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Abstract
This dissertation examines the satirical engagement of literature of various genres with the changing policies and public mindset regarding popular, working-class education and women’s education during the English long nineteenth century. Many scholars have produced studies of nineteenth-century literary engagement (often including, but not limited to, satire) with working-class education or women’s education during this period, but what is missing from the scholarly conversation is a more explicit analysis of how the two movements intertwine. I argue that although working-class education and women’s education were treated as discrete problems in the early years of the century, they gradually blended— in both the literary discourse and the actual policies—to become two components of the same movement. The earliest considerations of women’s education as a partly economic issue can be observed in the work of realistic novelists such as Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, and they were even more observable at the century’s end through Thomas Hardy, Rhoda Broughton, and George Gissing. I further argue that although the burgeoning women’s rights conversations doubtless played an important role in the expansion of girls’ schooling opportunities, the populist thinking that began around mid-century actually had an even bigger impact. The status of women’s education reform as a part of the larger movement for popular education reform can be demonstrated by the timing of various school reform-related texts and legislation relative to the Chartist uprising and European revolutions, by writers’ incorporation of economic and class-based arguments even into stories about women’s education, and by the fact that economics and class distinctions would continue to drive much of the most important school-reform legislation, and often satires of it, in the succeeding century.