Shapes and Spaces: Inside Joseph Lancaster's "Monitorial" Laboratory

Authors

  • Neville F. Newman McMaster University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11575/jet.v32i2.52523

Abstract

In this article I examine the nature of discipline in the monitorial school. Recognizing that much post-Discipline and Punish research has concentrated on contemporary educational institutions, I return to Lancaster's original school model not simply to identify the presence of discipline, but to describe its function. In other words I define what discipline is. Particular attention is paid to the architecture of the school, showing how the design of the school room operates to discipline and place the pupil. I also examine in detail two engravings that appear in Lancaster's treatise, The British System of Education (1810) in order to suggest that an identifiable anxiety underlies his ostensible confidence in the monitorial system. Finally, I look at the influence which the British monitorial school had on its North American counterpart and advance theories for the system's failure.

Author Biography

Neville F. Newman, McMaster University

Neville F. Newman is currently studying and teaching English literature at McMaster University, and is completing a Ph.D. on the theory of discipline in 19th-century British monitorial schools. He recent co-authored Alterity in the Discourses of Romanticism in the 1998 Special Issue of the European Romantic Review and has an article shortly forthcoming in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. His current research interests include an examination of monitorial education for females, and a study that seeks to determine the relevance of an idealized and aestheticized perception of the female to the conversion to Catholicism of the Victorian poet Ernest Dowson.

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Published

2018-05-17

Issue

Vol. 32 No. 2 (1998)

Section

Articles

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