Abstract
E. R. Robson was the first architect of the London School Board and the best-known school architect in the United Kingdom during the decades following the 1870 Education Reform Act. His travels in Europe and North America—“in search of the best schools”—shaped his book, School Architecture (1874), which became a critical text in shaping the nature of and discourse surrounding school design in England and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century. The text consists of a series of case studies from across Europe and the United States, which Robson identified as indicative of national practices. Robson advocated for English schools a design that reflected national character, English “in spirit” and built “on our own foundations.” This chapter uses a study of Robson’s travels and the production of his book to explore the problems associated with constructing a biographical study.
A different and shorter version of this chapter was published as “Designed spaces and disciplined bodies: E. R. Robson’s grand architectural tour,” in Greetje Timmermann, Nelleke Bakker, and Jeroen H. Dekker (eds.), Cultuuroverdracht als pedagogisch motief (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2007), pp. 39–54.
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Notes
We know that letters of introduction from Lord Granville were secured by the Sheffield Liberal member of parliament, A. J. Mundella via Lord Enfield. Mundella via Lord Enfield, “which were of very great service in each of the countries visited.” J. F. Moss, Notes on National Education in Continental Europe (London: Simpkin and Co. and Sheffield, Pawson, and Brailsford, 1873), p. 1.
P. Robson, “Edward Robert Robson, F.S.A.: A Memoir by his Son,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, February 1917, pp. 92–96.
H. Lee, Body Parts. Essays on Life-writing (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005).
R. Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (London: Flamingo, 1995), p. 27.
E. R. Robson, School Architecture: Being Practical Remarks on the Planning, Designing, Building and Furnishing of School Houses (London: John Murray, 1874), pp. 2–6.
T. A. Spalding, The Work of the London School Board (London: P. S. King and Son, 1900), p. 68n3.
This phrase is borrowed from David N. Livingstone’s Putting Science in Its Place. Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003) and the argument presented here is influenced by his ideas.
F. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998).
F. Clay, Modern School Buildings (London: Batsford, 1902), p. v.
Reyner Banham, “The Architecture of the English School: A Review Essay,” History of Education Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 189–193.
D. Gregory-Jones, “The London Board Schools of E. R. Robson,” in Edwardian Architecture and Its Origins, edited by A. Service (London: Architectural Press, 1975), p. 89.
Elizabeth Gargano, “Death by Learning: Zymosis and the Perils of Schools in E. J. May’s Dashwood Priory,” Children’s Literature 33 (2005): 1–19.
This heading is taken from P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom. Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003).
Y. Wong, “Beyond (and below) Incommensurability. The Aesthetics of the Postcard,” Common Knowledge 8, no. 2 (2002): 335. Girouard caught these ideas in the title of his study of the Queen Anne movement in English architecture: Sweetness and Light: The “Queen Anne Movement 1860–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Girouard’s title is a direct reference to Matthew Arnold’s essay “Sweetness and Light,” in Culture and Anarchy (London, 1889).
Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, pp. 144–182. See M. Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Gregory-Jones, “The London Board Schools,” p. 95; see also C. Burke and I. Grosvenor, School (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).
G. Stamp and C. Amery, Victorian Buildings of London, 1837–1887 (London: Architectural Press, 1980), p. 131. Stamp and Amery in their account of the work of Robson and Stevenson offer an interesting detail about school building in the 1870s London-in Deptford, the workmen building a school had needed police protection.
Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Naval Treaty,” The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 215.
John Brewer, Sentimental Murder. Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 2004), pp. 290, 293.
See Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), prologue; Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), Part III.
Sian Roberts, “Place, Life Histories and the Politics of Relief: Episodes in the Life of Francesca Wilson, Humanitarian Educator Activist,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2010, p. 10.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 204.
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© 2013 Thomas S. Popkewitz
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Burke, C., Grosvenor, I. (2013). An Exploration of the Writing and Reading of a Life: The “Body Parts” of the Victorian School Architect E. R. Robson. In: Popkewitz, T.S. (eds) Rethinking the History of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000705_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000705_10
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