the core cultural reason that the Victorian Novel deserves a place in the curriculum.

Victorian England was the global power of its day, the mother state of the Anglosphere, the British Raj, and centuries of white supremacy across much of the globe—from Delhi to Sydney, Cape Town to Hong Kong. Contemporary adults and the generations rising after us are forced daily to confront this damaging legacy of inequality, a legacy represented in the statues that still grace Westminster Abbey—statutes such as the incongruously noble red granite likeness of Lord Harry Palmerston, the two-time Victorian prime minister who forced British opium upon China,¹⁴ that stands just inside the North Door. As modern students confront this legacy, it is crucial that they understand not only how the British people was perceived by those that suffered under the empire’s unequal yoke, it is crucial that they understand how that people perceived itself. Otherwise they risk the danger of missing in themselves a propensity to enact the same harms enacted by the Victorians in their days of power and influence. Few people—and certainly not whole nations characterized by public religiosity—embrace (or sometimes even understand) their role in evil. They in common with all humans tend to see themselves differently than others see them. We humans almost always seem righteous to ourselves and often have the best of intentions. But even with the best of intentions, we can be agents of destruction.

Consider St. John Rivers, the Anglican minister who with his two sisters opened his home to Jane Eyre as she fled Thornfield destitute. St. John is unquestionably a devout man who demonstrates great compassion and charity towards Jane in her plight. He also becomes a representative of the same missionary class as Hudson Taylor, a class whose worldwide acts of Christian proselytization were so closely tied in time and space to British market and military imperialism. St. John is a good man, “zealous in his ministerial labours, blameless in his life and habits” (Jane Eyre, chapter 30).  He is consistent and unswerving in his service to others. “No weather seemed to hinder him in [his] pastoral excursions: rain or fair, he would, when his hours of morning study were over, take his hat, and . . . go out on his mission of love or duty” (chapter 30). These acts of service are without question beneficial to the people of his community. His work makes the lives of other people better. He opens a school for boys. He opens a second one for girls. He is careful to offer the position of mistress of the girls’ school to a young woman (Jane) who is badly in need of the employment, but he offers it gently, with clear consciousness of the sacrifices she will be required to make, though she needs the job so badly. “You shall hear how poor the proposal is,—how trivial—how cramping,” he says when he describes the job (chapter 30). There is no air of presumption in his offer, as if she owed him anything for taking her in or that she as a poor, friendless woman should humbly take what’s offered her without question. Moreover, St. John proves himself not just dutiful, gentle, and devout; he proves himself scrupulously honest, even at his own cost. When his wealthy uncle dies he learns that the only thing standing between himself and tremendous fortune is the secret of his cousin’s name and location, which he alone knows. All he had to do to inherit with his sisters was to remain silent. But he did not. He sought out the truth and then disclosed it to Jane so that she could inherit. As Jane herself says of him, “St. John was a good man” (chapter 34).

His goodness, however, has a flaw. It lacks something crucial. It lacks humanity; it lacks heart. He says it himself to Jane this way:

I am simply, in my original state—stripped of that blood-bleached robe with which Christianity covers human deformity—a cold, hard, ambitious man. Natural affection only, of all the sentiments, has permanent power over me. Reason, and not feeling, is my guide; my ambition is unlimited: my desire to rise higher, to do more than others, insatiable. I honour endurance, perseverance, industry, talent; because these are the means by which men achieve great ends and mount to lofty eminence. I watch your career with interest, because I consider you a specimen of a diligent, orderly, energetic woman: not because I am deeply compassionate of what you have gone through, or what you still suffer (chapter 32).

The religious transformation wrought by Christianity in his life has—according to him—turned St. John’s naturally calculating and ambitious bent away from pure self service and toward the service of something larger: “the ambition to spread [his] Master’s kingdom; to achieve victories for the standard of the cross” (chapter 32). But it has left a man who speaks, at times, “almost like an automaton” (chapter 31). He is a man who suppresses every natural human urge and affection (excepting only his familial affection for his sisters) under the principles of the Christian duty he has defined and embraced for himself—the religious imperialism he has undertaken as his life’s work. His sister Diana—herself a devout, caring woman—sees the flaw in her brother and expresses it to Jane this way: “He will sacrifice all to his long-framed resolves, . . . [including] natural affection [i.e. his feelings of love for his sisters] and feelings more potent still [i.e. feelings of romantic love and sexual desire]. St. John looks quiet, Jane; but he hides a fever in his vitals. You would think him gentle, yet in some things he is inexorable as death” (chapter 30). Critically (and this is the key observation), the inexorable commitment to a rationally-justified cause that leads the good man St. John Rivers to smother natural human emotion in himself, leads him ultimately to begrudge expressions of natural human emotion in others whom he feels should likewise embrace his chosen cause. After Jane comes into inheritance and learns that the dear friends who had saved her from penury and the street were in fact cousins who could rightfully be claimed as both kith and kin, the sisters and brother she never had. She resolves joyfully to invest her life in these dear relations. And St. John? Rather than leaning into her joy and celebrating with her, he reproves her turn to “the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilised affluence” (chapter 34). “Don’t cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh,” he says to her. “Save your constancy and ardour for an adequate cause; forbear to waste them on trite transient objects” (chapter 34). In the end, as he over time repeatedly “stifle[s] and destroy[s]” the natural affections within himself, he becomes increasingly inhuman. Jane wonders whether he might be insane. His features appear “like chiselled marble” (chapter 34). He also becomes increasingly possessive and uncaring of the feelings of others—just as he had been uncaring of his own. When he finally asks Jane to marry him, the gentle sensitivity with which he offered her the schoolmistress job is completely gone. In its place, a harsh sense of entitlement to not merely her work, but to her whole life, her destiny, her body. “A missionary’s wife you must—shall be,” he declares to her. “You shall be mine: I claim you—not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service” (chapter 34). St. John is a good man. But in the end, his willingness to sacrifice his humanity in the name of his Sovereign’s service leads him ultimately to an inhuman demand which he justifies to himself (and to Jane) because he makes it not for his own pleasure, but for the sake of the cause.

This willingness of  people to justify inhumanity for the sake of a principle or cause is a recurring theme in Victorian novels.

Thomas Gradgrind, the previously-mentioned cavernous-eyed superintendent in Hard Times, justifies his inhumanity in the name of a scientific principle: the primacy of Facts in human reasoning. Like St. John Rivers, he has good intentions. He has dedicated his life to education. “He intend[s] it to be a model.  He intend[s] every child in it to be a model” (Hard Times, chapter 3). And yet Dickens suggests his resulting method can be likened to “Murdering the Innocents” (chapter 2).

Jude the Obscure offers an extended meditation on the layers of inhumanity that can result when people suppress natural human feeling for the sake of the jots and tiddles of ecclesiastical law. One of the culminating examples is Sue Bridehead’s inhumanity against her own heart and the memory of her children as she forsakes all she held dear and returns to Phillotson, damning the memory of her children to Hell for having been born out of wedlock. “Lord, you be too strict!” says old Mrs. Edlin, calling out the incongruity that results when Cause overcomes Humanity. “What do ye use such words for, and condemn to hell your dear little innocent children that’s lost to ’ee! Upon my life I don’t call that religion!” (Jude the Obscure, part 6, chapter 5).

In Trollope’s The Warden, the principle which overwhelms humane concerns is the legal concern for financial equity for the bedesmen at Hiram’s Hospital. In the end, rights under the law were properly exercised (“If any man has been wrong . . . ,” says  Mr. Harding upon his resignation, “he has erred through wrong advice. In this country all are entitled to look for their own rights, and you have done no more” (The Warden, chapter 20).), but the human cost was greater than any justice won. “You’ve ruined yourselves,” says Bunce. “And you’ve ruined me too” (chapter 20).  

Victorian England was a country devoted to high principles: religious purity against evil, justice against lawlessness, technological and market advance against primitivism and poverty, civilization against barbarism. In this, it was in many ways the mirror of the United States since World War Two. But then as now, those very high principles that ostensibly would guide the nation and its people to a better place served either as a cover for exploitation, or else were pursued in a manner that, though well meaning, overwhelmed simple human concerns like human dignity, independence, and respect. In the name of religious purity, we curse the non-conformist. In the name of justice, we forget mercy. In the name of technological and market advances, we exploit workers and resources in unsustainable and destructive ways. In the name of civilization, we industrialize our own barbarism and erase different peoples and cultures from the earth. And yet, the principles themselves are often truly good.St. John Rivers was a good man. The question that the Victorian novel forces us to ask is, how can we as a nation founded on good principles, a nation enveloped in the splendor of wealth and power remain true to the principles without losing our humanity? What should St. John Rivers have done? Where did he go wrong? And where are we going wrong? The question is not merely academic, and the value to be gained from studying the Victorian period as represented in the elevated English and all-to-human situations portrayed in its novels is not merely academic either. It is humane.

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1. Chronicle.com “How to Fix the Adjunct Crisis.”
2. This is a deep topic, worthy of great attention, and on which many of the greatest minds through history have spoken. While working through it, I found myself spending undue time researching a topic which—in the end—is ancillary to the purpose of this paper: validating ENGL 725. (About the time I was pulling up the text of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium I decided it was time rethink.) For that reason, I have made the decision to minimize my references to the existing—and wonderful—body of material on this topic and write more or less extempore. I request the reader’s understanding.
3. “One main fact which it is most important to keep in mind throughout our discussion is the danger of overcrowding the school time-table. The risk of over-pressure is stressed now by many teachers and parents. . . . [T]here is the urgent demand of many subjects for more time. . . . [T]here are plenty of humane studies already included in the school curriculum . . . in all of which further development might be made with undoubted profit. The difficulty is how to find the time required. Can any other subject make way for them without an equivalent loss of value?”
   Valentine, C. W. Latin: Its Place and Value in Education. U of London P, 1935. 12, 17.
4. Though John Henry Newman was canonized in 2019, I can’t bring myself to write “Saint Newman.”
5. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated. London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1873. 276.
6. Ibid. 293.
9. Taylor, Howard Frederick. Hudson Taylor in Early Years: The Growth of a Soul. Singapore: OMF International, 1998. 98.⁷

   To a modern reader who considers that this is an unstudied letter between two teens, the maturity and skillfulness of the prose is striking. The vocabulary and syntax are more advanced than even many college-graduates writing today might muster. This striking literary proficiency among presumably average young people is an indication of what can develop when young people’s social and informational energy is not split between audio, video, social media, texting, memes, and video games but is instead funneled almost exclusively into the reading and writing of long-form text. A single tap root grows deep. A single trunk soars higher. The point of this example is not to credit the Victorian novel with making better readers and writers. It’s to underscore the democratic literary environment in which Victorian novels were being written. The widespread proficiency with and interest in long-form text in the Victorian period can be presumed to have been at or near its historical peak, and it can be expected that the novels written during that period—targeted as they were at a highly proficient audience—would be excellent source material for developing and promoting similar proficiency in modern students.

   Another example from Hudson Taylor’s letters—this to another younger sister, Louisa, in 1856 when he was 24—underscores the pervasiveness and influence of novels during the Victorian period, even when that influence was not welcomed.

   There is one thing I would specially warn you against . . . one of the greatest curses I believe of the present day—the practice of novel-reading. If you value your mind and soul, avoid it as you would a dangerous serpent. I cannot tell you what I would give to be able to forget certain novels I have read and to efface their influence from my memory. And I firmly believe, though some would deny it, . . . that no Christian ever did or ever will read them without injury, . . . very serious injury too, if the habit is indulged in. It is like opium-smoking, and begets a craving for more that must be supplied. Better books are neglected, and no one can estimate the mischief that results. Few, I believe , could honestly ask God’s blessing upon the reading of a novel, and few would venture to assert that they read them to the glory of God. I dread them for you especially as a temptation to which you are constitutionally disposed . . . for you and I resemble one another very much as to temperament.⁸Ibid. 378-9.

10. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Chapter 1. Gradgrind’s humiliating public interrogation of Sissy Jupe takes place shortly after this passage.
11. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Jim Kay, Illus. NY: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2015. 111-112. Snape’s humiliating public interrogation of Harry Potter takes place shortly after this passage.
12. https://readable.com/readability/flesch-reading-ease-flesch-kincaid-grade-level/
13. “I know not whether by luck or wisdom, we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him ‘a maker.’ . . . There is no art delivered unto mankind that hath not the works of nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend as they become actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth. . . . Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature; in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew; forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, Cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit.  Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.”
14. The First Opium War, 1839-42.