The book, as a whole, does a good job in revealing the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which teachers' lives, activities, and reflections were intertwined both with the everyday lives of the communities they served and with the wider historical developments working to transform British society in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular, the expansion of the state into new areas of social and domestic life. Bischof makes a convincing case for viewing some teachers as interstitial negotiators, communicating across social and class boundaries, while, at the same time, helping to remake and reshape those boundaries.

Heather Ellis, Journal of Modern History

Bischof's work is a useful addition to a literature that has often in the past focused on the role of the teacher as a dependent ... as opposed to the independent albeit constrained profession that Bischof masterfully conjures.His ultimate success is avoiding presenting teaching as black and white, either as endlessly put-upon drudgery or a romanticised storybook profession. He shows a world where teachers had very much the same aspirations and motivations as they have today and puts to bed the oft-stated desire of those seeking an imagined world of order and function to 'go back to the Victorian age', as the same problems existed now as then.

Joseph Hayes, History of Edcuation