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Wednesday, 24 November 2010

Free market in housing

It was the concentration of people in the burgeoning towns and cities of manufacturing Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that led to a growing housing crisis.[1] The inflow of population to towns before 1830 was accommodated both by massive new buildings and the subdivision and change of use in existing buildings. Many separate builders and developers provided new building in a variety of different ways and there was no shortage of building land in and around towns.

The landowner was not generally the builder, though small infill developments in gardens and yards could be carried out by the original owner. Usually land was sold to a middleman or developer who would finance and organise the building process. Landowners included municipal corporations, as for example in Liverpool and Newcastle; charities, schools and churches, large private landowners and professional and businessmen with small parcels of land. Developers could include local merchants, tradesmen, professional men (especially lawyers) and builders who would raise capital locally to finance house construction. Land was conveyed freehold in perhaps half of all sales, or through a building lease. Urban house building before 1830 took many forms. Most cities had some grand housing for the rich and leisured classes, perhaps best typified by the sweeping terraces built by John Wood in Bath and the development of Edinburgh’s New Town from the 1750s. Artisans’ housing ranged from substantial terraced houses to small courts. In Birmingham a relatively affluent skilled craftsman might live in a two or three storey house with two rooms on each floor with an associated yard and workshop. It would cost up to £200 to buy in 1800 and would be rented for at least £8 per year. Only a minority of workers could afford such rents and many houses were multi-occupied by 1830. From the 1770s, rows of back-to-back houses were being constructed costing £60 to buy but could be rented for less that £5 a year.

However, as pressure on space increased many of these were also multi-occupied. Some of the worst housing conditions in 1830 were found in London where population pressures and constraints on space were far more acute than in provincial towns. Working-class families generally lived in a single room or cellar without proper sanitation or water supply and paid 2-3 shillings per week rent. Lodging houses were also common in London, and in the poorest districts as many as 15 people would sleep in one room, each paying 1 or 2 pence for a night’s shelter.[2]

housing 1

William Street, Birmingham in 1905

It is hard to compare rural and urban housing conditions. Contemporary descriptions tend to focus on the horrors of urban living experienced by the very poor, but the situation was little different for the rural poor. The main difference was in the density of urban living. Living literally on top of or beneath neighbours in a multi-occupied tenement was a new experience for many requiring considerable adjustments in lifestyles and daily routine.

Victorian cities were in a state of constant social flux. Many residents in all large cities were migrants but they often did not stay long in one place: 45-55% of urban populations either died or moved from a town within ten years. Most housing throughout the period 1830 to 1914 was rented and owner-occupancy rarely accounted for more than 10% of the housing stock before 1918.[3]   Rented accommodation came in a vast array of types. In central areas most of provided through the construction of purpose-built working-class housing or was in large multi-occupied dwellings filtered down from the middle-classes that had moved to suburban villas or more spacious town houses. From 1850, terraced suburbs increasingly housed the skilled working-class. For those on low incomes, rent levels were crucial to housing availability. Although cheap housing had been built in many cities in the early nineteenth century, by the 1850s, it was increasingly difficult to built new housing to rent at much below 5s per week, well beyond the means of those on low or irregular incomes. Such families had little option but to rent lodgings or take slum housing in the city centre. Income determined where you lived and construction costs controlled the type of housing that was built in different locations. In such areas as Whitechapel or St Giles in London or dockside areas and commercial districts of Liverpool slum accommodation could be obtained quite easily. Accommodation was confined and relatively expensive; for example a single room 12 feet square could be rented for 1s 6d or more per week in a provincial town and for rather more in London. It could be dirty and facilities were shared with the other tenants.

By 1850, construction of new housing in the central areas of towns had almost ceased, but lower-density terraced housing was expanding rapidly in new residential suburbs of all English and Welsh towns. In Scotland tenement construction continued to be the norm. A new terraced house with four rooms, its own privy and in-house water supply would probably cost 5-7 shillings per week to rent. Relatively few such properties were multi-occupied, though the family might take in a lodger. Working-class home ownership was feasible only for those with relatively stable incomes in prosperous areas because of repayments of around 10 shillings per month. High levels were found in parts of north east Lancashire, County Durham, the West Riding and South Wales. Housing provided by employers or by philanthropic organisations, like the Peabody Trust in London, was often locally significant but never accommodated more than a few% of the population.

housing 2

The process of residential decentralisation with the construction of suburban housing estates by private enterprise gathered momentum after 1890. This was most clearly seen in London, but similar processes were operating in all large towns. In 1850 Ilford, for example, was a quite village on the main railway line from London to Ipswich, seven miles from Liverpool Street station. In 1891 there were some 11,000 people in the parish, but by 1901 the new urban district had expanded to 41,240 people and its population almost doubled again by 1911. Two London builders, W.P. Griggs and A.C. Corbett, encouraged by the good railway communication, acquired large areas of land and began to develop massive private housing estates. In 1906 on the Griggs estate a four-room house started at £260; a four-bedroom, double-fronted house at £375 and a five-bedroom house at £450. Both the builders and Ilford Council provided further incentives to move to the suburbs. Corbett gave loans to purchasers to cover some of the cash deposit while Ilford Council used the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act 1899 to give cheap mortgages. Ilford is a classic example of the ways in which improved transport, availability of land, the willingness of entrepreneurs and public bodies to invest and the demand for suburban living combined to restructure the city in the early twentieth century.

In the Housing of the Working-class Act 1890, government intervened in the free market for the first time and, in so doing, fundamentally affected the expansion and planning of towns. Though the provision of council housing was slight before 1919, some councils had begun building houses before 1890 and the Act gave further impetus to such schemes. Some 24,000 council units were built in Britain before 1914 but most were concentrated in London (9,746 units), Liverpool (2,895 units) and Glasgow (2,199 units). These schemes were too few in number to make any real impact on housing needs and, in any case, rent levels and selection procedures tended to exclude the very poor.[4]

There was little fundamental change in housing between 1830 and 1914. Paying rent to private owners remained the norm, accounting for 80% of all houses. Council housing accounted for only 1% in 1914 and housing associations 9%. Though all towns spawned a succession of new residential suburbs, these were mainly for the affluent working and lower-middle-class families who would leave the older parts of the city centre, and new skilled in-migrants. The poor remained trapped in low-cost, sub-standard housing. The spatial segregation of social groups was cleared structured by the economic realities, reflected in income and occupation that controlled access to different types of housing.

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Workers’ housing c1890


[1] For urban housing,   Chapman, S.D., (ed.), The History of Working-class Housing: A Symposium, (David & Charles), 1971, Gauldie, E., Cruel Habitations: a history of working-class housing 1780-1918, (Allen and Unwin), 1978 and Burnett, J., A Social History of Housing 1815-1985, (Methuen), 2nd ed., 1986 are major works. Rodger, R., Housing in Urban Britain 1780-1914, (Macmillan), 1989, (Cambridge University Press), 1996 is an excellent bibliographical study.

[2] Crook, Tom, ‘Accommodating the outcast: common lodging houses and the limits of urban governance in Victorian and Edwardian London’, Urban History, Vol. 35, (2008), pp. 414-436.

[3] Rodger, Richard, ‘The Invisible Hand: Market Forces, Housing and the Urban Form in Victorian Cities’, in ibid, Fraser, Derek and Sutcliffe, Anthony, (eds.) The Pursuit of Urban History, pp. 190-211 and Baer, William C., ‘Is speculative building underappreciated in urban history?’, Urban History, Vol. 34, (2007), pp. 296-316.

[4] See, for example, Durgan, Shirley, ‘Providing for “the needs and purses of the poor”: council housing in Chelmsford before 1914’, Local Historian, Vol. 33, (2003), pp. 175-189, Damer, Seán. ‘“Engineers of the Human Machine”: The Social Practice of Council Housing Management in Glasgow, 1895-1939’, Urban Studies, Vol. 37, (2000), pp. 2007-2026 and Chinn, Carl, Homes for people: council housing and urban renewal in Birmingham, 1849-1999, (Brewin), 1999.

Tuesday, 23 November 2010

Patriote thinking and the French language

The rebellions in 1837 and 1838 represent a major symbolic occasion in the collective memory of Quebec affirming Québécois national sentiments. In their fight for proper French Canadian political representation, deputies from the Parti Patriote, driven by the liberal ideal of equality, sought to protect and preserve their cultural heritage, especially the French language, as part of their programme to ensure equality of opportunity for French Canadians in the economic and political life of Lower Canada.[1]

The emergence of French Canadian national identity especially between 1820 and 1830 resulted in the transformation of the Patriote movement to form a national group whose socio-economic interests differed from those of British or Anglo-Canadian elites who controlled political decision-making. French Canadians sought an identity in being a French-speaking and Catholic people but also recognised the importance of British and American influences on their political heritage.[2] This challenged the notion of monarchies ruling by divine right and called for a widening of individual freedom. Political legitimacy in liberal thinking lay not with the sovereign but with the nation, and was expressed through a combination of parliamentary institutions and constitutional guarantees. These ideas reached Lower Canada after 1776 in the republicanism of the United States and from Britain in constitutional guarantees enshrined in the 1774 and 1791 constitutions. [3] The Patriotes took advantage of their rights under the British Crown to obtain constitutional institutions likely to represent better their nation. Thus, in the fifty-second of the 1834 Ninety-Two Resolutions

Résolu, Que c’est l’opinion de ce comité, que puisqu’un fait, qui n’a pas dépendu du choix de la majorité du peuple de cette province, son origine française et son usage de la langue française, est devenu pour les autorités coloniales un prétexte d’injure, d’exclusion, d’infériorité politique et de séparations de droits et d’intérêts, cette chambre en appelle à la justice du gouvernement de Sa Majesté et de son parlement, et à l’honneur du peuple anglais; que la majorité des habitants du pays n’est nullement disposée à répudier aucun des avantages qu’elle tire de son origine et de sa descendance de la nation française, qui sous le rapport des progrès qu’elle a fait faire à la civilisation, aux sciences, aux lettres et aux arts, n’a jamais été en arrière de la nation britannique, et qui, aujourd’hui, dans la cause de la liberté et la science du gouvernement, est sa digne émule; de qui ce pays tient la plus grande partie de ses lois civiles et ecclésiastiques, la plupart de ses établissements d’enseignement et de charité, et la religion, la langue, les habitudes, les mœurs et les usages de la grande majorité de ses habitants.[4]

The Patriotes sought to restate their membership of a nation of French origin and as a result the right of this nation to benefits equal to British Canadians. This was an assertion of the principle of national equality within a multi-national state and a call for an end to discrimination on racial grounds. In this context, the importance that Patriote speeches placed on the political features of the Lower Canadian crisis (control of subsidies, appointment of the officers, election to the Legislative Council, short-circuiting of the colonial government by boycotting English products), their willingness to take part in governing the colony and the objective of promoting a social agenda that they believed would ensure a national revival were compromised by existing constitutional institutions and seriously threatened by the Russell’s Ten Resolutions.

Que cette violation [les Résolutions Russel] de notre constitution est attentoire à la liberté du peuple, et tend à détruire son existence politique, par le renversement prochain des lois, culte, langage, mœurs et autres institutions des habitans de cette province.’[5]

This national revival meant maintaining social and cultural institutions specific to Lower Canada in which the French language was an essential component.

Or, le plus important, et le plus sacré de ces usages est indubitablement celui par lequel un peuple donne les mêmes noms aux choses et les mêmes signes aux idées.[6]

In this respect, Patriots asserted the necessity for an adequate French-speaking school system and continuance of the French dimension in government, particularly in the legal field. The question of education preoccupied the Assembly during 1824 over the loi des écoles de fabriques and again in 1829.[7]

Si l’on vouloit anéantir, pour les Canadiens, tous les moyens d’acquérir des talents et les connoissances utiles que procurent l’éducation parmi eux, on ne pourroit prendre un moyen plus sur et plus efficace que d’abolir l’usage de la langue Françoise dans nos colléges et ailleurs.[8]

For Patriotes, effective French schools and education was inseparable from the economic and social development of Lower Canada but they feared that this was under threat from the colonial authorities something that was evident from the early nineteenth century:

...13° Les injustes obstacles opposés par un exécutif, ami des abus et de l’ignorance, à la fondation de colléges dotés par des hommes vertueux et désintéressés, pour répondre aux besoins et aux désirs croissants de la population, de recevoir une éducation soignée.[9]

The problem of delivering public services in French when most officials were English-speakers was of particular concern to Patriotes. This was especially the case in the judicial system.

Résolu, -Que c’est l’opinion de ce comité, que par suite de leurs liaisons avec les membres des administrations provinciales et leurs antipathies contre le pays, quelques-uns des dits juges ont, en violation des lois, tenté d’abolir, dans les cours de justice, l’usage de la langue parlée par la majorité des habitants du pays, nécessaire à la libre action des lois et formant partie des usages à eux assurés, de la manière la plus solemnelle, par des actes du droit public et statuts du parlement britannique.[10]

For A. N. Morin, French needed to be maintained as a ‘language of right’ to guarantee equal accessibility to justice already restricted by the remoteness of rural areas and the lack of education of the plaintiffs that made access to the law increasingly inaccessible to the mass of rural French-speakers. In addition, lawyers were obliged to speak English reducing access to the legal profession among French Canadians. In 1791, there were 55 notaries and 17 lawyers; by 1836, this had only risen to 373 and 208 respectively or per capita ratios of 1:1164 in 1791 and 1:950 in 1836.[11] Plaintiffs often did not understand actions initiated by their representatives because they did not understand the language of the procedures.[12]

...quelle doit être la langue juridique d’un pays? La réponse se présente tout bonnement; c’est la langue du peuple que l’on juge. Ici toutefois d’injustes distinctions politiques tendent sans cesse à faire reconnoître en principe que les Canadiens dont neuf sur dix au moins n’entendent que le françois, sont obligés de se servir de la langue angloise dans tous leurs actes civils, lors même qu’il n’est aucune des parties intéressées qui ne l’ignore. Entre les raisons qu’on apporte au soutien de cette doctrine oppressive les principales sont les avantages de l’uniformité, la dépendance où nous sommes de l’Angleterre, la supériorité que doit avoir sur toute autre la langue de l’Empire, celle du Souverain...les journaux anglois...s’efforcent d’insinuer qu’il devroit y avoir dans le pays une classe privilégiée de sujets qui fît la loi aux autres sous le rapport du langage comme de tout le reste.[13]

Patriote claims for the French language were placed in the context of the natural right of the people to protect their cultural heritage, the recognition of their freedom as British subjects to preserve certain French usages and to benefit from services delivered in French language. These rights, they maintained, were guaranteed by the 1791 Constitution.

Les Canadiens anglois de naissance ne sont pas plus étrangers ici que les Canadiens françois; ils ont les mêmes droits que nous, ils sont protégés par les mêmes lois, et soumis aux mêmes usages; ils ont dû considérer avant de se fixer ici, l’ordre des choses qui y étoit établi. Nous ne leur contestons pas la légalité de leur langage; nous voulons seulement défendre celle du nôtre.[14]

Also the Patriote struggle for control of political institutions was grounded in an inclusive social agenda through which the nation could ensure its economic prosperity.

Que nous appelons de tous nos vœux l’union entre les habitans de cette Province de toute croyance et de toute langue, et origine, que pour la défense commune, pour l’honneur et le salut du Pays chacun doit faire le sacrifice de ses préjugés; nous donner la main pour obtenir un gouvernement sage et protecteur qui en faisant renaître l’harmonie fasse en même temps fleurir l’agriculture, le commerce et l’industrie nationale.[15]

The Patriote declarations made clear the urgency of preserving the French language under threat but these documents also testified to the unequivocal desire to see French as well as English recognised in the public life. The claims of liberalism were made clear in Patriote rhetoric especially popular legitimacy, equality before the law and the principle of individual freedom. Language may not have appeared as the primary feature of the Patriote programme that sought to ensure French Canadians control of their governmental apparatus but it was recognised as essential for their economic and cultural revival. It is significant that the links between language and political control remained important for the survival of French Canadian heritage and culture after the failure of the rebellions in the policies adopted by Lafontaine and Morin after 1841 and in the later evolution of the Québécois nationalist movement.


[1] Reid, Philippe, ‘L’émergence du nationalisme canadien-français; l’idéologie du Canadien (1806-1842)’, Recherches sociographiques, Vol. xxi, (1980), pages 11-53 provides a good summary of the major issues.

[2] Ibid, Harvey, Louis-Georges, Le Printemps de l’Amérique français: Américanité, anticolonialisme et républicanisme dans le discours politique québecois, 1805-1837.

[3] Bellavance, Marcel, ‘La rébellion de 1837 et les modèles théoriques de l’émergence de la nation et du nationalisme’, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Vol. 53, (3), (2000), p. 370.

[4] Bédard, Théophile-Pierre, Histoire de cinquante ans (1791-1841): annales parlementaires et politiques du Bas-Canada depuis la Constitution jusqu’à l’Union, (Léger Brousseau), 1869, pp. 348-349.

[5] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, Assemblée de Saint-François-du-Lac, pp. 180-182.

[6] Morin, A. N., Lettre à l’honorable Edward Bowen, Ecuyer, Un des Juges de la Cour du Banc du Roi de Sa Majesté pour le District de Québec, (James Lane), 1825, republished, Quebec, 1968, p. 11.

[7] Dessureault, Christian and Hudon, Christine, ‘Conflits sociaux et élites locales au Bas-Canada: Le clergé, les notables, la paysannerie et le contrôle de la fabrique’, Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 80, (1999), pages 413-439 shows clearly the contested nature of education.

[8] Viger, D. B., Considérations sur les effets qu’ont produit en Canada, la conservation des établissemens du pays, les mœurs, l’éducation, etc. de ses habitans et les conséquences qu’entraîneroient leur décadence par rapport aux intérêts de la Grande Bretagne, (James Brown, Libraire),1809, p. 11.

[9] Ibid, Bédard, Théophile-Pierre, Histoire de cinquante ans (1791-1841): annales parlementaires et politiques du Bas-Canada depuis la Constitution jusqu’à l’Union, p. 359.

[10] Ibid, Bédard, Théophile-Pierre, Histoire de cinquante ans (1791-1841): annales parlementaires et politiques du Bas-Canada depuis la Constitution jusqu’à l’Union, pp. 355-356.

[11] Mackay Julien S., Notaires et patriotes 1837-1838, Septentrion, 2006.

[12] Morin, A. N., Lettre à l’honorable Edward Bowen, Ecuyer, Un des Juges de la Cour du Banc du Roi de Sa Majesté pour le District de Québec, (James Lane), 1825, republished, Quebec, 1968, p. 8.

[13] Ibid, Morin, A. N., Lettre à l’honorable Edward Bowen, Ecuyer, Un des Juges de la Cour du Banc du Roi de Sa Majesté pour le District de Québec, pp. 4-5.

[14] Ibid, Morin, A. N., Lettre à l’honorable Edward Bowen, Ecuyer, Un des Juges de la Cour du Banc du Roi de Sa Majesté pour le District de Québec, p. 14.

[15] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, pp. 47-56, Assemblée de Saint-Scolastique.

Sunday, 21 November 2010

Public health reform 1854-1914: revised version

The cause of public health was at a low point after the enforced retirement of Edwin Chadwick in 1854, but even so some progress was being made. The Vaccination Act 1853 required parents and guardians to arrange for the vaccination of infants within four months of birth. Even though there were no provisions for enforcement, by the 1860s about two-thirds of children born were vaccinated and the death rate from smallpox fell as a result. The Nuisances Removal Act 1855 was a consequence of the cholera epidemic of 1853-1854 and required local authorities to appoint sanitary inspectors.  It also gave magistrates the power to order the ending of nuisances and powers to the local authorities to enter a nuisance at the expense of the occupier.[1]

There was, however, a great difference between Parliament passing acts and enforcing an effective policy against the opposition of local authorities and property owners who saw sanitary reform as a source of unjustified expense. For all the efforts that had been made progress was slow. The death rate between 1841-1845 and 1861-1865 actually rose slightly and as a result it is fair to conclude that the general health and environmental position remained largely unaltered. Public health was a far more complex problem than the pioneers of the 1840s had envisaged. For Chadwick, public health was simply a matter of better sanitation and water supply. In reality, the problem had far wider environmental causes, pressure of population, bad housing and poor nutrition and Chadwick had persistently underestimated the importance of medical questions.

In the twenty years after 1854, the progress that was made in public health was largely through scientific and medical developments. This can be seen in the statistical analysis of mortality by William Farr in the Registrar-General’s department after 1839 and improvements in understanding how diseases were transmitted. Important independent investigations were made during the cholera epidemic of 1848-1849 by John Snow in London and William Budd in Bristol with both diagnosing the cause of cholera as a living organism spread in drinking water and breeding in the human intestine. [2] Indeed it can be argued that by 1870 analysis of the causes of health problems had run considerably ahead of effective administrative machinery for remedying them.

The eclipse of the career of Edwin Chadwick coincided with the rise of John Simon (1816-1904).[3] Trained as a doctor, he was appointed as the first medical officer of health for the City of London in October 1848 at a salary of £500 a year (eventually £800.). Simon set to work at once with characteristic thoroughness, and presented a series of annual and other reports to the City commissioners of sewers. They were unofficially reprinted in 1854, with a preface in which Simon spoke strongly of ‘the national prevalence of sanitary neglect,’ and demonstrated the urgent need of control of the public health by a responsible minister of state.[4]

Public health 12

Portrait of Sir John Simon, Wellcome Library, London

The general board of health was reconstituted in 1854, and by a further act of 1855 it was empowered to appoint a medical officer. Simon accepted the post in October 1855. The board was subject to successive annual renewals of its powers and the new office was one of undefined purpose and doubtful stability. Simon produced several valuable and comprehensive reports for the general board of health: on the relation of cholera to London water supply in 1856, on vaccination in 1857 and reports on the sanitary state of the people of England and on the constitution of the medical profession in 1858.[5] In 1858, the board was abolished, its duties being taken over by the Privy Council under the 1858 Public Health Act and Simon remained medical officer. The 1858 act was only made permanent in 1859 in face of strong opposition.[6] As medical officer of the Privy Council he instituted in 1858 annual reports on the working of his department, treating each year special subjects with broad outlook and in terse and graphic phrase. Between 1858 and 1871, Simon was implicitly trusted by his official superiors, was allowed a free hand, and rallied to his assistance a band of devoted fellow-workers, who helped to make the medical department into an effective instrument for change.

Much of Simon’s work was deeply affected by the cholera outbreaks of 1848-1849 and 1853-1854 and like other reformers he saw the problems of the city as moral as well as material. From his appointment to the Board of Health in 1855 till he resigned in 1876, the emphasis of his work shifted to statistical investigation and exact scientific enquiry. His reports were of significant in developing state intervention in public health issues.[7] In 1857, Simon had published his Papers relating to the History and Practice of Vaccination. Ten years later the law was strengthened by a new act that both tightened procedures and providing ways of improving the vaccine.[8] In the Vaccination Act 1871, following a very serious smallpox epidemic, Boards of Guardians were required by law to appoint a paid vaccination officer. Other infectious diseases that the reports gave attention were smallpox, which re-appeared in 1865-1866, typhoid, scarlatina and diphtheria. There were studies of ‘industrial’ diseases like the lung conditions produced among miners, potters and steel-grinders. An ineffective Adulteration of Foods Act was passed in 1860, the precursor of more far-reaching legislation in 1872 and 1875, by which local authorities had to employ public analysts to test food. The Alkali Act 1863 was the first of a series of enactments to deal with acid gas pollution.[9]

Public health 13

Smallpox poster: Shropshire Archives: DA3/889/7

Simon’s eleventh report of 1866 considered the need to consolidate the different legislation and administrative agencies relating to public health. The solid foundation of scientific and medical knowledge that had not existed under Chadwick, meant that effective legislation was now possible. The threat of cholera helped produce the Sanitary Act 1866 that gave to local authorities increased powers to provide house drainage and water supplies. It provided stricter provisions for the removal of nuisances and additional powers were given to regulate communicable diseases. It made the specific duty of authorities to inspect their districts and to suppress nuisance and in case of failure to do this and upon complains being made, the Home Secretary had the power to send an inspector and, if neglect was established, to order the authority to act. Badly drafted as this legislation was, it included the vital principle of uniform and universal provision of sanitary protection combined with compulsory powers of enforcement on local authorities that formed the basis for the administrative reforms of the 1870s.

In August 1871, following the report of the Royal Commission on sanitary conditions, the Poor Law Board, the Local Government Office of the Home Office and the medical department of the Privy Council were amalgamated to form a new department, the Local Government Board. Simon became its chief medical officer in the belief that his independent powers would be extended rather than diminished. But neither Sir James Stansfeld, president of the board, nor Sir John Lambert, organising secretary, were prepared to accept Simon’s administrative independence. He protested in vigorous minutes and appeals that were renewed when George Sclater-Booth became president in 1874. After a fierce battle with the Treasury, his office was ‘abolished,’ Simon retired in May 1876 and the cause of scientific sanitary progress was prejudiced by his retirement.[10]

Practical reforms took a long time to implement and the medical and scientific work, associated with Simon, was reduced in the 1870s. The new Local Government Board was dominated by the old Poor Law officials and they took a different view from Simon keeping the medical scientific view out of policy-making in favour of the administrative principles inherited from the Poor Law. The result during the 1870s and 1880s was legislation that either established administrative structures or consolidated existing legislation. In 1869, the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone had set up a Royal Commission to look into sanitary laws and administration. It reported in 1871 and its recommendations were embodied in the Public Health Act 1872. The 1872 Act rationalised sanitary authorities throughout the country and made compulsory the appointment of medical officers of health. Finally, in 1875 a consolidating Public Health Act covered the whole field of public health, sanitation and nuisance prevention. It was accompanied by legislation in related fields: an act of 1875 regulating the sale of foods and drink; an act of 1876 on the pollution of rivers; in 1879 consolidating the law on contagious diseases in animals was consolidated; the Diseases Prevention Act 1883 no longer pauperised the recipient of treatment in hospital with infectious diseases; and, the Infectious Diseases Notification Act 1889 persuaded a large number of local sanitary authorities to establish isolation hospitals, a situation extended into rural areas by the Isolation Hospitals Act 1893.

Public health 14

The early phase of public health reform was dominated by Edwin Chadwick, the later phase by Sir John Simon. Both left office disillusioned by their inability to implement reforms in the ways they wished. Paradoxically Chadwick resigned because of criticism of too much central control and Simon because of too little. In some respects, the parameters of the public health debate had shifted by the early 1880s. National administrative structure and enforcement agencies were in place. Public attention, however, shifted to concentrate on the larger cities, particularly on London that, quite apart from its sheer size, suffered problems of its own. The issue became one of housing.


[1] Hamlin, Christopher, ‘Public Sphere to Public Health: the Transformation of “Nuisance”‘, in Sturdy, Steve, (ed.), Medicine, health and the public sphere in Britain, 1600-2000, (Routledge), 2002, pp. 189-204, Brenner, J.F., ‘Nuisance Law and the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 3, (1973), pp. 403-433 and McLaren, J.P.S., ‘Nuisance Law and the Industrial Revolution: Some Lessons from Social History’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 3, (1983), pp. 155-222.

[2] Vandenbroucke, Jan P., ‘Changing images of John Snow in the history of epidemiology’, in Morabia, Alfredo, (ed.), A history of epidemiologic methods and concepts, (Birkhaeuser Verlag), 2004, 141-148.

[3]   Lambert, Royston, Sir John Simon 1816-1904, (MacGibbon & Kee), 1963 is the major biographical study.

[4] Simon, John, Reports relating to the sanitary condition of London, (J. W. Parker and son), 1854.

[5] Stokes, T.N., ‘A Coleridgean against the medical corporations: John Simon and the parliamentary campaign for the reform of the medical profession, 1854-1858’, Medical History, Vol. 33, (1989), pp. 343-359.

[6] Hardy, Anne, ‘Public health and the expert: the London Medical Officers of Health, 1856-1900’, in Macleod, R. M., (ed.), Government and expertise: specialists, administrators and professionals, 1860-1919, (Cambridge University Press), 1988, pp. 128-142.

[7] Seaton, Edward, (ed.), Public health reports by Sir John Simon, two Vols. (J. & A. Churchill), 1887.

[8] Brunton, Deborah, The politics of vaccination: practice and policy in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, 1800-1874, (University of Rochester Press), 2008 and Lambert, R.S., ‘A Victorian national health service: state vaccination, 1855-71’, Historical Journal, Vol. 5, (1962), pp. 1-18.

[9] Macleod, R.M., ‘The Alkali Acts administration, 1863-84: the emergence of the civil scientist’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 9, (1965), pp. 85-112 and Garwood, Christine, ‘Green Crusaders or Captives of Industry? The British Alkali Inspectorate and the Ethics of Environmental Decision Making, 1864-95’, Annals of Science, Vol. 61, (2004), pp. 99-117.

[10] See Brand, J.L., ‘John Simon and the Local Government Board bureaucrats, 1871-6’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 37, (1963), pp. 184-194.

Public health reform 1832-1854: revised version

During the 1840s, there were two contradictory trends in matters of social policy. On the one hand there was a tendency to extend public control and, on the other, a tendency to call a halt to further change. The public health movement had to operate within the pressures produced by these opposing forces, pressures that in the end brought Chadwick‘s resignation and ended a stage in the history of social policy.

Public health 8

Public health was the fourth major area of policy, along with the poor law, factory reform and constabulary reform, with which Chadwick’s name was connected. The campaign bore the characteristic stamp of Chadwick’s mind. He propounded sanitary policies that tackled all parts of the problem and left no loose ends. He thought out an administrative structure at both central and local levels but his comprehensiveness and broad planning antagonised powerful vested interests. Nor were the plans free from Chadwick‘s characteristic dogmatism and they showed his distinctive inability to compromise or to modify his ideas.

Enquiries had been made by Arnott, Southwood Smith and Kay into the sanitary conditions in East London in 1839. Chadwick‘s own Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain was published in 1842. [1] It was the result of two further years’ exhaustive work and it put the whole discussion of public sanitary policy onto an entirely new footing. Chadwick’s ideas dominated policy up to 1854. He believed that disease was carried by impurities in the atmosphere and that the great problem was to get rid of impurities before they could decompose.[2] The key to resolving the whole problem was the provision of a sufficient supply of pure water driven through pipes at high pressure. This would provide both drinking water and make it easier to cleanse houses and streets. Manure could be collected when it left the town and used as fertiliser in the surrounding fields.[3]

Public health 9

It was the very completeness of his solution that presented many problems. Water companies normally provided water only on certain days a week and at certain times. They did not provide it in either the quantity or at the pressure that Chadwick desired. Many houses in poorer districts had no water supply at all and no proper means of sewage disposal. Where sewers did exist they were often very badly regulated. Chadwick wished to replace the large brick-arched constructions with smaller egg-shaped types developed by John Roe. In addition to his first two basic ideas, the atmospheric theory of infection and the cyclical theory of water supply and drainage Chadwick maintained that proper central direction of sanitary planning should be combined with efficient local organisation, an idea parallel to his views on poor law and police.

The 1842 Sanitary Report was complemented by a report the following year on interments in towns that exposed the terrible conditions of over-crowded graveyards of London.[4] These reports made a deep impression on public opinion and some 30,000 copies were initially printed. They were followed by a Royal Commission on the State of Towns, by a good deal of propagandist activity through the Health of Towns Association founded in December 1844, and eventually by the passage of the Public Health Act 1848.[5] Several points stand out in the Sanitary Report: Members and officials of existing commissions of sewers were generally examined in an unsympathetic, even hostile way. There were two authoritative statements of the views of reformers, one by Southwood Smith from the scientific and medical viewpoint, the other by Thomas Hawksley from an engineering viewpoint.[6] Complementing Hawksley’s evidence, there was evidence from other professional men about the importance of properly made plans and surveys as the pre-requisite for sound planning.

Public health 10

Portrait of Thomas Hawksley, H. Herkomer, 1887

By the middle of the 1840s, the local state was beginning to intervene in towns and several of the larger towns obtained private Acts to dealing with nuisances. In 1847 William Duncan became the Medical Officer for Liverpool, the first appointment in Britain.[7] By now the public health debate had polarised into those who favoured reform and those against it, characterised respectively as ‘The Clean Party’ and ‘The Dirty Party’ or ‘Muckabites’. [8]

The central State did intervene in 1846 with the Nuisances Removal Act and particularly in the 1848 Public Health Act. The prime motivation behind both pieces of legislation was to combat the imminent cholera outbreak. The 1848 Act began the process of breaking down laissez-faire attitudes and established a Central Board of Health with a five-year mandate based at Gwydir House in London with three Commissioners (Lord Morpeth, Lord Shaftesbury and Chadwick, with Southwood Smith as Medical Officer). Local Boards of Health could be established where 10% of ratepayers petitioned the Central Board or would be set up in towns where the death rate was higher than 23 per thousand. The Local Boards of Health would take over the powers of water companies and drainage commissioners and could levy a rate and had the power to appoint a salaried Medical Officer. They also had the power to pave streets etc. but this was not compulsory.

There were several important weaknesses in the Act. First, the lifespan of the Central Board was limited to five years. Secondly, it was permissive in character and many towns did not take advantage of the Act. The large cities by-passed the legislation by obtaining private Acts of Parliament to carry out improvements and so avoided central interference: for example, Leeds in 1842, Manchester in 1844 and Liverpool in 1846. Thirdly, the Act was based on preventative measures and was therefore narrow in outlook. Such measures did bring about improvements but Chadwick paid no attention to contagionist theories and so alienated the medical profession. Finally, the Act did not legislate for London, which remained an administrative nightmare. The scale of the General Board’s operations was modest. By July 1853, only 164 places, including Birmingham, had been brought under the Act. In Lancashire only 26 townships took advantage of the Act and by 1858 only 400,000 of the county’s 2.5 million people came under Boards of Health.[9]

Public health 11

The litmus test for the success or failure of the new policies took place in London. A new Metropolitan Commission of Sewers had been set up in December 1847 of which Chadwick was a leading member.[10] From the outset there were bitter rivalries in the Commission between him and the representatives of the old sewer commissions and the parish vestries. In 1850, Chadwick produced a new scheme for the water supply and for a system of publicly controlled cemeteries. Both schemes aroused a host of opponents and both were abandoned. The Treasury refused to advance money for the purchase of private cemeteries and the Metropolitan Water Supply Act 1852 left the whole provision in the hands of water companies.[11]

By 1852, hopes for any comprehensive reform in London had been dashed and there was growing opposition to the General Board in the country as a whole. Lord Morpeth was replaced by Lord Seymour who was hostile to Chadwick. Feelings against the Board and Chadwick in particular rose orchestrated by The Times. The Central Board should have ended in 1853 but was given a year’s extension (1853-1854) because of a renewal of cholera. Chadwick knew that the ‘Dirty Party’ was intent on his destruction. He produced a report on what had been achieved but again criticised the various vested interests. Hostility in Parliament and from The Times and Punch focused on Chadwick who was seen as trying to bullying the nation into cleanliness. It was Seymour, who left office in 1852, who demanded the removal of the present Board members and successfully carried an amendment against the government’s bill to reorganise the Board. Chadwick resigned and never held public office again. The Central Board was officially abolished in August 1854 but was replaced by a new Board of Health (itself abolished in 1858). This was the end and on 12 August 1854 Chadwick ceased to be a commissioner. Though he lived until 1890, it marked the end of his active public career.


[1] Chadwick, Edwin, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, (W. Clowes and Sons), 1842, reprinted, Flinn, M.W., (ed.), (Ednburgh University Press), 1965.

[2] See, Hamlin, Christopher, ‘Edwin Chadwick, ‘mutton medicine,’ and the fever question’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 70, (1996), pp. 233-265.

[3] Goddard, Nicholas, ‘“A mine of wealth”? The Victorians and the agricultural value of sewage’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 22, (1996), pp. 274-290 and Sheail, John, ‘Town wastes, agricultural sustainability and Victorian sewage’, Urban History, Vol. 23, (1996), pp. 189-210.

[4] Select Committee on the Improvement of Health in Towns, Supplementary Report on Internments in Towns, 1843.

[5] Paterson, R.G., ‘The Health of Towns Association in Great Britain, 1844-49: an exposition of the primary voluntary health society in the Anglo-Saxon public health movement’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 22, (1948), pp. 373-399.

[6] See also, evidence of Thomas Hawksley, First Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, Minutes of Evidence, PP, (572), XVII.1, 1844, pp. 298-331.

[7] Fraser, W.M., Duncan of Liverpool: being an account of the work of W.H. Duncan, Medical Officer of Health of Liverpool 1847-63, (Hamish Hamilton), 1947.

[8] See Sigsworth, Michael and Warboys, Michael, ‘The public’s view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain’, Urban History, Vol. 21, (1994), pp. 237-250.

[9] Bain, Alexander, Autobiography, (Longmans, Green, and Co.), 1904, pp. 196-210 provides a civil servant’s view of Chadwick’s attempted reforms in London and the 1848 Act.

[10] Hanley, James G., ‘The metropolitan commissioners of sewers and the law, 1812-1847’, Urban History, Vol. 33, (2006), pp. 350-368, Darlington, Ida, ‘The London Commissioners of Sewers and their records’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol. 2, (1962), pp. 196-210.

[11] Allen, Michelle Elizabeth, Cleansing the city: sanitary geographies in Victorian London, (Ohio University Press), 2008, pp. 24-85.

Reforming public health

Poor housing, overcrowding and high levels of disease, often held to have been exacerbated by the massive influx of Irish migrants, were certainly perceived as problems by those with power and authority in the Victorian city and by politicians at Westminster. Despite prevailing laissez-faire attitudes, the development of municipal intervention in various areas of the urban environment reveals a genuine crisis in urban living conditions with an increasing gap between public expectations and the realities of urban life. Much as they might have wished to, neither local nor national politicians could ignore urban living conditions. The increasing amount of statistical and other information was discussed and publicised by local societies and used as propaganda by medical men and others with first-hand experience of life in the slums. Edwin Chadwick[1] was the best-known propagandist, but at the local level many influential people became increasingly aware and concerned about conditions of urban life. Such evidence was unlikely to have been enough on its own to persuade ratepayers and their elected representatives to pass legislation and spend money improving housing and sanitation for the working-class. Self-interest was at the heart of political action. Concerned about events in Europe, politicians genuinely believed that poor living conditions could lead to mass disturbances and urban violence.

The impact of cholera in 1832 and 1848 brought home, especially to the middle-classes, the fact that disease affected all classes. The poor were blamed for the disease, but it was in the interests of the middle-classes to improve conditions and prevent it recurring. Intervention was also rationalised through economic self-interest since a reduction in disease and improvement in housing would bring about a more efficient workforce and therefore benefit industrialists and entrepreneurs. But there were also important constraints. The contrast between political reaction to Chadwick‘s contribution to the Poor Law Report in 1834 and reaction to his 1842 public health report is instructive. In 1834, legislation rapidly followed the Report while it took six years to produce the public health legislation Chadwick wanted. In 1834, Chadwick was expressing commonly held assumptions across a broad spectrum of society, whereas in 1842 he was radical and original and his ideas had far less support. If things were so bad why did neither central nor local government seem to do anything about it?

Public health 7

The Central Board of Health: Cholera Consultation

George Cruikshank, 1832

There were four important reasons for this situation. Today services such sewage disposal, street lighting and paving is provided by one local authority. Before 1835, many of the growing industrial towns did not have a Royal Charter and therefore did not have a Town Council. Where councils existed they were often corrupt and inefficient; self-perpetuating rather than elected and unaccountable for the ways in which they used the local rates. In some towns power was in the hands of the parish vestry that was elected by property owners. Most towns before 1835 tried to deal with ‘nuisances’ like water supply and drainage using Improvement Commissions. The problem was that each Commission dealt with a specific area of health not the whole package. There was consequently confusion and lack of co-ordination. Local government reform occurred with the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 that provided for elections every three years by the ratepayers of the town councils. It also allowed rates to be levied for street lighting, fresh water-supply and sewage disposal but this took a local Act of Parliament

The chaotic nature of local government militated against effective reform and so too did self-interest. Various groups in towns opposed interference with the existing situation largely because they were in search of profit. Water companies, for example, only supplied water to those areas of a town where the householders could afford the fees. Builders exploited the demand for cheap jerry-built housing and paid little attention to drainage, ventilation or water supply. Private landlords were reluctant to pay the cost of sanitary improvements and were reluctant to accept any responsibility for the cleanliness of the working-classes. Thirdly, there is also the suggestion that middle-class families were either ignorant of the real conditions in which the working-classes lived or were prepared to ignore them. Middle-class houses were built on the edge of towns and were worlds apart from the inner-city slums. Finally there was the question of who was responsibility for public health. How far should central government dictate to local government with regard to the problem? Initially laissez-faire attitudes meant that central government was reluctant to intervene directly in public health issues while local authorities were resistant to solutions imposed on them.

Whatever the reasons, the second half of the nineteenth century saw unprecedented activity in the passing of both by-laws and national legislation affecting urban living conditions. Local legislation was in practice more important than that passed by Parliament: national legislation often included what had previously occurred at a local level. Although the Public Health Act 1848 did not effect any major changes in urban areas, it was the culmination of a concerted public health campaign in England and Wales, marking acceptance of the fact that public health was an issue of national importance. Not until the Sanitary Act 1866 were local Authorities obliged to provide a proper water supply, drainage and sewerage system but the legislation lacked teeth to enforce its powers. Many towns acted independently: Manchester, for instance, took control of the city’s water supply in 1851. But powers to force Local Authorities to act to improve water supply and sanitation did not become effective until the 1875 and especially 1890 Public Health Acts.


[1] On Chadwick see, Lewis, R.A., Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement 1832-1854, (Longman), 1952, Finer, S.E., The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, (Methuen), 1952 and Brundage, A., England’s ‘Prussian Minister’: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth 1832-1854, (Pennsylvania University Press), 1988. Hamlin, C., Public health and social justice in the age of Chadwick, (Cambridge University Press), 1998 is essential.

Saturday, 20 November 2010

The Education Act 1870: revised version

The first two-thirds of the nineteenth century in England were years of extraordinary growth in popular education and literacy, reflecting the combined influence of increased private demand for basic instruction and the government-subsidised efforts of voluntary religious societies to construct schools for the working-classes. By 1858, the Newcastle Commission was able to report that there remained ‘very few cases indeed in which children have been at no school whatsoever.’[1] Although most working-class children had at least some experience of formal schooling, the general pattern of irregular attendance and early withdrawal was clearly detrimental to educational progress.[2] The existing educational free market of voluntary schools and state subsidies did not deliver an effective educational market for all and the development of a system of state-provided and controlled elementary education was an attempt by the state to address fundamental deficiencies in the rapidly expanding market for popular education.

Whatever the benefits of elementary education to the working-classes, the fees that were charged, however small, posed a problem. The Newcastle Commission reported

It is not to be denied that, in every division of my district, some parents are too poor to pay even the trifling sum charged by schools supported by the Committee of Council on Education.’[3]

More significant than the monetary cost of school attendance was the loss of the child’s contribution to the family economy. For many working-class families, sending their children to school would have entailed the loss of their financial independence. As a government inspector of schools concluded in 1854,

The earnings of the adult operative are insufficient to support himself and children up to fourteen years of age, hence the removal of them from school in order to meet the wants of his household. Compel them to go to school, and you drive the family to the workhouse.[4]

For families living at or near the level of subsistence, times of financial hardship frequently meant withdrawing children from school. The alternative for Victorian workers was to borrow money at reasonable rates but there were major difficulties with this that made this alternative unrealistic. Three basic forms of credit were available to members of the working-classes in the late-nineteenth century: ‘not-paying’, pawning, and borrowing.[5] Each of these options was unsuited to the modest but protracted expenses associated with investments in schooling and the complete lack of discussion by contemporary observers of the possibility of taking out temporary loans confirms its impracticality. In short, for those Victorian parents incapable of paying school fees or of subsisting even temporarily without the financial contributions of their children, existing capital markets were of little help.[6]

The economic incentives to acquire a basic education offered by the Victorian job market increased significantly after 1840 as a result of structural changes in the British economy. As technology developed and the potential uses of literacy increased, the skills taught in elementary schools came to be valued by employers in a far wider range of industries. As James Fraser reported to the Newcastle Commission in 1858, ‘prejudice against an educated labourer was rapidly passing away’ even in agricultural districts due to the development of ‘more scientific methods of cultivation’ for which ‘more intelligence is required in those who actually have to apply them.’[7] Literate workers were more likely to work in higher-status occupations than illiterates with the same background. Basic skills taught in elementary schools were increasingly necessary not only for the traditionally middle-class jobs of clerk or solicitor, but also for more modest occupations. Investments in elementary education, therefore, did generally offer an economic return for members of the Victorian working-classes. There was some resistance to this notion in some communities where the local economy was grounded in occupations that needed young labour and where elementary education was less well regarded. In mining communities, for example, parents were notorious for not sending their children to school despite relatively high earnings.[8] The Newcastle Commissioners acknowledged that the miners’ choice to send their children to work in the pits rather than to school was not necessarily selfish or near-sighted. Rather, it represented a rational economic decision to equip their children with the experience and skills that would benefit them as miners, a career that offered high earnings relative even to the small number of jobs in the region requiring literacy and into which most of them would go.

It was not a lack of ideas that prevented the government from becoming involved in education early in the nineteenth century as Parliament was well aware of the state-mandated systems of education emerging on the continent in Prussia and France. Bills to establish rate aid for schools were presented in Parliament and defeated in 1807, 1820 and in 1833, when John Roebuck presented a bill that would also have made elementary education compulsory. The British government’s earliest interventions in the market for popular education represented attempts to increase the supply of suitable education available to the working-classes at a price they could afford. As Henry Brougham informed his fellow members of the ‘upper classes’ in an 1825 pamphlet

‘...the question no longer is whether or not the people shall be instructed—for that has been determined long ago, and the decision was irreversible—but whether they shall be well or ill taught.’[9]

Forced to take a more active role after 1833, the government began an extended effort to improve the standard of education in the voluntary sector. The eventual substitution of statutory elementary schools financed by local taxation for voluntary and for-profit types of schooling represented an attempt to address the imperfections of the private educational market.

Towards state provision

The Elementary Education Act 1870 created school boards for those parts of England and Wales in that there were insufficient school places for working-class children. These boards possessed power to enforce the attendance of their pupils. Ten years later this power became a duty that devolved also on the school attendance committee, a body created under an act of 1876 in the non school-board areas. The idea of compulsory education was not new. Certain groups of children had been forced, under a variety of legislation that included the Factory Acts, the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Acts and the Poor Law Acts, to attend school before 1870 but the numbers involved were comparatively small.[10] What was new about the legislation of the 1870s was the extent of its operation. For the first time, the nation’s children had to attend school on a full-time basis for a minimum of five years, a period that extended to nine for many by 1914. The new laws had an important effect on the working-class way of life. No longer could parents take for granted the services of their children in the home and their contributions to the family budget. Traditional working-class patterns of behaviour continued in defiance of the law. The state had interfered with the pattern of family life by coming between parent and child, reducing family income and imposing new patterns of behaviour on both parent and child.

The 1870 Act was the culmination of a thirty year struggle to establish an effective and nationwide elementary schooling system. There was general agreement that this was necessary, but the sectarian interests of Anglicans, Nonconformists and Roman Catholics made this difficult. As long as the provision of schools was a voluntary, charitable activity, the three religious societies could co-exist. But any attempt to establish education as the responsibility of the state and spend public money, created acute tensions. Anglicans, as members of the Established Church, claimed that any national system must be Anglican-based, a claim fiercely resisted by Nonconformists and Catholics. As the events of the 1830s and 1840s show, each side was able to mobilise enough support to prevent successive governments from taking any large-scale action. Whatever its justification, the voluntary principle did not prove a success in promoting schools. Even many of the extreme Nonconformists were coming round to the view that voluntarism had been given a fair trial and had failed. The Congregationalist Education Union that had originated in the 1840s to oppose state education was wound up in 1867 and the symbolic acceptance of defeat was registered when the great voluntaryist Edward Baines accepted the practical case for state education. The Newcastle Commission and the controversies over the Revised Code were important because they reinforced the public interest in the subject that had been growing since the 1850s. Religion was one reason for the late growth of a national system of education but there were others.

Some of the conflict and bitterness was due to the social and political divisions that underlay and reinforced sectarian and theological disputes. By the 1840s, the Anglican Church was bitterly resented by its rivals: a national institution identified with a class and the Tory Party. Many Anglican clergymen regarded education as a means of crude social control. In this they were in agreement with the bulk of the Conservative Party that had frustrated Whig efforts in 1839-1840 to establish a national non-denominational system and that fought hard for the interests of the Church during the long debates in 1870. Paradoxically, the provisions of the 1870 Act had the effect of allying Catholics and Anglicans. Voluntary schools were to be in competition with the new board schools and Catholics were implacably opposed to this. Nonconformists naturally ranged themselves behind the Whigs and then the Liberals. However, at no point did they were never more than a vigorous pressure group within the party that, after 1867, was led by William Gladstone who in 1838 had been ‘desirous of placing the education of the people under the efficient control of the clergy’.[11] By 1870, he was prepared to accept the need for some government action on a non-denominational basis but refused, as did the majority of the Liberal Party, to act against the voluntary schools. It was impossible to devise a bill that would have satisfied both sides.

There was also a lack of parliamentary and administrative will to address the problems that did exist and an absence of local government structures that would provide the necessary local agencies. Municipal corporations had been reformed in 1835 but their powers were limited and their influence small. In the counties, elected councils were not established until 1888. There were serious administrative problems in involving the state in popular education. Local rate support would certainly bring demands for local control that was bound to raise the denominational issue. There was the growing problem of expense of government grants that the Revised Code was supposed to have resolved and this was combined with the tension that, since education was a local service, it ought to be financed from local taxation, a proposal that was a central proposal of the National Public School Association founded in 1850. The final problem was one of timing. Education took up a good deal of parliamentary time in the mid-fifties. In 1855, for example, there were three bills before Parliament though all were withdrawn. It was not a period when the state was likely to move into a major new area of social policy because the government was tending to restrict its activities in central planning. The 1850s was the decade of administrative reform and retrenchment with reformers planning to achieve economies rather than extend the range of government activity. As a result, much of the pressure for a national system of elementary education came from outside parliament.

Elementary education was an area where national policies were greatly influenced by local initiatives, beginning first in Manchester[12] and later in Birmingham.[13] The National Public School Association had the support of Richard Cobden and, among others, a young Bradford manufacturer named W.E. Forster who later carried the 1870 Act through the Commons.[14] It campaigned for public, rate-supported, non-denominational education during the 1850s but ran out of steam after an 1857 bill failed to become law. During the 1860s, opinion in cities became increasingly concerned about the large numbers of children who were not in school.[15] Evidence of poor educational provision was beginning to accumulate. In 1861-1862, the first and second reports of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment in agriculture brought out the poor state of education in the countryside. It was clear that the half-time system could not be introduced into agricultural work. Manchester was not the only major city to reveal its deficiencies. Very similar conclusions were reached by the Birmingham Education Society, founded in 1867, and the House of Commons return on the state of education in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool in 1869 showed that many children were attending no school at all and that existing private schools were very inefficient.[16] The Social Science Association argued, as a result of an extensive survey, that in every 100 children living with parents and not at work, 40 were at school and 60 were not. [17] Their conclusion was that only compulsory education could deal with the apathy of parents and the inadequacy of the voluntary system. Education bills were introduced in 1867 and 1868 but the latter was withdrawn when it was clear that a general election was imminent. When Gladstone formed his new Liberal government, Forster became Vice-President of the Committee of Council for Education, the man who spoke for education in the Commons.[18]

Legislation

The Reform Act 1867 enfranchised the urban working-class. Both Disraeli and Gladstone accepted that self-improvement and rising levels of literacy were, in part, a justification for this development. There is, however, some debate on the degree to which reform in 1867 led to educational reform in 1870. Robert Lowe‘s statement that ‘we must now educate our masters’ has to be seen as partly rhetoric but it raise the issue of parental non-consumers and the degree to which they should be coerced into sending their children to school. It has been argued that the extension of education in 1870 was a matter of social policy not one of political necessity. The leadership that had long rested with Manchester now passed to Birmingham. Education was one of the major interests of the Birmingham municipal reformers and in 1869 they created the National Education League with George Dixon as President and Joseph Chamberlain as Chairman of the committee.[19] The League was a national movement that carried on the ideas of the National Public School Association and represented the non-sectarian and Nonconformist view of the way ahead. In November 1869, the National Education Union was founded in Manchester with the protection of the interests of denominational schools as its primary objective.[20]

Forster introduced the bill in February 1870 and it became law on 9 August.[21] It did not design a new national system. It left the existing voluntary schools untouched with the same committees of managers. Where the existing school provision was inadequate or where a majority of ratepayers demanded it, school boards should be set up for boroughs and parishes with a single board for the whole of London, with the duty of building the schools that were necessary. These boards were to be elected triennially in the boroughs by the burgesses and in parishes by ratepayers, and were given the power to issue a precept on the rating authority to be paid out of the local rate. The religious question was resolved by allowing schools provided by the boards to be non-sectarian (the so-called Cowper-Temple clause) but giving parents the right to withdraw their children from any religious observance or instruction. Elementary education was not made free and school boards might make it compulsory for children to attend school. This was not extended to the voluntary schools. The Act essentially filled in the gaps creating a dual system of state schools and voluntary schools.[22]

The main feature of the debate was the major division of opinion not between Conservatives and Liberals but within the Liberal majority itself. The Conservatives on the whole supported the bill, though they disagreed over some issues. The original proposals were considerably modified by the Radical Nonconformist wing of the Liberal party, many of them recently elected MPs, who wanted to go further in a number of directions that the government had planned. Some Radicals were strong Nonconformists who advocated the disestablishment of the Church of England. Prominent in this group was Edward Miall, a former Independent minister who had founded The Nonconformist in 1841 and who was a leading figure in the Society for the Liberation of the Church from State Patronage and Control (or Liberation Society for short). Henry Richard, Welsh MP with similar views pointed out the particular difficulties raised by the religious situation in Wales and the dislike of the Welsh people for Anglican teaching in schools. They argued that school instruction should be entirely secular so that religious agencies would be left to do their work outside schools. The pressures were not all from the religious side. Compulsory education was strongly advocated by the Cambridge economist Henry Fawcett and by Sir Charles Dilke, whose main contribution to the final act was to propose that the ratepayers should elect the school boards. Free education, part of the programme of the National Education League, was little discussed and an amendment in favour of it soundly defeated.

Board schools with rates as well as government grants to draw on had the resources to grow. Voluntary schools had no source of local income comparable to rates and there was no way in which they could keep pace. In this sense the settlement of 1870 carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. By the 1890s, it was clear that provision for elementary education was uneven and annually growing more so. Nor was the structure one on to which provision for secondary education could be grafted. The Education Act 1902 put the Church on the rates. School Boards were abolished and, in return for rate aid, voluntary schools’ committees of management came within the control of the new Local Education Authorities, county and county borough councils, some 140 of them.[23]


[1] Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of Popular Education in England, Parliamentary Papers, 1861, Vol. 21, pt. I, p. 85.

[2] Ibid, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of Popular Education in England, pt. I, p. 178.

[3] Ibid, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of Popular Education in England, pt. III, pp. 236-237.

[4] Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education, Parliamentary Papers, 1854-5, pp. 79-80.

[5] Johnson, Paul, Saving and Spending: the working-class economy in Britain, 1870-1939, (Oxford University Press), 1985, pp. 144-192.

[6] Ellis, A.C.O., ‘Influences on School Attendance in Victorian England’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 21, (3), (1973), pp. 313-326.

[7] Ibid, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of Popular Education in England, pt. II, p. 105.

[8] Ibid, Colls, R., ‘“Oh Happy English Children!”: Coal, Class and Education in the North-East’.

[9] Brougham, Henry, Practical Observations upon the Education of the Poor: addressed to the working classes and their employers, (Printed by Richard Taylor ... and sold by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green ... for the benefit of the London Mechanics Institution), 1825, p. 32.

[10] After 1832, a series of acts shored up, but did not radically modify, the voluntary school system. The Industrial Schools Acts of 1857, 1861 and 1866; the Reformatory Schools Acts of 1854, 1857 and 1866 and the Education of Pauper Children Act of 1862 all helped local authorities to tackle the problem of the education of the ‘residuum’, the class the voluntary schools had neglected. When the efforts of pre-1867 parliaments had failed and the voluntary system had lost credence as the means of educating the children of the nation, then and only then, did the 1870 Act belatedly and reluctantly ‘fill the gaps’.

[11] Cit, Morley, John, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 Vols. (Macmillan and Co.), 1903, Vol. 1, p. 109.

[12] See, Maltby, S.E., Manchester and the movement for national elementary education, 1800-1870, (Manchester University Press), 1918.

[13] Marcham, A.J., ‘The Birmingham Education Society and the 1870 Education Act’, Journal of Educational Administration & History, Vol. 8, (1976), pp. 11-16.

[14] Jackson, Patrick, Education Act Forster: a political biography of W.E. Forster (1818-1886), (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), 1997 and Reid, T. W., Sir, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster, 2 Vols. (Chapman and Hall), 1888.

[15] On the impact of public opinion, see, Rich, E.E., The Education Act 1870: a study of public opinion, (Longman), 1970.

[16] Papers for The Schoolmaster, New Series, Vol. 4, (1868), pp. 163-164, Report of the first general meeting of members of the National Education League: held at Birmingham, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct. 12 & 13, 1869 ..., (The Journal), 1869, pp. 22-23. See also, Rodrick, Anne B., Self-Help and Civic Culture: Citizenship in Victorian Birmingham, (Ashgate), 2004, pp. 88-109.

[17] Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, (John W. Parker), 1869, pp. 38-74, 391-399, 454-455.

[18] See Roper, Henry, ‘Towards an Elementary Education Act for England and Wales, 1865-1870’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 23, (2), (1975), pp. 181-208.

[19] Ibid, Report of the first general meeting of members of the National Education League: held at Birmingham, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct. 12 & 13, 1869....

[20] Rich, E.E., The Education Act, 1870: a study of public opinion, (Longman), 1970 but see also the comtemporary studies, Adams, Francis, The Elementary Education Act, 1870: with analysis, index and appendix, (Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.), 1870 and Munby, F.J., A popular analysis of the Elementary Education Act, 1870: for the use of ratepayers, school managers, overseers, parents, and others outside the metropolis, (John Heywood), 1870.

[21] Armytage, W.H.G., ‘The 1870 Education Act’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 18, (1970), pp. 121-133, Baker, Gordon, ‘The romantic and radical nature of the 1870 Education Act’, History of Education, Vol. 30, (2001), pp. 211-232. See also, A Verbatim Report, with indexes, of the debate in Parliament during the progress of the Elementary Education Bill, 1870, (National Education Union), 1870.

[22] Ibid, Jackson, Patrick, Education Act Forster: a political biography of W.E. Forster (1818-1886), pp. 150-180 examines the passage of the legislation.

[23] Murphy, James, The Education act 1870: text and commentary, (David & Charles), 1972 provides the legislation and how it worked.

Friday, 19 November 2010

A cultural context

The conquest of Canada in 1760 and the Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended over a century and a half of French rule. Though French Canadians were a significant majority in the new British colony, over the next century their demographic advantage was gradually but inexorably eroded until, by 1851, English-speakers outnumbered those for whom French was the first language. French Canadians have always feared assimilation and that fear manifests itself in a view of Canadian history that is distinctly different from the English Canadians view. From the outset, French Canadians inside Quebec were a nation within Canada speaking a different language, worshipping at a different Church and using different laws and, as a result, seeing the world differently from English Canadians. They have always felt their culture was and still is in danger of disappearing. So, the protection of the language and culture of Québec has always been of major importance.[1]

The family remained the nucleus of French Canadian society at the turn of the nineteenth century ensuring social cohesion and underpinning the cultural fabric that bound individuals together. To guarantee continued family relations, people preferred to marry within the same parish or at most across neighbouring parishes. French Canadian oral culture had a saying, ‘Marry your own kind in front of your own door.’ It was natural, therefore, that spouses were generally chosen from within one’s racial, ethnic and most important religious circle. Furthermore, people tended to marry within their social group. It was hardly an accident that Amable Dionne, one of the richest merchants in eastern Lower Canada, gave his seven young daughters in marriage to seigneurs, merchants and professionals as each brought an $8000 dowry.

In the creation of French Canadian culture, the process of synthesis and assimilation resulting from the encounter of different cultural traditions has not only taken place as a result of the contact between European and North American aboriginal traditions. Of greatest importance in the evolution of French Canadian culture has been the sustained contact with the British, especially since the French colony was ceded to Britain in the mid-eighteenth century and the increasingly important cultural influence of the United States. Although this contact has not totally excluded the processes of synthesis and assimilation, including for example, the use of English weights and measures British culture generally served as a foil and catalyst for the development of a distinctive French Canadian culture and the continuing reference with regard to cultural origins has continued to be France.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the population had become more sedentary, more concentrated in the St Lawrence valley and largely agricultural. The evolving elite, influenced by the Romantic concept of nation, sought to provide the emerging society with a history and a destiny. A myth of origins was gradually created, positing a definite time, that of Maisonneuve and the religious heroes who came to convert North America to Catholicism and within a particular territory, the St Lawrence basin. The legendary economic activity became agriculture, rooting the previously nomadic French Canadian. Yet the attractive image of the coureur de bois never completely disappeared and continues to be a cultural reference point to the present.


[1] According to the Canada 2001 Census, Canada has seen a rise in francophones outside Quebec and about 4.4% of Canadians outside Quebec are francophones. About 17.7% of Canadians are bilingual. Quebec is the only province whose sole official language is French.

Vermont and the rebellions

Vermont is a small state in the north-east of the United States, less than a hundred kilometres from Montreal and which played a significant strategic role during the rebellions of 1837-1838. Vermonters were intensively involved during the period of the rebellions in part out of sympathy for the Patriote cause but also because it was on their territory that many Patriotes sought refuge. Many were committed to the Patriotes as partisans of freedom but also because individuals such as Brown, Nelson and O’Callaghan spoke their language. Several were involved in the crusade in favour of democracy in Canada. [1] Despite this, the mass of the population in Vermont did not want to precipitate serious conflict with a nation as powerful as Great Britain.[2]

Originally peopled by Amerindians (Algonquins, Abénakis, Iroquois), the territory of Vermont was originally explored in 1609 by Samuel de Champlain who named the area ‘Les Verts Monts’ and later villages were established to the west of the Green Mountains. In 1763, the area was ceded to Britain in the Treaty of Paris. In 1775, Ethan Allen and the ‘Green Mountain Boys’ hoped to conquer part of Canada and proclaim their autonomy from New Hampshire and the state of New York. Finally, Vermont was an independent republic from 1777 until 1791 when it became the fourteenth state of the new American Republic. During the War of 1812, soldiers from Vermont were involved in the campaigns in the autumns of 1812 and 1813 and in the summer of 1814. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, largely because of depression in agriculture, French Canadians began to move in increasing numbers into Vermont and other American states. Parallel to this, loyalist Americans who were committed to the British crown were settling in the Cantons de l’Est.[3]

In 1837, the governor of Vermont was Sir Silas H. Jennison, a Whig who had held the office since 1825. The United States President was Andrew Jackson who had held the post since 1829 and was now at the end of his second term. A lawyer, Jackson was the national hero of the War of 1812 as the victor of the Battle of St Orleans, was in favour of slavery and was vehemently against patronage. The National Republicans or Whigs opposed him. Jackson’s expected heir and closest adviser was Martin Van Buren, a lawyer from New York and vice-president since 1832. He became president in his turn in 1837, a post he held until 1841. The panic of 1837 resulted in hundreds of banks, companies and farmers going bankrupt and it took five years for the American economy to recover. [4]

It was in this context that many people in Vermont, already characterised by a particularly independent spirit, decided to support and help the French Canadian Patriotes.[5] From 1834, more and more Americans from Vermont took part in the Patriote assemblies at Stanbridge, Potton and Montreal. Some, such as Cyrus Myrick, enlisted in the Patriote units stationed on the border. Others offered their services to help the Patriotes in their fight for democracy. [6] This was the case with Alonzo Jackman who visited Lower Canada in the summer of 1838 to assess British readiness for defence. This kind of initiative was hardly encouraged by the American army spread out thinly along the northern border. [7]

At the beginning of 1838, the Patriote refugees in Vermont were ready for further action following the initial failure of rebellion in late 1837. On 28 February, Robert Nelson proclaimed the Republic of Lower Canada and shortly after the Frères Chasseurs, a secret organisation, was developed. [8] In Vermont, the independence movement was supported by Protestant millenarians and evangelists. Some Americans joined the Frères Chasseurs and published advertisements in newspapers inviting all of goodwill to join the ‘Great Wolf Hunt’ planned for the end of 1838. Gatherings in support of the Patriotes were held across Vermont: at Westford, Barre, Swanton, Burlington, Ludlow, Northfield, Royalton, Danville, Middlebury and especially Saint-Albans, the headquarters of the movement. [9] At Derby, the Patriotes established their newspaper, the Canadian Patriot. On the border, the situation proved difficult for the United States government that took measures to maintain its neutrality by increasing its military presence.[10]

The political tensions of the 1830s, the economic and religious crises of this decade and the independent attitudes of many Vermonters explain why the Patriotes received support there. Several Patriotes, such as Cyrille-Hector Octave Côté and Julius Gagnon, remained as refugees in the United States until their deaths.[11]


[1] Oury, Guy-Marie, Le Vermont au fil de l’histoire, (Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solmes, Westfield, Vermont), 1993, p. 39.

[2] Saint-Pierre, T., The Americans and Canada 1837-38, Authentic documents compiled by T. Saint-Pierre, (A.P. Pigeon), 1897, p. 3; Duffy, John J, & Muller, H, Nicholas III, An Anxious Democracy, Aspects of the 1830s, (Greenwood Press), 1982, p. 60.

[3] Fortin, Réal, Les Patriotes du Haut-Richelieu et la bataille d’Odelltown, (SNQ), 1987, p. 27.

[4] Duffy, John and Muller, H, Nicholas, ‘The Great Wolf Hunt: The Popular Response in Vermont to the Patriote Uprising of 1837’, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 8, (1974), pp. 153-169

[5] Ibid, Duffy, John J, & Muller, H, Nicholas III, An Anxious Democracy, Aspects of the 1830s, p. 6.

[6] Ibid, Duffy, John J, & Muller, H, Nicholas III, An Anxious Democracy, Aspects of the 1830s, p. 10.

[7] Ibid, Oury, Guy-Marie, Le Vermont au fil de l’histoire, pp. 36-38.

[8] Ibid, Duffy, John J, & Muller, H, Nicholas III, An Anxious Democracy, Aspects of the 1830s, p. 50.

[9] Ibid, Duffy, John J, & Muller, H, Nicholas III, An Anxious Democracy, Aspects of the 1830s, p. 23.

[10] Oury, Guy-Marie, Le Vermont au fil de l’histoire, pp. 39-40, 63.

[11] Ibid, Fortin, Réal, Les Patriotes du Haut-Richelieu et la bataille d’Odelltown, p. 13.