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Teaching Fiction and Poetry
Geoff Fox
The history of teaching English literature in schools has been marked by a series of
controversies. The most durable arguments have focused less on how literature should
be taught and more upon what should be taught.
In the mid-nineteenth century in Britain, however, the question was whether English
literature should be taught at all. The influential public schools preferred the literature
of Greece and Rome to that of Britain. Matthew Arnold however, as one of Her Majesty’s
Inspectors of Schools (HMIs), pressed for the study of English literature in the
curriculum. He argued that if schools were to be humanising influences, then great
literature (especially poetry) offered a powerful means to that end. All children should be
given access to the sustenance of the native culture; and, Arnold insisted in Literature
and Dogma (1873), the poor required culture as much as the rich.
The argument over the use of Classical or English texts had not been resolved when
the Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England was published in 1921. The
committee’s fourteen members included several eminent literary figures, among them
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, George Sampson, Caroline Spurgeon and John Dover Wilson,
HMI. Sir Henry Newbolt, the committee’s chairman, is best remembered for ‘Drake’s
Drum’, and ‘Vitai Lampada’ (There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight...’). Perhaps
Newbolt himself was the author of this section of his report:
If we explore the course of English literature, if we consider from what sources its
stream has sprung, by what a current it has come down to us, we shall see that it
has other advantages not to be found elsewhere. There are mingled in it, as only in
the greatest of rivers there could be mingled, the fertilising influences flowing down
from many countries and from many ages of history. Yet all these have been
subdued to form a stream native to our own soil. The flood of diverse human
experience which it brings down to our own life and time is in no sense or degree
foreign to us, but has become the national experience of men of our own race and
culture.
Newbolt 1921:13The sustained imagery may be too rich for contemporary taste, but the committee’s
thinking was driven by a passionate belief in the power of literature and an equally
committed concern for children. Given a choice (which they increasingly feel they are
not) most teachers at the close of the twentieth century might prefer Newbolt’s ringing