British and Danish policymakers in the long nineteenth century developed schools to support nation-building, industrialization, and democratization; yet they made different choices about the timing of public-school systems, workers’ access, variation of educational programs, pedagogical methods, and mechanisms for oversight. Beliefs about the purpose of education informed policy choices and fiction writers were important sources of ideas about education. British writers portrayed education as an essential tool for the cognitive development of the child and believed that a well-educated individual should master a prescribed curriculum to attain full selfhood. The right and left disagreed about the advisability of educating workers, yet even many on the left worried that educating the working class could “contaminate” the nation’s culture. Danish writers recognized the value of education for individual self-development, but both left and right also viewed schools for farmers and workers as essential for a strong society. Fiction writers joined political movements to put education and they fulfilled vital services in these movements. They were the spin doctors who provided cognitive frames about educational problems and solutions, and they popularized social problems with vivid, emotional language. A chorus of literary voices provided the soundtrack, inspiration, and subliminal messaging for campaigns supporting school development.

Despite having few natural resources and peasant serfs, Denmark developed public primary education in 1814, while Britain delayed the mass, public school system until 1870 and provided little instruction to working-class students. Later, Denmark’s secondary education system included publicly-funded vocational training programs, while Britain developed a single-track system that ignored technical skills. Fiction writers and their cultural narratives contributed to educational choices. Authors became important individual political agents in school reform movements, by using fiction to advance policy ideas and inspire emotional outrage. Writers collectively contributed to the nationally distinctive symbols and narratives about education that appeared in their country’s literature. Each generation of authors inherited these distinctive cultural tropes from their literary ancestors, reworked these for new problems, and passed these along to future generations. Studying fiction writers and their narratives offers a tangible way to evaluate how culture matters to political outcomes, as we may empirically (with computational linguistics and a close reading of texts) observe significant cross-national differences in historical literary images of education. The work suggests how cultural narratives contribute to the emergence of coordinated and liberal varieties of capitalism and reflects on how cultural narratives provide a source of continuity within long-term processes of institutional change.