32 chapter 1
were largely outnumbered by the more approachable and teachable metrical
histories in the late nineteenth century. One popular short version was called
Granny’s History of England in Rhyme (1871), which began with a dedication
that encapsulates the use of versification (as well as the generic shifts by late
century between poetry and the novel) in many late Victorian classrooms: “A
rhyme may glide into the mind / Like wedge into the oak, / Op’ning a broad,
marked path for prose.”^32 By 1896, educational theorists were assessing the suc-
cess of versified histories. Charles Wesley Mann explained in “School Recre-
ations and Amusements,” “without orderly arrangement in the mind, history
becomes a chaos of heterogeneous and isolated facts. For this reason, various
mnemonic jingles have been utilized as a means of fixing in the minds of pu-
pils, in regular order, the names of dynasties and sovereigns.”^33 What was “met-
rical” at midcentury changed, significantly, after the Revised Code: no longer
“metrical,” these histories were now “in verse” or “in rhyme,” “versification” or
“versifying,” as we shall see, replacing “meter” or “metrical” as the purely tech-
nical, non-poetic aspect of poem making. Just as poets, educators, and proso-
dists were defining and redefining “verse” and “poetry” in the late nineteenth
century, so too were they defining and redefining, with a great deal of fervor,
“meter,” “prosody,” and “versification.”
The history of English language and literature as a discipline is bound to
the way that “history” was taught through these metrically mnemonic meth-
odologies. English history, language study, and literary study all relied on the
possibility that meter could help students remember—could be a signifier
for—their role as subjects of the nation. “Meter” for the nation was orderly,
regal, and signified a long line of battles won; “meter” for the growing middle
class could be accessible and an easy to remember layperson’s tool—“meter”
could also hint at a level of technicality that would only be perceptible to
someone properly trained. ”Meter,” in the histories, was not referring to the
shifting terms of cadence, accent, and tone discussed in grammar books and
prosodic treatises. A popular concept of “meter” and “English national iden-
tity” emerged in these metrical histories: progressive, chronological, and tied
to a glorious past of either classical or ancient English origin. “Meter” for these
histories, except in the case of Dibdin, had more to do with memorization and
rhythm than with what became known as the study of verse-measure. But de-
spite the way that “verse” and “rhyme” began to replace “meter” as signifiers of
mental and national order and accessible, even vernacular knowledge, “meter”
as a term is still haunted by its simplification in the service of English history
teaching. At the same time, there is, even within the discourse of memoriza-
tion and rhythm, a hint of a more complicated knowledge—an erudite, elite
knowledge of verse form to which these histories do not aspire, as if to ap-
proach the frightening study of verse form might alienate the student alto-
gether and undermine the more important English history lesson. “English
meter” is at once used in the service of a vernacular, popular tradition and also