the history of meter 33
connected to higher learning, even if many of the histories go to great pains to
avoid the judgment that they imagine an “actual” poem about history would
attract.
A Grammatical History of England
In the same classrooms where history teaching was changing, the teaching of
English grammar also shifted radically over the course of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Though I focus on the period after the second reform bill in 1867, I want
to turn for a moment to the one hundred preceding years to briefly outline the
ways that the expansion of the franchise and the empire of English letters were
intertwined. When, in 1833, the Factory Act limited child labor and pre-
vented children under age nine from legally working, two hours of schooling
became compulsory for all children up until the age of nine. This minimal
educational standard followed on the heels of the Reform Bill of 1832, which
extended the franchise to one in every five voters in England. Passed only with
considerable controversy, the 1832 Bill resulted in insecurity about the preva-
lence of church-run schools as the sole basis of education among the newly
empowered voting classes. Concurrent with the subsequent increase in gram-
mar schools, Christopher Stray and Gillian Sutherland note that the first of
two “surges” in book publishing began in 1830 and continued until roughly
midcentury. Called the “distribution revolution,” and underpinned by the im-
pact of the Fourtinier paper-making machine, steam-driven presses, case bind-
ing, and the progressive abolition of the taxes on knowledge, these market
developments corresponded with the rise of formal schooling and the rise of
public examinations in England. Formal schooling had begun to play a more
central role in the socialization of children from the latter half of the eigh-
teenth century. The expansion of the franchise in 1832 only accelerated the
push toward national education. Stray and Sutherland note that “the sons of
elite families and those whose parents had aspired to gentility were increas-
ingly being sent to school,” and “the idea of a textbook in the modern sense of
the word solidified around 1830.”^34 The elocution handbooks of Enfield and
Walker were just two examples of a number of new English schoolbooks that
were printed and circulated informally in the scattershot early days of compul-
sory education. Education was conducted in various church schools (which
mostly relied on the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer), hedge schools,
charity schools, dame schools, grammar schools for the upper classes, and by
schoolmasters and schoolmistresses in addition to the traditional “public”
schools and each of these may have used different grammar books, standards,
or anthologies. The English grammar book attempted to provide a unifying
linguistic authority in the subject of the English language for a nation that had
no centralized educational authority over its young subjects. Just as the school
histories consolidated England’s past in the service of nation building, so too