Educating the upper classes: boys at public school

 I grew so rich that I was sent

By a pocket borough into Parliament

I always voted at my party's call, 

And I never thought of thinking for myself at all. 

I thought so little, they rewarded me

By making me the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

(W.S. Gilbert, making fun of politicians and

the Navy career structure in H.M.S. Pinafore 1881),

Life was not much better for pupils at fee-paying 'public' schools than it was for working class children scraping an education where they could.  A 'public school' in the U.K. has come to mean a private boarding school, where parents pay often huge fees to have their children housed in term, educated, and, very important, make useful connections for their future lives. (for details of their origin and development from free grammar schools, see Wikipedia) The future for boys from the gentry, aristocracy, or well-off families in the 18th and 19th century was expected to be: running the family country estates, enormous or small, becoming Members of Parliament and running the country, becoming officers in the army or, probably second choice, the navy; becoming Anglican clergymen and running the spiritual life of the nation, or entering the legal profession which, with Parliament, controlled the legal life of the nation.  Boys were also expected to make a suitable marriage, hopefully to a girl who would bring more money and estates into the family, and girls were educated with this in mind too.  Any girls who could not, or would not marry could become helpful companions to their families, and, of course, all girls were expected to do good works with the poor, especially if they had married one of the Clergy.

The eldest son, whether suitable or not, would inherit the family estates, which were probably entailed on the eldest male heir. This protected the often huge landholdings of the aristocracy from becoming fragmented.  The remaining sons would often be offered a choice of suitable Anglican 'livings', ie church parishes with a rectory and an income, or would be bought a commission as an officer in the army or navy.  They would be expected to work their way up to, maybe a bishopric in the Church, a General in the Army, or an Admiral in the Navy.
Children who inherited a title automatically also inherited a seat in the House of Lords, then much more powerful than it is in modern times.  Also, until the Parliamentary Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 many M.P.s in the House of Commons were more or less gifted their Parliamentary seats by the local landowner, who controlled the vote.  The Reform Acts gave the vote to many working men, though no women could vote.

Boys would usually be sent at age seven to a preparatory boarding school and then to board at senior public school.  Public school certainly toughened the boys up, if it did not kill them.  Flogging was extensively practised at all major public schools; several masters were renowned for it, and were admiringly spoken of for the ferocity of their beatings.  The best known of all, Dr. 'Flogger' Keate, headmaster of Eton from 1810 to 1834, once attempted to beat a hundred boys in turn.  After he had beaten about twenty the rest started to pelt him with rotten eggs.  He called in two masters with birches to assist him and continued beating.

Eton College, founded by Henry VI in 1440 (Wikipedia)

The future poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was at Eton in Flogger Keate's time.  The other boys enjoyed provoking him to furious rages:
He was known as Mad Shelley, and many a cruel torture was practised upon him for his moody and singular exclusiveness...I have seen him surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened bull...'
Shelley once stabbed another boy with a fork, but did eventually settle in and became an exceptional scholar.
(Richard. Holmes, Shelley, the Pursuit, 1974, quote from an article by W.H. Mearke in
The Athenaeum, 1848)

The pupils were charged for the rods used; Charles Hotham's bill at Westminster School in 1743 included 1/- 'for the rods at School twice'

The school was very rough at that time, a coachman died after five scholars 'gave him a Westminster drubbing' and wild Lord March, future Duke of Richmond, aged eight, assaulted a master:
'Set fire to Viny's greasy locks, and boxed his ears to put it out again'  (A.M.W. Stirling, The Hothams, 1918, Vol. 2, p.2; 3, internet edition available, California Digital Library)

The poet Lord Alfred Tennyson's brother was at Eton, and told his brother the students once stole a pig.  They kept it on the roof until she had her piglets and then ate them; Tennyson put the story into one of his poems, though not naming the school:

'By night we dragged her to the College tower
From her warm bed and up the corkscrew stair
With hand and rope we hauled the groaning sow
And on the leads we kept her till she pigged.
 (Tennyson, Walking to the Mail, Early Poems of Lord Alfred Tennyson, 1830 internet edition available, Project Gutenberg)

That story may or may not be true, but when the floor of the Old Chamber at Eton, where the pupils slept, was taken up in 1858 two cartloads of mutton bones taken down by rats were removed.  Boarders were expected to go out to houses in the town to wash and buy breakfast, there was no glass in the windows until 1818.   Pupils were still expected to sleep two to a bed at Harrow until 1805.  As blankets were inadequate this may have been a good choice. (Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy,
The Public School Phenomenon,  1977, an excellent, entertaining account of British public schools)

So maybe the behaviour of these young aristocrats partly explains the violence of the staff.
Lord Stanley's son Johnny was flogged at Harrow School in 1851 for:
'secreting light and being up all night, and also for jumping over the dinner table when Dr. Vaughan was there...I hear the foulness of his language is as much complained of as his swearing"
His father, Lord Stanley just remarked: "Dr. Vaughan is a prig"'
(Nancy Mitford, ed. The Stanleys of Alderley, 1939p.211)

Harrow in 1862 founded 1572 under Elizabeth 1
(BBC Archive)

Algernon Stanley was just as unruly:
'Two new punishments were invented at Harrow especially for him - one was to stop in on the half holiday, the other to have his name posted up as having done badly.'
Lyulph Stanley to his mother, concerning his brother Algernon, 1857, Mitford p. 193-4)

Algernon's parents did not consider these punishments enough and Algernon was moved from Harrow to Rugby; his mother, Lady Stanley said:
Rugby 'gives him a chance of strengthening his character in a rough sphere where more co-ercive measures are used.  Perhaps you will think Rugby is not gentlemanlike - it is not polished, but anything is better for Algernon that will change the sauntering, idle, lazy tone of his mind and manner.'
(Mitford p.211)

Rugby school, founded in 1567
as a free grammar school
for local boys (Wikipedia)

Clearly the parents were totally behind severe punishments, and, of course, the boys' fathers would have experienced them previously.  Here is another parent's comment, slightly earlier; 1687, by Mary Woodford:
'This evening I had the cutting news that my second boy was in rebellion at the College at Winton where he and all his Companions resolved not to make any verses, and being called upon to be whipped for it several of them refused to be punished, mine among the rest...God I beseech thee subdue their stubvborn hearts and give them grace to repent and accept of their punishment due to their fault, and let them not run to ruin for Christ's sake'
(D.H. Woodforde ed.  Woodforde papers and diaries, 1932. Google internet edition available)

This is the Rev. Heber, writing to his son Richard in 1792, at the time of the French Revolution, describing how Richard's brothers schoolfellows:
'According to the prevailing Rage of the Times of standing up for the Rights of Boys adopting Tom Paine's principles and doctrines and rebelling against King Kent (the headmaster) barring the master out of the school.  They were starved into submission.  So may all Rightful Monarchs ever prevail against Levellers and Republicans, the pest of Society.'
(R. Cholmondeley ed. The Heber Letters, 1783-1832, pub. 1950, p.78, Google internet edition available)

Giving evidence before the Public Schools Commission in 1836, set up to investigate complaints, Creasy, who was sent to Eton in 1821 at the age of ten, sums up conditions as 'privations that might have broken down a cabin boy or would thought inhuman if inflicted on a galley-slave
(Christopher Hollis, Eton, a history, 1960  p.236 internet edition available on Google Books)

And, finally, here is the testimony of Lord Shaftesbury, famous for championing the rights of chimney sweepers' boy workers and founder of the Shaftsbury homes. He was sent to preparatory school, Manor House, Chiswick, aged seven:
'Evil of every kind was rampant...The memory of that place makes me shudder; it is repulsive to me even now.  I think there never was such a wicked school before or since.  The place was bad, wicked, filthy; and the treatment was starvation and cruelty.'  Shaftesbury compared this school to Dotheboys Hall in Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, 1838, the novel which  made Victorians aware of the conditions in many of these boarding schools.  Lord Shaftesbury went on to Harrow, aged twelve, and was apparently happy there. 

Mrs. Squeers doses the boys, by Phiz,
Nicholas Nickleby 

The curriculum continued to be based on Classical languages.   Charles Darwin (1809-1882)  boarded at Shrewsbury School, founded in 1552, now an independent co-educational school of a very high quality.  In Darwin's day, he complained:
'Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler's school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught except a little ancient geography and history.'
(The Life and Times of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, 1888)

'Lord Chesterfield, in 1704, wrote to his son:
'Dear Boy...
Pray mind your Greek particularly; for to know Greek very well is to be really learned: there is no great credit in knowing Latin, for everyone knows it.'
(Lord Chesterfield, letters to his son, Letter XLIX.  C. Strachey ed. The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to his Son, 1901.) 
Lord Chesterfield's letters on education were very celebrated in the 18th and 19th centuries,
even though his the son and godson actually turned out rather badly.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)also remembered his Latin lessons, at St. James' prep. school, around 1880, aged seven:
'Learning the 1st declension.  Mensa, a table, mensa, o table, etc.  "What does it mean, Sir?" ..."O table - you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table."  And then, seeing he was not caring me with him, "You would use it in speaking to a table."  "But I never do," I blurted out in honest amazement.
"If you are impertinent, you will be punished, let me tell you, very severely," was his conclusive rejoinder.'
(Churchill, My Early Life, 1930 p.24)

Here is Leonard Woolfe, describing the Headmaster of  St. Paul's London, founded 1509, now a successful independent school.  Woolfe was there from 1894-99:
'His vision of the school and education was narrow and fanatical.  The object of a public school was, in his view, to give the boys the severest and most classical of classical educations'
(Leonard Woolfe, Sowing, 1880-1904, pub. 1960)

R. H. Quick summed up the curriculum, dammingly, in 1893:
'To produce a few scholars able to appreciate the classics of Greece and Rome they have sacrificed everybody else; and according to their own showing they have condemned a large proportion of the upper classes, nearly all the middle classes, and quite all the poorer classes to remain 'uneducated'. And, according to the theory of the schoolreoom, one-half of the human race - the women- they have not supposed to need education.
(R.H. Quick, Essays on educational reformers, new ed. 1893, p.18)

'There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight
Ten to make and the match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.'
(Sir Henry Newbolt, Vita Lampada)

'The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton'
(Attributed to the Duke of Wellington, 1856)

Public schools placed great importance on games, especially team games, and physical fitness.  According to the boys' adventure story writer G. A. Henty (1832-1902):
'Boating or cricket, you had your choice, but once made, you had to be perfect in one or the other.  Fellows rowed then and played cricket then.  They had to.
(G. Manville Fenn, George Alfred Henty, 1907)
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At Bedales, a very progressive school, which highly valued physical fitness, this was the regime:
'There were runs before breakfast, the last two being swished in by a prefect with a cane.  More runs in the afternoon, more swishing.  The emphasis on labour was not comfortable: there were beds and butter to be made, much digging, the rougher the better, cows to be milked early on frosty mornings.'
Bedales also had earth closets, the headmaster would shovel the excrement into barrows and the boys dug it back into the ground as manure.
Girls were introduced to the school in 1898; the founder, J. H. Badley's  wife refused to marry him unless he made the school co-educational.
(E.L. Grant-Watson, quoted in Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy The Public School Phenomenon, 1977, a fantastic account of public school life)

Boys were expected to call each other by their surnames:
'I must not call him Dick but Tuckfield for I shall be laughed at...'
(John Mordaunt, aged eleven, at Eton in 1820; Elizabeth. Hamilton, The Mordaunts, an Eighteenth Century Family1965, Google internet edition available)

John Mordaunt goes on to give his impression of Eton:
'Dearest Mama...I am in the Middle Remove, that is Middle 4th form and...I like Eton prettry well....I have a set of tea things with 6 cups & saucers, aand 6 knives & forks & spoons, with my name mark on them...I have also had an order for pens, ink, paper, and an inkstand...a great many of them (the boys) swears very badly, & others are quite the contrary...There has been a rough here not long ago, and one boy was expelled, some say for indecency and bullying the boys, and others for something about a fire in the college.'
'The boys of my age are all playing at Marbles now, the bigger boys play at Hockey, Fives and Single Stick, which is beating one another about as hard as you can with sticks I should not think it was a very agreeable game.'
'I am fag to Lord Dunlo, he is a very nice master I think.  I do not get much fagged, but I do not mind if I am a little fagged.'

Fagging was the practise of giving the older boys a younger one to run errands for them.  The idea was that the older boy would also mentor the younger.  Boys in the 6th form also acted as prefects, responsible for school discipline under the masters, with one of them chosen as Head Boy.
Here is a description of fagging by William Tollemache who was at Westminster school in 1830:
I was only two years at Westminster so was a fag the whole time I was there.  I had a rough, disagreeable master - Vance, the son of a surgeon.  I was exactly like his servant out of school hours and had to clean his boots, brush his clothes, fill his jug from the pump in Dean's Yard and prepare his evening meal.'
E.D.H. Tollemache, The Tollemaches of Helmingham and Ham, 1949.

Doubts were expressed about the system;  as early as 1693, the influential educationalist John Locke wrote:
I cannot but prefer breeding of a young Gentleman at home in his Father's sight under a good Governour, for till you can find a school wherein it is possible for the Master to look after the Manners of his Scholars...you have a strange Value for Words when...you think it worth while to hazard your Son's Innocence and Virtue for a little Greek and Latin.'
(John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693 p,148 internet edition available)

This, of course, depended on the attitude of the child's father, many were absent, dis-interested, or had other views on education; the famous Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder (1708-1778) said disapprovingly of  Charles James Fox (1749-1806)later the bitter political rival of the virtuous, well brought up William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806):
'Lord Holland educated his children without the least regard to morality, and with such extravagant vulgar indulgence that the great change which has taken place among our youth has been dated from the time of his son's going to Eton.
Charles James Fox was introduced to gambling by his father aged fourteen, and spread the habit among the pupils at Eton, where William Pitt the Younger was also a pupil:
I never was concern'd with a young Gentleman of so good Abilities'
(Pitt's tutor, Dr. Burchett, quoted in B. Tunstall, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 1938)

Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby from 1828 to 1841 is credited with much of the reform of public schools.  He introduced the prefect system which taught boys management and discipline, and his management of the school is celebrated in Tom Brown's Schooldays. 1857, This best-selling book, with Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, 1838, and F. W. Farrar's Eric, or Little by Little, 1858, a cautionary tale of the easy slide from virtue to vice and disgrace and early death,  helped to make the Victorian public aware of the state of boarding schools.   In 1861 a Royal Commission was set up to investigate  and they were gradually brought into order.

“He read ‘Eric, or Little by Little,’” said McTurk; “so we gave him ‘St. Winifred’s, or the World of School.’ They spent all their spare time stealing at St. Winifred’s, when they weren’t praying or getting drunk at pubs. Well, that was only a week ago, and the Head’s a little bit shy of us. He called it constructive deviltry. Stalky invented it all.”

“Not the least good having a row with a master unless you can make an ass of him,” said Stalky'

(Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co, a satirical parody of the Victorian school story, 1899.  Internet edition available)

'

Educating the Poor in the 18th and 19th centuries.

'Reading, Writing and Arithmetic are...very pernicious to the Poor, who are forc'd to get their Daily Bread by their Daily Labour...Those who spent a great part of their youth in learning to Read, Write, and  Cypher, expect and not unjustly to be employ'd where those Qualifications may be of use to the; the generality of them will look upon downright labour with the utmost Contempt...'
(Bernard de Mandeville, Essay on Charity and Charity Schools, 4th ed. 1725
See also on internet, The Fable of the Bees)

William Underhill, The Village School,
(Wolverhampton Art Gallery)

In  the 18th and 19th centuries there was fierce debate over whether or not education should be universal, compulsory, run by Church or State, teaching methods and the curriculum.  Especially in America there was a lot of disagreement about the relative merits of the study of classical languages, science, modern languages and other subjects with direct practical uses.

In the 18th and most of the 19th centuries a British, or a New England, child, especially in the middle classes, might begin his, or her, schooling at a dame school such as that described by the poet William Shenstone:

'Lo now with state she utters the command!
Eftsoons the urchins to their tasks repair;
Their books of stature small they take in hand
Which with pellucid horn secured are,
To save from finger wet the letters fair;
The work so gay than on their backs is seen;
St. George's high achievements do declare;
On which thilk wight that has y-gazing ben,
Kens  the forth-coming rod, unpleasing sight,
  I ween....'  (The Schoolmistress, 1737)

It was just this kind of school which William Gray attended with the poet Tennyson in the 1760s:
'Betsy Dales...held her school in her own sitting room and lodging room.  Her sceptre was a long hazel rod, polished by long use, which Tennyson and I well remembered.  Not I think that he ever felt its stroke.  Being a gentleman's son, when he rebelled, which he often did, he was tied to the bed post.'
(Mrs. Edwin Gray,  Pages and diaries of a York family 1764-1839.  Macmillan,1927)

A dame school (BBC Archive, Victorian schooling)

Children were sent to dame school at about the age they now go to playgroups or, in the late 19th century after Pestalozzi's educational methods became popular, to kindergarten.  Boys intended for a conventional classical education would often then be sent to begin Latin and Greek with a clergyman, as they often took a few pupils to supplement their incomes.  Alternatively boys or girls might be sent for a few years to some free charity school.

Working class children generally received only basic education, and sometimes not even that. Many were sent to a dame school for a few years before starting work at about age seven.  They might learn to read, possibly to write.  From the late 18th century increasing numbers learned to read in Sunday schools set up by charities or by their employers.  Girls sometimes attended work-schools where they learned a useful trade; sewing or lace-making, for example, getting a basic education and also earning their keep.

Horn books, used to teach the ABC and Lord's Prayer
The text was covered in a very thin sheet of horn, to protect it from little fingers
(Pinterest)

The 1697 Report for the Reform of the Poor Law gave great encouragement to the development of charity schools.  It had an appendix by John Locke, then Commissioner of the Board of Trade, which set out a plan for setting up working schools in every parish.  His plan was to see that relief intended for children was not spent by their parents in the ale house, and giving children industrious work habits early in life.  He also hoped the products of their labour would help pay for their maintenance:
'The children of the labouring poor are an ordinary burden to the parish, and are usually maintained in idleness, so that their labour is also generally lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old...The most effectual remedy for this, that we are able to conceive, and which we humbly propose, is, that working schools be set up in each parish, to which the children of all such as demand relief of the parish, above three and under fourteen years of age, whilst they are at home with their parents, and not otherwise employed for their livelihood, by the allowance of the overseers of the poor, shall be obliged to come.  By this means the mother will be eased of a great part of her trouble in looking after and providing for them at home, and so be more likely to work; the children will be kept in much better order, and be better provided for, and from their infancy be inured to work which is of no small consequence to making them sober and industrious all their lives after.'
(John Locke, Report for the reform of the Poor Law, 1697  Quoted in Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, 500-1948, Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969)

The school diet was to be plentiful but plain; bread, with warm water gruel in winter.  On the cost of the scheme Locke calculated hopefully:
'Whereas it may reasonably be concluded that computing all the earnings of a child from three to fourteen years of age, the nourishment and taching of such a child during the whole time would cost the parish nothing, whereas there is no child now which is maintained by the parish but before the age of fourten costs the parish fifty or sixty pounds.'
(John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning  Education, 1693, Appendix A)

John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education

The most successful work schools were run by charitable organisations such as the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, founded in 1699, and the Society for the Reform of Manners, founded 1691.  These were religious organisations founded to bring the poor to God.  Many were set up by Nonconformists such as the Quakers and Baptists.

The SPCK, the most important of these reliugous organisations, did not set up schools but linked together the efforts of various groups scattered all over Britain.  Originally the  SPCK was interested in providing basic education in reading, writing and religion, but it soon became attract to the idea of work-schools and in 1719 decided to employ children doing piece work for industry:
 'spinning, sewing, knitting or any Employment to which the particular Manufacturers of their resprective Countries (sic; counties) may lead them....this will bring them to an Habit of Industry as well as prepare them for the Business by which they are afterwards to subsist in the World, and effectively obviate an Objection against the Charity Schools, that they tend to take poor children off from those servile Offices which are necessary in all communities and for which the wise Governour of the World has by Providence Resigned them.'
(Dorothy Gardiner, English Girlhood at School, 1929, p. 27,quoting from the SPCK REports, 1737)

The idea of work schools was very popular in America, where John Locke was very much admired.  In Pennsylvania many similar schools were established by different religious sects, particularly the Moravians.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania USA
(Britannica)

There is a description in Harper's Magazine 1882 of the Wilson Industrial School and Mission, New York, which Miss Fryatt describes as 'the pioneer of the many industrial schools since organised in New York City'.  It only took girls and was a day school.  The pupils had three hours tuition in English in the morning, a warm dinner and two hours plain sewing in the afternoon.  They also learned how to carry out simple household duties of the kind that would help them to enter service as maids.  There were classes in religious instruction for both the girls and their mothers.  The pupils were mostly German immigrants from what Mis Fryatt describes as one of the worst slums in the city.
(Harper's New Monthly Magazine Vol. 64, 1882, p.374-381)

The New England Primer, 1777,
(Internet Archive, internet edition available)

The New England Primer .  It was compiled by the Rev. John Rogers, martyred for his faith at Smithfield, London, in the reign of Queen Mary, 1554.  His Primer, with its woodcut of Rodgers, burned at the stake, watched by his wife and ten children, became the standard for all young American Puritans in New England  to study their first alphabet, vocabulary and grammar

The work of charity schools was supplemented from the 1780s by Sunday schools.   Nonconformists set many of these up and ran them as part of their efforts to make Christianity meaningful to the working classes and the poor.
Although Robert Raikes is credited with being the first founder of Sunday schools, in fact the idea seems to have been but into practise independently in several parts of the countr.  By 1786 Raikes' friend Samuel Glasse thought 200,000 children were being taught and the movement continued to spread throughout the 19th century.  (from entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, Raikes, Robert)

Sunday schools provided basic education for children such as apprentices who were not able to take advantage of other schooling opportunities.  Th schooling provided varied considerably according to the school.  Basic religious knowledge centred on the Bible would be the main subject, and most Sunday schools also attempted to teach children good personal habits.  In the Sadler Report on child labour, 1832, the Rev. G.S. Bell is quoted pointing out that children working a fifteen hour day had no time to learn basic household skills; speaking of girls he said:
'The generality of them are as unfit as they possibly can be to fill the important station of a cottager's wife.  How should they, considering the length of labour to which they are now subjected...I am acquainted with many that can scarce mend a hole in their garments.' (Michael Sadler, Report of the Select Committee on Factory Children's Labour, Parliamentary Papers 1831-2, vol. 2, p. 423  Sections available on the internet)

Brook St. Ragged and Industrial school, London, 1853
(BBC Archive, Victorian schooling)

Although the children were taught to read they were not necessarily taught to write, since many of the school founders clearly felt this would make them unfit for their pre-ordained station in life.  The redoubtable Hannah More, founder of Sunday schools in Cheddar among numerous other good works, made her position clear in a letter to William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner:
The children at her schools learned the Bible, the catechism, and 'such coarse works as may fit them for servants.  I allow of no writing for the poor' (Dictionary of National Biography, More, Hannah)

However, Sunday schools did a great deal of important work, and did partly fill a much felt need for education.  This is shown by the attendance figures and individual testamonies.  For instance, Mrs. Trimmer, the writer, opened a Sunday school in Brentford in May 1786.  By July 159 children were attending, by June 1788 over 300. (Dictionary of National Biography, Trimmer, Sarah)  These were children who were most probably working all the week, maybe 14 hours a day.    By 1803 enough schools had been opened throughout the country for the Sunday School Union to be formed.

Witnessed brought before the Parliamentary Commissioners investigating working conditions were frequently asked whether they had attended Sunday schools, and many did so, although they often said they tended to fall asleep.  Those who did not often excused themselves on the grounds of exhaustion, and many clearly would have liked to attend.  One of the clergymen interviewed testified that, 'since this Factory Bill has been agitated, when I have been at the Mills the children have gathered round me for a minute or two as I passed along, and have said, "When shall we have to work 10 hours a day?  Will you get the Ten Hours Bill?  We shall have a rare time then; surely somebody will set up a necy (sic, night) school; I will learn to write, that I will."'
(Michael Sadler, Report of the Select Committee on Factory Children's Labour, Parliamentary Papers 1831-2, vol. 2, p. 470  Sections available on the internet)

Parents were often equally concerned to get some education for their children, particularly in mining districts, where night schools and Sunday schools were especially popular.  The 1842 Report of the Commissioner for Mines showed that many children attended,  though it was not easy for them.  One witness testified:
'When his son (aged six) gets a little more hardened to the pit, his father means to send him to night school and stop an hour off his sleep.'  The child had been at school from the age of three until he was sent down the mine.
(Report of the Comissioner for Mines, British Parliamentary Papers, 1842, Industrial Revolution, Children's Employment, Vol. 6, p. 90.  Surprisingly, this does not appear to be available on the internet, though some references are available. It makes shocking reading)

Charles Shaw was a child worker in the North Staffordshire potteries in the 1840s.  He attended dame school but had to leave and go to work at age seven.  He remebered, as he was working, seeing a boy about his own age reading a book, and the bitterness he felt at being deprived of education:
'the sight of this youth reading at his own free will forced upon my mind a sense of painful contrast between his position and mine.' (Charles Shaw, When I was a child, 1903, p.21)

In 1811 Andrew Bell, Superintendent of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church began to set up a national system of Church day and Sunday schools, largely run by volunteers.   Fashionable ladies often  became involved with this charity work, providing annual teas for the children and taking an interest in finding them work when they left.  The schools often provided a good education of its kind. In Two Generations, there is a description of one:
'The children were given a uniform dress consisting of poke bonnets, dark prints and white tippets, and were taught reading, writing, arithmetic and excellent sewing (they were all girls) They executed all the needlework for the underclothing of my sister Alice's trousseau'  This was in the days before sewing machines, when sewing, and knitting were really valuable skills.

The patrons of such schools could be very high-handed:
'On one occasion my mother, who took a great interest in the dame school, finding that the children's hair was often untidy, sent an imperative order that the locks of all the scholars should be shortened to the backs of their necks - and, with the message, the barber to execute it.'
(Osbert Sitwell, Two Generations, 1940, Memoirs of Mrs. Campbell Swinton, p.68)

A Ragged School for girls
(BBC Archive, Victorian schooling)

These schools were usually run on the monitorial system, largely developed by Joseph Lancaster.  This system, which was also very popular in America in the early 19th century, depended on the use of the brightest children as pupil-teachers.

The 1870 Education Act which provided for the setting up of school boards in all districts of the U.K. marked the transfer of control of the education system from the Church, but compulsory education did not finally become law in Britain until the 1880s.  Parents and employers continued to flout the ever-increasing restrictions in the employment of children until well into the 20th century.  Ages were frequently falsified until registration of births was made compulsory, and still more frequently school attendance, particularly in country districts, was simply irregular, according to demand for the children's labour.  Farmers often expected to have the labour of their workmen's whole families made available to them at particularly busy times, and children tended to be taken away from school to help get in the crops, working in family units, with even toddlers helping by twisting corn stalks to bind the sheaves.  Parents would also keep their children back to help with gleaning, for this was generally a field-hand's perquisit and an important addition to wages.  The depressed entries in the Akenfield school log show the difficulties rural teachers faced:

'June 1889: attendance bad.  Picking stones has ended and weeding in the fields still continues...Twenty boys hardly ever attend and are seen working.  The law is broken here with impunity...work how you will, it is uphill work in rural schools.'  'April 3rd 1890.  Field-work, gathering stones, cow keeping and farm work has reduced the average.  35 out of 61 attended.  It is impossible in my opinion to teach either Geography or Grammar owing to the bad attendance caused by the farmers sending the children out on the fields....'
(Ronald Blythe, Akenfield.  1969.  p.165. 'Akenfield', a made up name, was based on a real village in East Anglia)

In Lark Rise to Candleford Flora Thompson described her village school around 1900:
'The girls in their ankle-length frocks and long, straight pinafores, with their hair strained back from their brows and secured on their crowns by a ribbon or black tape or a bootlace, the bigger boys in corduroys and hobnailed boots, and the smaller ones in homemade sailor suits or, until they were six or seven, in petticoats.
(Flora Thomoson, Lark Rise to Candleford, 1945, p.171)

'Governess' taught all the classes herself in one room, with the assistance of two monitors aged about twelve.  Flora Thompson does not mention the absenteeism which plagued the teacher at 'Akenfield' but at about thirteen schooling finished, the boys going onto the local farms and the girls into service in local farmhouses and later, if they were lucky, in some grand country house, following a pattern which had been traditional for centuries.

However, Flora Thompson recorded the wind of change which was blowing even through remote Oxfordshire villages by her time; instead of teaching children to know their place, Miss Shepherd 'taught them that poor people's souls are as valuable and that their hearts may be as good and their minds as capable of cultivation as those of the rich, and read them stories of boys of poor parents who became great men (there were no women, Laura noticed)'
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, 1945 p.182)

Alison Uttley, the children's writer, and daughter of a respectable but not rich farmer also gives a description of a typical state school in Britain in the late 19th century:
'fifty children had lessons in the long open room.  On the walls were glass cases full of geological specimens, grey, brown and black stones, sparkling stones, bright green malachite, fossils and shells...Little classes of childdren, each with a pupil teacher, sat along the room, and in the centre sat the headmaster at his desk...By his side was the cane with which he swished the hands of unfortunate childdren...The lessons, the games, the singing and music, the open-air drill when little girls used wands and boys iron dumb-bells, all made a wonderful life for me.'
(Alison Uttley, Ambush of Young Days, 1937, p.155-9)

These schools were tough, but gave many children their start in life.  Schools for the 'gentry' could be just as rough.