Primum mobile: The genesis of the Newbolt Report

In his 1928 presidential address to the English Association, Newbolt attributes the ‘chaotic social conditions of today’ to a ‘wrong turn taken in the early years of the nineteenth century’. He claims that Wordsworth's view of the value of the ‘acquaintance with the great Nature exhibited in the works of mighty poets’ came ‘nearer to the truth than [that of] any [other] Englishman of his time’. The 1921 report over which he presided, he implies, has fulfilled Wordsworth's educational ambition, by proposing English literature as ‘a means of contact with great minds, as a channel by which to draw upon their experience with profit and delight, and as a bond of sympathy between the members of a human society’. This chapter examines the ways in which particular readings of Wordsworth came to frame the thinking of influential Victorian educators and eventually Newbolt.