Literary canons, too, can be weapons in a war, a war of claims and counterclaims about which books are good -- or bad -- for students to read. Back in the Victorian era when public schooling was first established, there were a number of "set texts" -- texts that would be studied in order for students to be examined on them later -- which formed in a sense the first English canon. Among these, excerpts from the Bible were the most common, along with the inexpensive pamphlets produced by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Under later Victorian "reforms," spearheaded by the poet Matthew Arnold, a dab of imaginative literature was added: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Milton's Paradise Lost, and the Tales of Maria Edgeworth (of Castle Rackrent fame). Arnold referred to these as the "mighty engine of literature in the education of the working classes" -- while at the same time lamenting the fact that much of its energy was wasted on merely getting pupils ready to read a newspaper. Arnold believed that great literature, even more than the Bible, had a 'civilzing' influence, and he was a hearty preacher of its gospel.
To these narrative works were later added a few selections of verse, which were to be memorized. The poetry of Felicia Hemans, particularly "Casabianca" (better known by its first line as "The boy stood on the burning deck"), along with her "The Homes of England," led the list, along with a selections from Shakespeare, Bacon, Pope, Byron, and Lamb (one can look over the entire list in Walter Low's 1876 compilation A Classified Catalogue of Educational Works). And yet, by the end of the century, literary works were once again disparaged in favor of more practical and "useful" books -- a trend which -- as with many Victorian educations notions (such as docking teachers's pay if their students did poorly on standardized tests) are being revived all over again today.
The effort to establish a single common canon of literature, however, never fully took hold at the elementary level; its time came at last with the boom in college attendance in the United States following WWII and the original GI Bill. The WW Norton company brought out its first Norton Anthology of English Literature in 1962, under the editorship of M.H. Abrams (who, amazingly, is still its 'editor emeritus' at the age of 102). You can, if you like, look over the original tables of contents for Volume I and Volume II, and (for comparison) those same volumes in the Ninth Edition used today. You may note that the 1962 edition has only one woman writer -- Katherine Mansfield -- among its 3000+ pages, while the ninth edition has 45; the first edition also had no writers of color, while the ninth has eight.
So who chooses what's in a canon? What falls out, and what comes in, and why? We should ask these questions as we approach Russ Kick's Graphic Canon, where the choices are entirely his. He has not been limited, of course, to British literature as is the Norton; the whole world is his oyster. Still, no choice is without its political dimensions, and there's no reason not to look at that aspect of his selections.
