This chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the volume. It establishes the conceptual foundations of English language teaching as a profession and highlights its complexity. Professional teaching needs to be regarded as a multidimensional process that combines issues pertinent to the classroom context and teaching–learning with institutional and general pedagogical factors. The process of becoming a professional teacher therefore implies an ongoing commitment to educational change and growth. By adopting a broader perspective, practitioners will be able to teach in a manner that is beneficial to students and society alike. This chapter also elucidates the fact that professional language teaching entails the use of culturally and socially embedded communication and an ability to connect pedagogy with language learning. To address these issues successfully, teachers need to engage in ongoing processes of reflection and theorisation of their practice. To conclude the chapter, a synopsis of all the chapters in this book is provided, highlighting the key themes that emerge from each.

This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

This chapter considers the role of the essay in debates over the ‘rise of English’ in the nineteenth century. It firstly explores the crossover between academia and publishing, focusing on David Masson and George Saintsbury, whose well-regarded literary essays led to professorial appointments at London and Edinburgh. It then considers how University Extension lecturer John Churton Collins turned to periodical essays to garner support for the introduction of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge. Collins’s diatribes argued that the literary essay itself was at risk of extinction if journalists and critics continued to be deprived of professional training. Finally, this chapter considers the inclusion of essayists on English literature syllabuses during the fin de siècle. Figures such as Joseph Addison, William Hazlitt, and John Dryden, along with later writers including Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Charles Lamb were prominently featured, suggesting that essayists were regarded as the sine qua non of literary study at that time.

This chapter shows the essay’s troubled evolution as an academic genre in the nineteenth century, from the norms of classical rhetoric taught in English schools to the professionalising educational practices of Scottish universities and their American counterparts. Aimed to introduce meritocracy to Oxford and Cambridge’s class preferment system, the rise of essay-based public examinations in the 1850s reshaped the academic essay to sustain an informational mastery of the complexities of British imperial rule. Professors of English reacted to the new public-exam essay regime with one of two tactics. One was to strip the essay down to a managerial model that came to be known as the five-paragraph essay, shorn of classical figurality and stressing correct usage. Meanwhile, advocates of liberal education revived the teaching of the literary essay based on Victorian models, setting up a lengthy dispute in the twentieth century between literary and social-scientific protocols of essay writing.

This chapter investigates how the idea of ‘service’ narrates the shifting (and sometimes consistent) ways in which actors have been understood on and off the British stage since the Second World War. ‘Service’ is a word often used casually by critics and theatre workers alike, but it contains a multitude of sometimes contradictory meanings, revealing of the peculiar social status of actors in Britain. The chapter argues that the combination of an idealist sense of service, inherited from the nineteenth century stage with the rhetoric of national duty during the war, promoted the increasing professionalisation among actors in Britain since 1945. The idea of the actor as public servant or member of the professional classes was complicated, however, by the longstanding association of actors with bohemianism, producing an ambiguous class identity for the acting profession. It is this class anxiety and ambivalence, complicated by post-war ideas of national service, that is the concern of this chapter. Finally, the chapter proposes that the rhetoric of service and the cultures of bohemianism have functioned as forms of mystification that disavow the actor’s status as a waged worker.

This chapter focuses on how the European integration process affects the role and function of the legal profession. The chapter starts from a number of observations on transformations in the legal profession, from the growth of the legal profession to the increasing tension between local and national lawyers versus those working in European and global settings. The overall development culminates in the European expert rhetoric, which is driven and promoted by the European Commission. Experts are expected to fill spaces in the endless numbers of European committees, and the whole inner machinery of the EU is dependent on self-named and EU certified experts. What then is a European legal expert? How does a legal expert differ from other experts? This chapter uses the professionalisation theory by Oevermann to test whether and to what extent legal professionalism is replaced by a legal expertise rhetoric and what it could mean for legal professionalism and the European legal profession.

Chapter 6 explores the efforts to institutionalise a new book-based expertise through the professionalisation of agriculture. First, it considers the reimagining of agriculture as a learned profession through contemporary analogies with medicine. Second, it examines how books were envisioned as part of a new system of learning by analysing proposals for educational reform. Third, it examines the development of the estate or land steward as an example of an agricultural profession that came to be defined by possession of universal book-based knowledge, through an analysis of manuals for stewards. It argues that while the vision of professionalised agriculture was only partly achieved, it reveals the scope of ambition of agricultural authors in their determination to monopolise knowledge.

New circus/nouveau cirque is an artistic movement that circus historian Martine Maléval locates between 1968 and the 1990s. It can be described as both an aesthetic and a political revolution that was rooted in the dynamics of the social and cultural revolutions of the 1970s. For numerous reasons this period can be identified as the source of a renewed institutionalisation of the circus that is still ongoing. Commencing with the professional careers of circus artists who were active in the 1970s and the 1980s, this chapter examines how these artists progressively defined themselves as ‘circus authors’, how they promoted innovation in the aesthetics and practices of the circus, and how they generated a long-term impact on local cultural policies and the social status of contemporary circus artists in Europe. The process through which new circus emerged and evolved can be understood using the concept of ‘artification’ (becoming an art form), a term used by the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich and subsequently applied to circus studies by Magali Sizorn. Using Maléval’s foundational research on the French nouveau cirque as its point of departure, this chapter adopts a European-wide perspective to examine the influence of new circus from the 1990s until today.

The Victorian period was the most formative era for professional nursing and for cultural concepts of the nurse. The most prominent representative figures of nursing from the period were the disreputable Sairey Gamp – the infamous character from Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewitt – and the very real and very proper Florence Nightingale. The Victorian cultural perception of nursing was more complex than these polar opposites might suggest, however. The influences that cumulatively fashioned the popular figure of the nurse were legion and contradictory, ranging from camp follower to proselytising nun to heroic martyr.

The evolution of nursing practice from menial to professional work was widely examined and debated in the media and through fictional representations of nurses. As these treatments reveal, there was marked cultural ambiguity about the entrance of refined women into nursing, which, even in its most professional form, entailed a level of intimacy with both male and female bodies and bodily fluids that was disturbing to Victorian sensibilities. What emerges in both the media and fiction is a curious and very Victorian fixation on sexuality that was explicitly or implicitly directed at the women who practised nursing.

This chapter examines the ‘servant problem’ from the servant’s point of view through a history of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–1910). It is the first ever in-depth history of this or any other servants’ trade union in Britain. It provides an important new perspective on both class relations in the suffrage movement and the gender politics of labour organising in the years leading up to the First World War. My account relies upon the correspondence pages of the Woman Worker and the Glasgow Herald, and on press cuttings from the local and radical press. These letters provide an unusual opportunity for the voices of rank-and-file domestic workers to be heard discussing working conditions and the possibility of self-organisation. The DWU aimed to be a union run ‘by servants for servants’. It sought to reconfigure the mistress–maid relationship as a formal employment contract, and did not shy away from the potential for class antagonism between these two groups of women despite also having its roots in the suffrage movement.