My aim in this book was to provide a fresh perspective on education and gender by using the lens of pedagogy to compare the instruction males and females received over the course of the Georgian period. Pedagogy is not just about methods for teaching and learning. This book has shown that it is also, as Robin Alexander has argued, ‘a purposive cultural intervention … which is deeply saturated with the values and history of the society and community in which it located.’1 Exploring this cultural intervention brought to light the importance of the relations between pedagogies, their competition and the power struggles which shaped and produced them. It is these relations that have provided the most important insights on the issues of gender this study aimed to investigate.

Vicesimus Knox's pedagogical intervention, redirecting the focus of the study of the classics from literature to grammar, illustrates Alexander's contention and the competitions that ensued. The plan Knox devised in his educational treatise Liberal Education was a model of learning embodied in a long-standing architectural metaphor which he refashioned to his purpose: laying a strong base in Latin grammar at an early age to uphold the superstructure of all learning. While the ostensible motive for Knox's plan was his desire to return to ‘antient’ methods and reform public schools, it was also constructed as both a legitimation of the dominant pedagogical regime of the classics and a response to the threat to that regime from the pedagogies of modern subjects.

The principal goal of Knox's architectural model of learning was gender: the avoidance of effeminacy and the production of masculinity which he encouraged by picturing study as a battle and learning as conquest. This had significant consequences for women's education because it established the conditions for considering girls’ learning as not based on the same intellectual foundations as that of boys. Knox's insistence that the grammar foundation should be taught at a puerile age was consistent with the belief of the time that children's minds were more ‘pliable and ductile’ and that early teaching was therefore most profitable, as Hester Thrale's success with her young children's rote learning attested.

This book is a study of the education of upper and middling class boys and girls in the long eighteenth century in England. It compares their education by investigating the pedagogies of the subjects constituting their instruction and presents a different perspective on the role of gender in their education. Although my aim is comparative, this comparison can only be uneven, because the amount of research has been unequal. While the education of young and older women in the middle and upper ranks of society has been the subject of decades of critical and biographical research, apart from major studies such as Anthony Fletcher's Growing up in England and Henry French and Mark Rothery's Man's Estate, there have been few equivalent studies about young and older males’ education in the eighteenth century.1 In one sense, it could be argued that the history of ideas about education has been about male education but this history has conflated the education of men with the norm or the ideal. One consequence, French and Rothery remark, is that for boys ‘it is extremely difficult to disentangle the experiences of schooling from … the normative stereotypes according to which the subjects themselves often judged or criticized their own school days retrospectively; and the stereotypes by which historians have subsequently assessed and interpreted these accounts’.

Historiography of male and female education

While the history of female education has also been subject to specific constraints and stereotyping, a now substantial historiography has produced a wider field of reference for women and girls’ education in the period under discussion than is available for boys. In 1996, historian Susan Skedd could conclude that in the late eighteenth century, women had better opportunities for education than ever before, and that her evidence contradicted the ‘prevailing historiographical view of neglect and inadequacy in women's education’. Why then has female education continued to be presented as inferior to male education, reproducing a narrative which assumes that the generality of girls obtained an inadequate, superficial, accomplishment oriented education?

A two-sided drawing by Artist A in ink, gouache, and metallic silver wash depicts a garniture of sumptuous late gothic armor that is decorated with filigreed punchwork, its edges bound in gilt brass fleur-de-lys. The recto of the paper leaf (fig. 127) visualizes this armor encasing the body of a figure who wields a simple staff. The gilded knuckles of the man's right gauntlet project prominently as he grasps his weapon. He rests his left hand on his hip, and the gilt peak of the pointed couter that encapsulates his elbow accentuates the angle of his bent left arm. His elegant cuisses are embossed and chased with linear patterns, and his poleyns include double-lobed wings, edged in gilt binding, that protect the vulnerable outside of the joint. The figure's closed greaves completely encase his calves in sculpted steel, and his feet seem to terminate in extremely long, golden points. Flamboyant toe-caps of this type echoed the elongated shoes popular during the late fifteenth century, and would have been affixed to the sabatons using pins after the wearer was mounted. This drawing meticulously represents the pins, which appear as tiny circles on the tops of the figure's feet.

On the sheet's verso (fig. 128) Artist A disassembles the individual components of the same armor and spreads the empty steel defenses across the page. Two rows of gilt binding adorn the breastplate, and its volumetric form is saturated in steel blue gouache that is visible through the sheet above the shoulder of the armored figure on the recto. Next to the breastplate, a matching backplate completes the cuirass, or torso defense. The faulds that cascade downward from the waists of the breastplate and backplate have elegantly cusped and punched edges. The draftsman depicted the visored sallet beneath the breastplate. The bevor, which accompanied the sallet to protect the lower face and neck, appears to the helmet's right along with a spaulder, augmented by two different besagews. In the third row of armor components, a smooth, gilded reinforce alludes to the armor's potential deployment in a mounted tournament or joust, where this steel plate would protect the left shoulder from lance blows. The crisp, geometric form of the reinforce's haute piece – meant to protect the left side of the wearer's neck – anticipates the silhouettes of such defenses depicted by Burgkmair.

Geography: a new subject of instruction

Geography as a subject of interest and study has a long history, but it is mainly in the eighteenth century that ‘begins the publication of books whose purpose seems to be that of instruction in schools’. Recent geography scholars have linked this expansion variously to the Enlightenment's desire for knowledge, the development of a public sphere of rational discussion, educational requirements for a commercial society, and the expansion of Empire. Their work has opened up and illuminated many aspects of the subject of geography in the eighteenth century, and they have created ‘a cultural and historical geography of geography’. My aim in this chapter is to build on this work and provide an additional perspective focusing on pedagogy. I want to examine the emergence of geography, a modern subject, and its pedagogy at a time when educational discourses represented ‘modern’ studies not as ‘progress’ but as inferior to classics because they ‘did not train the mind or did not do so as thoroughly as Latin did’. Using geography as example, I also want to analyse the role the classical vs. modern distinction played in relation to gender and the conceptual organization of school subjects.

Instructing the young in geography was relatively new in the eighteenth century. John Locke had recommended the study of geography in his educational treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) because he did not think classics should be the sole subject of study for a gentleman. John Clarke, Master of the Grammar School at Hull, agreeing with Locke, proposed that less time be spent on Latin to accommodate geography. Sixty years later, their proposals had not been taken up. When Vicesimus Knox noted that ‘scarcely any attention is paid to geography’ at many of the best grammar schools, he did not intend this as a criticism. Rather, it supported his sole concession to the subject, which was to introduce maps to help the boys identify locations for events in the classical texts they were studying. He specifically objected to ‘perplex[ing] [the pupil] with an unentertaining geographical treatise’.

The Public/Private Debate

On February 28, 1712, in the Spectator, Budgell addressed ‘that famous Question’: ‘whether the Education at a publick School, or under a private Tutor, is to be preferr’d?’, and referred specifically to Locke's ‘celebrated Treatise of Education’ before outlining both sides of the debate for his readers’ consideration. This was not a new issue. It emerged from a body of educational literature which can be traced back to the Roman Quintilian, but it was Locke who placed it ‘at the centre of the debate’ on education. Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education ‘reached a wide audience in eighteenth century Britain, and the book set the tone and marked the chief point of reference for most thinking about education at the time.’

Why the question about a public or private education could be asked at all is that in the absence of an overall educational authority, it was up to individual parents to decide where and how their children should be taught. Locke began his examination of the relative merits of public and private education for gentlemen's sons by conceding that ‘both sides have their Inconveniences’, but it is clear from the outset that for him the inconveniences of public education far outweighed its benefits. For Locke, education was above all about virtue ‘’Tis Vertue, then, direct Vertue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in Education.’ Domestic education he concluded, was ‘much the best and safest way to this great and main End of Education.’ From then on, most discussions of education written by moralists, educationists, men and women of letters, parents, private tutors or schoolmasters, included a section addressing the issue, and the debate thus represents a large body of contemporary opinion about education in eighteenth-century cultural life.

Boys Learning Latin

Some time in the late seventeenth century, Foster Watson observed, Latin grammar learning ‘came to be regarded as a subject in itself, and classical authors to be relegated to the position of store-house of examples for use in the illustration of grammatical rules.’ Possibly because of the assumption that there was one ‘proper’ method for learning the rudiments of the Latin tongue: ‘the memorising of the accidence and syntax, of vocabularies and phrases’, research on the elementary stages of language learning has been sparse, scholars’ focus being rather on the literature. As Locke's epigraph implies, and author-practitioner George Chapman makes clear, there was in fact a variety of methods to teach Latin. For Chapman, this was a problem to be corrected.

This chapter has three sections. The first discusses the pedagogical thinking and practices four eighteenth-century author-practitioners described and justified in the treatises they wrote and used to teach Latin to boys. The second examines corporal punishment as an integral part of Latin pedagogy. The third focuses on females’ learning of Latin in the same period. Because the authors I am discussing also ran a school, it is plausible to assume that because their treatises also served as advertisements for their school, they presented the methods which in their view promised success.

In a drawing executed in the style of the 1470s or 1480s, two pairs of horsemen clad in the elegant plate armor of the late-fifteenth century charge into combat with swords and maces raised (fig. 30). In the corner of the page, a pair of wrestlers grapple, each assuming a wide-legged stance to brace himself against his rival. In another drawing, likely created during the last decade of the fifteenth century, a knight encased in meticulously depicted armor straddles his opponent, pinning him to the ground (fig. 31). The defeated man's sword lies beneath his body, and he looks upward toward the victor's weapon, poised to deliver a final strike through the unfortunate man's open visor.

These two bellicose images belong to a group of three fifteenth-century drawings that were inserted between the first and second quires of the Thun album, likely during its compilation in the first decades of the seventeenth century. While drawings on paper manufactured in the 1530s or 1540s form the surrounding leaves, these three images appear on paper without discernible watermarks. However, their styles suggest that the drawings, each executed by a different hand, date to the second half of the fifteenth century. As the oldest works of art to be included in the album, they predate the images that surround them by up to five decades. Nonetheless they represent pictorial and literary genres that resonate through the album's collection of later drawings. The first and third images in the album's group of fifteenth-century drawings derive their imagery from martial treatises known as Fechtbücher (fight or fencing books) in the German-speaking lands. This genre combined didactic frameworks for communicating information related to martial skill, military science, and chivalric behavior. Fight books and literature that included martial knowledge, such as mirrors for knights, household compendia, or masters of arms’ books, were ubiquitous in the circles that created and viewed drawings like those collected in the Thun album. Because of this ubiquity, consideration of fight books helps to show how the visual and textual traditions that shaped the Thun album drawings imbued their depicted armored bodies with meanings familiar to their audiences. Through this, the album's fifteenth-century drawings became capable of functioning as mnemonic prompts that could incite their viewers’ recollections of martial knowledge.

The Public/Private Debate

Throughout the eighteenth century, both school and home education for boys had their advocates and their critics, but it is hard to find advocates of school education for girls. From conduct book author Anglican cleric John Bennett, who declared that ‘whatever elegant or high-sounding schools may be sought out for a girl, a mother seems the only governess intended by nature’, to radical Mary Wollstonecraft, who thought a mother's education at home was best ‘to prepare a woman to fulfil the important duties of a wife and mother’, home education was almost unanimously recommended for girls. Vicesimus Knox, who strongly supported female education, explained why he advised girls to be educated at home.

This was a recurring argument, even though as F. M. L. Thompson pointed out, grammar and great schools did not actually prepare boys for their future destination. Army officer and author Alexander Jardine considered a ‘private domestic education’ as ‘generally the best’, because even if some schools were ‘conducted by excellent women’, they could never ‘sufficiently resemble families, which are the foundation of society and the materials of which it is formed’. For John Bennett, a principal reason for preferring a domestic education for girls was that when parents are instructors, girls are ‘kept under their … immediate inspection’, ensuring that their reading will be regulated and controlled. All novels and romances must be shunned, Bennett insisted, because they ‘corrupt all principle’ and seduce girls away from the path of virtue.