The Empire's Schoolbooks

By tracing the enormous influence of nineteenth-century poetry published in schoolbooks from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this book dramatizes Romantic poetry's impact on education, on literary history, and on generations of readers. The Empire's Schoolbooks analyses these schoolroom poems while also considering the work of twentieth-century Caribbean writers, who were responding to their own experiences in the colonial classroom. Books like Thomas Nelson & Sons' Royal Readers, though designed for British children, spread widely, circulating across the empire in the millions. Children in Britain and children in the Caribbean were all reading the same poems in the same textbooks. Poems and schoolbooks alike live exceedingly long lives. Old books persisted, preserving and maintaining nineteenth-century ideas about race, poetry, and empire long into the twentieth century. Poems were transformed by their inclusion in these schoolbooks; in selecting, excerpting, arranging, and reframing the poems they included, editors powerfully shaped the meaning of those poems. Educators and editors turned repeatedly to particular poems, crafting them into pedagogical tools designed to instil in children, among other things, an appreciation of white, British superiority. They put nineteenth-century poems to use, as they constructed a literary canon in service of the imperial project. The writing of Caribbean poets, responding to their colonial education, demonstrates both the reach and the limits of that education. These poets challenged and transformed their poetic inheritance, adapting and deploying the techniques of British poetry for their own ends.