Miriam Burstein (The Little Professor) remarks on the difficulty of disentangling History from the same period’s Literature, and getting students to recognize primary-source context instead of pop culture-source context.
There’s also a link to an interesting Victorian Web essay which explains why so many 19th century books appear in multiple parts (at least the UK versions). I had no idea.
Seeing as how Odd Ends has mostly 19th century (and related) content seen through my own context, and as I am neither historian nor literary critic, I can only hope that I’m not contributing to Dr Burstein’s “sobs of agony.” Odd Ends gets many search engine hits during exam and paper time…