In Mary Shelley’s gothic creation Frankenstein, the Creature’s learning of language is described as something sublime: “[he]… perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science” (Shelley, 1818/2000, p. 103). In terms of linguistic development, the Creature’s learning that occurs from simply watching and listening to the day-to-day lives of a family of French exiles through a hole in the wall is quite naïve; there is no interaction between the Creature and the family, Shelley presumably conceiving him as a blank slate. Over time, the Creature realises an association between the signs in the books read by the exiles and speech, a tacit acknowledgement of the arbitrary link between word symbols and the nature of the sounds when spoken. The Creature does not explain exactly how he was able to learn what he calls the ‘science of letters’; his focus is on describing how learning to read “opened before me a wide field of wonder and delight” (p. 108). The affective impact of understanding language underlines the tragedy of the Creature: now that his mind has been ‘opened’ by language, he begins to wonder about the world and himself. In a Cartesian sense, the Creature thinks himself into existence as he grapples with his own identity through language: “the words induced me to turn towards myself … And what was I?” (p. 108). Language has provided thought, identity, and therefore existence.

This chapter will consider the particular manifestation of English as a ‘school subject’, principally in the country called England and using some small space for significant international comparisons, and it will mainly focus on the secondary school version. We will call this phenomenon School Subject English (SSE). The chapter will argue that historically SSE has gone through phases of development and adaptation, some aspects of these changes inspired by new theories and concepts and by societal change, some others, especially more recently, entirely reactive to external impositions (for an analysis of the current position of SSE, see Roberts, this volume). This chapter considers SSE to have been ontologically ‘expanded’ between 1870 and (about) 1990, increasing the ambition and scope of the ‘subject’ and the emancipatory ideology of its teachers. This ontological expansion was principally a result of adding ‘models’ of SSE, models that each emphasise different epistemologies of what counts as significant knowledge, and can only exist in a dynamic tension. In relation to this volume, SSE has always incorporated close attention to language but only very briefly (1988–1992) has something akin to Applied Linguistics had any real influence in the secondary classroom. However, with varying emphasis historically, there has been attention (the Adult Needs/Skills model, see later) to the conventions of language, especially ‘secretarial’ issues of spelling and punctuation, some understanding of grammar, and a focus on notions of Standard English, in writing and in speech; but these have never been the driving ideology of SSE. Of the two conceptual giants ‘Language’ and ‘Literature’, it is the latter that has mattered most over those 120 years.