Great Chesterford Church, Essex

Fitch, Edward

doi:10.1093/nq/s8-iv.103.492d

Cited by 1 publication

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“…54 Fitch ensured that Hardy's visit coincided with the May-Day Festival, the best-known of the 'new and promising experiments' that Fitch admired at the college. 55 Introduced by Ruskin in 1881, the ceremony was a costumed re-enactment of the Persephone myth and, as Jacqueline Dillion has shown recently, resembled the May Day rituals that Hardy depicted in The Return of the Native (1878) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). 56 May Day distinguished Whitelands from the seemingly more utilitarian focus of the other colleges, with the Pall Mall Gazette, for example, lauding the festival's 'spiritual and stimulating influence' and speculating that it could address the 'deficiencies of our national curriculum' if imitated across the nation.…”

Section: The College Inspectoratementioning

confidence: 99%

“…59 By noting 'their belief in circumstances, in convention, in the rightness of things', Hardy shows how a feminine individuality that celebrated the 'cultivation of the artistic sense' was only to be performed in settings finely choreographed by the college authorities. 60 According to the sociologist Erving Goffman, the function of the kind of 'institutional display' that Fitch and Hardy observed was to demonstrate that 'everything is all right on the Memel 12 inside' and to remind students of the 'connection, bureaucratic and subordinated, to structures in the wider world'. 61 Watching the May Day Festival was also a way for external visitors to maintain the kind of 'judicious and watchful but kindly discipline' that Fitch had commended on an earlier inspection of Whitelands.…”

Section: The College Inspectoratementioning

confidence: 99%

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Writers-in-Residence: Women Teachers and the Formation of Character in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure

Memel

2022

Journal of Victorian Culture

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In this article I argue that ‘the formation of the character’ of the teacher, a phrase coined by the pioneer of elementary-school training, James Kay-Shuttleworth, was of as much concern to the novelist as it was to the educationalist. Focusing on what became a classic depiction of Victorian teacher training in Jude the Obscure (1895), I situate Hardy among those educationalists and men of letters held responsible for refashioning character to suit the liberal currents of late nineteenth-century culture. Hardy read about the issue of formation in sources as varied as the letters of his sister Kate, who trained to be a teacher at Salisbury (1877–1879), and the reports of his acquaintance, and chief inspector of women’s training colleges (1885–1894), Joshua Fitch. At times his novel reflects the views of the inspectorate, but it also accommodates those who challenged the conception of the teacher that was otherwise imposed upon them. This article therefore contributes to recent interest in overlooked perspectives in the Victorian institution by addressing the ways in which women began shaping a profession in which they had become by far the largest constituent.

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Section: The College Inspectoratementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The College Inspectoratementioning

confidence: 99%