THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES
Essays for Ian Michael on his 88th birthday
Edited by Frances Austin and Christopher Stray
PREFACE
Eighty-eight is a doubly resonant number. Not only was Ian Michael eighty-eight on 30 November, 2003, but the Textbook Colloquium, whose co-founder he is, began life in 1988. This special issue of Paradigm is offered to him as a birthday gift by the Colloquium’s members.
Ian has had a long and interesting life. He was born in 1915 on a farm near Kelso in the Scottish Borders, where his father was a tenant of the Duke of Roxburghe; he was the youngest of four children. His grandfather was the first Medical Officer of Health for Swansea; a great-uncle had been Vice-president of the Linnaean Society, and had attempted to classify birds according to whether they walked, ran or hopped. Ian was educated by governesses until he was eight, when he was sent to the Old College in Windermere. When Ian was ten or eleven he wrote a poem called ‘Thought’, which so impressed his schoolfellows that they had it printed. (His own assessment is that ‘it was precocious, but has no other merit’.) In 1929, when times were becoming very hard and the family money was running out, they moved to a smaller farm. In the same year, Ian was sent to St Bees School, a grammar school founded in 1583. The atmosphere was philistine; Ian remembers the winner of an open scholarship to Oxford being hissed when the award was announced.
In 1933 he left school, and in the same year began teaching at his old prep. school, the Old College. His teaching began an hour after his arrival; his ‘teacher training’ consisted of the headmaster’s saying to him, ‘Begin as you mean to go on’. While teaching, he enrolled for a
London external degree, which he eventually gained, entirely by private study, in 1938. When the school closed down, Ian moved to St Faiths, a well-established prep. school in Cambridge which specialised in winning classical scholarships at Winchester. From here he moved in 1941 to the junior department of Leighton Park, a Quaker boarding school near Reading; he became its headmaster in 1946. Among his colleagues was Molly Bayley, whom he married in 1942.
In 1949 Ian was appointed a lecturer in English in the Department of Education at Bristol. In 1954 he registered for a Ph.D. and began working on early English grammar and grammars; his thesis, in two large volumes, was accepted in 1963, and became the basis for his English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800 (CUP, 1970). In the same year, Ian was appointed the first Professor of Education at the University of Khartoum, on a three-year secondment from Bristol. Soon after returning to Bristol, he was appointed the founding Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malawi. After nine years, and in the face of growing repression by the man who had appointed him, Dr Hastings Banda, he returned home and became Deputy Director of the University of London Institute of Education. Ian was awarded the CBE for services to education, but characteristically did not advertise the fact. He retired early in 1978 and returned to Bristol.
Once in London, Ian started work on the book which was to be published in 1987 as The Teaching of English, From the Sixteenth Century to 1870. Later on this large-scale publication was followed by two smaller works, Early Textbooks of English (1993) and Literature in School (1999). Both these were published by the Textbook Colloquium; and to celebrate Ian Michael’s 88th birthday, they are now on sale at £10 post free for both booklets.*
The prehistory of the Colloquium begins in 1986, when Ian and Chris Stray met at a meeting of the Henry Sweet (history of linguistics) Society, of which Ian was from its foundation Vice-President. Chris wrote to him to suggest that a research group on textbooks was needed, but Ian had just moved, and his mail was not forwarded efficiently. It was only eighteen months later that the letter reached him. From that point on, he was a tower of strength in the planning of the Colloquium, writing indefatigably to potential contacts in the UK and abroad and arranging a formal connection with the Institute of Education in London. Ian Michael was a pioneer both in his work on the grammar and teaching of English and in launching the Textbook Colloquium. He has now prepared for others to build on his work by giving his research notes to the Institute of Education, London, and his collection of English grammars to the University of Hull.
The nine essays in this volume cover a wide range and include pioneering work on a number of fronts. Manfred Görlach traces the history of the use of counter-examples (bad English)
in textbooks of English, from their first appearance in the middle of the 18th century. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade investigates the genesis of Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar of 1762, one of the most influential textbooks of the period. Lynda Mugglestone explores the campaign of the actor and elocutionist Thomas Sheridan for the correct pronunciation of English. Nigel Hall contributes a pioneering enquiry into the use of slates in Lancasterian schoolrooms. Frances Austin asks ‘Whatever happened to Lindley Murray?’, looking at the use of grammars in the early teacher-training colleges. Bernard Jones surveys the schoolbooks written by the poet and schoolmaster William Barnes. In the first of two contributions from and about the USA, Charles Monaghan discusses the spellers written by Lyman Cobb, a rival of Noah Webster. Jennifer Monaghan takes us back to the 17th century, looking back at the curriculum and politics of literacy in New England. Finally, Natalie Hole gives a detailed and systematic survey of the method manuals used in England between 1830 and 1910.
Frances Austin and Christopher Stray
* Please send orders to
Dr C A Stray Dept of Classics University of Wales, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK
enclosing a cheque for £10 made payable to ‘Textbook Colloquium’.