Universities and technical education to 1870

These were not glorious years for the ‘ancient’ universities. Cambridge and Oxford reposed in a social and curricular inertia that limited their value to society[1].

1. The social class of intake was remarkably stable and narrow: between 1752 and 1886 51 per cent of Oxford students and 58 per cent of those at Cambridge came from two social groups, the gentry and the clergy. The future careers were even narrower: 64 per cent of Oxford and 54 per cent of Cambridge men went into the Church.  The student body was limited by its connection with the Church of England. The requirement at both universities was that graduates should subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles that excluded Nonconformists. They were thus isolated from the new potential clientele of Nonconformist business families enriched by industrialisation.
2. High costs—a course could cost over £300 per year—also limited the social composition of courses. Oxford became socially exclusive in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. As a result many people needed scholarships, the bulk of which were in classics and mathematics. This had an impact of the school curriculum and led to a focus on and perpetuation of classical education in grammar and public schools. The provision of fellowships also had a similar effect. Most fellowships were tied to classics at Oxford and mathematics at Cambridge. In this way the whole financial scholarship-fellowship system locked the older subjects into the ancient universities.

This was also tied into the power struggle within the institutions between the university and the colleges. At Oxford and Cambridge the colleges were powerful and wealthy and the universities relatively weak as financial and administrative entities. This suited colleges who ran like private companies. They were aware the classics and mathematics were very cheap subjects to teach and did not entail research or expensive equipment or even rapidly growing libraries. The colleges were not only conservative about new subjects for financial reasons, they also feared a tilting of the balance of power in favour of the universities. More university power as, for example, in the building of common science laboratories, meant less college autonomy. Curricular conservatism was rooted in a defence of a private financial system and resistance to the growth of centralised power in the university.

The debate on the role of universities in society had several dimensions. There was an important argument about research as a function of the university. Advocates of research in the 1860s like Mark Pattison and Henry Halford Vaughan were influenced by German universities and accepted the discovery of new knowledge as part of their obligations. They wished to move Oxford and Cambridge away from being merely advanced public schools towards a more liberal education with more money on research on the sciences, history and archaeology. This viewpoint inevitably involved a clash with the established college position. The financial provision of scholarships and fellowships outside the classics and mathematics brought conflict with the curricular conservatism in college-based anti-research teaching. Until some changes were made to the autonomy of the colleges there could be no change in teaching and the colleges would continue to exert a stranglehold not just over university but also the schools that aimed to send their boys to Oxford or Cambridge.

Curriculum conservatism was defended as a positive virtue in a lively debate about ‘liberal education’ in relation to universities. This was an important argument against those who attacked the classics as a patently useless form of study on crudely utilitarian grounds. This argument had two basic propositions:

• There is a distinction between ends and means. Some activities and qualities are ends in themselves and cannot be justified by reference to some ends beyond themselves. This is the essence of the ‘education for its own sake’ case.
• As well as being ‘an end in itself’, the study of the classics fitted a man for no particular occupation thereby fitting him for all. This was a belief that was to become very influential in the 1850s when the general intellectual training given by classics was regarded as the most suitable for civil service recruitment through public examinations.

The culmination of the old liberal education ideal was expressed by John Henry Newman in his Discourses on University Education that he gave in Dublin in 1852. Liberal education made the gentlemen and was ‘the especial characteristic or property of a University and of a gentleman’. The end result of such education was ‘a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid equitable dispassionate mind’. The purpose was not vocational training but the general development of the intellect and of moral and social qualities for their own sake. This expressed what the ancient universities thought about themselves and what many others conceived the purpose of a university education to be.

From 1850 the ancient universities began a limited reform. Following Royal Commissions for both universities in 1852, an Act for Oxford in 1854 and for Cambridge in 1856 enabled Nonconformists both to matriculate and to graduate. This solved one problem but created another for graduated Nonconformists were still barred from becoming fellows of colleges throughout the 1860s and were not finally removed until the Universities’ Religious Tests Act 1871, that also obviated the need for fellows to be ordained clergymen.  There was also some curricular innovation. In 1848 Cambridge established new triposes in Natural Sciences and Moral Sciences, that included history and law. In Oxford two years later the Schools of Law and Modern history and of Natural Sciences were established. Since both universities now claimed to teach science to degree level they both built laboratories: the Oxford Museum in 1855 and the New Museum at Cambridge in 1865.

The watershed for Oxford and Cambridge came after 1870 with the Cleveland Commission of 1873 leading to the Act of 1877 and in turn to Commissioners to revise the statutes of colleges. The latter were obliged to release some of their funds for the creation of scientific professorships and university institutions. Only then, with this rebalancing of power between colleges and the universities was it possible to create an Oxford and Cambridge more oriented to research in science and scholarship, professional training, a widening curriculum and a strong professariat.

Oxford and Cambridge had considerable defects that were only beginning to be resolved in the 1850s and 1860s but there was no effective civic university movement that could serve as an alternative.

1. The Church of England had founded Durham University in 1832 but it became virtually a clergy training college with 90 per cent of its students going into Holy Orders. By trying to ape Oxford without having the latter’s resources it had very little success either with poor students or in the eyes of local industrialists who rejected it in favour of Newcastle as a centre of urgently needed mining education.
2. Owens College, Manchester, fared little better. It began in 1851 with £100,000 left by John Owen, a local textile manufacturer. Yet its intention was not a technological university to serve industry but a college to give ‘instruction in the branches of learning and science taught in the English universities’. It was to be the Oxford of the north! The Manchester business classes were not impressed and it was not until the 1870s when it acquired a new sense of purpose in service to industry that it began to take its place in the forefront of the civic universities movement.
3. A more vital root of the future civic universities lay in the emergence of provincial medical schools. The Apothecaries’ Act 1815 made it illegal to practise as an apothecary unless licensed by the Society of Apothecaries. This stimulated the creation of medical schools to prepare students for the examinations and, from 1831, those of the Royal College of Surgeons. Schools were founded in Manchester [1825], Sheffield [1827], Birmingham [1828], Bristol [1828], Leeds [1830], Liverpool [1834] and Newcastle [1834].

Both Durham and Owens before 1870 were abortive provincial initiatives stifled by the ancient universities and misguided into the dead end of being deferential and unsuccessful imitations rather than challenging alternatives. The medical schools, by contrast, provided one of the strands out of which civic universities were to emerge after 1870.  The origins of the University of London, by contrast, were rooted in an open antipathy to the ancient universities and not with any concern to reproduce them. Founded in 1828, it differed from existing institutions in three respects:

• It was free of religious tests and open to dissenters and unbelievers.
• It was to be cheaper than the ancient universities and to cater for ‘middling rich people’.
• There was a strong emphasis on professional training in the medical, legal, engineering and economic studies neglected at Oxford and Cambridge. It was to be useful and vocational.

The Church of England did not regard the creation of the new college [University] in ‘Godless Gower Street’ with kindness and established their own rival King’s College in 1828 as an exclusively Anglican institution but also with a focus on vocational training. From 1836 the University of London became the body managing examinations and degrees for its now constituent colleges, University and King’s. From 1858 it became the examining body dealing not only with London institutions but providing external examinations for all comers. The chief criticism levelled at universities in this period was that their neglect of science meant they could contribute little to the needs of industrialisation. Oxford and Cambridge produced clergy, gentlemen and, after 1850, civil servants. They did not appeal to the commercial classes or to the new professions. Nor did Durham and Manchester before 1870. Only the London colleges thrived on a close linkage with the new business and professional classes. Nor did the university sector as a whole keep up with rising population. By 1855-65 only one in 77,000 went to university. Higher education was still accessible to only a small minority.

Technical education

In the 1820s there was an attempt to create a scientific culture and technical education for the working classes. George Birkbeck, a Glasgow doctor who had settled in London, was instrumental with Benthamite radicals in establishing the London Mechanics’ Institute in 1823. His aim was to provide tuition in physics and chemistry for artisans and mechanics of various kinds. This was important in its own right but became the model for a provincial movement. By 1826 there were 100 mechanics’ institutes and by 1841 over 300.

In some cities, initially at least, they tried to serve a serious educative and scientific purpose. In Leeds, for example, local businessmen were strongly in favour of scientific education. Things, however, began to go wrong. Birkbeck had doubted that literacy levels in England were high enough to support further education of some rigour. His doubts were well founded and, as a result, many of the institutes took different paths in response to various other social pressures. Many concentrated on basic education in reading and writing while others became social clubs foreshadowing the working men’s club movement of the 1860s and some centres of radical political activity.

Most institutes forgot their origins and were taken over by the middle classes either as cultural centres for themselves — in Sheffield 88 per cent of members were business or professional men — or as institutions in which an attempt could be made to persuade the working classes of the virtues of temperance or classical political economy. Two things are clear about this movement:

• The institutes were not an entire failure. They fulfilled a variety of useful roles relevant to their time and locality and whatever path away from the original intention was taken as a result of local circumstances.
• Whatever Birkbeck had hoped, the mechanics’ institutes did not prove to be a mass movement giving working men that scientific culture that the middle classes had enjoyed since the mid eighteenth century.

In the mid-century the state became involved in the promotion of technical education in national institutions focused in London. In 1845 the Royal College of Chemistry was established and the Government School of Mines followed this in 1851. Both these institutions benefited from the Great Exhibition of 1851 whose profits of £186,000 together with a Government grant purchased the site in South Kensington where it was intended to gather various scientific institutions. In 1853 the School of Mines incorporated the nationalised College of Chemistry, the latter transferring to South Kensington in 1872 and the former joining it piecemeal thereafter.

In 1853 government created the Department of Science and Arts that controlled the School and the College. It also tried to create science schools in the provinces but with limited success. More importantly, in 1859 the new Department began a series of science examinations for schools and paid grants to such schools for successful pupils on a payment by results system. In 1860 nine schools with 500 pupils participated but by 1870 there were 799 schools with over 34,000 pupils. This represented a considerable effort to introduce science teaching into schools, its standards secured by the financial control of inspectors.

So how successful was the development of technical education? Britain had won most of the prizes at the Great Exhibition of 1851 but performance sixteen years later in Paris were poor. Despite government involvement in technical education, there was a strong feeling that we had fallen behind France and Prussia. National unease generated the civic university movement of the 1870s and 1880s but found immediate expression in the 1868 Parliamentary Select Committee on scientific education chaired by the ironmaster Bernhard Samuelson. This began twenty years of various parliamentary inquiries into science, industry and education that led to improvements in technical education especially after 1890.

Two major points emerge from this:

1. The industrial revolution seemed to have struck an economically efficient balance in its provision of education whatever its social deficiencies. Little serious effort was made before 1830 to maintain the elementary education of the mass of the population and this did not have any real adverse effects on economic growth since most of the new occupations being created did not in any case require literate labour. After 1840 Britain was sufficiently rich to finance expensive projects like its railway building and the considerable expansion of investment in education.
2. Expenditure on education was postponed but so too was a problem. While scientific and technical information circulated in middle class institutions, for working men the attempt to create a technical education was a failure. Apart from the central institutions in South Kensington and the introduction of technical examinations into schools in the 1860s, there was a dangerous flagging in the provision of technical education.

The roots of a great deal of anxiety about the level of education vis-à-vis Germany in the 1870s and 1880s lay in the lack of development in the 1850s and 1860s. Industrial success bred a lack of urgency to make rising literacy the basis for a higher level of working class scientific training. Britain’s economic decline from the 1870s was, in part, a result of this.

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[1] R.D. Anderson Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800, Macmillan, 1992 is a very useful, and short, summary of current research on the role of universities in nineteenth century society.

A middle class education

Before 1850 no one seriously argued the need for the state to provide schools for middle and upper class children. Here it was thought the free market was functioning admirably. Certainly it seems there was considerable activity and formal schooling appears to have been becoming the norm for boys. This sense of activity had to remain an impressionistic one. Its volume is difficult to quantify[1].

Before 1800 families who aimed to raise their sons as gentlemen and who could afford to do so employed tutors to educate their children at home. Home education was though to be more conducive to virtue than the public schools with their low moral state and harsh corporal discipline. The rising urban population and living standards brought an increase in middle class families able to afford modest fees for private day schooling in their home towns. It was these demands that were to revitalise the grammar schools and subsequently the public boarding schools.

Grammar schools responded strongly to demands for middle class education. Established in the sixteenth century, it was unclear what ‘grammar school’ meant by 1800. Many taught elementary subjects sometimes with classics, took all social classes, included girls and acted simply as the local village or parochial school. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a process of change in three areas:

1. Grammar schools began to change their curriculums, often including commercial subjects alongside the classics.
2. The new curriculums enabled the schools to charge fees. There was a decisive shift to a fee-paying middle class clientele and away from the poorer former free pupils. This was helped by Lord Eldon’s judgement in the Leeds Grammar School case of 1805 that decided that grammar schools could not use their endowments to teach non-classical subjects free of charge. The working classes did not want classics and they could no longer benefit from receiving a free elementary education at the grammar school.
3. Some schools pressed further along the road and turned themselves into boarding schools — Victorian public schools in embryo.

In the mid nineteenth century, three factors revitalised even those grammar schools that had already made the change and those that had not:

• A new breed of headmaster seemed to appear at this time, of high Victorian moral purpose and strength of personality. Such men often took over ailing or mediocre grammar schools and made them centres of academic excellence: for example, Caldicott at Bristol [1860], Jessop at Norwich [1859], Mitchinson at Canterbury [1859] and Walker at Manchester [1859].
• The schools were stimulated by the creation of a system of ‘middle class’ examinations from the 1850s. T.D.Acland in Exeter started these as a private venture in 1856 but so great was demand that their administration was taken over by Oxford and Cambridge in 1858 and they became known as the Local examinations. For middle class boys not intending to go to university they were a valuable school-leaving qualification and gave grammar schools something to aim for, and a perception of how they measured up to a common standard. The Higher Locals began at Cambridge in 1868 and at Oxford in 1877. In 1873 the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examining Board was established[2].
• The third factor was the Taunton Commission that investigated some 800 endowed schools between 1864 and 1867. It addressed the problem of middle class parents who could not afford to send their children to public schools but who wanted a local grammar school offering a curriculum that would provide entry to universities or to the professions for their sons. The Taunton Commission saw the solution in the abolition of free education in grammar schools. This would exclude free boys from the lower middle class, artisan and tradesman classes who had no university or professional ambitions and enable the curriculum to be determined by the market demand of fee-payers. The Endowed Schools Act 1869 established three Commissioners who, by making schemes and regulations for some 3,000 endowments, created throughout the country the middle class fee-paying academic grammar school. Their defect was in failing to provide for the tradesman-artisan class who had to resort to the new Board Schools created after 1870.

Public schools differed from grammar schools because they catered for the upper and upper-middle classes and were boarding establishments. The body of Victorian public schools were made up of various groups:

• There were the ancient nine schools investigated by the Clarendon Commission in the 1860s [Eton, Winchester, Harrow, Charterhouse, Rugby, Westminster, Merchant Taylors, St. Paul’s and Shrewsbury]
• To these were added certain grammar schools that had changed their status like Sedburgh and Giggleswick
• There were also waves of new foundations: nine in the 1840s [including Rossall, Marlborough and Cheltenham] and ten in the 1860s [including Clifton and Malvern]. Most were run as commercial ventures but many had wider purposes: schools at Lancing and Hurstpierpoint promoted high Anglicanism while those at Cranleigh and Framlingham stressed science and agriculture for farmers’ sons

The schools achieved a cohesion informally by inter-school games playing and formally by membership of the Headmasters’ Conference that met first in 1869 initially comprising the non-Clarendon public schools.

Public schools also underwent a process of changing vitality after 1830:

1. There was a decline in domestic education after 1830. Increasing numbers of middle class children survived infancy and they could no longer conveniently be taught at home. They had to be sent away to school. Improvements in transport facilities, fast road-coaches and then railways, made possible a national market in education. Newly founded schools or old town grammar schools could set out to attract a regional or even national catchment of clients who would reside as boarders.
2. The growing empire meant that many more families lived abroad but for cultural and climatic reasons they preferred their children to be educated in England in institutions that provided a home environment. Public schools were sought by newly prospering social groups who wished to confirm their status by assimilation with existing landed and professional elites.
3. Thomas Arnold’s reforms at Rugby and the spread of his masters into other schools raised the whole moral tone of public schools. This made them attractive to those who cared for their children’s nurture and who had shunned the violence and neglect of welfare that characterised many public schools before 1830.

Important changes took place in the content of education in public schools. Science was accepted into the curriculum, especially in the 1860s. Various factors changed this situation:

• The introduction of science degrees in the 1850s
• The army reforms of the 1850s that placed an emphasis on competitive examining including two papers in science
• A new generation of headmasters with particular interests in science: for example, H.M. Butler and F.W. Farrer at Harrow, Frederick Temple at Rugby. Parallel to this was the increase in the numbers of graduate science masters

Almost as important as change in the formal curriculum was a change in the value systems of the public schools. Thomas Arnold raised the tone of the schools from the 1820s with ‘godliness and good learning’ with the aim of producing the Christian Gentleman. From the 1850s these ideals came to be replaced by a more secular and robust emphasis on manliness and character training. ‘Muscular Christianity’, as advocated by Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, equated virile good health with Christian values and in the 1860s was expressed in a concern for organised games, athleticism and militarism[3]. Arnold had effected a change in the ethos of public schools and the changes of the 1860s matched them with secular needs outside.  These changes made the public schools highly attractive to social groups of parents somewhat below the traditional clientele and there was a marked change in the social intake of such schools after 1850:

1. In the first half of the century the social class of parents at eight leading public schools showed that the gentry provided 38.1 per cent of boys, titled persons 12.2, clergy 12.0 and professional parents 5.2. There was an expected and large predominance of the rural elites of gentry, titled and clerical families.
2. From the 1850s there is clear evidence of the rise of business families beginning to send their sons to Winchester and as more businessmen’s sons went to these schools so in turn more public school boys went into careers in business and industry. At Winchester this rose from 7.2 per cent of boys born in the 1820s to 17.6 per cent of those born in the 1850s.
3. These upward trends in businessmen sending their sons to public school and in public schoolboys entering business were to be of great importance. There was a linkage between class, public school, education and business leadership in the larger companies from the 1860s. An extended club of the public school network was to replace the older Nonconformist network that had characterised the early industrial entrepreneurs.

The strong expansion of middle class education both in grammar and public schools after 1830 was a response to the demands for education from parents. The Royal Commission under Lord Clarendon, established in 1859, looked at the nine ‘ancient institutions’ but the problem was the decaying grammar schools and in 1864 the government conceded another Royal Commission, under Lord Taunton, to look at all schools not looked at by either Clarendon or Newcastle. The two Commissions took as a given the stratification of schooling for the middle classes as it had developed in the first half of the century and formalised and systematised it into a hierarchy. At the top were the ‘first grade schools’ modelled on Eton and its eight correspondents, mostly boarding, with a classical education, sending boys to universities. Next came the ‘second grade schools’, mostly day, teaching a Latin but no Greek, whose boys would leave at sixteen. Finally there were ‘third grade schools’, all day, teaching a little Latin, sending boys into employment at fourteen. The three grades were conceived as parallel, separate tracks, only the common study of Latin allowing mobility via scholarships from one track to another for the very bright. The Public Schools Act of 1868 and the Endowed Schools Act the following year greatly helped the process.

The three-grade division proved over elaborate. The differentiation in demand was essentially a bifurcation, an increasingly clear distinction between schools for gentlemen and schools for those who aimed at respectability not gentility. The problem was not the grading but the opportunities open to the educated. Too many public schoolboys were being produced at a time when there were only very slowly growing opportunities in the Church, law and medicine between 1851 and 1871. Young men with middle class aspirations outstripped the availability of careers that would give them fulfillment. The fastest growing occupations lay in lower middle class employment like clerks and shop assistants to which ex-public schoolboys would be unlikely to be attracted. The Empire provided a safety valve as products of these new schools sought in colonial lifestyles and status they would have been denied at home.

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[1] For this area of education see T.W. Bamford The Rise of the Public Schools, London 1967, still the best overall treatment, and David Allsobrook Schools for the shire. The reform of middle-class education in mid-Victorian England, Manchester University Press, 1986.

[2] All these were the origins of the present examination system.

[3] Many schools began cadet corps in the 1860s, notably Eton, Winchester, Harrow and Rugby.

Elementary Education: Towards 1870

Government intervention in education was made more difficult by the sectarian conflict engendered. Grants provided the first form of intervention but during the 1840s and 1850s other forms of central control over education were instituted largely through the work of Kay-Shuttleworth whose period as secretary of the Committee of Council for Education lasted between 1839 and 1849.  He believed that the key to better standards was better-paid and trained teachers. He set out to change the monitorial system into a sound preliminary to a professional training and to attract teachers of the right class and calibre by raising salaries.

By the Minutes of 1846[1] selected pupils would be apprenticed at the age of 13 to their teachers and would receive a grant of £10 increased annually to £20 when they were 18. They were taught by the master for 90 minutes a day and had to pass the annual Inspector’s examination. They were to assist the master in teaching and he would train them in class management and routine duties and would be paid according to their level of success in the examinations.  This system was not new. Kay-Shuttleworth had used it at Norwood. Although the first pupil-teachers came from pauper schools, he intended that the bulk of them should form a social link between the children of labourers in elementary schools and the school managers, who were clergy or gentry. They would therefore be mostly from the upper working and lower middle classes.  The upper section of this ladder of recruitment and training was formed by the teacher training colleges. In 1839 there were four training colleges with model schools in the United Kingdom that took students through very inadequate courses of six weeks to three or four months. Beginning with the Battersea Training College in 1840, by 1858 there were thirty-four colleges partly financed by the Education Department through Queen’s Scholarships.

The Minutes of 1846 had brought to birth the trained elementary teacher but did it really improve the standard of teaching? To some degree any response to this question is subjective. Much school teaching was mechanical, overloaded with ‘facts’ for memorisation. The Teacher Training Colleges did provide a little teaching material, method and possible much-needed self-confidence. They were, however, severely criticised by the Newcastle Commission for their long hours, vast syllabuses, and addiction to textbooks and the superficial nature of many of their courses.

1. The main causes of poor teaching in elementary schools was generally considered to be the low wages of teachers and the low esteem that they reflected. The Minutes of 1846 attempted to solve the problem by state grants but the basic variations and inequities were left untouched. Salaries varied from area to area and school to school depending on endowments, contributions and school fees.
2. By 1855 the average annual pay of a certificated schoolteacher was assessed at £90. Higher pay would have removed elementary teachers too far from the class of their pupils and weakened the sympathy and understanding supposed to be felt between them
3. The reality was often different. Elementary teachers were educated above their station and in the 1850s began to demand promotion of the Inspectorate, to leave the schools for better jobs, or to climb into the church

The growth of grants to elementary schools increased dramatically from the original £20,000 of 1833 to £724,000 by 1860. From 1856 the Committee of Council on Education had a Vice-President to represent it in parliament. Yet the 1850s were considered a period of comparative educational stagnation. This was partly because all reformers (except the voluntarists) were not convinced that a national school system could not be completed without support from the rates. In addition, continuing sectarian bitterness defeated all attempts to secure rate support: bills in 1850, 1852, 1853 and 1862 all failed as did the recommendation of the Newcastle Commission in 1861.  The continuation of central grants ensured the survival and increase of the Inspectorate. From 2 in 1840, they had become 23 with 2 Assistant Inspectors in 1852, 36 with 25 Assistants in 1861 and 62 with 14 Assistants in 1864. Grants and inspectors came together with the introduction of the payment by results principle in the reconstruction of the government grant in the Revised Code of 1862-3. The bulk of a school’s grant, roughly half its income, was to be dependent upon satisfactory performance by each child over seven in examinations conducted by HMIs. It was unwelcome to those who thought that government should be doing more but was praised by those who though expenditure was mushrooming out of control and who doubted that the grants were giving value for money. Grant aid to education fell almost by a quarter and the levels of 1861 were not reached again until 1869. In effect, payment by results was a piece-rate system, putting teachers in the position of factory operatives.

Kay Shuttleworth had, through the central government department, established an inspectorate and a system of training teachers. Under his successor Ralph Lingen [1849-1869] the work of the Education Department, as it became in 1856, steadily expanded but on more formal and bureaucratised lines. The age of creative innovation was over. The department’s objective was to work the system as efficiently and economically as possible. Lingen saw his job as being to ‘stem the growth of a system of subsidies and to control the expansionist tendencies of inspectorate and educational public’.

A Royal Commission on Elementary Education, chaired by the Duke of Newcastle was appointed in 1858 and reported in 1861. In general, it considered that the system of state aid had worked well, but argued that the objectives had been set too high for the majority of children who attended the schools. It was desirable that results should be tested to ensure that schools were providing value for money, a recommendation used by Robert Lowe, the minister who spoke for the education department in the House of Commons, to establish payment by results. It also recommended involving local as well as central government in the provision of schools, allowing local government agencies to offer rate support to supplement government grants and suggested that this rate support should be dependent on the school’s results, in effect a series of incentive payments.

Until the late 1850s much of the schooling of the working classes was still informal or semi-formal. Efforts to bring government resources to bear had so far been hampered by the ‘religious problem’ and it took another twenty years to cut through this knot. Elementary education in the 1860s entered a period of some regression. The Newcastle Commission set low intellectual targets for the education of the poor and this can be compared with the hardening of Poor Law attitudes in the 1870s[2]. A national system of elementary education had to await the legislation of 1870 and 1880.

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[1] These were the minutes of the Committee of Council on Education of August and December 1846.

[2] Several areas of social administration went through these periods of regression in the third quarter of the nineteenth century: education in the 1860s and the poor law and public health in the 1870s.

Elementary Education: the state intervenes

Everyone was agreed that any education worth the name had a moral and therefore a religious core. But if religious, whose denomination? Anglicans, as members of the established church, argued that any school named in law and supported by government funds should be theirs. Nonconformists and Roman Catholics hotly disputed this. It was for this reason that there were two voluntary day school societies, joined by a third, the Catholic Poor School Committee, in 1849. This was the sectarian divide that dominated developments in elementary education up to 1870 and arguably 1902.

1. The Whig government in 1833 attempted to side step the issue by making a grant available to any voluntary school, of any or no denomination, that satisfied certain conditions of efficiency.
2. This was the beginning of a system of ‘giving to them that hath’. Government initiatives and funding were most needed in areas of ‘educational destitution’ where there were no middle class enthusiasts to start schools.
3. In 1839, therefore, the Whigs attempted to grasp the nettle of the ‘religious problem’ with a scheme that included grants to districts according to need and government training schools for teachers organised on a non-denominational basis. The Tories mobilised against it in both Commons and Lords and the opposition of almost the entire bench of bishops brought most of the scheme down to defeat.
4. In 1843 the Tories attempted to take the initiative in the education clauses of Graham’s Factory Bill creating Anglican-run factory schools. They faced a comparable storm from nonconformists and Catholics and likewise retreated.  Thereafter there was a stalemate with neither side strong enough to break through to a new system. The amount of grant continued to rise but still the money when only to localities already making an effort. This was only broken by the Education Act of 1870.

Public provision for elementary education began with a grant of £20,000 in 1833 in aid of school buildings. This was channelled inevitably through the two religious societies because these alone could show any degree of efficiency. 1833 also saw the Factory Act that banned children under eight from textile factories altogether and limited the hours of children between eight and thirteen to eight daily. This was continued in the Mines Act 1842 and Factory Act 1844. The idea behind this legislation was that if there were no work for children to do lawfully, they would go to school instead. Middle class enthusiasts broadly agreed that working class children should be in school, not at work. On the question of which school they should attend and whether government aid could be deployed to ensure that there were schools within the reach of all working class children, major divisions arose because of religion.  The debacle of 1839, where non-sectarian developments were effectively vetoed by the churches, did result in the creation of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education. Opposition continued from the Church of England resulting in the celebrated ‘Concordat’ of 1840 under which the church authorities secured control of the appointment of the inspectors of state-aided schools and the right to frame the instructions for religious education, though not over non-Anglican schools. The most positive result of the Concordat was the appointment as secretary to the new Committee of Education of James Kay Shuttleworth.[1]

Resistance to state elementary education and the sectarian conflict made it impossible to start a national system according to the Chadwickian technique of a Royal Commission followed by a governing statute. A step-by-step approach was adopted, from the small grant of 1833 to the Privy Council Minutes of 1846 that governed the mid-century expansion. However, in the 1830s and 1840s there were two other roots from which a national system of primary education might have grown: the new Poor Law and the Factory Acts.

Poor law education. Chadwick always had education on his agenda as a depauperizing influence sharing the assumption that universal education would in some unexplained way cure unemployment and render poor relief largely unnecessary. His enthusiasm was shared by several of the Poor Law Assistant Commissioners, who believed that pauperism as well as crime could be eradicated by early training.  The architect of poor law education was James Phillips Kay (Kay-Shuttleworth as he called himself after his marriage). Son of a Rochdale cotton manufacturer, trained as a physician in Edinburgh, founder-member of the Manchester Statistical Society and a writer on social questions, he was recruited as Assistant Commissioner for Norfolk and Suffolk in 1835. He found little or not education for pauper children: some were sent to local schools, but always the cheapest and worst and there was no industrial training.

Kay began by persuading the more intelligent guardians to employ young trainee teachers. He claimed in his autobiography, that this improved the workhouse schools up to a point where the Guardians would be persuaded to take more interest in pauper education, and perhaps consent to the creation of school districts.  When Kay was appointed Secretary to the new Committee of Council on Education in 1839 he selected he selected an establishment in Norwood for his experiment in pauper education. In three years he turned it into a model for the district school movement and a nursery of pupil teachers for elementary schools. After 1842, however, Peel’s government slowed down the plans for district schools as it was not prepared to coerce the Unions: the movement never achieved more than three Metropolitan School Districts and six small rural ones.

The failure of the district-school movement was partly compensated by the growth of separate schools in the more enlightened Unions. By 1857, 57 of these were listed. Some smaller workhouses had detached schools on the workhouse site. School standards greatly improved after 1846 with the beginnings of poor law school inspection and the decline in the use of untrained pauper teachers.  Poor Law education never aspired to becoming a basis or a model for state elementary education. It was on too small a scale even to fulfil its own task. It was intended for workhouse children but there were, in 1855, some 277,000 children in families on outdoor relief not provided with any education except in refuges or mission or ‘ragged’ schools. Poor Law schools were the top grade in a hierarchy catering for the very lowest levels of society.

Factory schools. The factory school was not new in 1833. It can be traced back to the 1780s and was pioneered by enlightened manufacturers like Henry Ashton at Turton Mill, the Peel family and Robert Owen. The factory master was traditionally responsible for the education of his apprentices.  The Factory Act 1833 made millowners responsible for the education of children who were not their apprentices but lived with their own parents and this annoyed them. The Act did not require employers to provide education themselves, but only to obtain a certificate of school attendance for the previous week. Many progressive millowners were alienated by the education clauses: W.R.Greg, an enthusiastic organiser of factory schools, became a leading opponent of the Act.

After 1833 much of the enthusiasm for the voluntary provision of factory schooling was lost. Millowners unable or unwilling to provide their own schools tried to obey the law by sending their children to the local day schools. These arrangements were often unsuccessful. The section of factory education in the Newcastle Commission Report was largely an indictment of their inadequacies.  Factory education might have improved, at least in small mills, if the millowners had co-operated in setting up shared schools. Factory education became embroiled in the sectarian debate over Graham’s Factory Bill of 1843 and the act eventually passed in 1844 was shorn of its education clauses.  The failures of factory education, especially its involvement in sectarian disputes, certainly delayed the spread of elementary education. Disgusted Nonconformists turned to the voluntarist movement and Anglicans too patently preferred the perpetuation of ignorance to giving up their own control of education. Faced with such attitudes, the government contribution to the development of education in the mid-century had to be made largely by stealth.

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[1] R.J.W. Selleck James Kay-Shuttleworth. Journey of an Outsider, Woburn Press, 1994 is now the standard biography of this seminal figure.

Elementary Education: Social control and sectarianism

No socially conscious person of influence could leave education to chance. As a result it became enmeshed in conflicting social and political aims. When economic conflict gave rise to class consciousness, people of one class saw a means of controlling other classes by offering them education on their own terms. When there was religious and sectarian conflict, education became involved there as well[1].

Religion and social control: a rationale for education

English elementary education grew in the face of constant fear and opposition from sections of the upper and middle classes. Education, it was believed, would teach the working classes to despise their lot in life, enable them to read seditious literature and make them less deferential to their social superiors. This attitude persisted, especially among rural farmers and gentry, throughout the nineteenth century. In 1847 the Rev. John Allen, Inspector for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire wrote the following that he maintained reflected rural opinion: ‘We cannot help having a school, but we think it advisable that as little as possible be taught therein.’

Overt hostility to any education may have retreated into the backwoods of rural England but it was followed more slowly by those who wished to give the working classes just enough education so that they could read the Bible, learn their duty to God and Man, and the place in life to which Providence had been pleased to assign them.William Lovett, the Chartist leader, denounced these educationalists as[2] ‘favourable to the securing of their prey, another portion, with more cunning, were for admitting a sufficient amount of mental glimmer to cause the multitude to walk quietly and contentedly in the paths they in their wisdom had prescribed for them.’

In time this attitude also weakened, partly through the actions of Lord Ashley who, though an enemy of secular state schools, was an enthusiastic champion of working class education. Its successor was the ‘Morals before Intellect’ line of those who demanded that working class education should be primarily religious, because its primary purpose was to inculcate good morals and obedience. This was often found among High Churchmen who believed that[3] ‘no secular knowledge really desirable for the bulk of the population could be fitly taught apart from a constant reference to religion.’  Among conservative landed gentry[4] ‘I consider those schools to be the most promising where The Commandments and the Duty of God and Man are regularly taught, because without moral and practical religious training there can be no real education.’ Secular educationalists were, until the 1860s, a small, noisy group advocating moral without religious training.

Modern historians often maintain that the purpose of early Victorian educationalists was the social control of one class by another or as Harold Silver puts it ‘Rescuing the poor for religion and a concomitant stable society’. But the concept of social control, though incontestably valid in any examination of education, is oversimplified:

1. As a label ‘social control’ is a crude one. It covered a multitude of stances from the crudely manipulative and instrumental attitude of a man like Lord Londonderry building schools in his mining villages after the Chartist disturbances to the wholly sincere attempt to remake the working class child in the middle class image. Among middle and upper class philanthropists it was an argument for enlightened self-preservation; to Ashley and Kay Shuttleworth education would rescue the working classes from crime and sedition.
2. The means varied. Churchmen sought to inculcate religion and morals to buttress duty and obedience while liberals attacked sedition and socialism by developing popularised versions of classical political economy.
3. Rescue meant conversion to the moral and social imperatives of the rescuers, who represented the spectrum of attitudes and motives in contemporary society.
4. Motives and means might have varied but there was a good deal of common ground among all educationalists. Lovett and Owen no less than Ashley and Kay Shuttleworth looked to education to rescue the working classes from vice and crime accepting the relationship between ignorance and criminality. Education as a means of ‘improvement’, embodied in the idea of the ‘march of mind’ with its roots in a very old liberal tradition, provided a counter-force to the Law and High Church preoccupation with faith, duty and obedience. The interesting question is not whether a given educational scheme was designed as social control but what sort of society it was intended to produce?

One reason why education in the 1830s appeared to be an instrument of class control was the decline of the parallel conception of education as a means of social mobility. It had declined as the professional and industrial middle classes turned to defensive measures against the working classes forming below them. Education, as a result, became involved in the class struggle. Education became politicised. By the 1830s there were Church schools teaching the Anglican catechism, Nonconformist schools teaching private morality from the Bible and public morality from readers of classical economics and Owenite schools propagating socialism. It was the dominance of the rescue motif, as interpreted by middle class enthusiasts, prevented education from permanently dividing into forms of propaganda serving conflicting social and political aims.

A sectarian divide: the emergence of the elementary day school

From the 1780s working class enthusiasts and middle class reformers alike were much concerned with what might be done to extend working class children’s encounters with schooling. Among the most successful enterprises was Sunday schools. They originated in the eighteenth century[5] and by the early 1830s it has been estimated that over a million children and adolescents were attending them. Sunday schools fitted into the interstices of working class struggles for economic survival very well:

• Sunday was the one day when schooling did not compete with work
• Chapel or church could be used as schoolroom; and teachers gave their services free, so that if fees were charged at all, they were very low
• All Sunday schools taught reading and a minority writing and even arithmetic. From 1807 controversies ranged, especially among Methodists, as to the appropriateness of activities other than reading on a Sunday and the teaching of writing was usually a good guide to those schools under local and lay control rather than under religious domination

Sunday schools differed from most day schools. Regular weekday school required some sort of building and paid teachers, that in turn required an initial capital outlay, either from endowment or charitable subscription or both, as well as a reasonably regular and sizeable fee income. The promotion of day schools resulted, in the early nineteenth century, is the formation of two Religious Societies. They were designed to co-ordinate effort and spread best practice nationally. The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in England and Wales was formed in 1811 and three years later the British and Foreign School Society [it replaced the Lancastrian Society formed in 1808]. The sectarian divide had been established: the Anglican National Society and the broadly Nonconformist British and Foreign School Society. The attractiveness of these voluntary schools was not enhanced wither by their teaching methods:

1. Both favoured the monitorial or mutual system of teaching, by which a teacher taught the older children [or monitors] who then passed on what they had learnt to groups of younger children[6]
2. It was designed to enable a single teacher to cope with very large groups of children
3. It was mechanical in its approach relying on rote learning and memorisation but it was economical and this appealed to many contemporary adult observers. The reaction of the children who endured this approach was far less positive[7]
4. At the same time, many monitorial schools were more ambitious trying to teach reading, writing and arithmetic as an integrated package

These voluntary religious day schools offered an experience significantly different from the pattern of schooling familiar to the working class and one that many of them chose to avoid. The number and persistence of what middle class contemporaries disparagingly called dame or private adventure schools is striking. Their flexibility and informality, willingness to accept attendance on an intermittent basis, parents paying when they could, fetching their child out to do an errand or job, were part of their attraction. It is difficult to generalise about them but:

• They were small in size, seldom more than thirty children and often as few as ten.
• They met often in the teacher’s home, in a back kitchen, basement or living room.
• They might simply be reading schools, taught indeed by an elderly woman or dame; but writing and arithmetic could be tackled for an additional fee.
• They did not have the resources of the monitorial schools but they lacked the noise, numbers and barrack-room discipline. They functioned often as an extension of the child’s familiar domestic environment rather than places separated from and often alien to it.

In competing for the custom of working class parents and their children, the voluntary societies and the schools affiliated to them had one resource that the working class private day schools lacked: access to central government and thus the possibility of mobilising its power and resources in their support.

In 1833 Lord Kerry’s Returns on elementary education concluded that about 1.2 million or about a third of all children in England and Wales aged 4 to 14 were attending day schools; 1.549 million or under half were attending Sunday schools, of whom a third went to day school as well. Day schools could not copy the mushroom growth of Sunday schools. They were more expensive to run, an expense reflected in fees ranging typically from twopence to five pence per week. They also competed directly with work and work almost always won. This competition made it difficult to get a child into a day school at all and even more so to keep him or her there.

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[1] The most straight-forward study of education between 1830 and 1914 is the relevant chapters of John Lawson and Harold Silver A Social History of Education in England, Methuen, 1973. The focus of much study has been on the education of the working population.  Central to the period 1830-70 are the contrasting views of E.G.West Education and the State, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965 and Education and the Industrial Revolution, Batsford, 1975 and J.S.Hurt Education in Evolution 1800-1870, London, 1971.  The work of Harold Silver is also important especially his The Concept of Popular Education, Methuen, 1965, republished with editorial introduction in 1985 and his collection of essays Education as History, Methuen,  1983.  B.Simon The Two Nations and the Educational Structure 1780-1870, Lawrence and Wishart, 1974 and G.Sutherland Elementary Education in the Nineteenth Century, The Historical Association, 1971 are essential reading.

J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds) Working Class Culture: Studies in history and theory, Hutchinson, 1979 is valuable for the two essays by Richard Johnson especially 'Really useful knowledge: radical education and working class culture 1790-1848'.  J. Burns 'From Polite Learning to Useful Knowledge 1750-1850', History Today, April 1986 and B.Harrison 'Kindness and  Reason:  William Lovett and Education', History Today, March 1987 are interesting.  T.W. Laqueur Religion  and Respectability:  Sunday  Schools and Working Class Culture  1780-1850, Yale, 1976 is the seminal work on a major educational movement. D.G. Paz The Politics of Working Class Education 1830-1850, Manchester, 1980 is the best new analysis of state  intervention.

[2] William Lovett Life and Struggles of William Lovett, 1876, 1967 edition, page 111. This autobiography is an excellent source on the nature of working class education and the need for its reform.

[3] Rev. Alexander Watson, curate of St John's, Cheltenham in 1846.

[4] Sir Charles Anderson of Lea, near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire in evidence to the Newcastle Commission in June 1859.

[5] Robert Raikes of Gloucester has traditionally featured as pioneering Sunday schools in the 1780s but in fact teaching Bible reading and basic skills on a Sunday was already an established activity in some nonconformist and evangelical congregations.

[6] It was sometimes known as the 'Madras system' as that was where the Anglican clergyman Andrew Bell first developed it or the 'Lancastrian system' after the nonconformist Joseph Lancaster who independently developed the same system in England.

[7] Charles Dickens Hard Times, published in 1854, contains the best satirical account of the monitorial system in action under the teacher Mr McChoakumchild while in Nicholas Nickleby he caricatures the 'practical' nature of education at Mr Squeer's Dotheboys Academy.

Drive to mass literacy after 1830

From 1830 there is no doubt that literacy was set for a steady rise for the rest of the century, though inevitably with regional variation in pace. Literacy rates were published by the Registrar General for each census year in percentages.

 

	1841	1851	1861	1871
Male	67.3	69.3	75.4	80.6
Female	51.1	54.8	65.3	73.2

This was paralleled by growth in the average number of years of schooling for boys: 2.3 years in 1805 to 5 years in 1846-51 to 6.6 years by 1867-71. Various factors lay behind this, but first it is important to consider the motives both of educators and of educated that made this possible.

1. The Churches were concerned with the salvation of souls and the winning back of the irreligious working class urban population to Christianity. The Church of England felt itself under attack from a revival of Nonconformity and Catholicism in the 1830s. By 1870 there were 8.798 voluntary assisted schools of which 6,724 were National Society Schools. At a more secular level the long period of radical unrest from the 1790s to the 1840s created deep anxiety about order and social control. Richard Johnson put it well when he says: ‘The early Victorian obsession with the education of the poor is best understood as a concern about authority, about power, about the assertion (or the reasserting) of control.’
2. In Spitalfields much education was aimed at controlling the population in the interests of social and economic stability. In the north eastern coalfields coal owners created schools attached to collieries in the 1850s as a means of social control following damaging strikes in 1844.
3. The social control argument was an old one dating back to the Sunday Schools, the SPCK Charity schools and beyond. These suggested that schooling and literacy would make the poor unfit for the performance of menial tasks because it would raise their expectations. Even worse, the acquisition of literate skills would make the working classes receptive to radical and subversive literature. This was the essential dilemma: whether to deny education to the poor and so avoid trouble, or whether to provide ample education in the hope that it would serve as an agent of social control. By the late 1830s the latter ideology dominated the minds of policy makers: education was seen as a means of reducing crime and the rising cost of punishment and also as a way of keeping the child or the child when adult out of the workhouse.

In the 1860s these views were joined by two other that presaged the 1870 Act. The victories of Prussia and the northern States of America suggested that good levels of education contributed to military efficiency. At home the Reform Act 1867 prompted concern to ensure the education of those who would soon wield political power through an extended franchise: ‘we must now education our masters’ spoke Robert Lowe, a leading Conservative politician.

Education may have been of limited value for actual job performance, but it had important wider bearings on the creation of an industrial society. It made it possible for people to be in touch with a basic network of information dispersal and could make labourers aware of the possibilities open to them or the products of consumers. For such reasons a positive belief in the value of education on the part of the authorities replaced earlier assumptions that teaching the poor to read would merely lead to the diffusion of subversive literature and the wholesale flight of the newly educated from menial tasks.

The literacy rate was driven up by the injection of public money into the building and maintenance of elementary schools. This rose from £193,000 in 1850, £723,000 in 1860 to £895,000 by 1870. The money was channelled largely into two religious societies: the Anglican National Society, founded in 1811, and the British and Foreign School Society, a Nonconformist body created three years later. These bodies raised money to build schools usually run on monitorial lines. However, by the early 1830s it was obvious that they were unable to counter the defects in school provision, especially in the north. State funding began in 1833 with investment of about one per cent of national income [a situation that compared favourably with that of the 1920s]. From the 1840s, under the guidance of the Privy Council for Education [established in 1839] and its Secretary James Kay Shuttleworth, expenditure soared as grants were extended from limited capital grants for buildings to equipment [1843], teacher training [1846] and capitation grants for the actual running of schools [1853]. Closer control over these grants was instituted in 1862 with the system of payment by results and by a reduction of teacher training to try and control sharply rising expenditure.

Important though the role of the state and religious societies was in developing literacy levels, some historians have pointed to the large sector of cheap private education where the working classes bought education for their children outside the church and state system. It has been suggested that at least a quarter of working class children were educated in this way. Why did the working class spurn the new National and British schools and choose slightly more expensive, small dame and common day schools?  There is no doubt, however, that the expansion of this type of education did result in the creation of a remarkably literate working class.

1. A major factor in rising literacy was the creation of a teaching profession in elementary schools. The religious societies had their own training colleges before the 1830s and from 1839 many Anglican dioceses established colleges to serve diocesan National Schools. The system received its most important stimulus from the Minutes of 1846 that established the training and career structure for teachers. The 1850s thus saw the rapid rise of a schoolteacher class: there were 681 certificated teachers in 1849 but 6,878 ten years later.
2. A further important factor was the role of Her Majesty’s Inspectors [HMI] first appointed in 1839 to ensure that the state grant was spent properly. Their duties expanded into more educational roles, examining pupil teachers and the training colleges, calculating the capitation grants of the 1850s and then examining children in the subjects on which the grant was based in the 1860s. They encouraged the replacement of the monitorial system with class teaching. By 1870 their number has risen from 2 to 73.

Mass elementary education was grounded in the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. Religion and bible study was equally central to the religious societies. Attempts to extend the curriculum were stopped when the Revised Code limited grants to the 3Rs and away from the broader cultural subjects. From 1867 history, geography and geometry were made grant-earning subjects but languages and a range of science subjects had to wait until the 1870s. What was learned was important and the development of a body of reading material accessible to the masses was a characteristic feature of the years after 1830. At the school level the SPCK, acting as the publishing arm of the National Society, set up its Committee of General Literature and Education in 1832 to produce schoolbooks. The National Society gradually took over from the SPCK and in 1845 established its own book collection for National schools. The British Society similarly published secular books for schools after 1839.

At an adult level there was a concern among the governing classes to provide edifying books that would divert the minds of the potentially dangerous working classes away from the propaganda of radicalism. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, established in 1826, issued a library of short books on popular science, history and all types of secular subjects. They were trying to combat the strong tradition of radical literature aimed at the same clientele. Into the market came commercial amusements: Dickens, Gothic and romantic novels and the railway reading of W.H. Smith. The work of the Churches and especially the National Society provided much of the education that pushed up the literacy rate over the mid-century. All this was achieved before the advent of state secular schools or free or compulsory education. Yet it was not enough. Some 39 per cent of children between 3 and 12 were not at school, some one and a half million children. There were one million children for whom there were no school places even had they chosen to attend. The 1870 Act filled in the gaps in areas where voluntary provision was insufficient to absorb the potential children. School Boards were established to build non-sectarian schools and the work of the 2,000 new School Boards and the general compulsory education from 180 finally achieved virtual mass literacy by 1900.

Literacy is an extension of the powers of speech and thought and has, in effect, enabled people to ‘speak’ and ‘think’ in new ways. Nevertheless the spread of literacy has been a two-edged process. For some people, it has been a source of social emancipation yet, for others, it has seemed more of an agency of social control. Those who aspire to retain the status quo sought to harness, if not control, literacy through censorship, licensing of approved printers and the taxation of publications. But this was rarely sufficient. People who had been taught through authorised texts acquired tools that gave them access to politically contentious works

The question of literacy

Literacy is difficult to define with any degree of accuracy and, in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century difficult to quantify[1]. Teaching and learning are complex communicative activities in which literacy plays a central role. It is the medium through which cultural storage can occur. The human memory has become less of a storehouse of raw experience and more of a repository of instruments that can unlock experiences stored elsewhere [for example, in books, letters, etc.].

The meaning of literacy

The concept of literacy can be defined very broadly as a person’s ability to read and sometimes write down the cultural symbols of a society or social group. Literacy has always been a two-edged sword: it provides the means to expand experience but also results in the need to control what people read. It supplies power to its possessors and, like other tools, provides them with a means of escaping from their immediate environment. It is not surprising that the dominant culture wants to control literacy while subordinate groups call for access to the ‘really useful knowledge’ of the dominant culture.

1. The economic innovations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to important changes in the working life of many people who were increasingly drawn to work in factories. This disrupted earlier patterns of domestic and community life. The employment of adults outside the home left many children unattended. Child employment meant that many children were denied the disciplines of schooling.
2. New types of schools were established to compensate for these factory-related developments. Factory schools, Sunday schools, evening schools and infant schools were all designed to accommodate the consequences of industrialisation.
3. These new schools adopted a new social agenda. They sought not only to inculcate virtue but also aimed to remold their pupils to fit in with the needs of an industrial society. Schools began to place much greater emphasis on continuous and regular attendance with teachers developing elaborate pedagogies to ensure that all children remained busy at their allotted tasks. Two developments flowed from this.
4. Much greater attention was given to the education, training and competence of elementary school teachers. Rote methods were given much less attention and, instead, teachers were expected to be accomplished in more intellectual methods of instruction. They were expected not merely to inspect the contents of their pupils’ minds by hearing memorised lessons but also to exercise the minds of their charges by questioning them on their lessons.
5. There was a major expansion of the school curriculum promoted alongside the spread of elementary education. Children began to be taught through secular as well as religious topics. It was assumed that if children knew how the world worked, they would be more ready to accept their allotted, if unnatural, place in the scheme of things.
6. Another educational consequence of economic change was that writing began to enter the core curriculum of schooling. This did not meet with unqualified approval. Some argued that writing, a business skill, should not be taught in Sunday schools, while others claimed that it would promote crime [’if you teach them to write, you teach them to forge’]. Many assumed that writing skills would elevate people above their proper station in life. Nevertheless, there was a powerful lobby that recognised the importance of writing skills to the prosperity and administration of the economy. The army of clerks expanded with industrialisation.

The spread of reading skills was assisted by the technology of printing in the 1830s and 1840s with the steam-driven printing press. The spread of writing in commercial institutions also received a technological stimulus with the invention of the mass-produced and low-cost steel-nibbed pen in the 1830s to replace the expensive quills, penknives and paper and the introduction of cheaper esparto grass paper in the 1860s. The stamp duty on newspapers and the tax on paper were both reduced in 1836 and finally abolished in 1855 and 1861 respectively. The average price of books halved between 1828 and 1853. Books and newspapers became more readily available with the Public Libraries Act of 1850 and communications were improved by the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840.

‘Read or was read to’: it is only in the course of the nineteenth century that reading gradually became a private rather than a public act for the mass of the population. Until the 1830s, if you could read, you were expected to read aloud and share your reading with family, friends and workmates. A population with a significant proportion of ‘illiterates’ may not be an ill-informed or stupid one; it may be at least as well informed as a population where the formal reading skill is widely diffused but seldom used.

Was literacy rising or falling in 1830?

There is some debate over whether levels of literacy were rising or falling in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. The problem that historians face is that there is no agreed standard for measuring literacy in this period. Attempts have taken two main forms: a counting of institutions and a counting of signatures on marriage registers. Both are fraught with problems. Counting the number of schools tells historians little about the education that went on in them, the average attendance, length of the school year or average length of school life, all of which have a direct relevance to levels of literacy. Counting signatures likewise poses problems. Is this all a person could write? What level of literacy does it assume? Yet signatures are the better figures, far more soundly based than attempts to count schools or scholars.

W.P.Baker’s survey of seventeen country parishes in the East Riding of Yorkshire found that male literacy was 64 per cent in both 1754-60 and 1801-10 and rose steadily afterwards. Lawrence Stone argues that literacy was rising between the 1770s and 1830 based upon more widespread analysis seeing this as a result of the process of industrialisation and its demands for a more literate workforce.  This optimistic view has, however, been called into question as far as England as a whole was concerned. There are various reasons for questioning whether literacy did rise:

1. Declining investment. The sharp rise in population after the 1760s began to swamp the existing provision of schools, especially charity schools funded by local patrons. Private, charitable investment in education slackened after 1780 as people diverted their investment into more expensive and pressing outlets—enclosure, canal and turnpike investment. The dynamic areas of growth in the education system were no longer the charity schools for the working population but private fee-paying schools for the upper classes and grammar schools for the middle classes.
2. Child labour. Children were drawn into the new processes of industrialisation and there were increased opportunities to employ them from an early age. This too militated against working class children receiving an education that would make and keep them literate, especially in industrial areas. Under these circumstances it would not be surprising if literacy rates did sag.
3. It was the Sunday school movement that from the 1780s countered these factors. In 1801 there were some 2,290 schools rising to 23,135 in 1851 with over 2 million enrolled children. By then three-quarters of working class children aged 5-15 were attending such institutions. However there are some limitations to making a strong case that Sunday schools sustained the literacy rate. First, many schools ceased the teaching of writing after the 1790s. Secondly, they have been seen as either the creation of a working class culture of respectability and self-reliance or as middle class conservative institutions for the reform of their working class pupils from above. A positive force in a worsening situation, they probably prevented literacy falling more than it did in areas vulnerable to decline.

There is some statistical evidence for a fall in literacy in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. Studies of Lancashire, Devon and Yorkshire suggest that there was a sharp fall in literacy in the 1810s and 1820s from around 67 to fewer than 50 per cent. Stephen Nicholas has examined 80,000 convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1840 and he found that urban literacy continued to rise until 1808 and rural literacy to 1817 but then both fell consistently for the rest of the period.

These divergent views illustrate the difficulty of extrapolating from specific examples to a general picture. We clearly need to avoid thinking of ‘England’, especially urban England, as a homogenous unit experiencing ‘optimistic’ or ‘pessimistic’ literacy trends before 1830.

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[1] On  literacy see C.M. Cipolla Literacy and the Development in the West, Penguin, 1969 contains an excellent chapter on literacy and the industrial revolution.  R.D. Altick The English Common Reader, Phoenix Books, 1963, R.K.Webb The British Working Class Reader 1790-1848: Literacy and Social Tension, London, 1955 and M. Sanderson Education, Economic Change and Society in England 1780-1870, Macmillan, 2^nd ed., 1991 contain important material.  D. Vincent Literacy and  popular culture: England 1750-1914, CUP, 1989 is an important study based on computerised research.

Education: The nature of the problem

Education is a social activity. Schools train children for their future role in life. Where society is hierarchical this includes their position in the hierarchy. Education is both product and support of the social order and its aims become diluted as a result. No socially conscious individual and eventually government could leave education to chance. As a result it became enmeshed in conflicting social and political aims. When economic conflict gave rise to class consciousness, men of one class saw it as a means of controlling other classes by offering them education on their own terms. When there was religious or sectarian conflict, education became involved in that too. While class and religion were related — the different forms of Christianity having a close linkage with the economic position and social status of those who hold those beliefs — the cross-currents generated by these conflicts influenced, and possibly distorted the development of English education. Education was therefore a major focus for those who believed in social control, as an instrument for molding public morals and social attitudes. Government and politicians cannot leave it alone. This was as true of the nineteenth century as it is today.

Baldwin Francis Duppa, Secretary of the Central Society of Education wrote in 1837 [1] ‘For schools to be efficient, it is necessary that they should be so ordered as to supply the wants peculiar to the class intended to be educated at them; that they would have a regard to existing evils, and that they should have reference, not to one class of faculties alone, but to all.’  The radical Robert Owen wrote in 1813 [2] ‘For every day will make it more and more evident that the character of man is without a single exception, always formed for him; that it may be, and is, chiefly created by his predecessors; that they give him, or may give him, his ideas and habits, that are the powers that govern and direct his conduct. Man, therefore, never did, nor is it possible that he ever can, form his own character.’

Education was a major support for the existing system but it could also act as a means for liberation, a force for subversion. The debate in the nineteenth century was, in part, about the degree to which it should be controlled, why and by whom.  ‘In an agricultural society the old man is the wise one; in an industrial society he is a has-been.’  So wrote the historian Carlo Cipolla in 1973. There has been a long debate on the nature of education and the ways in which education and schooling interact. Upbringing is a combination of two simultaneous processes: socialisation that makes people human, and acculturation. Socialisation occurs through communication between different members of society and they become acculturated because the content and form of the communication carries from one social context to another. To talk of socialisation is to refer to the attributes that all humans share, whereas to talk of acculturation is to focus on differences of life style.

Cultures typically differentiate themselves linguistically in their languages, dialects and accents. But cultural identity is also stored and transmitted through other channels: the way people design their homes, wear their cloths, eat their food, give each other flowers or hold each other’s bodies. Joining a culture or acculturation is rather more than becoming a human being. It is an intensely social experience comprising induction into a complex array of conventions and practices. Collectively these practices form the fabric of a culture.

1. As a major activity of acculturation, child rearing is a process of transmitting and decoding cultural messages. It is a culturally focused activity.
2. Education was transformed from a human activity into a human institution and became a highly visible feature of the cultural landscape. Significant areas of educational practice became separated from everyday life. They were seen as the responsibility of specialist personnel [child minders and teachers. They were conducted through specialist activities [for example, games, exercises, homework]; were linked to specialist materials [for example, toys, textbooks]; associated with specific periods in young people’s lives and, finally, were identified with specialised locations [schools, nurseries, playing fields].

Education, as a result of this transition from a process to an institution, also underwent a further change. It became less of an undisciplined, natural process and more of a regulated, cultural institution. The rise of schooling entailed a major reconceptualisation of social learning: a move from experiential, non-formalised learning grounded in older educational agencies [for example, employment, the church and the family] to formalised, rational, institutional learning in the school. In this process the nineteenth century is pivotal in the development of English education since, for the first time, all children were officially required to attend school. Schooling is as much a political institution as an educational one: it is an island of established and controllable order within a much wider — and far less ordered — educational framework.

Schooling emerged as the process of education became institutionalised. It gradually became a partitioned social activity, separate from the rest of life. The notion that learning might be place specific has its origins in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Before that a school meant, not so much a place, but a group of teachers just as the word church has two senses [a congregation of people and a more permanent structure]. The establishment of relatively permanent and static schools was accompanied by the attraction of teachers to specific settings. Historically schools like this, established by the Church or by local benefactors, were exceptional, both numerically and socially. They catered for a small sector of the population and, typically as grammar schools, were closer to the universities than to the forms of domestic one-teacher schooling that served the rest of the population. School buildings began to grow in size in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the single schoolroom was transformed into the multi-room, multi-teacher schools. Each classroom was, in effect, a separate machine room: but how were the different rooms to be coordinated? How were children to be allocated to their classroom? Were learners to be processed as individuals or as batches?

Before the sixteenth century, childhood did not exist. The transition from a state of dependence to the responsibilities of adulthood was very rapid. By the nineteenth century the period of infant-to-adult transition had, for some people, been prolonged. Schooling was one of the products of this process, an institution designed to occupy young people. The nineteenth century development of pre-schooling can be seen as an extension of the length of state-sponsored schooling. For many children, therefore, the time to learn (or, more accurately, the time to be schooled) started earlier in their lives and ended later.

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[1] Baldwin Francis Duppa 'Central Society of Education: Objects of the Society', Central Society of Education, 1837, Woburn Press, 1968, page 13.

[2] Robert Owen A New View of Society, 1813, Everyman edition, page 45.

Work in the countryside

The tendency for studies of nineteenth century Britain to concentrate on urban life and neglect the countryside reflects a time of unparalleled industrialisation, urbanisation and unprecedented urban problems. Yet in 1851, nearly half the population of Britain lived in rural areas and many more had been born in the countryside or had experienced a rural life. Indeed, it can be argued that for most of the nineteenth century a rural view of the world continued to exert a significant influence in Britain. The successive Reform Acts may have redistributed power after 1832 but much political power and personal wealth remained in the countryside until the late nineteenth century[1]. Two further myths about rural life should also be dispelled:

1. That rural life was in some way separate and distinct from that of the towns. Rural life had never been separate from the towns and, as nineteenth century urbanisation developed, the interconnectedness of countryside and towns became stronger and more obvious. Connections took many forms: most obviously expanding transport networks, initially by turnpike roads and then by railways, had by 1890 linked most villages into a complex and comprehensive communication system; through rural to urban migration that could lead to family links between countryside and town and in some cases through the rural-based but urban-financed putting out industries; and through social interaction at fairs, markets and other meeting places.
2. That life in the countryside was easier than that of urban dwellers. Many contemporary commentators misleadingly contrasted the images of an idyllic rural life with the horrors of urban living. Engels, for example, wrote in 1845 'They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do and yet earned what they needed. They had leisure for healthful work in garden or field, work which in itself was recreation for them and they could take part besides in the recreations and games of their neighbours....They were, for the most part, strong, well-built people....Their children grew up in the fresh country air....while of eight or twelve hours work for them was no question.'

Life in the country was every bit as harsh as that in towns: a combination of poor housing, lack of employment and poor social prospects frequently led to townward migration rather than any specific urban attraction. Undoubtedly built to lower densities, ameliorating the consequences of poor sanitation and associated disease, the density of occupation of rural housing was often as high or higher than that in towns. High natural increases in rural areas mostly offset migration losses up to the 1840s and rural population densities continued to increase. In many rural areas the housing supply expanded more slowly than population: indeed some large landowners demolished cottages and took less responsibility for housing their labour force[2].

Although the quality of rural housing varied greatly, for the very poor it was often worse than its urban counterpart. Slums were not simply found in urban Britain[3]. Increasingly urban housing had proper foundations, solid walls and slate roofs. By contrast much rural housing was severely substandard when first built. Most landowners accepted little responsibility for the provision of decent housing and cottages were often small, cold and wet. Such conditions persisted until at least the 1850s but, during the later nineteenth century, housing gradually improved as out-migration lessened population pressure on the countryside and sanitary and housing reforms began to percolate into rural areas.

For many rural families poor housing was combined with acute poverty. By the early 1830s many rural areas were beginning to emerge from the worst rural distress of the agricultural depression and direct rural protest, such as the Captain Swing riots in 1830 in southern England, were not repeated, rural wages remained low and highly variable from one area to another. James Caird surveyed wages in England in 1851 and found variations from 13-14s per week in the West Riding, Lancashire and Cumberland to only 7-8s per week in southern counties like Berkshire, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Northern wages were higher because of

• The greater prosperity of mixed and pastoral areas compared to the wheat-growing counties of southern England
• Competition for labour from industrial towns where wages were generally higher.

In southern England counties close to London [Sussex, Essex and Hertfordshire] also had higher rural wages of 9-10s per week. In the second half of the century farming round London became more varied and prosperous because of the growth of market gardening, cash cropping and milk production for the urban market.

Rural industrial workers were usually rather better off. In areas like the south Pennines survival of a dual farming-weaving economy gave some protection against poverty though, as the textile industry became more mechanised and factory-based, the distress of rural textile workers became acute and well documented. The effects of rural poverty can be seen in malnutrition and associated ill health. A survey of 1863 showed that most English rural labourers relied heavily on a diet of bread and potatoes, with meat consumption varying from season to season and area to area. Men were generally better fed than the rest of the family. Even so, the food supply in the countryside was rather better than that available to the urban poor: it was fresher and there were more opportunities to supplement it informally or illegally from gleaning, fishing or poaching or from the cottage garden.

The social composition of rural areas also changed after 1830: selective rural out-migration removed many younger and more active members of the community, but areas near towns began to experience urban-rural movement as rich families sought houses in the countryside. Commuter villages grew around such cities as Leeds, Manchester and especially London in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly where there were good rail connections. Rural resort areas also began to be exploited. While the reality of rural life was, for many, harsh and unpleasant, the image of rural idyll had, by the 1890s, become firmly implanted as a middle class vision of the countryside that was increasingly imprinted on rural areas through residence, landownership and conservation movements.

There was no 'one' rural England any more than there was 'one' urban England in the nineteenth century. England, and more broadly Britain, was an amalgam of regional economies each with its own often distinctive social, economic and cultural structures. Change and continuity in rural England occurred unevenly and certainly did not follow a 'national' timetable. However, within this framework of uneven development, Alun Howkins has suggested that it is possible to divide the period into four main 'sub-periods':

1. Between the 1790s and approximately 1850 rural England was dominated by endemic unrest and economic uncertainty.
2. Between 1850 and 1875 rural society and its productive system entered a state of calm in which the rural order functioned by and large successfully. A mixture of 'carrot and stick' was at the heart of the new paternalism of this period.
3. Between c1872 and 1895 the established and apparently 'permanent' society of the years after 1850 entered a series of crises. These came partly from contradictions within the system itself, for example the growth of education or rural depopulation, and partly from factors outside the system and over which it had no control, particularly the import of foodstuffs. The outcome of these problems was a period of flux and readjustment in which some long-term factors, the growth of nonconformity for instance, came together with the problems caused by economic depression to present a challenge to the models of paternalism whose economic base had anyway been weakened.
4. From 1895 to 1925 a 'new' farming system emerged based on a much more diverse cropping combined with the undermining of some of the traditional regional farming patterns as transport improved and urban incomes, especially among the working classes, rose. The problems of control and order that emerged again in the 1870s and 1880s in the new form of trade unionism and even radical politics continued to develop, bringing country districts more 'in line' with an overwhelmingly urban society.

By 1900 only just over 6 per cent of national income came from farming that employed about 6 per cent of the population. 'Urbanity', it seemed, had been triumphant. Yet this was precisely the moment when growing numbers of people believed that the town had 'failed' and that only in the countryside was truth and beauty and 'real Englishness' to be found. The flight from the cities by the affluent had begun.

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[1] The  most  useful general works on rural society are P. Horn The  Rural World 1780-1850, Hutchinson, 1980 for the early period and G.E. Mingay The Social History of the English Countryside, Routledge, 1990 throughout. See also the collection edited by Brian Short The English Rural Community, CUP, 1992. F.L.M. Thompson English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, Routledge, 1963 is the basic work. J.C. Beckett The Aristocracy in England 1660-1914, Basil Blackwell, 1986, 2^nd. ed., 1989 cover broader periods. These should now be supplemented by D. Carradine The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, Yale, 1990. M. Reed and R. Wells (eds.) Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside 1700-1850, Frank Cass, 1991 is a revisionist collection of papers attacking the approach of Horn, Mingay and Armstrong. A. Howkins Reshaping Rural England, Harper Collins, 1991 deals with the post-1850 period. W.A. Armstrong Agricultural Workers 1770-1970, Batsford, 1988. H.Newby Country Life, Weidenfeld, 1987 is a major and readable study. K. Snell Annals of the  Labouring Poor:  Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900, CUP, 1984 is  a mine of information and recent interpretation. P. Horn Life and Labour in Rural England 1780-1850, Macmillan, 1987 is a useful collection of sources.

[2] There is a useful discussion of Ashwell in Hertfordshire, Cardington and Houghton Regis in Bedfordshire in Richard Brown Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850, Routledge, 1991, pp.369-386.

[3] On this see G.E. Mingay 'The rural slum', in Martin Gaskell (ed.) Slums, Leicester University Press, 1990, pp.92-143.

Factory reform after 1850

The Factory movement as such disappeared in the 1850s with great success to its credit. As yet the legislation applied only to textiles and Lord Ashley, who in 1851 become the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, continued the battle in Parliament to extend legislation to unprotected trades. In many respects, however, 1850 remained the legislative high water mark. There were three stages to the development of factory reform:

1. The first phase occurred naturally, if somewhat illogically, on the hitherto excluded textile industries and their satellites such as bleaching and dyeing. This process had begun in 1845 when the 1844 legislation was extended to calico printing.
2. Next the great range of other child-employing industries where working conditions and arrangements were similar to those in cotton manufacture came under review. These included pottery, the metal trades, paper-making, chemicals, glassworks and printing.
3. Finally the principle of comparability was applied to units of production, whatever their size.

In 1862 Shaftesbury suggested the establishment of the Children's Employment Commission to inquire into the conditions in the unregulated trades. By 1866 the Commission had published five reports that the Russell government was preparing to act on. The last report was published in 1867 and drew attention to the practice of employing women and children in gangs in some agricultural counties[1]. The minority Conservative government took up these plans and in 1867 produced two measures: the Factory Act Extension Act and the Hours of Labour Regulation Act, that applied to premises including private houses with less than fifty workers. The former applied to premises with more than fifty employees in industries such as metalwork, printing, paper and glassworks, while the main effects of the latter were felt in clothing. Children under eight were forbidden to work and older children were required to have ten hours' schooling a week. Young people and women were also protected, and in all the measures affected 1.4 million people. The second measure was left to the local authorities instead of the factory inspectorate to enforce and they did it badly. The extension of the jurisdiction of the inspectorate to cover the handicrafts had to wait until 1878.

By the late 1860s over a wide range of industries the abolition of infant labour, the reduction of the hours of children to six and a half, the principles of 'protected classes' [children, young persons and women] in the mills and workshops, the 60 hour week all round, compulsory education over the age of eight and rudimentary forms of the modern working week and of factory safety and health codes had been achieved. The circle of exceptions was ever-widening but it remained and this meant continued gross abuse of infant, child, adolescent and female labour elsewhere -- to say nothing of adult males.

The next decade saw the final rounding off and consolidation of early Victorian factory reform. The electoral consequences of the 1867 Reform Act were felt much more powerfully in the general election of 1874 than in that of 1868. Factory hours were an issue, especially in Lancashire during the election. The result was a spate of legislation on factories and trade unions introduced by Disraeli's Conservative administration [1874-1880]: in 1874 and 1878 there were factory acts and in 1875 the Trade Union Act, Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act and the repeal of the remaining master and servant legislation.  The Factory Act 1874 was the work of Richard Cross, Disraeli's Home Secretary. It

1. Finally established the ten-hour day, the historic working class goal, as far as the factories and workshops embraced in the 1867 legislation were concerned.
2. Carried forward for the first time in a quarter of a century the frontier of regulation:

• The minimum age of half-time employment was raised from eight [which it had been since 1844] to ten.
• The minimum age for full-time employment was raised from thirteen [which it had been since 1833] to fourteen.
• Women and young persons were specifically included in the body of 'protected persons', who were to receive the benefits of the ten-hour day.
• Men were deliberately excluded: they gained the ten-hour day not in their own right but through the accident of working side by side with the protected persons.

The Factory Act 1878, followed from a Royal Commission established in 1876, and, though the more comprehensive act, it was essentially a consolidating Act pulling together all the provisions into one scheme.

The depression of the 1870s inclined some to argue that factory reform had gone too far and indeed was a major cause of the country's failure to keep up with her new industrial competitors. By that time, however, the principle of state intervention had been well established and could not be reversed. Children, young people and women at work were the responsibility of the state, secured by legal provisions enforceable through a bureaucratic machine. The effectiveness of the provision depended on the effectiveness of the inspectorate itself.  The size of the inspectorate meant that it was always unlikely that there would be comprehensive coverage. In coal mining only one inspector [H.S.Tremenheere] was appointed in 1842 and it was not until the Coal Mines Inspection Act 1850 that officials were empowered to make underground inspections. The number of inspectors was raised to four in 1850, six in 1852 and twelve in 1855. Even this gave each inspector an impossibly large area to administer and this was equally true of the factory inspectorate where a reorganisation in 1839 left each inspector some 1500 mills to supervise with the assistance of four superintendents. The total establishment for the factory inspectorate was raised to about twenty in 1839, at which level it remained for some thirty years. The inspectors were also hampered by inadequate budgets: in the mid 1860s the mines inspectorate had a budget of only £10,000 while that of the factory inspectorate was about a third more.

The inspectorates were never intended as an industrial police force supervising industry's every move. They were intended to create a moral climate of observance by the principle of inspection. Indeed, it was strongly believed that inspectors should not take from employers the ultimate responsibility for running decent industrial establishments. Almost inevitably the inspectors did not act in concert as a unified service -- in fact the 1876 Royal Commission questioned whether any unified policy existed. It was therefore common for inspectors to have different prosecution rates and to concentrate on different sorts of offences. In matters of fencing and safety at work the inspectorate was often quite ineffectual in raising standards but in other areas there was much greater levels of success. Well over three-quarters of prosecutions were successful and at times the rate was over 90 per cent. This was, in part, the result of prosecuting only in those cases that had a good chance of success.

The legislation of the 1870s represented the consummation of the early Victorian endeavour. 'Protection' was an unchallenged principle. Despite the changes in emphasis and disagreements within the factory debate, the combatants of 1833 soon found common ground in the notion of 'freedom of contract' as expressed by John Stuart Mill in his Principles of political economy[2]. Mill started from the overriding proposition that every individual was the best judge of his own interests and should be free to pursue them without interference from the state. However, he recognised that there were circumstances under which this was unacceptable. The issue was one of defining where and why the overriding proposition justified state action. Mill accepted three circumstances in which state intervention was acceptable:

1. Children and 'young persons' could not be the vest judges of their own interest: for them 'freedom of contract' was often 'but another name for freedom of coercion'. This is the essence of liberal paternalism.
2. In such an area as education, since good judgement itself might depend upon being subjected to it, compulsion was justifiable.
3. There were 'matters in which the interference of law was required, not to overrule the judgement of individuals respecting their own interests, but to give effect to that judgement'. So, if some employers wished to establish a ten-hour day, they might be restrained from pursuing what they conceive to be in their own best interests because their rivals resisted the innovation. Here all would have to be coerced if 'the judgement of individuals respecting their own interests' were to be given effect.

Central to Mill's entire position was the principle that full persons should be contractually liberated, altogether 'free' to pursue their interest, as they themselves judged it, in selling their time and labour. 'Interference' was rapidly accepted on all sides but only as an extraordinary suspension of a master principle. The principle was expressed as freedom of contract and the normal settled as the adult male. This can be seen in Cross's speech to the Commons in 1874 when he felt he must pay lip-service to the old Chadwick doctrine of the free agent: 'So far as adult males are concerned there could be no question that freedom of contract must be maintained and men must be left to take care of themselves.'

The legislation of 1874 and 1878 may have marked a 'victorious' climax to a phase but there were harbingers of a new era. In the early 1870s several bills were introduced in the Commons proposing a nine-hour day for men as for protected persons; and the royal commission of 1876 entered at length into the consideration of both health and hygiene in factories. There were early indicators that the battle was to move on to new ground.

New Horizons

Attention shifted to the sweated trades, those trades often carried on in domestic workshops or actually in a house, where hours were notoriously long and wages low. In 1888 a Select Committee of the House of Lords was appointed to report on the sweated trades and in 1892 another Royal Commission was established on labour conditions generally but which provided valuable information on both sweated and non-sweated trades. In 1901 the Factories and Workshops Act consolidated the law further.

Meanwhile in the major industries a new practice had grown up that had a further influence on the limiting of hours. This was the setting up of Wages Boards or Trades Boards on which both employers and employees were represented. In determining wages, working hours had also to be taken into consideration and this was particularly important as there was still no legislation specifically restricting the working hours of men. The Nottingham Hosiery Board dated from the 1860s while the Midland Iron and Steel Board came into informal existence in 1872, being re-constituted more formally in 1876. The Midlands Mining Wages Board also began informally in 1874, having an official existence from 1883 onwards. In addition, in the Birmingham area, the 'alliance system' was used from time to time. Under this arrangement employers would fix wages and employ only one union, while the workmen would all join the union and work only for employers in the alliance. In this way it was hoped to avoid competitive wage cutting by employers.

If one explanation for the early opposition to factory reform was simple ignorance of conditions, there could be no such excuse by 1900. In addition to Royal Commission and Select Committee reports there were the annual Reports of the Mines Inspectors and the Inspectors for Factories and Workshops which became more detailed as the century advanced. Early in the twentieth century two further advances occurred:

1. In 1908 the Liberal government passed the Eight Hours Act, the first Act regulating the hours of work for men fixing the working day for miners.
2. In 1909 the Sweated Industries Act [sometimes called the Trades Board Act] was passed, made necessary by the continued sweating of workers in certain trades. The Act required wage boards to be set up in specified sweated industries such as tailoring so that even these notoriously difficult to control industries came under increasing supervision. The Shops Act 1912 extended rights to shop assistants.

The working week after 1850 was gradually reduced in length. Although it was still a six day week, Saturday labour was less than before and only a half-day was worked in many trades from the 1870s onwards. Working men acquired four statutory holidays with the passing of the Bank Holiday Acts in 1871 and 1875. By 1900 a week's holiday a year was not unknown though it was more likely to be enjoyed by skilled workers than unskilled workers.

Regulations grew increasingly complex in the area of safety at work. The Coal Mines Acts provide a good illustration of this. By 1900 safety regulations were very extensive and the 1911 Act added further regulations covering many different matters: the fixing of hours for engine men, the provision of baths and facilities for drying clothes at the bigger pits and the searching of men for matches and other forbidden items. Accidents still happened and the rules were not always obeyed but the contrast with the 1850s is very striking. At other places of work employers found themselves under increasing pressure to make their premises safe. The Employers Liability Act 1880 and the Workman's Compensation Act 1905 required employers to pay compensation to any workman injured of suffering disease resulting from unsafe or unhealthy working conditions. National Insurance after 1911 and voluntary insurance before were no longer the only ways of coping with industrial injuries.

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[1] These gangs worked long hours under so-called gang-masters who frequently exploited and abused their workers. By the Agricultural Gangs Act 1888 all gang-masters had to be licensed by JPs, no boy or girl under eight was to be employed, and a licensed gang-mistress was necessary when women and girls were included in the gang.

[2] On the question of 'freedom of contract' see the illuminating and contentious study P.S. Atiyah The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract, OUP, 1971.