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Willingly to School: The Working-Class Response to Elementary Education in Britain, 1875–1918

  • Jonathan Rose
Extract

In Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1914, J. S. Hurt employs what has become a classic opening in works of social history. “Much of the history of education,” he declares, “has been written from the top, from the perspective of those who ran and provided the schools, be they civil servants or members of the religious societies that promoted the cause of popular education. Little has been written from the viewpoint of those who were the recipients of this semi-charitable endeavour, the parents who paid the weekly schoolpence and the children who sat in the schoolrooms of nineteenth-century England.”

Hurt's point is well taken, but he leaves himself open to the retort that he also draws his information mainly from official sources. The parents rarely speak in his book, the children almost never. One could make the same criticism of Phil Gardner's The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England. Gardner claims that the so-called dame schools, the private venture schools that served a large fraction of the Victorian working class, were unfairly disparaged and suppressed by educational bureaucrats. But he too depends largely on bureaucratic reports to reconstruct the history of schools outside the state system. Neither Gardner nor Hurt quite succeeds in plumbing educational history to the very bottom: they do little to reconstruct the classroom experience from the viewpoint of the working-class child.

What sources could we use to recover that history? There are, of course, the reports of school inspectors, but Gardner warns us that they had a vested interest in condemning dame shools.

Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © North American Conference of British Studies 1993
References
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1 Hurt, J. S., Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 25.

2 Gardner, Phil, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1984).

3 Lowndes, G. A. N., The Silent Social Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 13–20; Simon, Brian, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), pp. 115–19.

4 Holmes, Edmund, What Is and What Might Be (London: Constable, 1911), p. v.

5 Holmes, Edmund, In Quest of an Ideal: An Autobiography (London: Richard Cobden-Sanderson, 1920), p. 110.

6 Ibid., p. 63.

7 Ibid., pp. 63–64.

8 Gardner, p. 211.

9 Burnett, John, Vincent, David, and Mayall, David, eds., The Autobiography of the Working Class, 3 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984–1989).

10 Burnett, John, ed. Destiny Obscure (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). pp. 156–59, quote on p. 159.

11 Thompson, Paul, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (1975; reprint, Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1985).

12 No statistical sample can be representative of a population in every respect. For a discussion of the problems involved in making the Thompson-Vigne quota sample representative, see Thompson, Paul, The Voice of the Past, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 125–28.

13 Even “scientific” polling cannot entirely escape subjectivity. All poll results are open to interpretation, and well before those results are tabulated, the interviewees must interpret the questions put to them, usually without as much opportunity for probing, clarification, elaboration, and qualification as oral history affords. Poll interviewers, moreover, have been known to garble questions and (accidentally or deliberately) misrecord answers. See Thompson, , Voice of the Past, pp. 122–23.

14 Humphries, Stephen, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981).

15 Simon (n. 3 above), p. 119.

16 Dent, H. C., 1870–1970: Century of Growth in English Education (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 18–19, 69–70.

17 Horn, Pamela, The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1989), pp. 184–93.

18 Interview 218. All interviews are from the Oral History Archive on Family, Work, and Social Life before 1918 housed at the University of Essex, Department of Sociology, Colchester.

19 Orwell, George, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (New York: Harcourt. Brace & World, 1968); Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise (London: George Routledge & Sons. 1938).

20 Bold, Edna, “The Long and the Short of It: Being the Recollections and Reminiscences of Edna Bold,” transcript, 1978, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 1, 14–15, 36.

21 Lanigan, John, “Thy Kingdom Did Come,” transcript. Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 6.

22 Ibid.

23 Armitage, Joseph H., “The Twenty-Three Years; or, The Late Way of Life—and of Living,” transcript, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 29, 66.

24 Lock, Henry George, “An Old Man Tries to Remember,” transcript, 1956, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 1–2.

25 Catherine McLoughlin, untitled MS, 1978, Brunel University Library. Uxbridge. 5.

26 Balne, Edward, “Autobiography of an Ex-Workhouse and Poor Law Schoolboy,” MS, 1972, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 7–21.

27 Fowler, Hilda Rose, “Look after the Little Ones,” transcript, 1976, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 11.

28 Goldman, Ronald, ed., Breakthrough: Autobiographical Accounts of the Education of Some Socially Disadvanlaged Children (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 132.

29 Smith, T. Dan, An Autobiography (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Oriel Press, 1970), p. 8.

30 Nancy Day, untitled MS, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 40–41.

31 Barker, Lottie, “My Life as I Remember It, 1899–1920,” transcript. Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 24, 30.

32 Mays, Spike, Reuben's Corner: An English Country Boyhood (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), pp. 64–66, 75–76.

33 Goldman, ed., pp. 7–9.

34 Lowndes (n. 3 above), pp. 16–17, quoted in Simon (n. 3 above), p. 115.

35 Thompson, Paul, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1985), p. 73.

36 Meacham, Standish, A Life Apart: The English Working Class, 1890–1914 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), p. 171.

37 Jennings, Douglas, “Solarium: The Diary of a Nobody,” MS, 1955, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 349.

38 Dickens, Stan, Bending the Twig (Ilfracombe, Devon: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1975), pp. 19–20.

39 McLaughlan, Thomas, “The Life of an Ordinary Man,” transcript, 1979, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 2.

40 Beeston, Reg, “Some of My Memories of and about Uley until About 1930,” MS, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 1.

41 Edmonds, John, “The Lean Years,” transcript, 1970, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 70–71.

42 Thompson, , The Edwardians, p. 74.

43 Meacham, pp. 174–75.

44 Hurt (n. 1 above), p. 212.

45 Humphries (n. 14 above), pp. 39–40.

46 Roberts, Elizabeth, A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 37.

47 Davies, Walter Haydn, The Right Time—the Right Place (Llandybie, Wales: Llyfrau'r, 1972), pp. 90–91.

48 Martin, Martha, “The Ups and Downs of Life,” MS, Brunel University Library, Uxbridge, 57–58.

49 Asquith, Margot, ed., Myself When Young (London: Frederick Muller, 1936), p. 404.

50 See, e.g., Turnbull, Annmarie, “Learning Her Womanly Work: The Elementary School Curriculum, 1870–1914,” in Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850–1950, ed. Hunt, Felicity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

51 Dyhouse, Carol, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1981), p. 31.

52 Elizabeth Roberts, pp. 1–2.

53 Ibid., p. 34.

54 Peterson, M. Jeanne, Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), chap. 2.

55 Foley, Alice, A Bolton Childhood (Manchester: Manchester University Extramural Department, 1973), pp. 33–34.

56 Dent (n. 16 above), pp. 69–70.

57 Roberts, Robert, The Classic Slum (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 25.

58 Crick, Bernard, George Orwell (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), chaps. 2–3: Rose, Jonathan, “Eric Blair's School Days,” in The Revised Orwell, ed. Rose, Jonathan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992), pp. 75–84.

59 Thompson, , Voice of the Past (n. 12 above), pp. 112–13.

60 Ibid., pp. 138–41.

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