110 chapter 4
many educational theorists began to see an opportunity in the teaching of
English poetry to promote a kind of “ordered liberty,” especially among
younger students. English poetry in and outside of the classroom, once freed
from the comparison to classical poetry, sustained its own division between
“verses” (used mainly for memorization, discipline or drill, and the history les-
son) and “poetry,” which represented the best of English literature but that
might prove too difficult for the younger student whose mind had not been
conditioned by convention. English meter was the center point of this grow-
ing distinction; seen as at once naturally felt and artificially imposed, the cur-
riculum of versification, still largely based on the classical model of scansion in
English grammar books, diminished in the English literature classroom and
was replaced by a concept of meter that imagined poetic rhythm as that which
could be felt naturally without having to understand the potentially off-
putting terms used to name those rhythms.^1
Traditional accounts of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
“rise of English”^2 have exposed the ideologies behind English literary study on
a broad scale. From the beginning of institutionalized English literary educa-
tion—ostensibly with Lord Macaulay’s great “Minute on Education” in 1835
through Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in 1869—great works of lit-
erature, and especially poetry, were believed to have the power to civilize and
shape the otherwise disordered minds of the masses and thus safeguard En-
glish society from “savages” (or the philistine working class), a sentiment with
roots in the writing of Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, and John Stu-
art Mill, among others. Chris Baldick, in The Social Mission of English Studies
1848–1932, outlines how schools that promoted English studies were seen as
part of the “protection of society,” a “guarantor of social stability,” and reveals
how Macaulay believed that teachers should be trained and paid by the state
on the same principle as soldiers.^3 Both Baldick and Terry Eagleton note that
En glish was first taught at working men’s colleges, and that the ideologies of
“protecting” society not only meant civilizing the working classes but also
teaching them to defend the empire. John Churtin Collins, himself at one time
an extension lecturer for working men’s colleges, wrote in his 1891 manifesto,
The Study of English Literature (a plea to establish a school for English at Ox-
ford): “[The people] need political culture, instruction, that is to say, in what
pertains to their relation to the State, to their duties as citizens; and they need
also to be impressed sentimentally by having the presentation in legend and his-
tory of heroic and patriotic example brought vividly and attractively before them.”^4
Though there is a vast field of literature about the complicated history of
English education, the rise of English as a discipline in the elite public schools,
the battle for English in the universities, and literacy and learning among the
working classes, scholars have tended to generalize about the ascendancy and
importance of poetry as a civilizing power in the Arnoldian sense, on the one
hand, and the “heroic and patriotic” ideologies of Englishness in the state-