Eradicating Illiteracy in the Rural Masses during the Great War

This study analyses a unique Italian publication linked to a wider project aimed at eradicating the illiteracy of the rural masses. Il Piccolissimo (1917–1919), a magazine written for children in the agricultural area around Rome, informed them about the Great War and educated them about better values and the importance of making savings. This cultural project, conceived and edited by Giovanni Cena and other intellectuals of the time, also envisaged the establishment and management of rural schools and infirmaries to provide children with a better and healthier life. In Italy, during those years, the magazine Il Corriere dei Piccoli was published to entertain and educate children of the middle and upper classes, while Il Piccolissimo sought to develop an awareness of social responsibility in the poor and hardworking children of the countryside. By examining its contents, graphic layout, iconic language, and educational aims we intend to highlight how the type of childhood it targeted acquired unprecedented social visibility in Italy.

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Hannah Jessie Hankin-Hardy, in medical and humanitarian mission in Serbia during the great war

Archive of oncology ◽

10.2298/aoo1004136p ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 18 (4) ◽

pp. 136-139

Author(s):

Slavica Popovic-Filipovic

Keyword(s):

Medical School ◽

Cultural Tradition ◽

Great War ◽

Medical Missions ◽

Humanitarian Mission ◽

The Poor ◽

Adriatic Coast ◽

The Great War ◽

Humanitarian Work

The Studenica Monastery, built in 1186 A.D., the royal mausoleum of the Nemanjic Dynasty, is considered the forerunner of the Serbian statehood and conscience because in it the first school and hospital were established. It is also where the first book was written in Serbian language. Studenica, as the cradle of the Serbian medicine, produced - and through the following eight centuries, nurtured many educators and iconic figures of the Serbian cultural tradition. Among them was St. Sava, the first Serbian Archbishop, whose name is also borne by one of the highest Serbian civilian orders, which is awarded for extreme dedication and philanthropy in Serbia and worldwide. This here is an attempt to preserve the memory of the philanthropist Hannah Henkin Hardy, who was also personally awarded one of these Serbian orders. Hannah Henkin Hardy (1886-1944) was born in Worchester, U.K., completed a medical school in Melbourne, Australia, and arrived in Serbia in January 1915 together with the first Scottish Women's Hospitals. In Kragujevac, together with the Serbian physicians, and the 'Kolo srpskih sestara,' Mrs. Hardy established the League of Serbian Women to jointly fight the great typhus epidemic. She also founded the out-patients ambulances for the poor in Kragujevac, as well as the soup kitchens, and took part in various humanitarian activities. Mrs. Hardy and her husband Samuel Hardy, together with some other philanthropists, repaired the war-damaged Church of St. George in Topola. She joined the Serbian refugees in their escape from the invading enemy forces to the Adriatic Coast through the dangerous snowbound mountains of Albania and Montenegro. She remembered the suffering of the Serbian people and the dedicated humanitarian activities of the Serbian medical corps and foreign medical missions for the rest of her life. Mrs. and Mr. Hardy dedicated their lives to philanthropy and humanitarian work, helping small and suffering peoples and nations.

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An Ethics of Wartime Protest

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781949979374.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 67-80

Author(s):

Eleanor McNees

Keyword(s):

Virginia Woolf ◽

Great War ◽

War And Peace ◽

Revision Process ◽

To The Lighthouse ◽

Narrative Structures ◽

The Poor ◽

The Great War

Reacting to the Armistice of November 11, 1918 in her diary, Virginia Woolf reported seeing a “fat slovenly woman” on the train from Richmond to London and commented that “she & her like possessed London, & alone celebrated peace in their sordid way...” (D 1:216). Of Peace Day, July 19, 1919, designated as the official celebration of the peace, she later remarked how the “poor deluded servants” had taken the bus to see the decorations left over from the celebratory parade. She stated, “I was right: it is a servants [sic.] peace” (D 1:294). In spite, however, of these patronizing and slightly derogatory comments about servants’ crowd mentality, Woolf initially chose to present both the Great War and the Armistice through individual servants’ eyes in the Time Passes interval in To the Lighthouse and in the 1914 and 1918 chapters of The Years. The lurching Mrs. McNab in To the Lighthouse and the hobbling Crosby in The Years are not among the sordid celebrators Woolf criticizes in her diary. Instead, their painful efforts to persevere regardless of war or peace reflect Woolf’s criticism of a jingoistic and patriarchal patriotism that panders to the lower classes. Adapting Gérard Genette’s and Mieke Bal’s narrative structures of focalization, this essay considers Woolf’s ethical struggle as a novelist to articulate private and voiceless alternative perspectives through the servant characters. McNees traces Woolf’s successive revisions of both novels from holograph to published edition in which she substantially reduces the servants’ roles to render them less effectual as alternative reflectors of war and peace. Against critical analyses that consider Woolf’s revisions as mainly aesthetic, the essay argues for an ethics of revision in which Woolf critiques her own methods of manipulating the servants’ views of war and peace to produce an authentic alternative to the paternalistic public version. Examining the revision process of both Time Passes and the first “expurgated chunk” of The Years, McNees suggests that Woolf’s efforts at focalization through Mrs. McNab and Crosby ultimately fail because, as Woolf herself states in “The Niece of an Earl” (1928),, “...it is impossible, it would seem, for working men to write in their own language about their own lives” (E 5:132). Nevertheless, Woolf’s attempt to cross this divide to register a perspective otherwise silenced and obscured deserves the qualified praise she rendered Meredith.

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