An almost universal concern of the Victorian governing classes was with the question of social control: how to deflect a largely uneducated working class from their inevitable challenge to the centres of power, accepted value systems and existing authority structures. The fear in which the masses were held by the middle and upper classes came to dominate access to education or, more accurately, to what they defined as "useful knowledge," since this was designed to instil the values of a just and ordered society. Conversely for the working class, it would give them power; power over their own...