A common school: Models of instruction in the United States common school movement and the 1850s literature of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Lee Hentz, Fanny Fern, and Mary Jane Holmes

Popular fiction in the United States before the Civil War contributed to the growing consensus around the common school movement, as novelists shared concerns of the common school reformers, including the hiring of women as teachers, the public funding of free, public elementary schools, the necessity of extended education for women, and the importance of family and community involvement in education. This dissertation examines the intersections between the common school movement and the antebellum fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Lee Hentz, Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton), and Mary Jane Holmes. An interdisciplinary approach analyzes how the philosophies and practices of education in the popular fiction correlated with precepts expressed by educators and education reformers such as Horace Mann and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Both the reformers and the women writers articulated the value of women as educators yet expressed anxieties about middle-class women entering the public sphere of employment outside of the home.; Stowe asserts, in abolitionist novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), that all people have educational rights and that the education of slaves creates the desire for emancipation and equips former slaves to live in freedom. While Stowe widens the scope of the public school movement, Hentz constricts it, undermining public school movements. In Linda (1850), Eoline (1852), The Planter's Northern Bride (1854), and Ernest Linwood (1856), Hentz promotes the extension of women's education and influence but limits educational opportunity to wealthy white citizens. In Ruth Hall (1855), Rose Clark (1856), and journalism, Fern reinforces antebellum reformers' urgings in the areas of parental involvement in schools, physical improvements to the schools, age-appropriate studies and homework, and the limitation of corporal punishment, while satirizing school administration. In Tempest and Sunshine (1854), The English Orphans (1855), and Meadow Brook (1857), Holmes promotes the adoption of common school reforms as well as the value of higher education. Despite different emphases, authors of domestic fiction participated in cultural debates about establishing a system of education in the U.S., urging the hiring of women teachers and the expansion of women's educational opportunities.