ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that teachers show useful non-fiction resources from the nineteenth century can be in teaching students across all stages of secondary education. From bringing the historical context of novels to life, to teaching students how to write using nineteenth-century vocabulary, they are a wonderful tool that adds variety to teachers’ teaching and opens students’ eyes to a world that, in reality, was not much different to own. School teaching or governessing were the only acceptable professions for a middle-class, unmarried woman without private means, and with most upper- and upper-middle-class families choosing to educate their children at home, they were in high demand. Familiarising students with nineteenth-century language usage and helping them to approach older texts with less trepidation are also something that non-fiction texts help with enormously. The bigger the bank of resources teachers build up, the more ways in which they will find space for slotting nineteenth-century non-fiction into their lessons.
