Is the novel a category of knowledge that merits serious study? Even if the novel has shed the stigma of being mindless entertainment, one might easily assume that reading a novel is not "studying," unless one reads closely and carefully, preferably from a scholarly edition or for a scholarly purpose. "Novel Pedagogy" explores…

Through a close reading of five nineteenth-century instructional books in the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, this essay examines the relationship between new print technologies, memory, teaching, and learning. The article beings with a discussion of Comenius's seventeenth-century "Orbis Pictus," considered the first…

Alison Wolf's article on Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" ("Adults Learning," January 2009) rightly sees the links between the barriers facing the eponymous hero of the novel and his modern-day counterpart seeking education rather than vocational training, and prompts a revisiting of this novel, which has, more than once, been…

A review of nine books on education in Victorian England. (RA)

Examines British and American 19th-century classroom readers and their treatment of death. Quantitatively analyzes several series, using a computer database for each volume. Finds that school readers reflected the Victorians' preoccupation with death and helped socialize children into the Victorian sense that death was ever at hand. (PA)

Investigates the connection between racism in the public school art curriculum and the ethnocentric ideas of George Zerffi. Zerffi lectured widely and taught art history to future art teachers in England, between 1868 and 1892. Although occasionally brilliant, his views reflected the ethnocentric ideology of Victorian England. (MJP)