the discipline of meter 113
Code, the legislation of which was administered by “her majesty’s inspectors”
(HMIs), more traditional prescriptive grammar books were gradually replaced
in the late nineteenth century by “readers” geared toward helping the students
pass their exams in “the three Rs.” In his 1867 General Inspector’s Report,
Matthew Arnold disparages the type of popular poetry that children in the
fifth form read aloud for examination: “[p]erhaps it may be permitted to an
ex-professor of poetry to remark that in general the choice of poetry in these
books is especially bad. . . . When one thinks how noble and admirable a thing
genuine popular poetry is, it is provoking to think that such rubbish as this
should be palmed off on a poor child for it with any apparent sanction from
the Education Department and its grants.”^13
This report was reprinted in the magazine, The Museum, as “Teachers and
the Education Bill,” one of many articles that represented a general concern
about the administration and curriculum of the state-funded school system,
about the place of English in the public schools and universities, and about the
position of both the subject of English and the newly educated English
middle-class subject in the empire. Though poetry recitation was not man-
dated as part of specific examinations until 1875 (and English literature added
to the list of “specific subjects” in 1876), Arnold’s Inspectors’ Reports, again
and again, single out poetry as a civilizing and cultivating force in the state-
funded classroom. Arnold, like Bridges, Saintsbury, and Newbolt, imagined
English poetry through their classical training ; that is, they felt, as did many
others of their generation, that English literature was best understood and ap-
preciated after substantial training in the classics. But Arnold’s classical ideals
were compromised by the realities of working-class education, and in place of
the rigors of memorizing classical verse forms Arnold imagined that memoriz-
ing English poetry could provide some measure of the mental discipline that
the classics had provided the upper classes.
According to the Classified Catalogue of School, College, Classical, Technical,
and General Education Works, English grammars slowly began to replace clas-
sical grammars toward the end of the nineteenth century, and English recita-
tion readers and anthologies of poetry became equally as important as books
that only covered English grammar.^14 English poetry was taught as a recitation
subject, not as a means to understanding the language, as it would have been
for the study of classics. Ian Michael and Manfred Görlach have begun to col-
lect information about English grammar books published in the nineteenth
century (they estimate that almost 2,000 texts existed).^15 A study of English
grammar books in the United States before 1850 shows that “prosody,” as the
fourth part of the traditional textbook, only occupied 7 percent of the book
when it was included at all. The “rubbish” that Arnold derided, therefore, did
not accompany any lesson in English prosody or pronunciation; rather, the
poetry in the “standard readers” of state-funded schools was not part of a les-
son in poetry at all.