For our first episode of the season, we talk with Rachel Bynoth about distance education in the late-eighteenth century and how using the dual lens of gender and emotions can help us better understand educational processes. We focus on Rachel’s recent article in History, A Mother Educating her Daughter Remotely through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century, and discuss how a series of letters between two women – Hitty and Bess Canning – can help us understand how correspondence could serve as a means of informal education.
Rachel Bynoth is a postgraduate researcher and associate lecturer at Bath Spa University. She is a historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specializing in social, gender, and emotions history. Her PhD research focuses on the Canning family as a case study of the operation of remote familial relationships. She also serves as a committee member of the History Lab, the postgraduate wing of the Institute for Historical Research, and currently is the co-convenor of their seminar series. You can read more of her work at The Conversation.
Episode Transcript
Michael Donnay
This is Passing Notes from the History of Education Society.
If you’ve been lucky enough to work from home during the last few years, you’ve probably spent a lot of time on Zoom. Although most of us can speak to the challenges this has presented, educators and students have been particularly impacted by this switch to the virtual. Teaching and learning over distance presents specific challenges. These challenges aren’t necessarily tied to Zoom, or to the kind of virtual learning that students have been doing. In fact, it’s not even a new phenomenon at all. In the 18th century, for example, people engaged in education across distance through different technology, the letter, but they faced many of the same challenges we face today.
As a student myself, I wanted to better understand these challenges. What about distance makes education difficult? How do technologies impact how we learn? And I was particularly interested in different ways to think about these questions, something a little more nuanced than the Twitter hot take. I wanted to know are there other perspectives that could illuminate these challenges, particularly when we think about them in the history of education?
Today’s guest does exactly that. Rachel Bynoth is a postgraduate researcher at Bath Spa University and a historian of the 18th and 19th centuries. She specializes in the history of family, relationships and emotions. Recently, she wrote an article for History, the Journal of the Historical Association, called A Mother Educating Her Daughter Remotely Through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century. As the title suggests, the article answers a lot of these questions that I’ve been asking. Specifically, it looks at distance education in the 1700s and in particular uses the lens of emotional and gender history to explore educational practices within family life. The article builds on Rachel’s research into the extended correspondence network of the Canning family in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, made famous by George Canning, the British prime minister in 1827, who has the ignoble distinction of being the shortest serving Prime Minister in British history. The Canning family were firmly situated in the emerging middle classes by the 1780s.
Today’s conversation and Rachel’s article focuses on two of George Canning’s relatives, Hitty and Bess Canning, and a series of letters they exchanged between 1789 and 1792. Hitty, who was Bess’ mother, was away in London, attending to family matters during this time, and she used letters to oversee her daughter’s continuing education from a distance. I was really excited to speak with Rachel, because I think her research powerfully illuminates how emotion and gender can help us think differently about the history of education. We’ll talk about how the letters between Hitty and Bess Canning provide a view into the often unseen elements of women’s education during the late 1700s. We’ll talk about why emotions can be a useful tool for focusing our attention on overlooked elements within sources. And of course, we’ll talk about what the history of distance learning can tell us about our own Zoom based present.
Hi, Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. I’m really excited to have you on the podcast today.
Rachel Bynoth
Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Michael Donnay
I think a good place to start might be setting the scene for people about what distance education looked like during this period, the late 1700s. In your article, you mentioned formal correspondence courses and contrast them with the kind of informal familial education happening here between Hitty and Bess, could you lay out what those correspondence courses might have looked like during this period? And what distinguishes them from the kind of informal learning that your article discusses?
Rachel Bynoth
There were very few. This was a relatively new enterprise in the 18th century, and mainly was happening in America rather than Britain where this particular correspondence was situated. What happened in these courses is that they actually taught you various different subjects a bit like how we might get things through the post today saying, “welcome to so and so here’s all the things you need to know”. They tended to do courses on learning to write, particularly through these mechanisms, so they tended to use very formal measures. For example, they might send sheets for you to copy, and then you would return them back by mail, you would also get exercises to perform perhaps if you’re doing one, looking at improving your writing skills, it might be on how you’re actually writing in terms of tone, it might be physically the handwriting that you’re trying to improve. It might be you’re doing one that’s thinking about how to structure the particular letter that you’re thinking about. So what kind of topics you might be covering. And particularly, this would be important if you’re looking at different types of letter, for example, business letters, maybe love letters, ones that are focusing on grief, so condolence letters, so they tended to be much more how you would see it as a very sort of educationally focused, purposely educational focused, and it’s very much a transactional style processes, you get sent the material, you then engage with it however you’re supposed to, and then you send it back, and then you get a back and forth process in that way.
Whereas this is much more organic and much more wholistic. This is a correspondence that is not just about education, but education is firmly centered within it, doing a lot more work than just simply Bess doing some exercises and then sending them back to her mother. This is based a lot around their actual relationships. So there’s a lot of emotional maintaining, and relationship building and maintaining going along side the actual education that’s going on in these letters. Something that would be very different from the correspondence course, far more transactional. This is much more based around their relationship and actually has a specific way of using emotion as a sort of rhetoric or sort of tool to actually elicit things like compliance, to strengthen their own actual relationship between them while the education is going on.
Because of course, these are people that are far apart. So we’ve got a mother, who is in London, and the daughter is in Brighton, in temporary lodgings waiting for her mother to come back and say that she’s found their new sort of more permanent home. And so there’s a lot of concern from 13-year-old Bess about her mother’s love her mother’s affection, and just wanting her mother with her. So there’s a lot of talk about their actual relationship going on, as part of this education. And they use the education to actually strengthen their relationship. Although it does have some of its challenges, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. There is a real sense of the emotion coming through and the relationship being much more central to the educational processes and purpose, then say in a correspondence course, which is far more transactional.
Michael Donnay
I think the distinction you draw there between transactional and holistic learning is really interesting. And I was wondering, maybe to ground that discussion a little bit, could you talk a bit about the content, the sort of educational areas that Hitty and Bess are covering in their letters?
Rachel Bynoth
The kinds of things that they learned about: so the first thing that hitty does, is she doesn’t teach best to write but she teaches her to improve her techniques. And she presents herself very much as sort of the teacher as well as her mother. So she says that she flatters herself, that she will help to improve her writing style. And there’s little quips about things that Bess may have spelt wrong, for example, so she’s saying something along the lines of You know, why have you spelt it like that, and a lot of it comes to tone and language. So whereas you might get in a correspondence course, very much sort of transactional style language. here, you get people that are clearly very familiar with each other enough to sort of tell them off or to chastise them or use much more informal methods to say no, this is incorrect.
So Bess tends to write in a more entertaining fashion and sometimes this is good and Hitty praises the saying that this is brilliant. But other times, she says that her gramar needs attention. And she needs to think about practicing and she also framed this in a way that saying actually you need to do this for me. As your mother you know, if you love me, you will you will be attentive to your studies and diligent and Bess’ replies show how this relationship comes in. She writes her letters and presents her writing as a way that she wants to please her mother and she actually writes down really hope that I please you with whatever I’ve done. So for example, she might send a French exercise to her mother. And she says, I really hope that I’ve pleased you with my diligence in practicing my French. And I’ve been practicing the harpsichord. So she’s been doing music, she sometimes talks about her household account. So she’s been keeping up to date with the accounts. And so there’s a real sense of wanting to please her mother, in a sense that you wouldn’t necessarily get with a sort of transactional relationship. There’s much more desire to please and to almost receive praise and affection and love in return for the work that’s been put in by Bess.
Michael Donnay
One piece of content that the letters covered, which I found, you illuminated really well in the article, is this idea that there’s emotional education taking place. That it’s not just about specific content knowledge, but might be what we would today call soft skills. Obviously, they didn’t think about it in that way at the time. But it’s evident that that kind of education is still happening throughout the letters. Could you explain what that kind of emotional education looks like in these sources?
Rachel Bynoth
In terms of other subjects, beyond sort of improving the letter writing, you tend to get much more emotional education. So there’s a lot of sort of French and music and things like that being mentioned. But you also get much more emotional and social education going on in these kinds of letters. And this is something you wouldn’t get in a correspondence course. Hitty uses these letters to teach her daughter emotional management. So Bess sometimes throws what we’ve probably turned a hissy fit in her letters saying “That you haven’t written to me in over a week, you don’t love me anymore. You know, you’re not showing me that you love me.” And Bess is using this to try and gain affection from her mother, she’s cross, she’s angry. She’s saying I want affection.
And Hitty uses this as a way of teaching her daughter the art of waiting and patience, and explaining that it’s not because she doesn’t love her daughter. But she has a lot of obligations on her time, she’s writing three or four letters a day to various different individuals, some are particularly important to their current situation in trying to find a house. She’s also writing international letters to America, although we don’t know why. So she’s quite busy in terms of her other correspondence commitments. And in other letters beyond this article, there was a lot of talk of how this can be quite fatiguing, and quite tiring. And so she might not always have the sort of mental capacity to actually pen something to her quite demanding daughter that will be actually sufficient to meet Bess’ needs. Because it’s quite important that she doesn’t just rush something off, as this could be misconstrued. And of course, the letter can take a day, two days to come to the recipient, and then potentially another one or two days to come back, which is a lot of stewing time if you’ve misunderstood something. So it’s really important that she actually dedicates her time.
And there’s also social distinctions as well. So while Hitty is in London, she speaks to Bess about what goes on in the political circles in which she is embroiled. And she talks a lot about the the etiquette of the aristocracy, particularly the Duchess of Devonshire. And there is a real sense of slight disdain in how they how they operate. So they almost break some of the sort of social etiquettes of society in private. And she notes how she almost gave George Canning a hug. And realizing, just at the last moment how inappropriate that would be in company, and yet, the Duchess of Devonshire has no qualms about going up and hugging an acquaintance when they come in the room. And so she berate their lack of attentiveness to matters of etiquette. And, and through this she’s actually distilling her view, and this is what’s really important to think is that this is Hitty is going to be teaching her daughter, her way of seeing things and her way of managing things, as opposed to a more general or dispassionate education. So it’s quite subjective in this sense, and this is something else that’s quite specific to these kinds of educational practices. It is informed by wider sort of societal ideals and perhaps conduct literature. But how Hitty has interpreted these things is actually how Bess will be receiving them. So that’s something else that comes out of this kind of relationship and this kind of learning practice.
Michael Donnay
There is so much to dig into there, maybe a place to start would be looking at the actual type of etiquette education happening in these letters. I’m curious, did you find any similarities or any dissimilarities between what Hitty is writing to Bess and what say published etiquette manuals or other prescriptive literature might have been saying about proper modes of behavior at this time?
Rachel Bynoth
in the letters, you can really see her practicing general etiquette from the conduct books. I can’t say it’s 100% followed, she certainly doesn’t do everything in the conduct books, at least not in the letters – we don’t know, of course, what she was doing in person. But we do see her broadly, teaching Bess in line with that kind of literature, and very few sort of ideas of deviation. And I think a lot of that might come from her position. Whereas you see a lot more deviation, particularly in her letters from her aristocratic friends, and those with those closer connections. She really knows them through Eliza Sheridan. So she doesn’t necessarily have the full political and social power that maybe sort of Eliza Sharon herself might have. And she definitely had her moments when it comes to immorality. So you can see very much Hitty trying to keep herself to herself. And this links a lot to the actual letters themselves, as we can see her almost consciously framing her letters in a way that if others are reading them – for example, she mentions that she passes Bess’ letters around to her friends – that this idea of upholding standards, particularly in relation to her, her motherly duties, can really be seen very clearly, as “I’m sticking to the social rules. And I’m actually idealizing a lot of things.”
Michael Donnay
That was one of the things it was so nice to be reminded of that, in particular contexts, at least, letters are not a private genre at this point. They’re very much a public genre that is meant to be shared within social circles or in particular contexts. I was wondering, did you see any ways that that public nature might have shaped the educational content included in the letters or the way in which either Hitty or Bess is discussing education within the documents?
Rachel Bynoth
So a lot of this education itself potentially could actually be happening, because of Hitty’s determination to show she is still fulfilling her motherly duties in educating her daughter. One of the ideal motherhood characteristics of this time is mothers educating their children, showing love and affection and devotion. And by still continuing Bess’ education remotely through these letters, she is fulfilling these ideals. There was a sense that, you know, mother shouldn’t really be leaving their children. But of course, Hitty has justification that she’s actually doing this for the benefit of her family and for her children, and for their, their wider kin network as well. So her excuse for leaving was already centered in her role as a mother very, very clearly. And so she continues this through these letters.
And of course, having shown them to other people, there is a real sense that she in some way performs the role of mother, particularly well, almost with this consciousness that she could well be judged. And she does make a very pertinent quote, to Bess that “We are being judged, all eyes are upon us.” And so there’s a real sense that she is fully aware that these letters are going to be revealing not just about what she’s teaching Bess or what they’ve been talking about, but also how that reflects on them as a relationship between mother and child. It also reflects how Bess is progressing and what Bess has been taught. And her diligence actually reflects on Hitty as a mother. So there’s a real sense of identity shaping and how important the child’s behaviors and educational attainment actually reflects on the mother themselves, and particularly from daughter to mother. In terms of sons that tended to reflect more on the father. So this particular mother-daughter relationship was actually very important for showcasing Hitty’s identity as a good mother.
Michael Donnay
I’d now like to turn and talk a little bit about methods. The central theme for the podcast this year is thinking about how different disciplinary perspectives can inform the history of education. And I would love to think with you a little bit about how gender or the history of emotions can provide new insights for the history of education. You’ve already discussed the relationship between emotion and the educational goals of these letters. Could you talk a bit more about how using an emotions lens led you to particular discoveries, or maybe revealed things about the educational process that you might not have seen without that perspective?
Rachel Bynoth
The history of emotions lens really showcases how emotional education is, and particularly how important relationships and the emotional connections or lack of emotional connections you have with the people who are teaching you – how that informs what you might be learning from certain individuals. The other thing it really has opened my eyes to is actually how much we learn beyond the formal. So this particular correspondence, on the face value of it, you can see very clearly the the sort of learning to write and the teaching French back and forth in the letters. And her checking up on her daughter, saying “How arethe accounts, how are you getting on with your music practice? How was your poetry coming along, etc.” But what a sort of history of emotions approach really gets into the idea that actually learning is far more holistic. And we’re learning much more from lots of different things that we’re doing – more than perhaps, methods that we’re actually using to maybe think more about this in a formal sense.
Other things are going on in terms of educational practices. I’ve talked already, of course, about the emotional practices, which I think would go very unnoticed unless you’re really thinking about emotions, because they’re very much led by emotions. Of course, the social practices themselves are linked to emotions. And I think it’s important therefore, to think about how the way that things are presented and things are communicated either do or do not reflect the actual opinions or expressions or feelings of the historical actors. We need to remember, these are ways of being constructed for particular purposes, potentially crafted for particular viewpoints performances, and actually doesn’t necessarily reflect how they actually felt. But how they felt that they should be experiencing, feeling things. So it’s really useful to think about how people might be performing, or people might be trying to express something. But the specific these are the specific language parameters that they actually have in which to do so. And potentially sometimes how limiting language can be in both educating but also expressing how we actually feel about things. And I think it’s really useful to think about the emotions that come with learning. And I think this starts to think about some of the ways in which we can think about the emotions behind education, certainly more in this specific context, but it certainly could be broadened and widened out.
I think that’s a really productive way to think about integrating the history of emotions with the history of education. The article also obviously has a really strong gender focus. Could you talk a bit about how that particular focus, again, led you to particular discoveries or helped you see things in the sources that you might not have otherwise?
In terms of gender, I think it particularly highlights not just what women were actually being taught, which is much more wide scope than just these letters, but also how they were taught remotely. And there’s very little done on the fact that women still were educated through letters remotely from their parents, particularly their mothers. There’s a lot of work done on female education in the home, and how they might use tools or games or objects or dialogue to actually convey ideas and reinforce certain mentions, for example, about the household. They can shadow their mother or they can help their mother in certain tasks. Whereas these letters show that this education was still going on even when the mother or the child, depending on the situation, was actually away from the family home. And it still was a continual process.
So it takes it away from that center of the learning for a female was going on in the home, which was very big idea in this period. They tend to say, well, they’re either a girls schools, often boarding schools, or they were being educated at home, potentially by governess. Whereas this shows actually, there was much more going on – when people weren’t necessarily in the home – going on in the letter space, as well as in an actual physical space. There’s a lot more done on this for for men. They talk a lot about parents writing to men when they were boarding school, and actually the educational transactions that are going on through that process. And actually this particular article showing how that’s also going on for women, in some ways in a much more formal process than the letters that are actually going between parents and sons.
Michael Donnay
It’s so helpful to think how by bringing in those different perspectives, you can almost problematize the categories of formal and informal education. By having physical representations of what would otherwise have just been communications in the home that we can’t access anymore, you can see that process so much more clearly through these letters.
Rachel Bynoth
Absolutely.
Michael Donnay
So I want to apologize in advance for my next question, which I’m sure you must get a lot about this research. Although in fairness, you do reference it a bit in your abstract, so I’m sure you were looking to make at least some of those connections more explicitly. But when I was reading the article, and in our conversation today, I’ve definitely got some sort of heavy Zoom implications for this work. And by that I mean, you’re thinking about how distance education works, what it means how it plays out in different contexts. And I would love to take the last few minutes just to talk about those connections.
Maybe as a starting place, we can go to this excellent quote, you include in your article from one of the letters, which is speaking about the challenges of the postal system, and it reads, “This vile post often puts our patience to the test”. And to my mind, you could replace post with Zoom, or Microsoft Teams or any of the other technology we’ve been using. And it captures just how much the material conditions of our virtual communications have been challenging. And you talk about that a bit in the article. But I was wondering if you could expand: were there any connections or resonances that came to you when you were working on this article or maybe with your own experience of distance education in the last few years?
Rachel Bynoth
Yeah, I mean, there are actually a surprising amount of parallels, considering the technological differences between the letter and virtual learning platforms such as Zoom, and as you say, Microsoft Teams. So I already talked a little bit about the idea of fatigue. And I actually talked about this a bit in a article for The Conversation about how we talk a lot about Zoom fatigue today. And actually, there was a lot of letter writing fatigue in the 18th century. And they talk about how their hands are cramping, the amount of letters that they have to write – very similar to how many zoom calls or meetings we might be in a day. And as I said, earlier, Hitty actually says to her daughter, that “You need to understand that I’m not just writing to you, I’m part of a wider correspondence network, and so will you be and so you need to think about patience, and actually how you manage your correspondences and how you manage your expectations of those you’re corresponding with.”
And it’s really all part of this epistolary practice, in a similar way that we need to think about Zoom etiquette, I suppose in people might be tired, people tend to be a bit more lacks in terms of formality. So people might be there with cups of tea, they might be there in their pajamas, or whatever it is to help try and make these experiences more comfortable. And also make sure we manage the expectations of what people can and can’t do with these distant education formats. So there’s certainly one area in that sense. In relation to the quote you mentioned, which is a particularly brilliant one that Hitty mentions about the viral post is something we deal with today with the post, as well as things like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. That sense of a lack of physicality, but also time lags and issues that we might have. In our case with Zoom, it tends to be internet connections, or “you’re on mute” and things like this. It might be that we lose people momentarily and then they can come back in. Sometimes the sounds might go. We need to then set up the operations in terms of sound and video cameras and things like this.
And it’s very similar in the sense in the 18th century, we have the material objects concerned with letter writing. You need to make sure you have a sharp pen. And there’s so many complaints about pens being useless and breaking and having to learn how to sharpen them in order to actually get on with the business of letter writing. We have the issues with the post. So you could almost equate the post in this case to our internet connections, saying that they lose letters, they don’t deliver them timely. These letters are going through very many different hands as well, so they can often get lost and misplaced.
There’s a great discussion about a letter which Hitty fills with all of the illuminations to do with the Prince Regent. And she’s talks a lot about a diamond brooch that a relation (the wealthy relations from the gentry side, who didn’t get disinherited) have bought. And then Bess says, “You didn’t tell me anything about the illuminations in – what’s going on?” when she received her next letter. And then Hitty is confused: “Well, I did definitely write about it.” And then Bess, she writes about it again. And then Bess goes, “Oh, I’ve just received two letters, and they’re pretty much identical.” So we ended up getting issues of communication, which can cause tensions. And Bess herself feels like she’s been forgotten. There’s been no communications from her mother when they were expected. She feels cross that she was promised information and she wasn’t given it. And then of course, you have issues on Hitty’s side, “My goodness, communications are breaking down, my letters aren’t getting through. And I don’t know what the problem is.” So there’s a lot of reliance on technology services outside of our own control, which we can certainly relate to. When we think about platforms such as Zoom.
Michael Donnay
And in terms of learning, do you see any continuity or discontinuity?
Rachel Bynoth
In terms of learning, it’s a slower process, and it’s a more disembodied one in terms of you’re not physically with a person. And one of the benefits we do now have with our online platforms is that we can speak almost instantaneously as if we’re having a conversation. Whereas letters have a time lag, which does inhibit what’s going on, because people’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas change all the time. And so with a two-day delay, something you may have written two days ago, you might think, actually, I should have mentioned this, or I should have thought about this, or this is now relevant, or I need to now think about this. So there’s a lot of delays in communicating some of the ideas that are going on, some of the news and some of the thoughts that are happening, which may have been more relevant at certain times than others. Which we don’t have as a consequence of zoom. So that’s one benefit we can, we can see from today – is that we actually have much more instantaneous communications.
On the other hand, there is a similarity in that even in the fractions of seconds between these communications, there’s still a sense of anxiety and concern about miscommunication and being misunderstood. And although we live in a much more instantaneous age of communication, we still have those feelings. You may send a text and say, “Oh, my goodness, are they going to understand what I mean by that emoji?” Or “Do they think that I’ve written that in a really no harsh tone when it wasn’t meant in that way?” And we can still have that sense in our instant communications today through social media and texting, and also chats on Zoom and Teams platforms, like they do in letters and have those worries. The differences is that the worries are longer, and perhaps built up more, which causes them much more intense frustrations and outbursts than perhaps we would do today, when we don’t have we can remedy things much, much more quickly.
Michael Donnay
I think one of the most common critiques about Zoom is this idea of lacking physical presence, that even though we have video and audio, there’s something really essential missing when you’re not able to be physically present with other people for an educational experience. And I’m curious, were there any signs in either your sources or other encounters with 18th century material, that people had similar reflections about the limitations of letters, when it came to the sort of material or physical engagement around education?
Rachel Bynoth
In terms of the learning we do have the sense that there is a lack of materials in both senses. So of course on Zoom, they might put pictures up of objects that we might actually want to feel in touch and engage with. And the same would be happening with 18th century letters. There are no mentions about the physical sort of objects of play or objects of learning that you see in studies of the home. So we’ve got Serena Dyer’s new book of material lives really talks about how women used different objects they may have made themselves, or they may have bought them, to actually educate their children, particularly their daughters in different ideas. They may have made like a paper dolly, and put on paper, dresses and things like this. There’s no mention of any of that kind of engagement.
And I think it’s one of the reasons that the emotional connections are much more important in a distant communications relationship such as this, because it’s on that that you get authority. Because of course, on Zoom, you know, your kid, the kid on the other side, could be doing anything for all we know. Similarly, in order to retain a sense of authority, there needs to be that want from the child to please their parents who do as the parent says, and so that’s a relationship that’s been both cultivated off the page, but also continues on the page, and it is reinforced strongly on the page as well. So that’s something I think that we need to think about when we’re doing our own distance learning: is actually that importance of the relationship with the with the child or the pupil, or the person we’re trying to educate. How are we eliciting that compliance? And what methods are we taking to do so? Because of course, we weren’t all the educated by our mothers. But there is a lesson in terms of actually how compliance is given at a distance, when it’s so much easier to be not paying attention, to be doodling. And it’s very difficult to actually have the authority to their attention and actually bring them back then it isn’t a physical environment where people are placed in a place of learning or a place they associate with learning rather than perhaps their bedroom or their living room or something. So there’s a real sense that we need to think about that idea of relationships and emotional connection, in terms of what’s changed through distance. And I think that’s something that relates to both the letters and also more modern platforms.
Michael Donnay
One of my favorite things about history generally, but that I think your article does so well, is this idea that by thinking about, particularly the material conditions of the past, it can help clarify our thinking about the material conditions of our own present.
Rachel Bynoth
Yeah, I think it’s really important to think about what’s going on in the past, and actually, people who have been in a situation that were maybe more unfamiliar with. So we’ve obviously not been in an age where digital education and distance learning was a norm. It was around but it wasn’t as mainstream or centralized, as it has been recently. Yet, in the past, it was a much more familiar phenomenon, being separated, being apart. And actually, it’s worth thinking about when people were more used to this, what were the practices and routines that they had that we can maybe think about, and draw on in our own situations.
Michael Donnay
That feels like a really great place to end it. Rachel, thank you so much for coming and talking with us today. I really appreciate you sharing your perspective and your research with us. I feel like I’ve learned so much about distance education in the 18th century, and have a new set of questions to interrogate my own experience with distance education. So thank you again for joining us and for sharing all of your expertise.
Rachel Bynoth
Thank you so much for inviting me it’s been great.
Sources
A Mother Educating her Daughter Remotely through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century by Rachel Bynoth
What one Georgian family can teach us about writing letters in the age of Zoom by Rachel Bynoth
Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century by Serena Dyer