Miss Bowlware taught them History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 
starting with the Romans at Londinium and careening through the Norman 
Conquest, Magna Carta, Wars of the Roses, Renaissance, and Civil War; but she 
didn't really hit her stride until she got to the Georgian period, at which 
point she worked herself up into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that 
syphilitic monarch, which had inspired the right-thinking Americans to break 
away in disgust. They studied the most ghastly parts of Dickens, which Miss 
Bowlware carefully explained was called Victorian literature because 
it was written during the reign of Victoria I, but was actually about pre-Victorian times, and that the mores of the original 
Victorians—the ones who built the old British Empire—were 
actually a reaction against the sort of bad behavior engaged in by their 
parents and grandparents and so convincingly detailed by Dickens, their most 
popular novelist.