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SEEKING
WISDOM
IN ADULT
TEACHING
AND
LEARNING
an autoethnographic inquiry

WILMA FRASER
Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning
 Wilma Fraser

Seeking Wisdom in
Adult Teaching and
Learning
An Autoethnographic Inquiry
Wilma Fraser
Canterbury Christ Church University
Canterbury, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-56294-4    ISBN 978-1-137-56295-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56295-1

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 In loving memory of my first storytellers Bel (1917–2014)
and Greg Fraser (1916–1996). And to the staff of St Heliers
Residential Hotel, Folkestone, Kent, whose love and concern for
Bel during her six years with them exemplifies the best the caring
professions could offer, my heartfelt thanks.
 Preface

It was one of those cold, dark Saturday mornings in late autumn, when the
sun struggled blearily through the grey canopy of low-lying cloud to offer
some light, but little heat, to the day’s unfolding. Our university depart-
ment was holding a conference on the future of lifelong learning, and I
was sharing the journey into work with a colleague. We were both to
attend the morning session and then drive to another forum concerning
adult education’s fragile future, this time organised by a national educa-
tion charity for which I used to work. The day was, therefore, already
tinged with misgiving, and my colleague and I swapped, after our fashion,
the kind of desultory comment which reflected our levels of quiet con-
cern. On arrival, we were soon thoroughly taken up with the last-minute
tasks that any conference demands, and it was only a few minutes before
the keynote session was due to begin that I noticed that a line had been
drawn across the notice for my workshop, and the word FULL embla-
zoned underneath. It was then that participants began to approach and
ask if I would let them in: ‘It’s a big room, no-one would notice.’ I glanced
at my colleagues’ lists; most had a few names attached, but one was com-
pletely blank and I had a moment’s wave of sympathy for the rejection this
seemed to announce. But this was not a popularity contest. It was my title,
‘Wisdom and Adult Learning’, that had attracted the crowd.1
The energy in the room was palpable. The air of expectation and willing
participation surprised me, and there was such appetite for a language that
we rarely spoke; ‘skills’ yes, but ‘wisdom’? I showed a picture of
Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. I began
with the iconic framing of Adam’s and God’s hands in that almost but not

vii
viii PREFACE

quite touching moment of connection, of life, of the transmission of spirit.

But what of the rest of the picture? Who was the woman framed by God’s
left arm? Eve? Yet, as we all knew, Eve’s creation followed Adam’s.
A number of scholars (including Conrad 2007; Hall and Steinberg
1993; and Rzepinska 1994) suggest that this figure represents the femi-
nized personification of wisdom, ‘who accompanied the Lord from the
beginning of Creation’ (Rzepinska, p. 181) and whose voice is to be heard
in the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. This claim for her identity
is also supported by theologian Karen Armstrong, who notes, ‘[i]n the
third century BCE, a Jewish writer personified the Wisdom of God that
had brought the world into being. He imagined her at God’s side, like
Plato’s demiourgo’ (2009, p. 79).2 In ancient Greek, the word for wisdom
was sophia (sapientia in Latin); and in the succeeding millennia, the per-
sonification of wisdom as Sophia has undergone both accretion and trans-
formation, as ‘she’ has been appropriated by a significant number of
religious and secular thinkers to represent a possible summation of knowl-
edge’s potential. My suggestion in the conference session was that ‘her
half-hidden nature, in terms of the level of mainstream cultural attention
paid to her, reveals much about her contested presence in prevailing
Western discourses’ (Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 26); and my
challenge to the participants in that workshop was the following: ‘What
care and attention, if any, do we give to notions of wisdom in our daily
pedagogic practices? If the answer is in the negative, what consequences
might there be for the framing and so-called delivery of educational poli-
cies; and for their reception by students, by institutions and by ourselves
as lecturers and tutors within FE, HE and Adult Education?’
Later that morning, my colleague and I left for the meeting concerning
the future of adult education in the light of a forthcoming general elec-
tion. The local Branch of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA)
had invited all prospective parliamentary candidates in the town where I
live to a special meeting about their respective political parties’ attitudes
towards sustaining government support for adult education should they
gain power. The WEA is a national educational charity (with international
reach) which was established in 1903/1905 in order to provide educa-
tional opportunities for working-class men and women, the better to
ensure the sustainability of a healthy citizens’ democracy via the fostering
of critical intelligence.3 Its aim for the afternoon was rather less ambitious;
during the previous 10 to 15 years, the WEA, and other adult education
providers, had suffered a significant decline in government funding, at the
 PREFACE
   ix

same time as finding themselves the focus of particular accountability

regimes consistent with instrumentalist and bureaucratic forms of surveil-
lance and control (Field 2000; Martin 2008; West 2010). The purpose of
the meeting was simple. ‘To what extent might the WEA and other, simi-
lar, organisations, be enabled to continue their work?’ The responses were,
stripped of their polite embellishments, equally simple; and I paraphrase:
‘Whilst we recognise and applaud the sterling work of the WEA and oth-
ers, we cannot, in these dark days of recession and minimal resources,
privilege support for adult education beyond the needs of the economy
and relevant and related “upskilling”.’
There was some comfort to be derived in the days following my presen-
tation. Some of the participants told me how they had drawn upon our
session on wisdom within their own teaching practices. They did not mini-
mise the challenge involved. They were all tutor-trainers, and their con-
texts included working with bricklayers, army engineers and the police.
My colleagues explained that they had wanted to harness some of the
vitality in the workshop, but they did not expect the overwhelming
responses which their students provided. ‘It’s real you see,’ the tutors said,
‘it’s so much more real than the stuff we normally deliver’ (see Fraser and
Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 25).
But what was meant by these distinctions between differing levels of
reality? What was being offered that could generate such enthusiasm and
promote further dissemination? Other colleagues at our conference
offered the promise of rebellion in their titles (e.g. Strategy, Discipline and
the Lifelong Learning Body; The Future of Skills for Life: Differentiation or
Disgrace?). But the word ‘wisdom’ in mine hinted at something more, and
the opportunity of connecting with each other in a different kind of peda-
gogic space.
One of my colleagues spoke to me of the resonances he had felt during
our session. ‘Sean’,4 a retired Detective Chief Superintendent, taught in
the same department as me. He compared the environment that he had
left in the police service with the prevailing situation in some fields of adult
education, including our own department of post-compulsory education
and training:

A lot of the issues were the management mantras; ‘value for money,’ ‘effi-
ciencies,’ ‘economies,’ ‘more for the same’ and ‘the same for less’ and it
appeared to me that we were actually beginning to lose focus from what we
were here to do; and we very much got into instrumentalist sort of policies,
x PREFACE

and works, and targets and performance which skewed a lot of the real pur-
pose of policing. But the thing that surprised me is that some of the things
that I railed against in the police force, I still rail against today [in Education]
because the aims and objectives, the intended learning outcomes, the lesson
planning is so defined they’ve actually lost the plot of what they’re here to
do. (Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 32)

Sean’s words resonate with those of Abbs (1979, pp. 11–12), who
argued so cogently almost 40 years ago that:

[T]he instrumental view of education is recorded faithfully in the mechani-

cal metaphors and grey abstractions of current educational discourse […]
The effect of such language is to numb the mind. […] It is not an accident
that many of the metaphors, dead as they are, derive from mechanics […]
from military manoeuvres […] and from behavioural psychology […] It is
the language of stasis, leaving education without a subject, without a history
and without a future. (In Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 29)

It is a language far removed from the vibrant and vital potential I see in
Michelangelo’s depiction of the female figure in God’s embrace. But to
what extent might she serve as restorative metaphor for a revitalised fram-
ing of certain teaching and learning policies and practices? Sean and I, and
others of our colleagues who responded to my workshop, would seem to
be in accord in distinguishing between our current parcelling of the learn-
ing process into easily digestible components ‘and the opening of the
mind and soul to the potential for greater knowing that cannot always be
predicted’. And, as Tara Hyland-Russell and I also went on to argue, if:

instrumentalist, consumerist and bureaucratic forms of knowledge dissemi-

nation come to dominate our pedagogic practices, the idea that [knowledge
construction] could make sense outwith these discursive frames becomes
less and less of a possibility. And it is because of its power to help [in deeper
meaning-making] that the pursuit of wisdom is so crucial. (Fraser and
Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 32)

Rather surprisingly, perhaps, the concept of ‘wisdom’ is significantly

undertheorised within educational terrains (Tisdell 2011). The book that
follows seeks Sophia, and her metaphorical power, to help in understand-
ing the different and hopeful expectations she seemed to evoke in col-
leagues such as those who attended the workshop, and to explore her
 PREFACE
   xi

resonance in articulating some of the tensions within the prevailing dis-

courses which shape and frame particular kinds of educational practices.
This quest for Sophia is also couched within larger questions about the
potential for education, specifically adult education, to attempt to address
deeper and more troubling aspects of certain sociopolitical, psychosocial,
spiritual and environmental concerns that beset us all.
This pursuit also entails trying to grasp what Sophia represents for me
and why I feel I must heed her call. Without that understanding, I fear
that the integrity of this project would be significantly diminished. In what
follows, in this autoethnographic inquiry, I am striving to find connections
between certain aspects of my own biography and their resonance with
larger concerns. C. Wright Mills (1959/2000, p. 11) urges precisely this
connectivity in The Sociological Imagination:

What are the major issues for publics and the key troubles of private indi-
viduals in our time? To formulate issues and troubles, we must ask what
values are cherished yet threatened, and what values are cherished and sup-
ported, by the characterizing trends of our period.

It is in the spirit of asking these questions, and in the invitation to read-

ers to engage with the ‘conversation’ that follows, that my search for
Sophia is framed. And it is in this spirit that the tone and tenor of the book
unfold.

Canterbury, UK Wilma Fraser

 Notes
1. This episode first found expression in ‘Searching for Sophia: Adult Educators
and Adult Learners as Wisdom Seekers’, which was co-written by Tara
Hyland-Russell and me, and included in Tisdell and Swartz, 2011.
Quotations from that chapter are duly acknowledged.
2. In Fraser and Hyland-Russell, 2011, p. 26.
3. For an evocative portrayal of how historian and WEA tutor, E.P. Thompson,
interpreted the WEA’s mission, see Luke Fowler’s 2012 film, ‘The Poor
Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna
Southcott’ (lux.org.uk).
4. ‘Sean’ is one of many who have contributed so much to this volume. All
names introduced with quotation marks are pseudonyms.
 Acknowledgements

In a sense, this book has taken me a lifetime to write. Acknowledging the

support, encouragement, challenge and celebration, which have accompa-
nied its creation, would take almost as long to elucidate. My grateful
thanks are more than due to so many; the following list a snapshot merely
of students, colleagues, friends and family who have accompanied me on
larger or smaller parts of this endeavour:
Eleanor Christie, Laura Aldridge and Dhanalakshmi Jayavel at Palgrave
Macmillan for their patience and guidance from the book’s inception to its
final publication; Tara Hyland-Russell for that ‘initial conversation’ and
for so many which followed; the interviewees for their generosity of time,
spirit and belief in the importance that Sophia should be heard; ‘Jane’,
‘Hannah’, ‘Sean’ and ‘Susanne’, I am forever in your debt; as I am to Peter
Jarvis and Tricia Wastvedt, whose wisdom, creativity and insight have
helped so much with both conceptualisation and articulation. I must also
acknowledge the gifts bestowed by so many students over the years whose
wisdom has far surpassed my own. To name a few would be disrespectful
to the many, I simply thank you all. The same must be said of the many
colleagues over the years who have shared similar struggles in their desire
to keep our teaching and learning candles burning. I mention but four:
Lesley Hardy, Carolyn Jackson, Antonio Sama and Sue Soan.
My gratitude is also due to Cheryl Hunt and Peter Clough for encour-
aging the translation from thesis to book, and to Jacki Cartlidge, Susannah
Ireland, Jenny Knight, Hazel Reid and Penny Rose for their careful perusal
of the growing text, and for their comments and challenges, which, I trust,
I have fully honoured in this final version.

xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

But my deepest thanks must also go to my friends and family whose

willingness to keep their faith despite my long absences and neglect of the
social round has moved, nourished and sustained me: Jenny and David
Cross, Patty Key, Stephen Kirby, Linda Kushner, Carol Lewis and Fiona
Roberts, thank you for your patience; Frances Bekhechi, Ann Harrison-
Brooks, Jacki, Agnes Douglas, Jenny, Joy Pascoe (for whose patient
proof-reading, I am also especially grateful), Helen Reynolds, Penny,
Chris Scarlett, Tricia, Kim Wellard, Linden West and Rosie Williams, I
really could not have completed this without your general fortifications of
mind, body and spirit; Ian Jasper, you always keep the faith, and you have
so often helped me keep mine.
And to the artists whose works both grace these pages and remind us of
the many guises which wisdom adopts, thank you for so generously allow-
ing their inclusion: Sue Cooper, David Cross, Ann Harrison-Brooks
Pavlina Morgan and Catherine Robinson.
To Catherine and to Corinne Gladstone, I must also acknowledge the
other kinds of wisdom which you have shared with me in the process of
encouraging my own searches and seekings. I owe you both so much.
And now I come to Melanie Lewin. I simply could not have completed
the book without your readings, corrections, reminders, suggestions and
your belief that Sophia might be honoured in ways which have validated
both writer and this written outcome. Thank you.
Monkey, Dog and Eagle, you also played your parts, but to tell the
hows and the wherefores would require another book.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
A Darkening Present?  1
An Autoethnographic Inquiry  7
Metaphor as Key 11
The Structure of the Book 16
Chapter 2: From Adult Education to Learning and Skills 17
Chapter 3: Searching for Sophia: Wisdom as Paradox 18
Chapter 4: Epiphanies, Ontologies and Epistemologies 18
Chapter 5: In Search of the ‘Genea-Mythic’ 19
Chapter 6: From Mythos to Logos 19
Chapter 7: The Stories That We Tell and Those That Tell Us 19
Chapter 8: Towards a Wise Curriculum 20
Chapter 9: Conclusion 20

2 From Adult Education to Learning and Skills 23

Introduction 24
An Autoethnographic Frame 24
From Adult Education to Learning and Skills 28
Learning Democracy? 35
Diminishing Places and Spaces 38
Conclusion 41

xv
xvi Contents

3 Searching for Sophia: Wisdom as Paradox 43

Introduction 44
‘Accounting for All Things’ 45
Wisdom Literatures 50
‘From Philosophy to Neuroscience’ 52
Wisdom and Adult Learning 58
The Challenge for the Adult Educator 60
Conclusion 65

4 Epiphanies, Ontologies and Epistemologies 67

Introduction 68
Chronos and Kairos 68
Ontologies and Epistemologies 72
Veracity and Verisimilitude 74
Notes Towards a Methodology 78
Autoethnography—Promise and Challenge 81
Autoethnography as Method and Methodology 83
Conclusion 84

5 In Search of the ‘Genea-Mythic’ 89

Introduction 90
‘Co` leis a tha thu?’: ‘Who Do You Belong To?’ 91
Sorley Maclean and His Poetry101
Notes Towards the ‘Genea-Mythic’106
‘Co` leis a tha thu?’112
Conclusion114

6 From Mythos to Logos117

Introduction117
Sophia’s ‘Fall’119
The Influence of Gnosticism124
The Triumph of the Church126
The Rise of Modernity131
Reclaiming Sophia from Past to Present136
 Contents 
   xvii

7 The Stories That We Tell and Those That Tell Us139

Introduction140
‘Writing as Inquiry’143
The Interview ‘Data’: The Nature of the ‘Given’ and the
Hermeneutic Circle144
The ‘Truth’ About Fiction147

8 Towards a Wise Curriculum165

Introduction165
‘Men Are Afraid That Women Will Laugh at Them.
Women Are Afraid That Men Will Kill Them’168
Reclaiming Other Narratives172
Towards a Wise Curriculum?174
Revisioning Our Pedagogic Practices177
Community Arts and Education (CAE)179
Poesis180
‘Re-enchanting the Academy’181
Theoria/Sophia183

9 Conclusion185

References193

Index211
 Notes on the Artist Contributors

Sue Cooper Having concluded that ageing entitles you to do what you
like, Sue has embarked upon a third career as a community artist (after
careers in business and in management training). She is determined to add
some fun and colour to the ageing process. So far this has led her to create
a troupe of elderly acrobats who escape from their care homes at night to
join the circus (‘Cirque du Sunset’). She is currently re-imagining a
Zimmer frame, painted with wild colours and complete with fancy shoes,
called ‘Old lives matter.’ Sue lives in London and Florida, depending on
the weather forecast.
David Cross David studied Fine Art at St Alban’s College of Art and the
West of England College of Art between 1968 and 1971, successfully
avoiding a career in favour of a life of serial enthusiasms. These include
printer, furniture maker, graphic designer, illustrator, exhibition designer,
shop owner, builder and decorator and finally exhibition officer for
Canterbury Museums. A founder member of the steering group for Herne
Bay’s Duchamp Festival 2013, David curated all the exhibitions during
the award-winning three-week event. Over the years, he has appeared in
various group shows both in Kent and in Cornwall (UK). He has work in
a number of private collections.
Ann Harrison-Brooks Ann writes poems to give her authentic self a
voice. For her, starting a poem is like opening a door to see what inhabits
the space beyond, what it sounds like and how it might speak for her. She
has been reconnecting to Sophia for some time now as she continues to
search for wisdom, serenity, solace and grace. She lives in a quiet b
­ ackwater

xix
xx Notes on the Artist Contributors

in Kent, UK, where she spends her time being, thinking, and prayerfully
giving thanks for the joy of each new day.
Pavlina Morgan Pavlina has made a half-decent attempt at being an eter-
nal student, having studied for a degree in theology in Prague, a Master’s
in psychology of religion in London and now, again in London—after
four one-year foundation courses in various kinds of psychotherapy—has
begun clinical training in psychoanalytical psychotherapy. She gets all the
practice she needs at home with her husband and lop-eared rabbit
(Sigmund of course; the rabbit, that is), and when she’s not poring over
Freud, Jung or Klein (or Christianity or Zen), or translating theology and
philosophy (Czech-­ English), she writes. Poetry mostly. But also her
dreams. And thoughts. She doesn’t blog.
Catherine Robinson Catherine’s art practice emerged out of a lifetime’s
journey of zigzag paths—from English degree to teaching yoga and Tʼai
Chi, horticulture, motherhood, remedial massage, craniosacral therapy,
and carer, to a Fine Art degree at Canterbury Christ Church University,
where she specialised in printmaking.
Working from her studio at home, she explores a wide range of print-
making techniques including etching, drypoint, monoprint, woodcut and
linocut. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in London and Kent, and
she has prints in private collections around the world. Her work reflects
the many facets of her journey, and her search for a mellow place of equi-
librium in this crazy world.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 ‘Arbitrary Marks or the Absence of Understanding’ by

David Cross (Copyright by David Cross) 23
Fig. 3.1 ‘Quest’ by Catherine Robinson (Copyright by
Catherine Robinson) 44
Fig. 4.1 Russian aircraft carrier, Folkestone, 21 October 2016,
on its way to Syria (Taken by WF) 87
Fig. 5.1 The old croft house in Braes, Skye, in the foreground, with
part of Sorley Maclean’s extension behind it (Photograph by
WF 13/2/2006) 93
Fig. 5.2 Angus Stewart—family possession (date unknown) 98
Fig. 5.3 Some of the children of the Braes in around 1926.
Bel is the one on the donkey—note the bare feet and
‘tackety’ boots (Family photograph) 108
Fig. 5.4 Bel and Greg’s Wedding Day 26 March 1942
(Copyright by Wilma Fraser) 111
Fig. 9.1 ‘Mandala’ by Sue Cooper (Copyright by Sue Cooper) 185

xxi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A Darkening Present?
On 24 June 2016, at about 3.40 in the morning, there could no longer be
any doubt. Britain had voted to leave the European Union. Or, at least,
that was true of England and Wales. It was not the case in Scotland or
Northern Ireland. A friend and I wept. We were not alone. Of the ‘48 per
centers’ who had voted to retain our relationship with the rest of the
Union, we were but two who fell prey that early morning to feelings of
disgust, fear and betrayal. ‘How could they have been so stupid?’ ‘How
can we stay in this bloody country with these xenophobic idiots?’ Our
region had voted to leave in significant numbers. The thought of staying
in the neighbourhood that weekend was intolerable. ‘Let’s take a couple
of days away, let’s just book into a hotel in H—, and have a change of
scene.’
But first there were the hugs and embraces with others, and the phone
calls. ‘Can you believe it?’ ‘I know, I know; what now?’ ‘There’s a petition
for another referendum,’ ‘Yes, but if we’d won, we’d be saying “accept
it,”’ ‘Ok, but it’s different, we were all lied to,’ ‘Yeah, and we saw through
it.’ H—proved both diversion and source of deepening rage. At a music
festival on the Saturday afternoon, the drummer suddenly stopped playing
and announced to the crowd that he was Muslim. The crowd cheered.
Afterwards, I went and thanked him. But for what? For stating who he
was? For feeling that he had to state who he was? He looked at me.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

W. Fraser, Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56295-1_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION

‘Coming to the gig today, someone told me to get off home. … I’ve lived
here for years.’
At breakfast the next morning, we overheard a conversation between a
man in his 30s and two of the hotel staff: one a local man in his late teens,
the other a young woman from Poland. ‘I am so, so sorry,’ said the man,
looking over in our direction. ‘It’s the older ones who have wrecked your
lives, I can’t tell you how much they sicken me.’ He walked past us on his
way out. I called the local teenager over to our table. ‘I don’t know who
that man is, but I’d like to speak to him. We might be “old”, but we are
as disgusted as he is.’ ‘Oh, don’t worry, he’s just very upset.’ ‘We’re all
upset! We’re all quite desperate, we’re all sorry!’
There was comedy as well. Whilst waiting in the hotel foyer to settle the
bill, we were suddenly in the middle of a film set. A German news crew
had arrived to interview ‘key’ townspeople after the vote. A very large man
was sitting on the balcony and patting a bulldog. He was the focus of the
crew’s attention. ‘Why him?’, I asked, ‘Who is he?’ ‘He’s the Chair of our
local UKIP1 group.’ ‘Complete with bulldog?’ ‘Ah, yes,’ the hotel man-
ager laughed, ‘But it’s a French bulldog!’
Tragedy tinged with farce? Well, that depends on your point of view.2
The preceding account of my reactions to the result of the UK referendum
of 23 June 2016 includes the anger, the sadness and the sense of deep
despair that I felt during that first ‘post-Brexit’ weekend. It also includes
examples of my feelings of superiority over the ‘bloody idiots’ who believed
the ‘lies’. It includes the comfort to be derived from knowing that most of
the people close to me felt the same way and that I could merge my voice
within the louder clamour of righteous rage and indignation. It includes
my fury at being mistakenly targeted as ‘one of them’. It includes mention
of the fact that I was able to go away for the weekend, that I had sufficient
economic and social capital to seek alternative shores and different hori-
zons. In other words, the preceding paragraphs offer illustration of a type
of ‘Remain’ voter: University-educated, professional ‘middle class’. My
age, over 60, broke one particular pattern: the ‘Leavers’ tended to be
older. But for the rest, I conformed to type. What is not included in this
account is much reflection, or much wisdom.
Social and cultural psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, argues in The
Righteous Mind. Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
(2012) that David Hume was right in positing an emotional basis to our
reasoning processes and moral conclusions, and he contrasts Hume’s
propositions with those adhering to the rationalist delusion, among whom
 A DARKENING PRESENT? 3

he includes Plato and Kant. ‘I call it a delusion because when a group of

people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to
think clearly about it’ (2012, p. 34). Haidt suggests the metaphor of the
elephant and its rider to illustrate his claim about human nature that,
whilst the rider/reason thinks she is in control, her role is actually post hoc
rationaliser to explain the movements of the emotionally and intuitively
driven elephant. And from this, he postulates (2012, p. 55) ‘the social
intuitionist model of moral judgement which has four main links: 1)
Intuitive judgement; 2) Post hoc reasoning; 3) Reasoned persuasion; 4)
Social persuasion’. Haidt emphasises the point that he is not advocating a
simplistic understanding of emotion which drives our moral choices, but
rather that ‘intuitions (including emotional responses) are a kind of cogni-
tion. They’re just not a kind of reasoning’ (p. 56). The conclusions arising
from this are worth quoting at length for what they have to offer the disil-
lusioned ‘Remain’ voter struggling to understand what went so badly
‘wrong’ on 23 June:

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and politi-
cal arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by
the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog
happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by
utterly refuting their arguments. […] [I]f you want to change people’s
minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants. You’ve got to use links 3 and 4
of the social intuitionist model to elicit new intuitions, not new rationales.
(Haidt 2012, p. 57, original emphasis)

Drawing upon neuroscience, philosophy and psychology, and upon

thousands of cross-disciplinary studies, experiments and interviews both
within the United States and internationally, Haidt concludes that there
are six foundations to what he terms our moral matrix, and that each oper-
ates on a spectrum: ‘care/harm; liberty/oppression; fairness/cheating;
loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation’. He is not a
moral relativist. He argues that these categories pertain across the globe,
although with different emphases.
Haidt also suggests that it is those with the more conservative mindset
who are more likely to operate across the six elements of his moral matrix,
whereas those of a more liberal leaning will generally concentrate on the
first two or three, and pay little attention to the rest. Thus, the liberals will
be primarily concerned with improving care and reducing harm, with
4 1 INTRODUCTION

increasing liberty and reducing oppression. The conservatives tend to

include questions of loyalty (e.g., to the nation), respect towards those in
authority and the need to protect the sanctity of certain beliefs and institu-
tions against external threats and (perceived) moral dissolution. Both pay
attention to the spectrum concerning ‘fairness and cheating’, but the con-
servatives are more likely to reframe their interest in what is fair, in terms
of ‘proportionality’ rather than in promoting equal shares for all. In other
words, as Haidt argues, and rather counterintuitively for many, it is the
conservatives who have a far greater moral range from which to pitch their
arguments, and, thence, from which to form emotional, and intuitive,
bonds with their listeners.
It was the early morning news of 9 November 2016 that finally con-
firmed to me what I had been struggling to accept in the ‘watches of the
night’. The United States of America had belied its own name and had
voted for Donald Trump to become the next US president. One of the
first to congratulate him was the head of France’s far-right National Front,
Marine Le Pen, who viewed his victory as a boost to her own presidential
aspirations in early summer 2017. Norbert Hofer, leader of Austria’s far-­
right Freedom Party, was also encouraged by the result, as were the
Alternative for Germany Party, the Dutch Freedom Party and the nation-
alistic Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán. In the febrile days following
Trump’s triumph, the media played and replayed scenarios ranging from
the apocalyptic to the placatory, the latter view based on assumptions that
‘common-sense would prevail,’ and ‘The Donald’ would be contained
and constrained by the saner minds on Capitol Hill. I am finishing this
book at the beginning of 2017, in Trump’s first weeks as President. To say
I am fearful is an understatement; to continue with a book about ‘wisdom’
perhaps sheer folly; and yet—and yet? ‘We need to huddle together for
warmth,’ said more than one friend after the US election. We also need to
find ways, any ways that we can, to try and come to terms with the shock
waves assailing Europe and the United States. Not in order to accept an
inevitable drowning by the resurgent Right, but in order to imagine, and
thence perhaps to realise, alternative narratives of hope and renewal.
For those of us struggling to understand why so many could counte-
nance the arguments of the ‘Leavers’, and those of the climate-change
denier and tax-evading billionaire, when it was obvious to us that to do so
would have a significantly deleterious impact upon their own jobs, fami-
lies, communities and the planet, and when it was patently clear that so
many of those arguments were based on blatant falsehoods, Haidt’s
 A DARKENING PRESENT? 5

a­nalysis is apposite and telling. Although he is talking of the American

context, his words can so easily be applied to Britain:

Republicans have long understood that the elephant is in charge of political

behaviour, not the rider, and they know how elephants work. Their slogans,
political commercials, and speeches go straight for the gut. […] Democrats
have often aimed their appeals more squarely at the rider, emphasizing specific
policies and the benefits they’ll bring to you, the voter. (Haidt 2012, p. 181)

The simple, sloganising rhetoric of Donald Trump provides further illus-

tration of how successful such appeal to the ‘gut’ can be.
But if our moral frameworks, and our corresponding political beliefs
and allegiances, are so apparently immune to the lights of reason and
rationality, then what hope for those of us who do not find comfort in the
particular relationship with the elephants that the Republican/British
Right bring to their endeavours? What hope for the adult educator who
has spent a working lifetime in pursuit of the first three markers in Haidt’s
moral matrix, with, admittedly, little attention to the remaining three? Of
course, we do not have to accept his analysis, however telling his insights,
but there are other links in his ‘social intuitionist model’ which might
offer some encouragement. I have noted the first four: ‘Intuitive judge-
ment; Post hoc reasoning; Reasoned persuasion; and Social persuasion.’
He also mentions two other ‘rarely used links: 5) Reasoned judgement
[and] 6) Private reflection’ (2012, p. 55). Can these, underused, links not
help inform the basis of a concerted, and revivified, form of educational
politics—one which recognises the felt realities, and the intuitional truths
of those with whom we disagree? And how might such a project be
regarded if it recognises difference, privileges communication, transcends
partisan pleading and encourages individual and societal understanding? It
might be considered wise.
The conference presentation on ‘wisdom and adult learning’, described
in the Preface, reflected the very early stages of my search for Sophia, and
for the lessons I might learn in relation to my role as university lecturer
within a Faculty of Education in the south east of England. This book,
written some years later, describes that search, and explains why I think
that we pay far too little regard to the concept of ‘wisdom’, and its rela-
tionship to questions of value, purpose, intention and meaning across the
fields pertaining to adult teaching and learning. Whether we agree with
Haidt’s analysis or not, and my Brexit/Trump blues notwithstanding, the
6 1 INTRODUCTION

fact remains that the year 2016 has been variously described as ‘mad, bad,
and exceedingly dangerous’.3 Be it the continuing depredations of the so-­
called armies of ‘Islamic State’, the refugee crisis stemming from failed
policies in the Middle East, the European/US mayhem described earlier
or the increasing threats to our fellow species on the planet and the envi-
ronment in general, few would suggest that wisdom has played a very
significant role in our sociopolitical and, I would argue, educational phi-
losophies, policies and practices. I am aware of Steven Pinker’s (2012) The
Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, in which
he argues that, contrary to the horrific scenes we see across the daily
media, we are actually becoming better people as the advantages of moder-
nity take hold. But I do not share his optimism because of the fragility
which attends so many of the political decisions which are taken. By this,
I mean that Pinker’s vision relies upon a historical trajectory, within which
he can take the ‘long view’. My fears concern the particular madness of
2016, which might be illustrated by British Tory MP Michael Gove’s dec-
laration that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts.’ In his
rejoinder, Professor Brian Cox told The Guardian newspaper: ‘It’s entirely
wrong, and it’s the road back to the cave. The way we got out […] and
into modern civilisation is through the process of understanding and
thinking.’4
Haidt’s analysis might suggest that Cox is falling foul of the rational
delusion noted earlier. But that is not the point. The year 2016 would
appear to be one in which the elephant has not simply followed benignly
intuitive, and genetically wise, footsteps, but has run amok and trampled
all before it. Of course, I am not suggesting that 2016 represents some
kind of apogee of historical bedlam. That is patently absurd. But as I sift
through the thousands of words written this winter to explain, under-
stand, ameliorate or abjure this year’s events, I am very mindful of the
ways in which the thrust of our neo-liberal discourses have shaped and/or
reflected particular mindsets and tribal allegiances. And my argument in
this book is that our adult teaching and learning policies and practices
have done little to facilitate a better relationship between elephant and
rider. My suggestion is that we might foster a kind of wise curriculum
which encourages Haidt’s two ‘rarely used links’ of reasoned judgement
and private reflection (2012, p. 55) in ways which open up spaces for much
more imaginative, even intuitive, modes of promoting and providing adult
education.
 AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC INQUIRY 7

What follows is distillation of the research undertaken in the years

between the events of the Preface and the early days of 2017.5 During that
time, I have sought Sophia across a range of disciplines and in conversa-
tions with colleagues and theoretical friends both in the United Kingdom
and internationally. I have drawn upon my own professional history in the
fields of adult, further and higher education. I have also benefitted beyond
measure from the insights, oppositions and, at times, sheer bafflement of
my students. But in those intervening years, and for reasons which should
become clear as the book unfolds, I have become both saddened by the
loss of certain spaces within which Sophia might find expression and more
impressed by the need for a radical review of how we engage with the chal-
lenges besetting our educational terrains.

An Autoethnographic Inquiry
The gestation of this book has been discussed in general terms in preced-
ing pages, but its title, ‘Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning’,
might suggest that I shall be offering a comprehensive overview of all
forms of formal and informal adult learning. This is not the case, and I
need to be clear from the outset about the terrains that I shall be explor-
ing. I have spent the last 13 years within higher education, teaching and
working with mature students across a range of disciplines including tutor
training, undergraduate teaching, directing two Master’s programmes and
engaging in doctoral supervision. I was also the designer of, and then
Faculty Director for, our Community Arts and Education (CAE) suite of
non-accredited courses, which were to be studied ‘for their own sake’. For
over 20 years before that, I was employed by the Workers’ Educational
Association (WEA), an educational charity which is part of an adult educa-
tion movement with a history of over a century and a half. The generality
of the book’s title, therefore, is meant to reflect my concern for the spaces
in which adult teaching and learning have been limited, how these might
be reclaimed within both formal and informal educational settings and
how they might offer meaning, guidance and purpose in dealing with the
kinds of questions and dilemmas that I have posed thus far, rather than
concentrate upon recent debates about adult learning theory.
This book is offered as part of that conversation. It is also intended as
illustration of how flexible we can be in terms of our methodological
choices and articulations. Its purpose, therefore, is twofold. The first is to
engage with others, across a range of disciplines, who are also seeking
8 1 INTRODUCTION

means by which we might revision a wise curriculum. The second is to

adopt and exemplify particular methodological choices in ways which
might encourage students and colleagues to further ‘trouble the edges’ of
their pedagogic endeavours.6 For these reasons, the tone of the book is
deliberately exploratory and open-ended, as I shall now explain.
In the Preface, I adopted Sophia as metaphorical carrier of wisdom
by way of illustrating what I regard as her marginalisation, her almost
invisibilisation within certain Western epistemological discourses. If she is
to be found, to be reclaimed in any meaningful sense, it has to be in ways
which honour her standing outwith the kinds of methodological
approaches which privilege particular forms of enquiry dependent upon
quasi-scientific notions of reliability or validity. My approach has to enable
celebration of her that finds echo in the words of, for example, feminist
theologian, Catherine Keller (in Deane-Drummond 2007, p. 176), for
whom wisdom, ‘at least as practised in the indigenous and biblical tradi-
tions, is irredeemably implicated in the sensuous, the communal, the expe-
riential, the metanoic, the unpredictable, the imaginal, the practical’.7
Both Preface and Introduction have been written using the personal
pronoun, and this choice will pertain throughout my text. I am responsi-
ble for the words that follow, and I am writing about the particular ethno-
graphic fields of which I have been a part for almost 35 years. There is a
basic reflexivity at the heart of this project. As the book unfolds, the very
act of writing might help to bring Sophia out of the shadows, but with the
full cognisance that the text’s (and Sophia’s!) shape and form are depen-
dent upon my own dispositions in relation to the new learning that I have
been acquiring. The premises outlined earlier do not arise ab nihilo from
this writer’s mind and pen. Each is predicated upon other choices of tex-
ture, shape and content, which together comprise the thrust and momen-
tum driving the narrative on its particular trajectory. Some of those
‘choices’ may be clearly and consciously articulated; others remain as elu-
sive, and unconscious, as those which colour the larger narratives compris-
ing my own lifeworld and my experiences of it. ‘[Sophia] is, in fact, the
learning process itself. She calls us to a life of seeking understanding of the
world in which we live’ (Cole et al. 1996, p. 23).
The pages which follow represent my response to that call, but they also
reflect my attempts to locate my ‘self’ within aspects of the nexus which
have framed, and continue to frame, the ‘I’ who pens these lines. Without
such location, this ‘quester’ would be adrift on a sea of abstraction and
generalisation—an ‘absent presence’ and one that would mock the
 AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC INQUIRY 9

i­ntegrity of my search. On the other hand, by locating my ‘self’ within a

series of particularities, I would hope that such rootedness might resonate
with the reader and forge a bridge between us where further meanings are
made, and ‘truths’ explored, rather than detonate such connection with an
explosive mix of solipsistic self-indulgence. I need, therefore, to find a
methodological approach which will help me to explore these issues within
a framework which is also conducive to the act of writing itself. Hence the
autoethnographic element—an approach which is part of the larger meth-
odological family of auto/biographical and narrative studies. I am, there-
fore, acknowledging the impetus behind the book’s gestation and
articulation, but I am also bearing in mind what renowned adult educa-
tionalist Peter Jarvis has noted. Because he feels that it is ‘difficult to
regard wisdom as a single, integrated whole except inasmuch as it is a
response to the unknowns of existence itself’, he doubts the potential for
researching wisdom ‘per se’, although he does acknowledge that ‘bio-
graphical research projects may also prove a resource for wisdom studies’
(2011, p. 91).
The other key word in my subtitle is ‘inquiry’. This book is not intended
as some kind of summative statement (if that were even possible, or desir-
able) of the relationship between wisdom and adult education. In many
respects, as I set out on this endeavour, I am not entirely sure where I shall
be led, or of the conclusions that I might reach. This is not meant to
sound disingenuous. The writing that follows is predicated upon certain
key assumptions of mine which seek to offer some alternative to the kinds
of assertions that underpin what I regard as limiting and reductive peda-
gogical pronouncements. I am encouraged by the work of autoethnogra-
phers such as Ronald Pelias, whose intention in ‘A Methodology of the
Heart—Evoking Academic and Daily Life’ is stated in the following terms:

As I go about my business of just living and of doing my job in the academy,

I never want to hurt or be hurt, but too often I’ve watched claims of truth
try to triumph over compassion, try to crush alternative possibilities, and try
to silence minority voices. Seeing the pain this causes, I seek another dis-
course, one that still has an edge, that could say what needs to be said but
would do no harm. I want a scholarship that fosters connections, opens
spaces for dialogue, heals. (Pelias 2004, p. 2)

I am suggesting that my search for Sophia must entail the pursuit and
inclusion of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives if we are to do justice
10 1 INTRODUCTION

to the complexities of our relationships to ourselves, to each other and to

our lifeworlds. I am arguing against the kind of reductionism which char-
acterises many truth claims that are espoused in opposition to the com-
passion required in our work if we want a scholarship that genuinely
‘opens spaces for dialogue’ and ‘heals’. I am urging realignment in the
ways in which we conceptualise much of our pedagogic practice in order
to proffer vigorous rebuttal to those policies and processes which limit the
potential for inviting Sophia into our classrooms. In other words, I need
an approach that functions as both medium and message; hence autoeth-
nography with a particular interest in ‘writing as inquiry’ (Richardson
1994, 1997), which is also expressed so cogently by Elizabeth Hoult
(2012a, p. 4):

I therefore developed a methodology that sought to inhabit the space

between theory and creativity. The methodology […] required me to
engage in a holistic process of writing, engaging the cognitive, emotional,
and visceral aspects of my learning and increasingly requiring me to let go of
conventional structures and to have faith that the process of writing itself
could reveal the answers I sought.

For these reasons, all of which will be explored in succeeding pages, the
writing and thence reading of what follows might pose some particular
challenges. As I begin my search, I know neither the shape nor the full
content of what might transpire, nor what my quest might reveal. My
search for Sophia is both construction and mediation; my intention is that
it is offered with integrity, however difficult that aim might prove in its
articulation. As Cole et al. (1996, p. 19) point out, ‘[t]he relationship a
person has to Sophia is virtually the same as their own relationship to the
process of understanding.’ And that is the key to this project. I seek some
kind of understanding of how the meaning and pursuit of wisdom might
be fostered in certain professional and pedagogical spaces, and in my own
relation to both, but my ‘quarry’ is elusive and perhaps the best that I
might hope for is an occasional glimpse of Sophia between my pages.
The tone of the book is deliberately open-ended. Counter to the expec-
tations generated by many academic texts, I am not striving for either
certainty or a particular kind of authority in what I write. This is not to say
that what follows has not been thoroughly searched and researched, but
that I am deliberately eschewing a tone of voice which often accompanies
academic presentation. Too many texts fall foul of either the imperative to
 METAPHOR AS KEY 11

publish or ‘be damned’, or to a kind of academic jostling which, too often,

favours the more abstruse and the less accessible. There is an assumption,
in some academic circles, that the more difficult the text, the better it must
be.8 I wish to engage in dialogue, in conversation with friends and col-
leagues who walk across these pages. I do not claim to know the ‘answers’;
the best I can hope for is a deepening understanding of the complexity and
profundity of my search. Is this a pilgrimage? Blackie’s definition certainly
resonates with mine:

A pilgrimage is a search for knowledge, a search for becoming. And pilgrim-

age begins also with longing: longing for deep connection; longing for true
nurturing community; longing for change and the rich healing dark. (Blackie
2016, p. 94)

Metaphor as Key
Given the metaphorical weight that I am asking Sophia to carry, it might,
at this point, be helpful to link my interest in the role of metaphor with my
methodological approach. In the Preface, I asked, ‘to what extent might
she serve as restorative metaphor for a re-vitalised framing of certain teach-
ing and learning policies and practices?’ Any potential answer has to
include some analysis of the role of metaphor and its power to shape and
frame our lifeworlds and the narratives we elect to live and explain them.
As Hyland-Russell and I argue elsewhere, ‘because of its deceptively
simple nature […] we often disregard the ways that our language use
shapes our theories, ways of becoming as people and teachers, and our
teaching practices’ (Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 29). And we note
Hill and Johnston’s assertion that ‘[r]eflecting on the effects of the lan-
guage choices we make as adult educators is perhaps a deceptively simple
yet the most transformative action to undertake’ (2003, p. 21; emphasis
added).9 If we are to find ways by which our pedagogic practices might be
changed and challenged and opened to the light, we must pay heed to the
languages that prescribe and, in some cases, proscribe our behaviours. As
Richardson points out, ‘[w]e become the metaphors we use. We construct
worlds in our metaphoric image’ (1997, p. 185), and this represents a key
challenge for the adult educator. How might we ‘engage our students in
vibrant metaphors of learning that provide multiple options and growth,
for both educator and learner, and that animate perceptions of learning as
active and agential’ (Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 29)?
12 1 INTRODUCTION

In The Master and His Emissary (2009), McGilchrist’s magisterial

exploration of ‘the nature of the divided brain and the making of the
Western World’, he includes an analysis of how the left and right hemi-
spheres of the brain have developed. His challenge to certain neuroscien-
tific framings might be summarised as a rethinking of the relative
importance of the hemispheres in responding to our worlds. Many have
assumed that the left hemisphere is the more important because it is the
site of language and, thence, verbal communication. McGilchrist argues
that this marks a profound misunderstanding of how we frame ourselves
in relation to our experiences, and he reclaims the right hemisphere as the
site of metaphoric generation. This fact, he argues, is crucial to how we
both story ourselves, and of how we are storied. ‘Metaphoric thinking is
fundamental to our understanding of the world,’ because it is only through
metaphor that ‘understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life
itself. It is what links language to life’ (2009, p. 115). In other words, our
embeddedness in the world, and our apprehension of that experience, is
mediated via the right hemisphere. The left, McGilchrist argues, is respon-
sible for turning that experiential reality, at the connotative level, into the
denotative systems favoured by the intellect, and framed by language:

Where the left hemisphere’s relationship with the world is one of reaching
out to grasp, and therefore to use, it, the right hemisphere’s appears to be
one of reaching out – just that. Without purpose. In fact one of the main
differences between the ways of being of the two hemispheres is that the left
hemisphere always has ‘an end in view’, a purpose or use, and is more the
instrument of our conscious will than the right hemisphere. (2009, p. 127)

McGilchrist’s thesis is that the development of key Western discourses

has become increasingly dominated by the model of utility favoured by
the left hemisphere, and he brings a formidable array of evidence from the
fields of philosophy, art, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology and neuro-
science to support his view of a hemispherically left-leaning cultural bias.
He is not suggesting a crude polarity between the left hemisphere as
objective and the right as subjective.

Rather the point is that philosophy in the West is essentially a left-­hemisphere

process. It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualised, dis-
embodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature
of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear
 METAPHOR AS KEY 13

approach to truth, building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick
by brick. (2009, p. 137)

McGilchrist sees this left-dominated cultural view as exemplifying the

mindset of modernism10 and the Anglo-American world, and he notes the
challenge presented by the European phenomenologists, for example,
Husserl, whose warning is redolent of my concerns:

According to Husserl, the roots of the European crisis of modernism lay in

‘verirrenden Rationalismus’ and ‘Blindheit fur das Transzendentale’: a sort
of mad rationalism and a blindness to the transcendental. […] He came to
the conclusion that there was an objective reality, but that it was constituted
by what he called intersubjectivity. This comes about through shared experi-
ence, which is made possible for us by our embodied existence alongside
other embodied individuals. (2009, pp. 143, 144)

Of course, McGilchrist’s final point here has echoes with a number of

sociological theorists from Mead onwards, who drew on the work of
Dewey and William James to develop the theory of symbolic interaction-
ism, and thence other social constructionist avenues which were predi-
cated on the basis that we learn in relationship (see, e.g., Bruner 1996;
Denzin and Lincoln 2008; Dimitriadis and Kamberelis 2006; Merrill and
West 2009; Pascale 2011; Plummer 2001; Richardson 1997). One can see
how McGilchrist’s thesis echoes the potential for a number of different
epistemological possibilities, and thus for different ways of conceptualising
how we come to know and the relative merits of how these knowledges
are articulated.
For argument’s sake, I am going to assume the reader’s concurrence
with the thesis as expounded by McGilchrist: that our initial experiences
of the world are embodied and ‘intersubjective’; and apprehended by
means of our ‘reaching out’. Their metaphorical weight (stemming from
their substantive reality) is ‘carried across’ (meta-phor) to the left hemi-
sphere, which attributes linguistic and intellectual cognisance to their rela-
tive importance in terms of the sign systems within which the left
hemisphere is operating. Without regulation, the system becomes self-­
perpetuating and our experiences of the world are caught and shaped
within the dominant discourses available to us. Peter Abbs (1979, pp. 8,
9) drew upon the work of George Orwell’s 1984 to remind us of the
power of language to shape and contain our understanding of the world,
and of some of the consequences:
14 1 INTRODUCTION

If such a state was ever achieved a thinking beyond existing realities would
be all but impossible because the major means of thought, language, objects,
would not allow, or rather support, such a movement. Each time the mind
tried to escape, the corrupted symbolism would draw it back into its win-
dowless cage […] Education is now almost everywhere defined in terms of
functions, markets, services, needs. Indeed, so much so that it is becoming
an imaginative effort to think, feel and act in other terms.

This is not to suggest that we must remain trapped within the solipsistic
mind frame within which the left hemisphere repeats its articulations;
rather we must find ways to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies and sub-
vert their discursive power. At one level, this might seem both rather obvi-
ous and, perhaps, arch reminder of our raison d’être as educators. But the
nature of the challenge before us cannot be underestimated, as an explora-
tion of some current pedagogic messages will reveal:

What we find increasingly in educational documents is a functional discourse

which makes the educational status quo appear as the only conceivable real-
ity. The sense of possibility, of ethical choice, is thus entirely erased. Education
becomes merely the sum total of current practices. This is the subtle tyranny of
instrumental pragmatism. (Abbs 2003, pp. 3, 4; original emphasis)

Indeed, the very notion of ‘delivering’ programmes of study speaks vol-

umes about the discursive framing within which this articulation resides. It
is consistent with the idea that knowledge is reducible to digestible units
of consumption; and this is consistent, in turn, with a prevailing cultural
orthodoxy that privileges profit and the material over other forms of men-
tal and spiritual nourishment. In short, it represents the triumph of the left
hemisphere’s ‘grasping’ of the world, rather than being in attentive rela-
tionship with it. Although McGilchrist’s analysis is primarily philosophical,
I appreciate the metaphorical resonance which chimes with the framing of
our teaching and learning practices. Surely there could be no better hint of
how we might find and foster Sophia than in the following extract (from
McGilchrist) in which Steiner draws on the work of Heidegger:

Thus, our question as to the nature of philosophy calls not for an answer in
the sense of a textbook definition or formulation, be it Platonic, Cartesian or
Lockeian, but for an Ent-sprechung, a response, a vital echo, a ‘re-­sponsion’
in the liturgical sense of participatory engagement […] For Descartes, truth
is determined and validated by certainty. Certainty, in turn, is located in the
 METAPHOR AS KEY 15

ego […] For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-con-
sciousness are not the centre, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privi-
leged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is
not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of ‘grasping’ and prag-
matic use. It is a relation of audition. We are trying ‘to listen to the voice of
Being’. It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodian-
ship, answerability to and for. (Steiner, in McGilchrist 2009, p. 152)

Of course, I am not suggesting that all teaching and learning practices

might be contained within this wonderful framing of attention. The art of
training for very specific purposes, for example when particular skills and
competences are required in the fields of health and social care, or within
the emergency services, probably provides instances when the delivery of
another’s knowledge needs to involve an element of transmission which
this relationship of attention may not necessarily include. But, in a sense,
I am suggesting that that is the very challenge which is there before us: at
an incalculable cultural cost, we have eschewed the balance of certain edu-
cational practices away from a basis of apprehension, of paying attention to,
in favour of a ‘one size fits all’ reductive practice of unitised packaging and
dissemination.
As the book unfolds, I shall explore certain kinds of anxiety within for-
mal educational terrains about encouraging spaces in which to posit alter-
native narratives to those predicated upon linearity, hierarchy and simplistic
enunciations of progression. I shall argue that we need to learn to tolerate
the uncertain, the unknown, the unpredictable, for it is also the potential
for unknowing that marks Sophia’s call to us. And it is because of her
power to help a life become more meaningful that I am suggesting the
pursuit of her is so crucial. I am reminded of the joy with which I came
across the work of Angela Brew (1993) when struggling with the potential
for ‘meaning-making’ in a different context and many years ago:

Wisdom may come through experience, but it does not come through an
accumulation of experience […] I think what I am referring to is the process
of unlearning: the attempt to access our inner knowings; the coming face to
face, again and again, with our ignorance; with our not-knowing. The high-
est point of knowing is not knowing. Herein lies the paradox of learning
from experience. (In Fraser 1995b, p. 60)

Sophia offers a metaphorical vehicle for my quest, but she also seems, at
this stage, to represent a profound sense of loss which I feel lies at the
16 1 INTRODUCTION

heart of this project. There are many reasons for this, and some of them
will be explored in later chapters. I suppose that one of the key questions
I am pursuing is the extent to which such loss is personal, and my argu-
ments necessarily limited by the shape and colour of the lens through
which I view my lifeworld. If my rather jaundiced view of certain peda-
gogic practices stems largely from my own predispositions, then I have to
guard against the kind of polarised extremism which finds expression in a
kind of prelapsarian longing and crude darkening of the present. On the
other hand, if such a sense of loss were to find echo and resonance in the
hearts and minds of colleagues and others, then the value of my quest
might, in the end, have greater and deeper resonance as my strivings for,
and commitment to, a kind of ‘heartfelt’ authenticity meet their mark
(Pelias 2004). Either way, I find a certain irony in Michelangelo’s placing
of the female figure in the Creation of Adam:

If we concur with those who suggest that she is the personification of wis-
dom, her framing within this section of the painting has always been over-
shadowed by the iconic image of God’s hand linking with Adam’s. Perhaps
it is time that Sophia came out of the shadow of God’s embrace and claimed
her place at the heart of the educative process. (Fraser and Hyland-Russell
2011, p. 30)

The Structure of the Book

In choosing autoethnography, to an extent as both medium and message,
I am engaged in two overlapping endeavours: my search for Sophia and my
interrogation of the efficacy of my approach. Whilst I take it as axiomatic
that one cannot remove the searcher from the research, I am fully aware of
those who still seek some kind of ‘objective’ assessment of the subject
under study, and of the accusations of ‘unprofessional partiality’ so often
aimed at those of us who take the former view. The chapters that follow
are intended to add to the increasing potency of approaches such as this,
especially among newer researchers seeking greater legitimacy for their
endeavours.
I also celebrate the freedoms that my choice of methodology allows me
in including a range of different voices, styles and media, which intend
from the outset to dissolve the margins between different disciplines and
methodological approaches. Speedy’s (2008, p. xvi) wish resonates with
mine: ‘I hope that by experimenting with and moving between literary,
 THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK 17

scholarly, investigative, imaginary and personal styles of inquiry I will gen-

tly scrape away at the discourses of research.’ In keeping with my approach,
which entails striving for reflexivity and personal interrogation, the book
will present a range of voices and forms of expression. Personal circum-
stances will be depicted where their telling might enable the kinds of reso-
nance which take them out of the particular and into the general, and I
shall draw upon various literary and visual genres, including the novel,
poetry, paintings and photographs, in an attempt to enrich the timbre and
quality of the completed work.
Others’ voices will also inform my exploration, whether they be from
interviews, conversations or the written word. Throughout, I am con-
sciously striving to create a dialogic space with all my sources in order to
open up the potential for greater meaning-making as those ‘conversations’
resound one with the other. I am mindful of the words echoed by
Henderson and Kesson in their exploration of Curriculum Wisdom.
Educational Decisions in Democratic Societies (2004, p. 6). Drawing on
Pinar et al. (1995, p. 848), Henderson and Kesson remind us that ‘[t]here
are no definitive models. There is only […] “an extraordinarily compli-
cated conversation” that must be engaged in meeting the curriculum wis-
dom challenge.’
I am not striving for a straightforward, linear narrative which proceeds
logically from beginning to end. I prefer the idea of the spiral. It offers
further metaphorical resonance with my underlying quest and method-
ological approach, neither of which assumes certainty or linearity at its
heart. Therefore, the chapters which follow interweave the general with
the more particular, the personal and the political, all in a process of
becoming which marks the impetus behind the whole.

Chapter 2: From Adult Education to Learning and Skills

The term ‘adult education’ is highly contested, but I shall urge reclama-
tion of its radical potential, and begin to explore ways in which that poten-
tial might be differently perceived and articulated, particularly in relation
to movements for social and environmental justice and protection. I am
not concerned with workplace learning per se, although reference to it will
be made. My interest lies in the shifts in recent years away from the kinds
of drivers that characterised adult education as a place where ‘learning for
its own sake’ and for social justice were paramount and towards its appro-
priation by the strictures and demands of the marketplace. The chapter
18 1 INTRODUCTION

concludes with an appeal for a re-visioning of education’s role and pur-

pose, to better envisage alternative to the meagre and, ultimately, life-­
denying diet with which we are currently served.

Chapter 3: Searching for Sophia: Wisdom as Paradox

This chapter is concerned with tracing the varying, and various, guises that
wisdom has worn in certain Western discourses. The picture that emerges
is a paradoxical one. Whereas one might have assumed some degree of
homogeneity in the ways in which the Ancient Greeks, for example, por-
trayed and pursued wisdom, this proves not to be the case. Neither is the
picture more straightforward when we look at wisdom’s articulations
across a range of beliefs and disciplines including the Judaeo/Christian,
Western philosophical and psychological traditions, and, latterly, the
neuroscientific.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the search for wisdom in educa-
tional terrains is problematic and contradictory. The chapter includes the
challenges besetting the adult educator, but reiterates the appeal underly-
ing this whole volume: an urgent entreaty to find ways in which wisdom
might be invited into her teaching and learning spaces.

Chapter 4: Epiphanies, Ontologies and Epistemologies

Throughout the book, I have chosen to personify my exploration of wis-
dom by adopting Sophia as key metaphor. Whilst Chap. 3 traces part
of the history of this personification, this chapter explores the genesis of
my search in a ‘moment of being’, an epiphanic moment, which resonates
with certain pursuits of wisdom which privilege Sophia’s link to aspects of
the divine, or to a sense of a deeper ‘reality’ beneath the realm of appear-
ance. The chapter explores the distinction between the framing of time as
chronos and kairos, and links with Virginia Woolf’s ‘moments of being’,
and with James Joyce’s ‘epiphanies’ by way of discussing certain of mod-
ernism’s tenets and preoccupations, and the limits, or otherwise, of lan-
guage’s function as signpost, signifier or embodiment of our ways of
narrating our lifeworlds.
The second part of the chapter explains my use of autoethnography as
both method and methodological underpinning to the whole, and it is
written by way of exposition and encouragement to those researchers who
may be new to this field. The chapter concludes at a tangent, with a
 THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK 19

synchronistic moment which is offered as further illustration of our need

to remain alert to opportunities presenting themselves when we might
engage the reader in an ongoing ‘pedagogy of conversation’ (Granger
2011, p. 245), and further subvert more traditional readings of academic
texts.

Chapter 5: In Search of the ‘Genea-Mythic’

The term is one I have coined to describe the interrelationship between
the ‘penning’ of the narrative and the broader historical and familial con-
nections that inform the lifeworld of the one who holds that ‘pen’. This
chapter moves between the recent present and the past, and between the
relative fragilities attending the subjectivities of two of the protagonists.
Once again, I draw on the literary arts to augment the discussion, whilst
celebrating the work of a poet relatively unknown to English-speaking
audiences.
As well as extending this inquiry into the auto genesis of this overall
text, the chapter poses certain ethical questions about the appropriateness
of protagonists’ inclusion when permission from those protagonists is not
possible.

Chapter 6: From Mythos to Logos

In some ways, this chapter functions as a companion piece to Chap. 3
in returning to particular narratives which have proven so fundamental to
the shaping of certain Western narratives. Whereas Chap. 3 concentrated
more on the philosophies of Ancient Greece, and the wisdom literatures
of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, this chapter explores aspects of
the early Christian Church, narratives of inclusion and exclusion, includ-
ing those of the Gnostics, and suggests ways in which certain epistemo-
logical framings have been privileged at the expense of others.

Chapter 7: The Stories That We Tell and Those That Tell Us

This chapter explores aspects of narrative construction, and alternative
ways in which we can ‘write up’ our data. Drawing upon some of the inter-
view material generated in the course of my research, I offer a fictional
framing of the ‘truths’ that the interviews revealed in order to excavate
more deeply the ‘graphic’ element in the term ‘autoethnography’. The
20 1 INTRODUCTION

fictional presentation of my material highlights, and makes transparent, the

re-presentational nature of what we do whilst posing broader epistemologi-
cal questions about veracity and verisimilitude: truth and representation.

Chapter 8: Towards a Wise Curriculum

This chapter explores the potential for a wise curriculum. I am hopeful
that we might find new courses, and reclaim older ones, both within our
institutions of learning and in informal spaces and in our own lives, so that
we may envisage, and thence put into practice, ways of being which have
Sophia at their heart. I draw on the ‘seven modes of inquiry’, as outlined
by Henderson and Kesson (2004) in their pursuit of Curriculum Wisdom,
as illustration of examples from my own institution where our pedagogic
practices have challenged the kinds of utilitarian reductionism that this
whole volume has contested.

Chapter 9: Conclusion
In keeping with the whole tone and tenor of the book, this conclusion
offers no ‘summing up’ of the search that I have undertaken. I offer reflec-
tions on the questions and challenges that I have posed, and I wonder to
what extent we might invite Sophia into our classrooms even if we cannot
hope to presume to ‘teach’ her. I am reminded of the poet Keats’ urging
for the ability to live in ‘negative capability, that is when a man [sic] is
capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason’ (from a letter to his brothers, 21 December
1817).11 Paradoxically, we are more likely to encounter the wisdom of
Sophia if we are willing to abandon such ‘irritable reaching’ and embrace,
rather, a stance of curiosity and openness, if we can also foster an attitude
of attentiveness and encouragement towards the potential for ‘unknow-
ing’ as both antidote and opportunity for change.

Such deeper meaning, we argue, requires thought that is both complex and
integrated – thought that cannot be packaged as items of skill-sets but that
is imaginative and metarational. But how might we encourage such a shift in
attention, which could assist in the recovery of wisdom and in the spaces
where Sophia might be nurtured, nourished and encouraged? (Fraser and
Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 28)

The book ends with a question, as, indeed, it should.

 NOTES 21

Notes
1. UKIP stands for United Kingdom Independence Party. Its then leader,
Nigel Farage, had been one of the key Leave campaigners.
2. I do not wish to disparage those who voted Leave; I am aware of the many
good arguments for having done so. The choice is a personal one, and no
less painful for that.
3. See, for example, Charles M. Blow’s ‘The Madness of America’, 6 June
2016, in The New York Times (nytimes.com); Stephen M. Walt’s ‘The
Madness of Crowds’, 15 July 2016, in Foreign Policy Magazine (foreign-
policy.com); Brett Redmayne-Titley’s ‘A Return to the Madness of
M.A.D., 27 July 2016, in Activist Post (activistpost.com); and the series on
‘The Madness of Humanity’, July 2016, in cosmos & culture (npr.org).
4. ‘It’s the road back to the cave’, 2 July 2016, huffingtonpost.co.uk
5. Some of the research was used for my doctorate.
6. See, for example, the work of Jane Speedy (2008).
7. See also Fraser and Hyland-Russell (2011), p. 30.
8. For an interesting discussion about this concerning literary criticism, see
Eagleton (2017).
9. See Fraser and Hyland-Russell (2011), for further discussion of this point.
10. Certain writers use ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ interchangeably. The dis-
tinction will be discussed in later chapters.
11. In Fraser and Hyland-Russell (2011), p. 33.
 CHAPTER 2

From Adult Education to Learning and Skills

Fig. 2.1 ‘Arbitrary Marks or the Absence of Understanding’ by David Cross

(Copyright by David Cross)

© The Author(s) 2018 23

W. Fraser, Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56295-1_2
24 2 FROM ADULT EDUCATION TO LEARNING AND SKILLS

Introduction
The title of this chapter requires closer examination, both because of the
assumptions underlying it and because of the kinds of narrative that I am
attributing to those assumptions. On the one hand, I am suggesting a
discrete field of policy and practice known as ‘adult education’; on the
other, I am clearly demarcating this field, perhaps even polarising it, from
what I term ‘learning and skills’. My particular concern lies with what I
regard as a significant loss attending the shift away from adult education,
but I acknowledge that that concern is itself a product of my own ethno-
graphic experiences within both domains, as well as a corollary of my polit-
ical allegiances, and my belief in, and espousal of, adult education as a
means of empowering individuals towards a broader commitment to social
justice. My argument in this chapter is that ‘the impact of socio-­economic
shifts throughout the eighties, nineties and noughties resulted in a narrow-
ing of the discursive possibilities, and thence the real opportunities, within
which to articulate educational provision’ (Fraser 2015, p. 30). Elsewhere,
and with Tara Hyland-Russell, I have noted that ‘[c]ommitments to fos-
tering “knowledge for life not livelihood” foundered on the Scylla and
Charybdis of instrumentality and economic efficiency’ (Fraser and Hyland-
Russell 2011; Fraser 2015, p. 30). I am aware of a tendency towards
‘golden age thinking’. Rose (2001/2) and Roberts (Ed. 2003) provide
cogent reminders of the tensions inherent throughout the history of adult
education in terms of its ‘true’ potential for change and liberation, and this
is a key point to which I shall return in succeeding pages.
But I shall begin by outlining the ethnographic fields of which I have
been a part for almost 35 years, and include discussion of earlier writings
about aspects of educational ‘delivery’ which are germane to my argu-
ments. I shall then return to interrogation of this chapter’s title, and the
narrative assumptions which it includes. This, in turn, leads to broader
discussion about, and thence appeal for, the potential for adult education
to be reinvigorated as a means by which questions of authentic or genuine
democracy might be engaged. The chapter concludes with return to the
main theme of the book, which is the deeper quest for wisdom, by way of
introducing Chap. 3.

An Autoethnographic Frame
My working life within the terrains of adult education and/or the lifelong
learning sector was significantly formed in the more than two decades
spent with the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). This is a charity,
 AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC FRAME 25

established in 1903/5, with the original aim of fostering the kinds of criti-
cal intelligence necessary to ensure the maintenance of a healthy public
democracy. The intention was to offer adult education to those for whom
advanced schooling and university were beyond their social and capital
means. My roles in the organisation included providing liberal education
courses, and thus the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, within my local
region; designing, delivering and evaluating appropriate training for multi-­
agency tutors and WEA volunteers; and working in partnership with statu-
tory bodies to generate external funding streams to support community
learning. This area of my work included a Women and Health project,
which we ran nationally and which was cited as an example of best practice
by the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education(NIACE) in
2001.1 I was also responsible for organising local, regional and national
conferences to disseminate best practice in widening participation and
partnership working; representing the WEA on a European/Transnational
Programme to combat social exclusion in rural areas; organising, chairing
and/or convening local and regional steering groups involving senior col-
leagues from higher education, further education, the voluntary sector,
local and district councils, social services and health at regional and
national levels – in relation to urban and rural regeneration initiatives. In
the last few years of my time at the WEA, I was given the task of ­developing
women’s education in our South Eastern district; representing our region
on the national Women’s Education Committee (WEC); teaching a vari-
ety of courses in literature and women’s studies, and in a variety of settings
including prison and higher education.
In 1992, I was seconded to Goldsmiths College at the University of
London to undertake research into ‘Learner Managed Learning in an
Institution of Higher Education’ and my report was published in 1993. In
1992, I collaborated with Linden West, then at the University of Kent, on
a pilot study based at their School of Continuing Education (extramural
department) which concerned ‘The Assessment of Prior Experiential
Learning in Universities’ Admissions Procedures’; our report was pub-
lished in the same year. In 1995, my book Learning from Experience.
Empowerment or Incorporation? was published by NIACE and concerned
the results of a project I had undertaken on the potential for ‘making
experience count’ across a number of locales including higher, adult and
community education. In the book, I explored the impact of what I have
later termed the ‘tyranny of the learning outcome’ (Fraser 2009, 2011).
In the earlier text, I outlined some of the impact that Bloom’s (1956)
taxonomy had had on formulating ways of measuring educational attain-
26 2 FROM ADULT EDUCATION TO LEARNING AND SKILLS

ment. I was writing about the introduction of learning objectives within

the pedagogic practices of the WEA, and their later adoption by an extra-
mural department of our local university. Both institutions were seeking
ways of addressing the threats to non-accredited liberal provision follow-
ing the curtailment of ring-fenced government funding in 1992. In other
words, both institutions were seeking ways of proving their accountability
to government for their receipt of public funds.
Recent years brought a move to higher education and a number of
teaching roles at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I was then
appointed to the design and delivery, and became Faculty Director, of a
series of liberal adult education courses under the title Community Arts
and Education (CAE), which came about both as a consequence of the
decline in extramural provision at the other university in the city and as
part of a strategy to develop greater links with the local community. My
time is now spent, primarily, on doctoral supervision.
My teaching roles included tutor training for those engaged in further
and adult education across the lifelong learning sector. It was here that I
experienced the full impact of an increasingly reductive educational frame-
work. As Stephen Ball (2007, p. 186) reminds us, ‘the means/end logic of
education for economic competitiveness is transforming what were
­complex, interpersonal processes of teaching, learning and research into a
set of standardised and measureable products’.
Our tutor training included the necessity of having to frame schemes of
work and session plans within the context of achieving SMART learning
outcomes. The acronym is anything but, if we are to believe that learning
comprises more than the delivery of pre-packaged units of knowledge
which have been weighed and found appropriate to their mode of delivery.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable (sometimes ‘agreed-­
upon’ or ‘assignable’), realistic and time-related. The session plan stated
the number of learning outcomes which would be met by the conclusion
to the lesson. The formula was as follows: By the end of the session, the stu-
dent will be able to… and the ideal outcome was couched in the language
of action verbs or competences. Such pedagogic practices have been neatly
summarised by Henderson and Kesson (2004, p. 205), who point out that
‘[t]hese sorts of mandates exemplify what we mean by disempowerment
or deskilling and represent what we consider the triumph of the standard-
ized management paradigm’. I am very grateful to my colleague, Ian
Jasper, for directing me to the origin of these SMART objectives. In
November 1981, in Spokane, Washington, George T. Doran published his
 AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC FRAME 27

paper entitled ‘There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals

and Objectives’. Doran was a consultant and had been Director of
Corporate Planning for Washington Water Power Company.2
There are obviously a number of problems with this, not least the trans-
lation of Doran’s SMART framework from business to its ubiquity in edu-
cation, but also the fact that the discourse within which this particular
requirement is couched assumes a number of propositions which frame
our mode of pedagogic delivery. The model suggests a behavioural con-
ception of the human subject. Its competence-based framework privileges
(as the nomenclature demands) outcomes or products at the expense of
process, and it is fundamentally utilitarian in intention and execution. Let
us not forget that the word ‘education’ is derived from two Latin sources:
educere and educare. The first refers to the process of ‘drawing out’ the
learner, and might be seen as more reflective of an andragogical3 style of
delivery. The second emphasises ‘training’ or ‘inputting’ and was origi-
nally reflective of the practice of ‘training someone to take their appropri-
ate place in society’ (Jarvis, in Fraser 1995b, p. 43).4 As Henderson and
Kesson also point out, one of the results of such a shift is that ‘the present
climate is not conducive to the pursuit of democratically liberating educa-
tional purposes’ (2004, p. 205). Indeed, and in summary, these emphases
on the means by which we, as teacher educators, are required to deliver
the learning goods are directly antithetical to any potential for ‘unknow-
ing’, or finding Sophia within our classrooms.

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,

Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts … they lie unquestioned, uncombined
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.
(Edna St Vincent Millay “Huntsman, What Quarry?” 1939)5

I am aware that some might argue that a distinction between ‘educa-

tion’ and ‘training’ could explain such reductive packaging of our tutor-­
training programmes. I would reply that if we are in the business of
training teachers, then we should be availing ourselves of the best means
of ensuring the potential for liberating our students, and that means revis-
iting the educere element in our understanding of our educational prac-
tices. Only then might we have the potential for ‘a strong sense of an
28 2 FROM ADULT EDUCATION TO LEARNING AND SKILLS

opening out of the mind that transcends detail and skill and whose move-
ment cannot be predicted’ (Abbs 1994, p. 15). My fear is that such
emphasis on technical upskilling has stripped educational delivery of much
of its meaning, mystery and magic (Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011).
This, then, is the ethnographic field, or fields, of which I have been a
part for over three decades. Looking back on the preceding paragraphs,
thinking again about the various developments I have either initiated or
played a role within, and reflecting on the research and writing I have
done as a practitioner, I am struck by two clear thoughts and feelings: my
regret at the loss or change of so much of the landscape I have described;
and the similarity in my written responses over the years, whether under-
taken alone or with others. In other words, what strikes me so forcibly at
this point is the extent to which I have always placed myself at the margins,
and with a fighting disposition of greater or lesser ferocity.
Yet I must remain mindful of the distinction between the ‘I’ who types
these words and the ‘thou’ of my ethnographic field(s). In other words, I
need to acknowledge the obligation of the autoethnographer to be able to
distinguish between her own narcissistic concerns and the so-called reali-
ties of the field under study. This is not to suggest that I am striving for
some kind of objective assessment; that is patently at odds with the whole
thrust of my narrative which has argued the impossibility of such a mea-
sure from the outset. But it is important to be aware of the nature of my
own projections lest the whole argument falls into a kind of solipsistic
mire, thus fuelling the prejudices of those who view autoethnography as
both spurious and self-indulgent. I shall now turn to a broader discussion
of the terrains under review, and explore some of the consequences attend-
ing their discursive shifts in recent decades.

From Adult Education to Learning and Skills

What currency does the term ‘adult education’ still hold? As I noted in
the Introduction, the terrain has long been contested,6 and has been the
subject of countless conferences, reviews and assessments including
Fieldhouse’s study in 1996. At that point, there was still sufficient
cogency in the concept to enable Fieldhouse and his associates to offer a
review of adult education’s previous history, and to make claims and
recommendations about the then present and the future. Fieldhouse
(1996, p. 399) made a point of iterating what many have said before
and since about the ‘artificial distinction between vocational and
Another random document with
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the author’s talents cannot overcome. I would rather be the poorest
Greek whose fate he commiserates, than Lord Byron, if this poem be
a true transcript of his feelings. Out of charity we must hope that his
taste only is in fault, and that the young lordling imagines that there
is something interesting in misery and misanthropy. I the readier
believe this, as I am intimate with one of his lordship’s most attached
friends, and he gives him an excellent character.” The “intimate
friend” alluded to was William Harness who, from the Harrow
schooldays onwards, was chief among Byron’s friends; indeed,
Byron expressly desired to dedicate Childe Harold to Harness, and
only refrained “for fear it should injure him in his profession,”
Harness being then in Holy Orders while Byron’s name was
associated with orgies of dissipation, to be followed later by
calumnious charges which Harness nobly did his best to refute.
It is a tribute to Miss Mitford’s critical faculty that she found little
difficulty in probing the mystery as to the authorship of Waverley, that
“half French, half English, half Scotch, half Gaelic, half Latin, half
Italian—that hotch-potch of languages—that movable Babel called
Waverley!” as she termed it. “Have you read Walter Scott’s
Waverley?” she writes. “I have ventured to say ‘Walter Scott’s,’
though I hear he denies it, just as a young girl denies the imputation
of a lover; but if there be any belief in internal evidence, it must be
his. It is his by a thousand indications—by all the faults and by all the
beauties—by the unspeakable and unrecollectable names—by the
hanging the clever hero, and marrying the stupid one—by the praise
(well deserved, certainly, for when had Scotland such a friend! but
thrust in by the head and shoulders) of the late Lord Melville—by the
sweet lyric poetry—by the perfect costume—by the excellent
keeping of the picture—by the liveliness and gaiety of the dialogues
—and last, not least, by the entire and admirable individuality of
every character in the book, high as well as low—the life and soul
which animates them all with a distinct existence, and brings them
before our eyes like the portraits of Fielding and Cervantes.”
She was, however, at fault over Guy Mannering, being thrown
clear off the scent by Scott’s cleverness in quoting a motto from his
own Lay of the Last Minstrel, an act of which Miss Mitford evidently
thought no author would be guilty: “he never could write Guy
Mannering, I am sure—it is morally impossible!”
Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility she joined with
others in ascribing to any but their real author, but when she learned
that they were Miss Austen’s she let her pen go with a vengeance.
“A propos to novels, I have discovered that our great favourite,
Miss Austen, is my countrywoman; that mamma knew all her family
very intimately; and that she herself is an old maid (I beg her pardon
—I mean a young lady) with whom mamma before her marriage was
acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest,
most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers; and a
friend of mine, who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into
the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of ‘single
blessedness’ that ever existed, and that, till Pride and Prejudice
showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case,
she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen,
or any other thin or upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in
peace and quietness. The case is very different now; she is still a
poker—but a poker of whom every one is afraid.” Fortunately this
description was qualified: “After all, I do not know that I can quite
vouch for this account,” especially as the consensus of opinion
regarding Miss Austen is entirely opposed to the above description.
Miss Edgeworth she found too cold and calculating as a writer: “I
never can read Miss Edgeworth’s works without finding the
wonderful predominance of the head over the heart; all her
personages are men and women; ay, and many of them very
charming men and women; but they are all of them men and women
of the world. There is too much knowledge of life, too much hardness
of character—too great a proneness to find bad motives for good
actions, too great a contempt for that virtuous enthusiasm, which is
the loveliest rose in the chaplet of youth; and, to say all in one word,
I never take up her volumes myself without regretting that they were
not written by a man; nor do I ever see a young girl reading them
without lamenting that she will be let into the trick of life before her
time.”
 Early in the year 1813 a letter was received from Mr. and Mrs.
Perry, inviting Miss Mitford to stay with them at their house in
Tavistock Square. Mr. Perry was then Editor of the Morning
Chronicle, and the invitation was gladly accepted, not only because
Perry was a friend of her father’s, but because the latter had assured
her that Tavistock House was the rendezvous for many of the
leaders in the political and literary worlds. During this visit she met
Mrs. Opie—“thinner, paler, and much older, but very kind and
pleasant”—and Thomas Moore,—“that abridgement of all that is
pleasant in man,”—with whom she had the “felicity” of dining
frequently. “I am quite enchanted with him,” she wrote. “He has got a
little wife (whom I did not see) and two little children, and they are
just gone into Wales,[17] where he intends to finish a great poem [
Lalla Rookh] on which he is occupied. It is a Persian tale, and he
says it will be his fault if it is not a fine work, for the images, the
scenery, the subject, are poetry itself. How his imagination will revel
among the roses, and the nightingales, and the light-footed Almé!”
Mr. Moore did not forget his little friend and, a year later, gave her
the added pleasure of reading over a part of his manuscript, “and I
hope in a few days to see the whole in print. He has sold it for three
thousand pounds. The little I have seen is beyond all praise and
price,” she wrote enthusiastically. These visits to town were
undoubtedly something more than mere pleasure jaunts, for it is
quite apparent that they were undertaken with a view to keeping the
name and person of Mary Russell Mitford well in the public mind and
eye. Making her headquarters at 33, Hans Place, the residence of
Fanny Rowden’s mother, she spent a whirling fortnight during the
summer of 1814, meanwhile keeping Mrs. Mitford well-informed on
all details, however slight. Under date, June 16, 1814, she writes:
“Yesterday, my own dearest Granny, was, I think, the most fatiguing
morning I ever underwent. Stuffed into a conspicuous place, stared
at, talked to, or talked at, by everybody, dying with heat, worn out
with flattery, I really should have wished myself in heaven or
somewhere worse, if I had not been comforted by William Harness,
who sat behind me, laughing at everybody, and more playful and
agreeable than any one I ever remember.” The occasion was the
Midsummer Breaking-up performance at her old school, during
which an ode she had composed for another function was recited.
“We had no exercises,” she continued, “nothing but music and
recitations, which lasted nearly four hours, and did them great credit.
The March of Mind was well repeated, and received, of course, as
verses commonly are in the presence of the authoress. I was to have
presented the prizes; but to my great comfort Lady Caroline Lamb
arrived, and I insisted on giving her my post.” Then follow particulars
of a carefully-planned programme of sight-seeing, finishing with:
—“How little people in the country know of fashions! I see nothing
but cottage bonnets trimmed with a double plaiting, and sometimes
two double plaitings, and broad satin ribbon round the edge. Gowns
with half a dozen breadths in them, up to the knees before, and
scarcely decent behind, with triple flounces, and sleeves like a
carter’s frock, sometimes drawn, at about two inches distant, and
sometimes not, which makes the arms look as big as Miss Taylor’s
body. I like none of this but the flouncing, which is very pretty, and I
shall bring three or four yards of striped muslin to flounce my gowns
and yours. Tell Mrs. Haw, with my love, to prepare for plenty of
hemming and whipping, and not to steal my needles.... I have been
to see Haydon’s picture, and I am enchanted.... I saw, too, in a print-
shop, the beautiful print of ‘Napoleon le Grand,’ of which you know
there were but three in England, and those not to be sold. Oh, that
any good Christian would give me that picture!”
Napoleon Bonaparte was one of her heroes, and she could never
bring herself to adopt the general view of him held by the populace in
this country. Her friend M. St. Quintin wanted her to translate some
epigrams which he had composed against the late Emperor: “Let Mr.
St. Quintin know that he has brought his pigs to the wrong market,”
was her reply to her father, who had offered her the commission. “I
am none of those who kick the dead lion. Let him take them to Lord
Byron, or the editor of The Times, or the Poet Laureate, or the
bellman, or any other official character.... I hate all these insults to a
fallen foe.”
Later, when the Bellerophon with Napoleon on board—then on his
way to exile—put into Plymouth, Miss Mitford wrote to Sir William
Elford: “Goodness! if I were in your place, I would see him! I would
storm the Bellerophon rather than not get a sight of him, ay, and a
talk with him too. You and I have agreed to differ respecting the
Emperor, and so we do now in our thoughts and our reasonings,
though not, I believe, much in our feelings; for your relenting is pretty
much the same as my—(what shall I venture to call it?)—my
partiality.... But though I cannot tell you exactly what I would do with
the great Napoleon, I can and will tell you what I would not do to him.
I would not un-Emperor him—I would not separate him from his
faithful followers—I would not ransack his baggage, as one would do
by a thief suspected of carrying off stolen goods—I would not limit
him to allowances of pocket-money to buy cakes and fruit like a
great schoolboy—I would not send him to ‘a rock in the middle of the
sea,’ like St. Helena.”
But this is a digression. We left Miss Mitford in London describing
the Hans Place celebrations. The next morning she was taken to the
Freemasons’ Tavern, in Great Queen Street, to attend the meeting of
the Friends against the Slave Trade, where she heard such notables
as Lords Grey and Holland, together with William Wilberforce and
Lord Brougham.
“Lord Grey had all the Ogle hesitation, and my noble patron”
[Holland, to whom her first book was dedicated] “has my habit of
hackering so completely that he scarcely speaks three words without
two stops; but when we can get at his meaning, it is better than any
one’s. My expectations were most disappointed in Brougham, and
most surpassed in Wilberforce. I no longer wonder at the influence
he holds over so large a portion of the ‘religionists,’ as he calls them;
he is a most interesting and persuasive speaker.”
The great day, however, was Friday, June 24, 1814, when the
members of the British and Foreign School Society dined together, at
the Freemasons’ Tavern, on the occasion of their anniversary
meeting. The Marquis of Lansdowne was in the chair, supported by
the Dukes of Kent and Sussex, the Earls of Darnley and Eardley,
and several other eminent persons. Miss Mitford and a party of
friends were in the gallery “to hear splendid speeches and
superlative poetry, and to see—but, alas! not to share—super-
excellent eating.” Miss Mitford was always a great believer in, and
supporter of all efforts which were made to facilitate the education of
the people, and on this occasion her ode on The March of Mind,
which she had specially composed for this event, was set to music
and sung. “I did not believe my own ears when Lord Lansdowne,
with his usual graceful eloquence, gave my health. I did not even
believe it, when my old friend, the Duke of Kent, observing that Lord
Lansdowne’s voice was not always strong enough to penetrate the
depths of that immense assembly, reiterated it with stentorian lungs.
Still less did I believe my ears when it was drunk with ‘three times
three,’ a flourish of drums and trumpets from the Duke of Kent’s
band, and the unanimous thundering and continued plaudits of five
hundred people.... Everybody tells me such a compliment to a young
untitled woman is absolutely unprecedented; and I am congratulated
and be-praised by every soul who sees me.”
This London visit, in Miss Mitford’s twenty-seventh year, was an
excellent piece of stage-management, and if it was due to the
exertions of her father—and we may properly suppose it was—it
stands as one achievement, at least, to his credit.
Home from these festivities, with the plaudits of the crowd and the
congratulations of her friends still ringing in her ears, she had once
again to face the problem of depleted coffers and how to set about
the task of filling them. Each succeeding year there was trouble
about the payment of taxes. “I do hope, my own dear love,” runs one
of the letters, “that you returned to London yesterday, and that you
have been actively employed to-day in getting money for the taxes. If
not, you must set about it immediately, or the things will certainly be
sold Monday or Tuesday. There is nothing but resolution and activity
can make amends for the time that has been wasted at Bocking.”
This last sentence alludes to the Doctor’s absence in
Northumberland attending to the complicated money matters of a
relative. Just previous to this Mrs. Mitford had written: “After sending
off our letter to you, yesterday, Farmer Smith came to tell me what a
piece of work the parish made with him about our unpaid rates. They
have badgered him most unmercifully about sending a summons
and compelling payment, but he is most unwilling to take any step
that might be productive of uneasiness to you.... You will be
astonished to hear that there is none of the farmers more
outrageously violent than Mr. Taylor, who blusters and swears he will
not pay his rates if they do not exact the immediate payment of
yours.” The rates due at this time were for two years—£46 8s. in all,
for which the Doctor had paid £10 on account.
Later on there is a promise of other, though similar trouble, in a
letter to the Doctor addressed in great haste to him, and to three
different localities, as they were not sure of his whereabouts. “I am
sorry to tell you, my dearest father, that Mr. Riley’s clerk has just
been here with a law-paper, utterly incomprehensible; but of which
the intention is to inform you that, if the mortgage and interest be not
paid before next Monday, a foreclosure and ejectment will
immediately take place; indeed I am not sure whether this paper of
jargon is not a sort of ejectment. We should have sent it to you but
for the unfortunate circumstance of not knowing where you are. The
clerk says you ought to write to Mr. Riley, and negotiate with him,
and that if the interest had been paid, no trouble would have been
given. Whether the interest will satisfy them now I cannot tell. No
time must be lost in doing something, as next Monday some one will
be put into possession.”
What a sorry plight the mother and daughter must have been in!
No wonder that we read the daughter’s request for “a bottle of
Russia Oil, to cure my grey locks.” And to make matters worse, there
was pending a Chancery Suit in connection with the sale of Bertram
House, which so soured the Doctor that he would have nothing done
to the garden or grounds. The gravel was covered with moss, the turf
lengthened into pasture, and the shrubberies into tangled thickets—a
picture of desolation which only emphasized the misery of the
financial outlook.

FOOTNOTES:
[17] Miss Mitford was wrong in this; Moore went to a cottage near
Ashbourne, in Derbyshire.
 CHAPTER XII

DWINDLING FORTUNES AND A GLEAM OF

SUCCESS

Miss Mitford’s great and growing affection for the simple delights of
the country is amply proved in some of the letters which she wrote to
Sir William Elford during the years 1812-1815, and in the publication
of her poems on Watlington Hill and Weston Grove. Of these two
works Watlington Hill is, on the whole, in praise of coursing, although
it also contains some fine descriptions of scenery which all who
know the locality will recognize and appreciate. The piece was
originally published as a separate poem and dedicated to “James
Webb, Esq., and William Hayward, Esq.,” two coursing friends of her
father’s, the last-named being the owner of the Watlington Farm
which Dr. Mitford made his headquarters whenever a coursing
meeting was in progress in the district. In this form it was published
by A. J. Valpy, but later on was embodied in a volume entitled
Dramatic Scenes, and published in 1827, by George B. Whittaker.
Weston Grove is a description of the place of that name, near
Southampton Water, then the seat of William Chamberlayne, Esq.,
M.P.—another friend of the Mitfords—to whom the poem was
inscribed. Neither of these works had a great sale.
In addition to these Miss Mitford made, in 1813, an attempt to
produce a play entitled The King of Poland, concerning which she
wrote to her father that “it will be in five acts instead of three, and
runs much more risk of being too long than too short. My favourite
character is a little saucy page ... and who is, I think, almost a new
character on the English stage. We have, it is true, pages in
abundance, but then they commonly turn out to be love-lorn damsels
in disguise. Now mine is a bona-fide boy during the whole play.”
Late in the year 1815 we find her telling Sir William Elford that she
has “been teased by booksellers and managers, and infinitely more
by papa, for a novel and a play; but, alas! I have been obliged to
refuse because I can only write in rhyme. My prose—when I take
pains, is stiffer than Kemble’s acting, or an old maid’s person, or
Pope’s letters, or a maypole—when I do not, it is the indescribable
farrago which has at this moment the honour of saluting your eyes.
This is really very provoking, because I once—ages ago—wrote four
or five chapters of a novel, which were tolerably lively and
entertaining, and would have passed very well in the herd, had they
not been so dreadfully deficient in polish and elegance. Now it so
happens that of all other qualities this unattainable one of elegance
is that which I most admire and would rather possess than any other
in the whole catalogue of literary merits. I would give a whole pound
of fancy (and fancy weighs light), for one ounce of polish (and polish
weighs heavy). To be tall, pale, thin, to have dark eyes and write
gracefully in prose, is my ambition; and when I am tall, and pale, and
thin, and have dark eyes, then, and not till then, will my prose be
graceful.”
In this outline of qualifications for the writing of graceful prose Miss
Mitford did herself scant justice, as time has proved; for while her
verse is forgotten, it is her prose alone which has lived and by which
she is remembered. Had personal bulk been the deciding factor,
then, assuredly she would have been ruled out, for in a previous
letter to Sir William—with whom, by the way, she was now on such
intimate terms that personal matters of this sort were freely
discussed—she had informed him of the “deplorable increase of my
beautiful person. Papa talks of taking down the doors, and widening
the chairs, and new hanging the five-barred gates, and plagues me
so, that any one but myself would get thin with fretting. But I can’t
fret; I only laugh, and that makes it worse. I beg you will get a recipe
for diminishing people, and I will follow it; provided always it be not to
get up early, or to ride on horseback, or to dance all night, or to drink
vinegar, or to cry, or to be ‘lady-like and melancholy,’ or not to eat, or
laugh, or sit, or do what I like; because all these prescriptions have
already been delivered by divers old women of both sexes, and
constantly rejected by their contumacious patient.” And this she
supplemented by likening herself to “a dumpling of a person tumbling
about like a cricket ball on uneven ground, or a bowl rolling among
nine-pins.”
Of her prose, we shall find that her earliest descriptive pieces were
contained in the letters sent to Sir William and, although they may
lack the grace of the later finished work written for publication, they
do, at least, prove their author’s possession of “the seeing eye.”
“I am just returned from one of those field rambles which in the
first balmy days of spring are so enchanting. And yet the meadows,
in which I have been walking, are nothing less than picturesque. To a
painter they would offer no attraction—to a poet they would want
none. Read and judge for yourself in both capacities. It is a meadow,
or rather a long string of meadows, irregularly divided by a shallow,
winding stream, swollen by the late rains to unusual beauty, and
bounded on the one side by a ragged copse, of which the outline is
perpetually broken by sheep walks and more beaten paths, which
here and there admit a glimpse of low white cottages, and on the
other by tall hedgerows, abounding in timber, and strewn like a
carpet with white violets, primroses, and oxlips. Except that
occasionally over the simple gates you catch a view of the soft and
woody valleys, the village churches and the fine seats which
distinguish this part of Berkshire, excepting this short and unfrequent
peep at the world, you seem quite shut into these smiling meads.
“Oh, how beautiful they were to-day, with all their train of callow
goslings and frisking lambs, and laughing children chasing the
butterflies that floated like animated flowers in the air, or hunting for
birds’ nests among the golden-blossomed furze! How full of
fragrance and of melody! It is when walking in such scenes, listening
to the mingled notes of a thousand birds, and inhaling the mingled
perfume of a thousand flowers, that I feel the real joy of existence. To
live; to share with the birds and the insects the delights of this
beautiful world; to have the mere consciousness of being, is
happiness.”
 That was her picture of Spring. She improved as the year rolled
on, and the next January gave play for her pen in a description of
hoar-frost.
“A world formed of something much whiter than ivory—as white,
indeed, as snow—but carved with a delicacy, a lightness, a precision
to which the massy, ungraceful, tottering snow could never pretend.
Rime was the architect; every tree, every shrub, every blade of grass
was clothed with its pure incrustations; but so thinly, so delicately
clothed, that every twig, every fibre, every ramification remained
perfect; alike indeed in colour, but displaying in form to the fullest
extent the endless, infinite variety of nature. This diversity of form
never appeared so striking as when all the difference of colour was
at an end—never so lovely as when breaking with its soft yet well-
defined outline on a sky rather grey than blue. It was a scene which
really defies description.”
It was during this period, notably in 1812, that Miss Mitford must,
metaphorically speaking, have begun “to feel her feet” in literary
matters. The adulation of her father’s friends in London, backed up
by the reviews, which were, generally, favourable to her work, were
sufficient proof that she had a public and that, in time, she might
hope to secure something like a regular and even handsome income
from her pen. In this she was encouraged by Sir William Elford, who
did all that was possible to impress upon her the necessity for
studied and polished work. To this end he informed her that he was
carefully saving her letters, playfully hinting that they might prove
valuable some day. This may account for the “high, cold, polish”
which William Harness deprecated. The hint was not lost on her and
drew from her an amusing and, as events have proved, prophetic
reply: “I am highly flattered, my dear Sir William, to find that you think
my letters worth preserving. I keep yours as choice as the monks
were wont to keep the relics of their saints; and about sixty years
hence your grandson or great grandson will discover in the family
archives some notice of such a collection, and will send to the
grandson of my dear cousin Mary (for as I intend to die an old maid, I
shall make her heiress to all my property, i.e. my MSS.) for these
inestimable remains of his venerable ancestor. And then, you know,
my letters will be rummaged out, and the whole correspondence be
sorted and transcribed, and sent to the press, adorned with portraits,
and facsimiles, and illustrated by lives of the authors, beginning with
the register of their birth, and ending with their epitaphs. Then it will
come forth into the world, and set all the men a-crowing and talking
over their old nonsense (with more show of reason, however, than
ordinary) about the superiority of the sex. What a fine job the
transcriber of my letters will have! I hope the booksellers of those
days will be liberal and allow the poor man a good price for his
trouble; no one but an unraveller of state cyphers can possibly
accomplish it,”—this in allusion to the occasional illegibility of her
handwriting which elsewhere she described as “hieroglyphics, which
the most expert expounders of manuscripts fail to decipher.”
Reference to her manuscripts recalls the trouble some of them
entailed on young Valpy, the printer—really a long-suffering and
estimable young man—and his staff. For a writer so fully aware of
her shortcomings in this matter, as was Miss Mitford, she was
extraordinarily impatient and exacting. Poor Valpy did his best
according to his lights—and these were not inconsiderable—and
was more than usually anxious in the setting-up of Miss Mitford’s
work, seeing that, as she remarked in one of her letters, he had
“dandled me as an infant, romped with me as a child, and danced
with me as a young woman,” but by reason of which, she unkindly
concluded, he “finds it quite impossible to treat me or my works with
the respect due to authorship.”
Judging by the hundreds of Miss Mitford’s letters which we have
handled, full of closely-written and often indecipherable characters,
we are of opinion that she was singularly fortunate in finding a printer
able and willing to ascertain their meaning. Her condolences with her
friend, Sir William, on his “press-correcting miseries” are, though
extravagant, very diverting and, in these days of trade-unionism,
throw an interesting light on the personnel of Valpy’s little
establishment in Tooke’s Court. “I am well entitled to condole with
you, for I have often suffered the same calamity. It is true that my
little fop of a learned printer has in his employ three regularly-bred
Oxonians, who, rather than starve as curates, condescend to
marshal commas and colons, and the little magical signs which
make the twenty-four letters, as compositors; and it is likewise true,
that the aforesaid little fop sayeth—nay, I am not sure that he doth
not swear—that he always gives my works to his best hands. Now,
as it is not mannerly for a lady to say ‘you fib,’ I never contradict this
assertion, but content myself with affirming that it is morally
impossible that the aforesaid hands can have that connection with a
head which is commonly found to subsist between those useful
members. Some great man or other—Erasmus, I believe—says that
‘Composing is Heaven, preparing for publication Purgatory, and
correcting for the press’—what, must not be mentioned to ‘ears
polite.’ And truly, in my mind, the man was right. From these
disasters I have, however, gained something:—‘Sweet are the uses
of adversity’; and my misfortunes have supplied me with an
inexhaustible fund of small charity towards my unfortunate brethren,
the mal-printed authors. For, whereas I used to be a most desperate
and formidable critic on plural or singular, definite and indefinite,
commas and capitals, interrogations and apostrophes, I have now
learnt to lay all blunders to the score of the compositor, and even
carry my Christian benevolence so far that, if I meet with divers
pages of stark, staring nonsense (and really one does meet with
such sometimes), instead of crying, ‘What a fool this man must be—
I’ll read no more of his writing!’ I only say, ‘How unlucky this man has
been in a compositor! I can’t possibly read him until he changes his
printer.’” Nevertheless, and although there might be an occasional
author glad to shelter himself behind such an excuse, the fact
remains that the work which emanated from Valpy’s press is entitled
to the highest encomiums—despite his three Oxonians who,
choosing the better part, preferred to compose type rather than
sermons.
There is no record that Miss Mitford published anything from the
year 1812—when Watlington Hill appeared—until 1819, the interval
being occupied with various short trips to London, most of which
were, however, only undertaken at the urgent request of friends who
were keen on offering hospitality and entertainment. But for this
hospitality and the assurance that the visits would entail little or no
expense, it is evident that they could not have been indulged in. The
Chancery suit still dragged its weary length along and the Doctor
continued his lengthy jaunts to town, each trip being followed by the
infliction of fresh privation on his wife and daughter. The large retinue
of servants which had been installed when the family took
possession of Bertram House, had dwindled gradually, until at last it
was represented by one, or, at most, two. There was no lady’s maid,
and the footman had been replaced by a village lad who, when not
waiting at table, had to make himself useful in the garden or stable—
the jobs he was really only fitted for. The carriage-horses had gone
and were replaced by animals which could be commandeered for
farm-work; the result being that, as they were oftenest on the farm,
they were rarely available for use in the carriage, thus curtailing the
pleasure of the ladies, both of whom greatly enjoyed this form of
exercise. Finally, when the carriage required to be repaired and
painted, it was found that there was no money in hand, so it was sold
and never replaced.
Mrs. Mitford had the greatest difficulty in getting sufficient
housekeeping money wherewith to meet their quite modest
expenses, until at last the tradesmen refused to supply goods unless
previous accounts were settled and ready money paid for the goods
then ordered. They were really in the most desperate straits for
money—the daughter actually contemplated the opening of a shop—
and in one letter we are told that Mrs. Mitford begged her husband to
send her a one-pound note, as they were in need of bread! This
represented actual want, and yet, through it all, there was scarcely
any diminution in the kennel, the occupants of which were a source
of the greatest anxiety to Mrs. Mitford, who frequently did not know
whither to turn in order to obtain food for them.
In perusing the letters which were written to the various friends of
the family during this period, it is astonishing to find little or no
evidence of the distress under which the writer suffered. Miss
Mitford’s optimism was remarkable, whilst her belief in her father was
so strong that even when she found that their miserable condition
was due to his losses at the gaming-tables, she only commiserated
him and blamed others for cheating and wronging so admirable a
man, an attitude of mind which her mother shared!
 It was towards the end of the year 1818 that she seriously thought
of turning her attention to prose, encouraged by Sir William Elford,
who had been struck by her descriptions of the neighbourhood in
which she lived. She conceived the idea of writing short sketches
illustrative of country scenes and manners, and when she had
executed a few of these to her own and mamma’s satisfaction, they
were submitted to Thomas Campbell as possible contributions to the
New Monthly Magazine, of which he was then the Editor. He would
have nothing to do with them, nor did he encourage the writer to try
them elsewhere. Nothing daunted, she offered them to one or two
other Editors, but still met with refusal until she tried the Lady’s
Magazine, the editor of which had the good sense not only to accept
them but asked for more. The result to the magazine was that its
circulation went up by leaps and bounds, and the name of Mary
Russell Mitford, hitherto known only to a limited circle, became
almost a household word.
 CHAPTER XIII

LITERARY FRIENDS AND LAST DAYS AT

BERTRAM HOUSE

“What have you been doing, my dear friend, this beautiful autumn?”
wrote Miss Mitford to Sir William Elford, towards the end of 1817.
“Farming? Shooting? Painting? I have been hearing and seeing a
good deal of pictures lately, for we have had down at Reading Mr.
Hofland, an artist whom I admire very much (am I right?), and his
wife, whom, as a woman and an authoress, I equally love and
admire. It was that notable fool, His Grace of Marlborough, who
imported these delightful people into our Bœotian town. He—the
possessor of Blenheim—is employing Mr. Hofland to take views at
Whiteknights—where there are no views; and Mrs. Hofland to write a
description of Whiteknights—where there is nothing to describe.[18] I
have been a great deal with them and have helped Mrs. Hofland to
one page of her imperial quarto volume; and to make amends for
flattering the scenery in verse, I comfort myself by abusing it in prose
to whoever will listen.” The Hoflands were an interesting couple, and
Mrs. Hofland, in particular, became one of Miss Mitford’s dearest
friends and most regular correspondents. She was already an author
of some repute and an extremely prolific writer. In the year 1812 she
wrote and published some five works, including The Son of a
Genius, which had a considerable vogue. Previous to her marriage
with Hofland she had been married to a Mr. Hoole, a merchant of
Sheffield, who died two years after their marriage, leaving her with
an infant four months old and a goodly provision in funds invested.
Owing to the failure of the firm which was handling her money, she
was left on the verge of poverty and had a bitter struggle to secure
enough to live upon. A volume of poems which she published in
1805 brought her a little capital, with which she was enabled to open
a boarding-school at Harrogate; but in this venture she failed, and
then took to writing for a living. In 1808 she married Mr. Hofland, an
event which crowned her troubles for, although outwardly there was
no sign of it, there is every certainty that the overbearing selfishness
of Hofland and his lack of consideration for any but himself, made
their home-life almost unendurable. It will, therefore, be understood
why so much sympathy came to exist between Miss Mitford and her
friend, seeing that they were both suffering from an almost similar
trouble, although the matter was seldom mentioned between them.
Mrs. Hofland was an extremely pious woman, and she was also
something of a busybody, though possibly one whose interest in the
affairs of others was never unpleasant enough to cause trouble.
Hearing of the Elford correspondence, she twitted Miss Mitford with
having matrimonial designs in that quarter, which drew from the latter
the clever retort: “The man is too wise; he has an outrageous fancy
for my letters (no great proof of wisdom that, you’ll say), and
marrying a favourite correspondent would be something like killing
the goose with the golden eggs.”
Another of the notables who came prominently into Miss Mitford’s
life at this period was young Thomas Noon Talfourd, the son of a
Reading brewer. He had been educated at the Reading Grammar
School under Dr. Valpy, and “began to display his genius by
publishing a volume of most stupid poems before he was sixteen.”
The description is, of course, Miss Mitford’s. Nevertheless, he who
wrote such detestable poetry, “wrote and talked the most exquisite
prose.” Upon leaving school he was sent “to Mr. Chitty a-special-
pleading; and now he has left Mr. Chitty and is special pleading for
himself—working under the Bar, as the lawyers call it, for a year or
two, when he will be called; and I hope, for the credit of my
judgment, shine forth like the sun from behind a cloud. You should
know that he has the very great advantage of having nothing to
depend on but his own talents and industry; and those talents are, I
assure you, of the very highest order. I know nothing so eloquent as
his conversation, so powerful, so full; passing with equal ease from
the plainest detail to the loftiest and most sustained flights of
imagination; heaping with unrivalled fluency of words and of ideas,
image upon image and illustration upon illustration. Never was
conversation so dazzling, so glittering. Listening to Mr. Talfourd is
like looking at the sun; it makes one’s mind ache with excessive
brilliancy.”
Miss Mitford’s prophecy as to Talfourd’s future was more than
fulfilled, and he came, at length, not only to illumine the legal
profession but to shed a considerable lustre on literature and the
drama.
A year or two after the writing of the eulogy just quoted, Talfourd
was in Reading in a professional capacity and caused a mild
sensation by his masterly and eloquent pleading. Miss Mitford went,
with her father, to hear him, and was so moved that she wrote the
following sonnet:—
“On Hearing Mr. Talfourd Plead in the Assize-Hall at
Reading, on his first Circuit,
March, 1821.

Wherefore the stir? ’Tis but a common cause

Of cottage plunder: yet in every eye
Sits expectation;—murmuring whispers fly
Along the crowded court;—and then a pause;—
And then a clear, crisp voice invokes the laws,
With such a full and rapid mastery
Of sound and sense, such nice propriety,
Such pure and perfect taste, that scarce the applause
Can be to low triumphant words chained down
Or more triumphant smiles. Yes, this is he,
The young and eloquent spirit, whose renown
Makes proud his birth place! a high destiny
Is his; to climb to honour’s palmy crown
By the strait path of truth and honesty.”
 During the year 1817, Sir William Elford lost his wife. She was a
most estimable woman, and although her husband had,
occasionally, called on the Mitfords—turning aside, for that purpose,
from the main road which ran through Reading—in his journeys from
the west to London, she had never made their acquaintance and
only knew of them by repute and what she gathered from the
voluminous correspondence which passed between her husband
and his literary friend. News of this lady’s death drew from Miss
Mitford a charming letter of condolence which must have proved to
Sir William how large a place he held in her thoughts: “Your very
touching letter, my dear friend, brought me the first intelligence of the
dreadful loss you have experienced. I had not even any idea of
danger, or surely, most surely, I should never have intruded on you
those letters whose apparently heartless levity I am now shocked to
remember. I write now, partly in pursuance of your own excellent
system, to avoid, as much as may be, prolonging and renewing your
sorrow, and partly to assure you of our sincere and unaffected
sympathy. We had not, indeed, the happiness of a personal
acquaintance with Lady Elford, but the virtues of the departed are
best known in the grief of the survivors. To be so lamented is to have
been most excellent. And the recollected virtue, which is now agony,
will soon be consolation. God bless and comfort you all!
“I hope soon to hear a better account both of yourself and your
daughters; but do not think of writing out of form or etiquette. Write
when you will, and what you will, certain that few, very few, can be
more interested in your health or happiness than your poor little
friend.”
From this date the correspondence between the two underwent a
considerable change in tone and feeling. It became less stilted,
suggesting to the unbiassed reader the idea that the existence of
Lady Elford had, hitherto, forced the young person at Bertram House
to mind her P’s and Q’s, “which I detest having to do.” She may,
possibly, have adopted this freer style of writing in the hope of
diverting Sir William from thinking of his bereavement. In any case
the happier style of writing thus begun was never abandoned, and
the consequence was that, thereafter, they contained more of that
life and spirit which her friend Harness thought so characteristic of
her writings when she let her words drop without any premeditation,
at the prompting of her emotions.
“I have lately heard a curious anecdote of Mr. Coleridge,” she
writes, “which, at the risk—at the certainty—of spoiling it in the
telling, I cannot forbear sending you. He had for some time
relinquished his English mode of intoxication by brandy and water for
the Turkish fashion of intoxication by opium; but at length the earnest
remonstrance of his friends, aided by his own sense of right,
prevailed on him to attempt to conquer this destructive habit. He put
himself under watch and ward; went to lodge at an apothecary’s at
Highgate, whom he cautioned to lock up his opiates; gave his money
to a friend to keep; and desired his druggist not to trust him. For
some days all went on well. Our poet was ready to hang himself;
could not write, could not eat, could not—incredible as it may seem
—could not talk. The stimulus was wanting, and the apothecary
contented. Suddenly, however, he began to mend; he wrote, he
read, he talked, he harangued; Coleridge was himself again! And the
apothecary began to watch within doors and without. The next day
the culprit was detected; for the next day came a second supply of
laudanum from Murray’s, well wrapped up in proof sheets of the
Quarterly Review.”
As a foil to this she tells, in the next letter, a story of Haydon the
painter—poor, embittered disappointed Haydon, who, later, killed
himself—which she had just heard from Mrs. Hofland. “He was
engaged to spend the day at Hampstead, one Sunday, with some of
the cleverest unbelievers of the age ... and being reproached with
coming so late, said with his usual simplicity, ‘I could not come
sooner—I have been to church.’ You may imagine the torrent of
ridicule that was raised upon him. When it had subsided, ‘I’ll tell ye
what, gentlemen,’ said he, ‘I knew when I came amongst ye—and
knowing this it is not, perhaps, much to my credit that I came—that I
was the only Christian of the party; but I think you know that I will not
bear insult, and I now tell you all that I shall look upon it as a
personal affront if ever this subject be mentioned by you in my
hearing; and now to literature, or what you will!’”