The Consequences Of The Education Act

By Author: Christ Pual
Total Articles: 55
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It was possible to be even more pessimistic than Linton about the consequences of the Education Act. For some, mass literacy harmed not just English fiction, but England itself; an argument that was made forcefully by Samuel Smith (1836-1906), Liberal MP and spokesman for the National Vigilance Association. When Smith began his parliamentary career in 1882, he welcomed literacy as Replica Breitling a 'revolution' that rescued 'waifs and strays' from 'heathen ignorance' and enabled the 'mass of English children' to read. But three years later the MP wondered if the 'so-called "education"' of 'destitute children' had 'only multiplied] their evil' by 'enabling] them to read... rubbish'.

Believing that unregulated mass literacy lay at the root of metropolitan crime, Smith led the NVA's pursuit of the 'trash-mongers' who were reputed to enjoy free rein in post-1870 literary culture. Although the NVA was established in order to protect 'young girls' from the 'moral corruption' and 'personal attack' that had been described in 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern ...
... Babylon' (1885), the Pall Mall Gazette's sensational report on child prostitution, the group insisted that its duty surpassed the mere 'detective business' of exposing brothels. It strove not only to curb vice, but also to curb 'the causes of vice'; and since the Education Act had apparently ensured that the 'mischief done by cheap immoral literature is greater than it was', the NVA identified reading as one such cause. While the 'mischief that it attributed to 'cheap immoral literature' was often ill-defined, the NVA did explain on at least one occasion why its goal of Breitling Replica Watches eliminating child prostitution required tight controls on print culture. When Smith tabled a Commons motion in May 1888 to suppress 'demoralising literature' he told his fellow MPs that: It had become the rule with a low class of booksellers to provide [young girls] with private rooms stocked with the vilest class of literature... these shops were in league with houses of the worst class, to which the girls, when their minds were sufficiently polluted and depraved, were consigned.

The 'chief culprit' Smith said, was Henry Vizetelly, who 'boasted [of] selling in England 1,000 copies of Zola weekly'. This vivid scenario brothel-keepers using translations of Les Rougon-Macqwrt to groom child prostitutes suggests that it was Zola's depictions of sex, in particular, which caused alarm. Though the MP's allegation may sound eccentric, it merely mapped the NVA's specific, post-'Maiden Tribute' anxiety onto a familiar English trope that characterized French fiction as a menace to innocence. The abused heroine of W. H. Mallock's novel A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, for instance, recalls how her predatory uncle loaned her 'horrid French novels' in the belief that she would 'live up to [her] education'.