Diligent and docile workers: descriptions of the working poor and the social order in the Läsebok för folkskolan, 1868–1920s

ABSTRACT The educational system in nineteenth-century Sweden was, as in many other industrialising states, segregated by social class. Children of the economically and politically marginalised classes were educated in basic primary subjects in the nationwide Folkskola (primary schools). From 1868 to the early 1940s, the government issued, subsidised, and distributed the Läsebok för folkskolan (Reader for Primary School; “the Reader”). Besides poems and songs, the Reader contained religious, fictitious, moral, and historical texts – all wrapped in an explicit nationalist discourse. However, it also contained images and ideologies about social class which have remained unexplored. The representations and social vernaculars in the Reader about how children of the working poor should identify and conduct themselves in order to grow up as functional members of a bourgeois society have been more or less overlooked. This paper deals with the images of the poor and marginalised in the Reader. We suggest not only that the Swedish state reproduced a class-based society through a segmented school system, but that the social descriptions in the book were aimed to produce diligent and docile workers to serve the political and economic interests of the dominant classes.


Introduction
The rich man, when he noticed it, Grew serious and said, "Faithfulness in times of need is more than gold and bread". 1 Sweden's nineteenth-century educational system was segregated by class. Children from poor or working-class families went to the public primary school called Folkskolan. The section quoted above was part of a longer story, published in the Läsebok för folkskolan (Reader for Primary School; "the Reader"), subsidised and distributed by the state. The story, written in verse, was about the hardships of a poor family, forced after the father's death to move to a small cabin, where the mother and her two children endured a life of suffering and penury. In time, they could no longer feed their faithful old dog, Musti. The mother chose to sell Musti to the rich man in the mansion located a short distance from the cottage. Musti kept running back from the rich man's mansion to his home. even though food there was scarce. The rich man's admiration of the dog's faithfulness is an example of the ideas about wealth, poverty, and moral values presented in the Reader. The rich man, who is the authoritative voice in the story, advises children that a poor home with love and caring is worth more than a wealthy manor and constructs poverty as a virtuous state.
This story is but one example of many that treat the relationships between poverty, wealth, and morality. Thus, as children of the poor and working classes learned how to read, they also learned an ideological vocabulary of social categories and images from which they could understand society and themselves. From 1868 to the late 1930s, the Reader was fundamental in reading exercises for as many as 7 million primary-school pupils. 2 Therefore, the Reader must be considered one of the main state apparatuses for governing the values and interests of the dominated classes during this era. In this article, we analyse the Reader to understand how the nineteenth-century Swedish government tried to foster worker identities in the children of the poor.
The Swedish state was not alone in trying to control and influence the politically and economically marginalised at this time. Efforts were initiated by many capitalist governments across Europe and the US. As the British historian David Cannadine writes, nineteenth-century industrialising countries saw the rise of class affect how society was perceived and how people identified their place in the new social order. As the worldviews and identities of the former society faded, classes and categories such as workers and industrialists, "the people", and the educated classes gradually came to dominate how society was understood. 3 The meanings and roles of the emerging social classifications and groups were contested, and the hearts and minds of the working poor were at the centre of this battle. The popular press, socialist parties, and organised labour formed political working-class identities based on their shared interest in political and economic equality. These groups used class language as a political tool to mobilise against the unjust economic system. 4 The ruling classes, on the other hand, used their political influence and cultural power against such mobilisation and in support of the status quo. They spread a doctrine of loyalty among the dominated, changed the language of class, and fabricated group identities to support their continued dominance. In Sweden, such efforts included the spread of the concept "the dangerous classes", a liberal construct of the concept "worker's class", in liberal and conservative media directed at "the working people", in scientific knowledge production on the foundation of poverty, and, of course, in statistical schemes and legislation regarding unemployment and vagrancy. 5 Yet, we can also observe it in the very establishment of a state-organised system of mass education and in the pedagogical materials the government provided.
While the role of the state and the hidden curriculum of schooling has been thoroughly considered in how the poor learned to become labourers in the twentieth century, 6 comparatively less attention has been paid to the role of the nineteenth-century state in reproducing the social relations of capitalist production in a cultural sense, installing classificatory systems, and teaching the population new social vernaculars and senses of self. Foremost among other such identity projects during the same era were the formation of national identities, the function of the modern state, and especially its school systems. 7 Although considerable research has been devoted to national identity and national languages of meaning, only a handful have discussed social identity and discourses relating to work, occupation, and economic status. Perhaps the scholars in the field of history of education have most explicitly underlined the role of nineteenth-century governments in ascribing to working-class children, via schooling, the desired conducts and social identities of the dominant classes. In the case of England, Stephen J. Heathorn has shown that a liberal master narrative influenced the language of the social order that workingclass children learned in primary-school textbooks and readers. The middle-class values of self-help, industry, civility, and loyalty were cultivated in Victorian English classrooms. 8 However, there is much to suggest that England was not an exception with regard to the role of government in teaching working-class social vernaculars with implicit ideological values emanating from the dominant classes. Yet to what extent children's school experiences differed between industrialising nation states is largely unexplored. In our view, the historical and political-social circumstances, as well as the general ideological orientation of the dominant classes and their 5  intellectuals, must have had an impact on the content of the social languages in the pedagogical contents of mass education. This makes a study of the comparatively more conservative and centralised Swedish experience interesting. 9 How were social identities constructed in Swedish primary schools? What was the general ideological orientation of the visions of sociality presented? To answer these questions, we analysed descriptions of the working poor and the social order in four of the thirteen editions of the Reader from 1868 to the late 1920s. 10 In the analysis, we found the Reader of that period to be a government tool used to fashion poor children into docile and diligent workers. We also suggest that conservative social views were prominent in the Sweden of that time.
In the next section, we describe the development of the Swedish educational system, focusing especially on the state primary school for the children of workers and the poor. After this, we discuss how the state took a more active governing role in the content of primary-school teaching in the 1860s, which led to the creation of the Reader. Furthermore, we discuss how previous research has treated textbooks and readers with a focus on their identity-creating significance. After we have presented the study's theoretical and methodological starting points and design, two empirical sections follow. Finally, we discuss the results of the study.

The rise of mass education in Sweden and the Läsebok för folkskolan
The state was without doubt the main apparatus of the ruling classes for installing the new political economy in nineteenth-century Europe. 11 Educational development was a part of that process. 12 The development of schooling in Sweden during the nineteenth century can be described as nothing less than an educational revolution, as it brought about not just a massive expansion in the number of schools, but also major changes in how schooling was organised and conducted. 13 During the first half of the nineteenth century, the public debate over education turned towards schools for the common people. 14 As a result, Sweden passed its first general primary-school act in 1842. The school act stipulated that every parish should hire a teacher and build a primary school for the working-class children. 15 These new schools, together with the traditional grammar schools that were designed to educate boys for an ecclesiastical career, formed the basis for a parallel educational system from the mid-century on. As in many Western countries, this parallel system was socially segmented and a vital factor in the rise of a modern class society. 16 In Sweden, this meant that while the children of the working classes were taught Christianity and how to read, write, and do simple arithmetic in public primary schools, the boys of the middle and upper classes got more advanced forms of education in grammar schools (läroverk). The daughters of the middle and upper classes also got a more advanced education in special girls' schools (flickskolor) that were not formally part of the school system. 17 Much previous research on the creation of a socially segmented school system in Sweden has centred on the evolution of different types of school for different social classes. 18 Several researchers have argued that this segregated school system aided in creating a class society. 19 Less attention, however, has been paid to how the content of teaching in these schools reproduced the capitalist social conditions of production. 20 The primary-school act of 1842 supplemented teaching the catechism with teaching other subjects as well. 21 During the first decades, the children were educated in the Christian faith, biblical history, reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. 22 The need for more comprehensive teaching materials, not least for reading exercises, was discussed from at least the early 1860s. The government came to take the lead in the process and a decade of discussion resulted in the creation of the subsidised Reader. 23 This coincided with the government taking a more active and interventionist role in the educational system at large. For example, school inspections were introduced in the same decade. 24 The main source material in this article, the Reader, was first issued in 1868 on orders from the Swedish Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs and was used in Swedish primary schools until the late 1930s. During that time the Reader was reissued several times, and the 8th (1878), 9th (1899), and 10th (parallel; 1911-) editions stand out as especially important as they contain major revisions. 25 We know that the Reader was used in primary-school classrooms, which makes it appropriate to answering the research questions, although it was criticised for being too abstract and advanced for these pupils. 26 The Reader was edited by a group of scholars and teachers that changed over time through the various editions. The editors could be understood as state intellectuals as the Reader was sanctioned by the Ministry for Ecclesiastical Affairs. Johan Wickström characterised the editors and authors as bourgeois intellectuals who created and instilled the moral codes of the new capitalist ruling class. 27 Besides poems and songs, the Reader contains religious, fictional, moral, and historical texts -all wrapped in an explicit nationalist and Lutheran protestant discourse. 28 The first edition consisted of seven sections. The first section consisted of short moral texts, religious and moral rules of conduct, and poems. Sections two and three focused on Swedish history and geography, and sections four and five described geographies and cultures of foreign countries and their peoples. Part six contained essays on technical developments, physics, and scientific inventions, and the last section consisted of short essays and songs in Danish and Norwegian. 29 The first edition was printed as one book, but as the number of pages increased in the following editions the separate parts were printed as books of their own. 30 The substantive changes in the new editions were actually quite small until the 10th parallel edition, although the Reader went from 564 pages in the 1st edition to 1,920 in the 10th. The general outline of the book remained intact, and the biggest change was that more texts were added. The 10th parallel edition, however, marked a more significant change as added texts were written especially for the Reader, while previous editions had consisted mainly of renowned texts written for other purposes. By then the Reader had expanded to nearby 2,500 pages. 31 The impact of this book for nationalising the masses has been highlighted repeatedly in earlier research. Previous research has also examined how the Reader portrayed the Nordic region and compared it to a similar reader published in Finland during the same period. 32 However, the Reader also contained other interesting images and ideologies related to class and class identities, which have remained relatively unmapped. 33 Furthermore, much of the earlier research focused on the first edition of the Reader. 34 Because the Reader was issued and reissued during a time of rapid industrialisation and the initial stages of a radical working-class culture and identity, 35 it is interesting to also analyse whether and how the Reader changed during this period.

Analysis of ideological descriptions of poverty, working people, and class relations
Previous research has consistently highlighted the importance of analysing textbooks to understand how schooling mirrors social hierarchies of power and class relations. 36 As Michael W. Apple points out, textbooks can be understood to convey the dominant ideals of how society works and how it should be conceived, 37 and, like many critical researchers, we agree. As shown in analyses of more contemporary textbooks, this understanding can help unpack how class conflicts have been hidden and middle-class experiences portrayed as the norm, which in practice excludes working-class experiences as legitimate. 38 There is still unmapped historical terrain in this area, especially concerning how class identity and class relations have been ideologically constructed in different historical contexts and by different transmitters. For instance, research on the role of teaching materials in the reproduction of social relations in Sweden has focused on schooling in the twentieth century, rather than the nineteenth, when the curriculum was anything but hidden. 39 Nineteenth-century historiography has shown that the functions of schooling were discussed explicitly in terms of controlling and fostering. 40 Swedish research on textbooks and Swedish curriculum history has focused extensively on the changing content and ideological messages in pedagogical texts in subjects such as history, civics, and  33 The fact that the book conveyed an image of a good citizen as someone who is diligent, orderly, and pious has previously been highlighted in Edgren, "Menige mans humaniora", 123, "'Fosterlandets pulsar' och införandet av Läsebok för folkskolan", 200, and "Kungsådran av den lilla läroanstaltens bildning", 101. 34 Among the exceptions can be found: Edgren, "Skandinaviskt och nordiskt i Läsebok för folkskolan under 1800-talets avslutande decennier", 157-70 (which also analyses the 9th ed.); Wickström, Våra förfäder var hedningar (which also analyses the 8th, 9th, and 10th ed. religion. 41 Discussion of social class has been integrated into analyses of different identities and interpreted in historical myths. 42 Ulf P. Lundgren and Tomas Englund, in their analysis of curriculum codes, found that nineteenth-century primary education expressed a moralistic curriculum code that evolved into a rational code in the twentieth century. The content of moral education and pedagogical texts aimed to instil certain values and loyalties. Loyalty to the state and to the imagined national community was the most important element. 43 But as Wickström has discussed, religion and national myths also included visions of the social order. Analysing pedagogical texts from a Marxist perspective, Wickström has shown that images in religious myths of different social groups with different social rankings, for example farmers and thralls, reproduced a view of social hierarchies as natural. According to the author, these social narratives were part of a nineteenth-century politics of hegemony. Against that background, it seems highly relevant to explore and analyse portrayals of the working poor and class relationships in the most dominant school texts of the nineteenth century. Similar to several of the authors discussed above, we approach the subject of our paper from a Marxist theoretical tradition. We understand social identities as an effect of interpellation, the spread of languages and notions about class and occupational/socioeconomic groups, and depictions of the social structure. 44 In the analysis and discussion, we use the term "social identity" in a narrow sense to refer to identification based on belonging to a certain occupational group, status group, class, or socio-economic strata. In doing so, we have sought to avoid "class identity" because the concept of class is not used in the source material. At the same time, it is important to remember that class identities or identity politics directed at a class were seldom done with the help of the political language of class. As mentioned in the introduction, during the period that the Reader was in play, the state was but one of the players involved in the political struggle over the interpretation of the social order. Battles over the meanings attached to poverty, wealth, and the "working people" were fought out in the public sphere. In the early labour movement, the concepts of "class" and "people" were used confrontationally as the bases of political demands and the formation of political identities. Right-wing and liberal social reformers and politicians also addressed the "working man" or "the workers", but called upon them not to lobby for social change, but to change their ways of living and raise their moral standards. Concepts related to class and descriptions of workers were used by different actors in different ways and with contesting ideological implications. 45 Therefore, it is also important to study the ideological content of concepts and descriptions that promote identification with a social group or abstract community. 46 41 For an extensive discussion on Swedish curriculum history, see Spjut, Att (ut)bilda ett folk, 57-64, 93-115. 42  The relationship between school texts and the elusive concept of identity has been much written about. Swedish historiography has also addressed the concept and analysed how textbooks and readers promoted a prescribed sense of self that especially favoured identification with the Swedish ethnicity and national community. 47 Off course, the making of identities in classrooms was a larger affair, encompassing the guiding help of the teacher, particular uses of textbooks, and the pupils themselves. Still, analysing textbooks, especially readers dedicated to teaching children to read, is important because it was through these texts that children learned abstract language and concepts, metaphors, and syntaxes, which they used to understand themselves and their social world. 48 Textbooks and readers both opened and limited pupils' vocabulary because the concepts and languages were endowed with certain meanings. However, once instilled, the acquired language remained open for future transformation and accumulations.
We analysed the Reader according to the premise that concepts, languages, and depictions of workers and the poor are very likely to have influenced children's sense of self. (By workers, or people holding working class positions, we mean people holding non-academic and manual jobs.) We also paid attention to the ideological content of the representations, especially regarding desired behaviours and relationships with other social groups and classes. Following Norman Fairclough, we see texts, their representations, narratives and language, as ideological to the extent that they contribute to reproducing a society's power relations, its social relations of production, and exploitation of the disadvantaged. 49 In light of these starting points, we analysed how poor and working people were represented in the Reader and which values and desirable conducts were encouraged. We also analysed how the social order was described and what ideological views of social relations were represented. Our method was to perform a qualitative text analysis of four editions of the reader, 1868 (1st edition), 1878 (8th edition), 1899 (9th edition), and 1922 (10th parallel edition). 50 In practice we used digitalised copies of the textbooks. We performed a series of searches where words from the first round led to further searches in the next round. We started by searching for broad words, namely workers (arbetare) and the poor (fattiga). For example, finding depictions of poor craftsmen, shop boys, and the like led us to use these words in our second search round. The search process was accumulative and terms associated with workers and the poor eventually resulted in a large corpus of texts (stories, proverbs, poems, essays) for analysis. We also searched for words such as class society, social class, working class, middle class, upper class, bourgeoisie, and proletariatconcepts and models of the social order that were used in public discourse at the time. However, such concepts of class were not used in the Reader. and Läsebok för folkskolan, 10th ed. (Norstedt: Stockholm, 1922). The reason for using the version of the 10th parallel edition published in 1922 is that it has been digitised, which has been a prerequisite for a more systematic analysis of the texts in the Reader.

Diligent workers and the ethics of poverty
How were the working poor represented and described in the Reader, and what values and desirable conducts were assigned to them? Descriptions of the poor appear in the Reader not only in short stories and poems, but also in more documentary-like reports on the growth of industrial areas and factories. Social languages and representations are present in stories such as "The Crofter's Son" (Torparsonen), "The Cabin Boy" (Skeppsgossen), and "A Shop Boy Is Needed" (En bodgosse åstundas), in poems about poverty, or proverbs advising that it was better to be poor with honour than rich with shame. 51 The representation of the worker and his work varied in the Reader. Sometimes hard and thorough work was as towards possible social advancement; sometimes it was an end in itself. The good worker (always a man or a boy) was portrayed as a hard-working subject who worked for the sake of work because God had put him on earth to serve this very function. Such representations of work and workers changed very little over time. The moral of all these stories can be boiled down to the same ideological message: you must live according to a strict work ethic; you must be diligent and do your duty.
In the story "A Shop Boy Is Needed", included for the first time in the 9th edition (1899), a wealthy shopkeeper puts a sign in his windows advertising for a shop boy. When the boy John applies, he is sent up to the attic to sort scrap iron (old nails and screws) lying in a coffin. The shopkeeper tells John to sort what is useful from what is useless and then leaves him to solve the task. As John cannot find anything of value in the coffin, he soon stops trying to sort the scrap iron. The shopkeeper finds John lazy and fires him. The story repeats itself with other boys until a boy named Herman answers the call. Unlike the other boys, Herman sorts through the whole coffin and finds a golden coin at the bottom, which he promptly hands over to the shopkeeper. Herman has also organised the scrap iron into different categories and marked them with labels such as "rather good nails", "wall nails", "small keys", etc. The shopkeeper is impressed and decides that Herman is the shop boy he wants and gives him a job. Given this opportunity, Herman works his way up and after many years of service becomes the shopkeeper's partner. 52 The moral of this story was simple: don't be a John, be a Herman. If you work hard and meticulously, if you are honest and respect the difference between yourself and the rightful owner of "the gold coin", then you may be able to work your way up in the future.
Conscientiousness and trust in God were the key moral messages in this poem and also in "The Poor Cabin Boy". The cabin boy is braver than the sailors and climbs the main mast of the ship when no grown man dares. When asked how he could be so brave, he cites his faith in God and the prayers that his mother taught him. 54 Risking one's life at work is presented as virtuous and right. Perseverance and diligence were values that children would read about frequently. To persevere was to work hard and do your manual duty, despite a life of hardship filled with obstacles. Diligence was a virtue that characterised mining, agricultural, and other physical labourers. Their work was difficult and even dangerous at times, but their diligence is celebrated and praised in the Reader. To take one example, the poem about the "Miner" (Grufarbetaren) describes the worker's satisfaction with mining and staying below ground, despite the heavy work and constant danger. God, it says, is also in the underworld. The message to school children in stories like this one is that God's providence depends upon your faith. You should work hard and be satisfied with the situation you have been given. Prayers are the way to cope with worldly struggles. 55 The Lutheran protestant belief system, upheld by the conservative state church at the time, held the answer to why one should keep working or resign oneself to being poor. 56 Poverty was represented as an unfortunate, but ultimately moral, state. Poverty had an ethics. The poor could gain relief from their struggles through their prayers and trust in God. Tales about poor families focused on how they always managed, through innovation, industry, and faith, to find food for the day. The belief systemic offered no criticism or explanation of why people might be poor or whether society should help those who were starving. The focus instead remained on how families managed with very little and yet remained grateful. In a story in the Reader, a poor family obtains a little bit of flour and is able to bake a small bread cake, which tastes "much better than the most expensive food for a rich man's children". 57 The people in this story and others in the Reader make the most of, and are grateful for, the small gifts they receive; they never question their lack of resources.
Initially the Reader depicted workers mostly in domestic or other services, agriculture, or mining. The idealisation of industrial work, factories, and technical innovation arose around the turn of the century, mirroring the advances in society at large. 58 The essay "A Factory in Norrköping" (En norrköpingsfabrik) in the tenth parallel edition (1922) describes where the parents of Norrköping children actually worked at the time. It begins by describing how close the primary school is to the factory, how the children can sometimes hear the roar of its machinery, and the inevitable role of the factory in the children's futures: The essay goes on to narrate how the children visit different factories in Norrköping and are amazed by all the machines at work and the beautiful, coloured fabrics they produce. The moral of the essay is that factory work is something to strive for and desire: this is good, honest, modern work.

Conservative and liberal visions of the social order
The working poor were prescribed values and conduct supporting the reproduction of the economic system. But how was the wider social world imagined? How was the social order described, and what ideological views of social relations were represented? In Swedish historiography, scholars have shown that multiple political social imaginings were constructed and spread in the public sphere during the nineteenth century. From the 1860s on, the literature has examined four main understandings of the nature of society: conservative, liberal, left-liberal, and social democratic. Conservatives saw society as a hierarchical construct comprising different social occupational groups with different roles, governed by a worldly authority that represented God himself. In their thinking, society was an organic whole in which different groups fulfilled different functions. The natural condition was one of harmony, not conflict, as all groups worked together for the good of the social body. Liberal visions differed from conservatives in assuming that "man", as an individual and citizen, was responsible for providing for his own prosperity and lifting himself out of need rather than depending on a divine order to society. Leftliberals represented a more intellectual view of society and considered individuals and the government as the main actors in society. They supported issues such as universal suffrage and state welfare for the disadvantaged. Organised labour and social democrats regarded economic and political differences in society as unjust. By its very nature, society was a class hierarchy installed by the wealthy to serve its purposes, and classes would therefore always be in a state of conflict. As mentioned, these are rough ideal types, but scholars have shown that these thoughts form the bases of a range of political and government decisions, parliamentary discussions, political and social movements, and editorials and reports in the political press. 60 Because the Reader contains texts from many different well-known Nordic authors, we cannot expect to find one dominant societal vision in the book. The question is, which visions were the most prominent? The Reader mainly contains images of society based on an organic conservative belief system. An example of this ideological world view can be found in the editions up to and including 1899. The fable "The Limbs of the Human Body" (Menniskokroppens lemmar) demonstrates the consequences of breaking the social order. The fable describes how the feet, the hands, the mouth, and the eyes once argued about their obligations to serve each other. They stopped working and focused only on their own self-interests: But what happened? When the feet no longer wanted to walk, the hands did no work, the mouth would not eat, and the eyes would not see, the body began to fade in all its limbs and started to die. Then they all realised that they had acted unwisely, and agreed to do so no longer. Now the limbs and organs served each other again, and all remained as healthy and strong as before. 61 This organic view of society as a human body with limbs with certain functions in society was a common conservative ideological trope in the nineteenth century. 62 It was often used to explain how society worked, and what would happen if the labouring classes revolted from their given social functions. Often the organic harmonious order was described as given by both God and nature. Revolt was therefore viewed as unnatural or ungodly.
In the example above, a reasonable division of labour structured society. But how were different socio-economic groups dealt with in this view? First, they were not described with class language. The nineteenth century is usually considered the century of the middle-class or the bourgeoisie. It is noteworthy that neither the middle class or equivalent categories found in the public sphere nor the common three-part model of working, middle, and upper classes are part of the social vernacular in the Reader. Instead, binary models of rich and poor, King and people, employer and worker are more prevalent in the Reader. No matter what the groups are called or what the characters symbolise, however, the main value is always social harmony and cooperation.
As discussed above, working people are constructed in the Reader as moral and ethical because of their ability to live with their poverty. Furthermore, they are described as unwilling to contest the order of things; they make do with what they have been given. Many stories about poor families or children also describe people with authority or wealth, and some even focus on meetings or conversations between people from different classes. In such meetings, although the poor are often portrayed as the most godly, sensible, and hard-working, the higher status people are always the authorities. These men (again, always men) consecrate the functional ethics of the working poor through praise and draw conclusions supporting the submission of the poor in service to the social order. In the Introduction, we discussed the story of the dog Musti, who escaped home to the poor family because his emotional bonds outweighed his hunger. In this story, as in most of the Reader, the rich man has the authority to interpret the moral to be understood through the dog's decision. Like a father figure or priest, he concludes that 61  faithfulness is more important than all the gold in the world. 63 Similarly, in the story of the shop boy, it is the employer who recognises and rewards the diligent and obedient boy, Herman. 64 Another example of this power relation is found in a purportedly true story called "The Daily Allowance" (Dagpenningen), from the 9th edition (1899). During a recreational horseback ride, King Charles XI (1660-1697) meets a farmer who is ploughing his field. When the king asks the farmer if it is not a heavy and tedious work, the farmer answers that it is his calling, and that he is content with it. The king then asks the farmer how much he earns, and the farmer answers that he has not thought much about it, but that his income is enough to pay off an old debt, support himself and his wife, and invest for the future. When asked to elaborate, the farmer says that he uses one third of his earnings to support his old father (paying off an old debt), one third to support himself and his wife, and the last third to raise his son (an investment in the future, as the son may be expected take care of him and his wife when they get old, just as the farmer supports his own father). 65 Stories like this show how the Reader portrays relationships between the rich and the poor. The poor are humble and content with their place in society, they provide for themselves in a rational and calculated way, and their common sense is so strong that even a king can learn from their way of living. 66 Läsebok för folkskolan was not exclusively dominated by conservative/organic ideas. The story above emphasises the ethics of individual responsibility -an important notion in the liberal discourse of the time. Moralising stories on self-help and even a few tales of social mobility are present in all the editions we analysed. Only a handful of stories in the Reader describe social progress, but we analyse two of them extensively because they reveal complex notions about the foundations of class mobility. These stories convey the message that social mobility is possible, but only when the sound morals and diligent ethics of a poor boy are noticed by an employer or other figure of authority. "The Crofter's Son" (Torparsonen), included in all editions up to the 9th (1899), tells the story of the poor child Sven who, with the help of the local priest, enters upper-secondary school in the city of Skara. There he encounters several rowdy and malicious rich children who scorn his origins. These sons of rich men are presented as arrogant bullies, but Sven does not allow himself to be disturbed by them and chooses instead to focus on his studies. His hard work and pious character are noticed by the priest of the parish, who helps Sven to go on study at Uppsala University and eventually become a bishop in Skara. Sven proves himself in the story to be morally superior to the wealthy children, with a soul richer than the privileged boys' because he is a pious believer and has a burning desire to work. Sven remains humble despite his success, 67 proving the moral of the story: hard work and religiosity may be rewarded if you have the right character.
"The Crofter's Son" was based on a real person, Sven Lundblad, born in 1776 to Greta Andersdotter and her crofter husband Anders Svensson. Sven entered grammar school in Skara in 1789, and in 1799 he became a student at the university in Uppsala. From there he worked his way up the university ranks until he became professor in theology in 1827 and was soon appointed bishop of the diocese of Skara in 1829. 68 The fact that Lundblad could make such a remarkable career despite his humble beginnings was in fact a result of the undeveloped Swedish school system in the late eighteenth century. With the introduction of basic primary schools in Sweden in the mid-1800s, working-class children's opportunities for higher education actually diminished as the segmented school system kept poor children in the inferior public primary schools. 69 Around the turn of the century, in the 1899 edition, another Sven appears in "The Weaver from Mark" (Väfvaren i Mark). Sven Eriksson starts out as a textile worker, working at home with his mother, but eventually becomes a major Swedish textile factory owner. The child worker Sven, so the story goes, becomes one of Sweden's largest industrialists because of his entrepreneurship, energy, and compassion. 70 Like "The Crofter's Son", the story of Sven Eriksson is also based on the life of a real person. Sven Erikson was born in 1801 in western Sweden to Kerstin Andersdotter and her husband Erik Andersson, a farmer. At the age of 12, Sven loses his father and at 24 he starts his own business. 71 Unlike the son in "The Weaver from Mark", however, the real Sven was far from poor. With his mother he ran a generations-old family business consigning yarn to weavers to make fabric. 72 The story describes Sven as a hard-working boy who took responsibility for his mother's small business as a rational entrepreneur and as a generous philanthropist reinvested the profit in a textile mill, giving back to the community by investing in infrastructure and cultivation of the countryside. Contemporary descriptions of Sven Eriksson, however, paint him as more a dreamer than a hard-working or skilled businessman. The success of his industries is also exaggerated in the story, which fails to mention that Eriksson was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1845. 73 As the stories of the two Svens show, the Reader does contain stories of social mobility, but such stories are rare. What is common to both of these tales, drawn from reality, is their lack of reference to the prevailing social structure. In both cases, success is described as the exclusive result of hard work and good character, giving the impression that anyone could change their social class as long as they worked hard enough and were of pure mind. This concealment of the social relations between different classes by depicting success primarily as a result of individual achievement may be seen as an attempt to instil a false consciousness through inculcating the ideology of the ruling class. 74 It is also an example of how liberal ideals of self-help and entrepreneurship intermixed and collided with the conservative vision of a harmonious social body where people stayed, and were expected to be happy, in their given places. Although we allowed extensive space in the analysis for the Reader to offer examples of social mobility, all the editions we consulted encouraged poor and working-class children to accept their place, work hard to contribute to some imagined greater good, and never reach for more. Given the masculine construction of the worker, whose social progress was presented as possible only through the confluence of luck and perfect character, anything other than being a diligent worker for the social body was unthinkable for the reading girl. Diligence and docility were the ideal behaviours and attitudes for boys, and the only choices for girls, in the several editions of the Reader.

Conclusions
During the nineteenth century, the languages of class and the new social relations of production came to replace the traditional feudal languages of the social order. The identities and political interests of the poor and the workers became the focus of a political struggle between dominant state-supporting classes and radical social movements. This article focused on how the Swedish state participated in this struggle by producing and disseminating a reader titled Läsebok för folkskolan for use in schools for the poor and working classes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Reader was used to teach lower-class children to read from the late 1860s to the 1930s. As we have demonstrated, the Reader constructed and assigned a certain kind of social vernacular to its readers. Although the Reader went through several updates, especially after 1910, the ideological content regarding social identity remained highly consistent.
The Reader presents categories such as "worker" or "poor" and an assortment of manual jobs as parts of the social language and points of identification for school children. Working hard is celebrated and living in poverty is presented as a morally superior condition. There is no doubt in the Reader that its primary-school readers are destined for a future of hard manual work, which they should do happily and gratefully. The prescribed sense of self for these future workers, their functions, and their relations to other classes can be summed up in two words: diligence and docility. They should be satisfied with their given social roles and happily consent to work for the good of the whole society. If fortune should strike, it will only be because a person (man) with authority decides you are worthy. Even this luck, however, is not imaginable to all reading children. In all of the stories and the few examples of social mobility we analysed, the hard-working child who is elevated to any higher position is always male.
In a wider perspective, the moral curriculum code, which according to the literature was hegemonic during this era in the Swedish case, was clearly "classed" and functioned as an ideological tool in the social reproduction of the future work force. 75 The Reader worked not only as an ideological tool to create identities and loyalties based on the imagined community of the nation, it also served to demobilise the exploited and shape the consent of workers and to a segmented and class-based society. Thus, it prescribed a social lens well-fitted to the political economy. This conclusion supports the broader argument that the industrialising state participated in shaping social class identities in the nineteenth century. However, we suggest that conservative values were more influential in Sweden than in the liberal "master narrative" in England. 76 The emphasis on harmony between groups and the organic image of the social order, combined with a protestant Lutheran idea of the sacredness of that order, speaks to such a conclusion. Still, a liberal discourse focused on self-help, character-building, and rational management of resources is also present in some of the texts in the Reader. Further studies on this topic are needed to construct a consistent argument regarding the ideological character of the Swedish master narrative.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Anne Berg is an associate professor of History and senior lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research includes social history, cultural history, and the history of education, focused mainly on the history of popular education in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Sweden. Berg has researched subjects such as the social conditions of nationalism in nineteenth-century Sweden, the democratic functions of the early working-class movement, and the economics of voluntary associations. Esbjörn Larsson holds a PhD in History and is a professor of History of Education and Dean of the Faculty of Educational Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research includes the history of childhood and the history of education, focused mainly on the Swedish educational system during the nineteenth century. Larsson has researched subjects such as the training of cadets at the Swedish Royal War Academy during the nineteenth century, the introduction of the monitorial system in Sweden, defence service training and secondary schools during World War II, and the marketisation of the expanding preschool sector in Sweden since the 1980s.