{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022326674500587545, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006462984723854289, 'mean_word_length': 5.5, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
What the Victorians Learned: Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks: Introduction

In many people’s experience, the first serious engagement with books, reading, and knowledge happens when they encounter textbooks in school. Yet schoolbooks tend to be forgotten by their readers, and consequently neglected by scholarship, pushed deep into personal and collective memory and supplanted by the genres, disciplines and formats that adults know. The humble schoolbook is not only unglamorous, its theory is subtle and its methodology complex, as has been amply demonstrated by the work of Valerie Chancellor, Stephen Heathorn and Alexis Weedon and by articles in the Textbook Colloquium’s journal Paradigm.1 Our collaborative essay aims to pose new questions about how some schoolbooks were conceptualized, designed, published, distributed, and used. Schoolbooks implanted the values of class, race, gender and national superiority into susceptible minds, to be sure. But the textbook round-table held on 23 February 2007 in the Morison Room of Cambridge University Library established that the study of textbooks goes beyond pointing the finger at propaganda. Books long ago relegated to the Supplementary Catalogue, and stored in the far reaches of the UL’s trademark Tower, turned up that day looking as fresh and crisp as the day they were printed. The lessons to be learned from their contents, their production and the political and pedagogical ideologies they conveyed seemed to jump off the page, straight into the interdisciplinary preoccupations of 2007. Four academic disciplines and two broad classes of schoolbooks are represented here. Beginning with classics, then mathematics, then