by A. N. Wilson
Thomas Arnold was generally credited not merely with the revival of Rugby School from a state of moral and intellectual torpor, but also with the invention, in some sense, of the public school ethos, as understood for the next century. Stanley’s two-volume biography of his hero (published 1844) sees Dr Arnold’s achievement as an essentially religious one. It ends, indeed, with a near-apotheosis, in which an old boy of the school, writing to Arnold’s widow, imagines the headmaster actually set down at the right hand of God:
As our Saviour’s wounds were healed on the morning of the Resurrection, so shall his mortal disease be healed, and all that we most loved in him shall become immortal. The tone of earnestness shall be there, deepened perhaps into a more perfect beauty by a closer intercourse with the Son of man … and how will the most aspiring visions of reformation that ever filled his mind on earth be more than accomplished in that day of the restitution of all things!16
Even in heaven, it would seem, the headmaster was to be earnestly looking for something to reform.
Arnold’s achievement, perhaps, historically, was to see the public school as the ideal social expedient by which the liberal-conservative ideals of the early nineteenth-century reformers could be put into practice. Rather than the bourgeoisie, as on the continent, displacing the aristocracy as the governing class, they could themselves acquire some of the attitudes, and speech inflexions, of the upper class by having the education of ‘gentlemen’. From a comparatively small pool of privately educated boys, the colonial governors, senior ecclesiastics, politicians, statesmen, lawyers and other professionals could be drawn. An easily expandable governing class could quietly be created in which aristocrats did not lose their place, but in which there was room for those clever enough to push for, or rich enough to buy themselves, a position. Of course, this cynical Benthamite explanation of Arnold’s campaign to make the boys of Rugby into ‘Christian gentlemen’ misses out the personal and religious sincerity of Arnold’s ideals: but it is a fair description if not of Arnold’s aims, then of the effects of his reforming zeal at Rugby. (The numbers of which we are speaking remain proportionately tiny – only 7,500 boys were at boarding school in England during the 1860s.)17
Tom Brown’s Schooldays, unconsciously perhaps, mirrors the feelings of the Victorian middle classes towards the public schools. Although a sunny book, devoted to celebrating the manly joys of pure comradeship, games, Bible-reading and hero-worship of Dr Arnold, the bits we all remember are about bullies tossing the little boys in blankets and roasting them before the fire. (It was inspired of George Macdonald Fraser, in his late twentieth-century series of novels about the Rugby bully, to see that Flashman was an archetypical Englishman.) Flashman, in fact, takes over the story in spite of all Hughes’s desire to the contrary, rather as Satan defies Milton’s pious intentions at the beginning of the epic and becomes the hero of Paradise Lost.
Those ‘first-generation’ families who sent their sons off to public school were not necessarily appreciative of what they found. Arnold had high academic standards. The cleverer boy, taught by his principles, would certainly have been very good at Greek; and the more receptive might have imbibed muscular Christianity. But after Arnold’s premature death, aged forty-seven, the major public schools remained insanitary nests of bullying, sexual depravity and – as far as a general knowledge of the natural or social world was in question – ignorance. Gladstone was just such a middle-class product of a public-school education bought by parents who had learned to see these places as the training-grounds of a new aristocracy. Eton made him, and he remained obsessed by the place to his dying day. But the Liberal in him was forced to recognize that public schools, like everything else in the world, would benefit from Reform. For this reason Gladstone, when chancellor of the Exchequer in Palmerston’s second Cabinet, was largely instrumental in the setting up of a parliamentary commission under Lord Clarendon to investigate the condition of the public schools.18
The commission worked for almost three years, from 1861, and interviewed 130 witnesses. It investigated such matters as school administration, the syllabus, the necessity or otherwise of teaching children science, the desirability of ‘fagging’ (that is, younger boys working as servants for older boys), the place in life of games and athletics, the need or otherwise for examinations … Yet throughout its deliberations, and the discussions in both Houses of Parliament of its final report – leading eventually to the Public Schools Act of 1868 – it is hard to avoid the feeling that the main thing under discussion was class. Even when it came to the anodyne question of whether science was a suitable subject to which to draw a young gentleman’s (or would-be gentleman’s) attention, you have the sense that they are not really discussing whether boys ought to know chemistry. An impressive array of scientists appeared before Clarendon to urge the adoption of a scientific education, and interestingly Dean Farrar (author of such school classics as Eric, or, Little by Little) was thoroughly in favour of this. But the headmaster of Shrewsbury, B.H. Kennedy, carried the day. The natural sciences, he told Clarendon, ‘do not furnish a basis for education’.19 As the author of The Public School Latin Primer he had a nice little earner on his hands: speaker after speaker in Parliament, including Gladstone, emphasized the undesirability of science as a school subject. Lords Derby, Stanhope and Carnarvon all argued that it would lead to ‘cramming’ and overwork, and cut into time needed for games, and the Earl of Ellenborough was able to spell out exactly where this could lead: examinations in which tradesmen’s sons could succeed against, for example, the sons of army widows ‘who had learned truth and honour at home’.20
All the public schools had, as a matter of historical fact, been founded to teach poor scholars. It was centuries since a poor person had been to Eton; and those public schools which retained places for poorer pupils found them in a distinct minority, though a witness to Clarendon said that at Charterhouse ‘gown boys were not looked down upon’.21 Other schools found it less embarrassing actually to found new establishments for the worthy townsfolk, lest the ‘young gentlemen’ boarders in Eton collars from richer homes should have to mix with the children of local tradesfolk or even of artisans. The Lower School of John Lyon came into being in the town of Harrow in 1875. Dulwich in 1857 had created Alleyn’s School for the more plebeian pupils; Oundle’s amputation was called Laxton Grammar School; Repton had the Sir John Port School and Rugby the Lawrence Sheriff – in both cases named after the founders of the original charitable enterprise.
So popular was the idea of public-school education that even as the Clarendon Commission sat, new ‘public schools’ were founded – Beaumont in 1861, Clifton and Malvern in 1862, Cranleigh and St Edward’s, Oxford, in 1863. For the clearer it became in everybody’s mind that the schools were to be the reinforcement of the new class system – indeed its seedbed – the more necessary it was to have a hierarchy of schools. An extension and elaboration of this hierarchy was indeed the life’s work to which the Reverend Nathaniel Woodard (1811–91) was devoted. Woodard was a keen Tractarian, and wanted to educate children in the High Church principles which he had himself imbibed at the feet of Newman, Pusey and Keble at Oxford, where he only got a pass degree, having married and had children as an undergraduate.22 The religious motive notwithstanding, Woodard was always perfectly open about the need to see boarding schools as vehicles of social engineering. His manifesto, A Plea for the Middle Classes, was published in 1848, and his Letter to Lord Salisbury, published twenty years later, was a progress report on his remarkable success in raising the money by public subscription for the establishment of no fewer than sixteen schools – ‘providing a good and complete education for the middle classes at such a charge as will make it available for most of them’. Salisbury himself when still Lord Robert Cecil, Longley, archbishop of York (former headmaster of Harrow), Gladstone, Bishop Wilberforce, Temple when headmaster of Rugby and Charles Kingsley all gave Woodard money and encouragement, so in spite of his Anglo-Catholic credenti
als he appealed to a wide spectrum.
From the first he recognized that ‘middle class’ was now a term which applied both to ‘gentlemen with small incomes, solicitors and surgeons with limited practice, unbeneficed clergymen, naval and military officers’ and to a second class of ‘respectable trades folk’. There was also a third category who could afford his fees but who were not, strictly, respectable – the keepers of ‘second-rate retail shops, publicans, gin-palace keepers’, etc.23
Woodard established three sorts of school: the first were mini-Etons, which would educate boys until they were eighteen and then send them to university or into the army; the second class would keep them until sixteen; the third until fourteen. All would have the architecture of an ‘old school’ – a chapel, a quadrangle, masters and headmasters in academical caps and gowns, all the bogus appurtenances of ‘public school’. Such is the eagerness of the socially mobile that the publicans were only too happy to send their sons to the third-class Woodard schools, such as St Saviours, Ardingly, knowing that these boys might so better themselves in later life that they could aspire to send their own sons to grander Woodard establishments, such as Lancing. Who knows? Within three generations they could even have escaped the Woodard group altogether, and be rubbing shoulders with the upper middle classes at Charterhouse or Shrewsbury.24 Woodard was clever enough to see that such arcane transformations would be hindered by too much of the stabilizing influence of home, which is why from the first he insisted on the need for boarding schools.
The non-hierarchical or anti-hierarchical spirit of our age is so much at variance with Canon Woodard’s ideals that we are in danger of ignoring the obvious fact that they were ideals. The children of gin-palace keepers deserved educational opportunities just as much as the children of the ducal palace, the vicarage, the suburb or the slum. The Victorians invented the concept of education as we now understand it; even if we believe ourselves to be more egalitarian than they, it is from them that we derive our axiomatic assumption that learning should be formalized learning, education institutionalized, the imparting of knowledge the duty of society and the state to every citizen. The 1860s, which began with the Clarendon Report on Public Schools and ended with the parliamentary Act guaranteeing elementary education for all, was the decade in which this culmination of Benthamite control was accomplished. Bishop Stanley, choosing to send the delicate Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, his son, to Rugby School, was emblematic of the change which had come upon England with the coming of the age of Reform. The bishop had not been to school himself. John Ruskin did not go to school. Nor did Queen Victoria, nor John Stuart Mill, George Eliot or Harriet Martineau. It would be absurd to suggest that Disraeli, Dickens, Newman or Darwin, to name four very different figures, who attended various schools for short spells in their boyhood, owed very much to their schooling. Had they been born in a later generation, school would have loomed much larger in their psychological stories, if only because they would have spent so much longer there, and found themselves preparing for public examinations. It is hard not to feel that a strong ‘syllabus’, or a school ethos, might have cramped the style of all four and that in their different ways – Disraeli, comparatively rich, anarchically foppish, indiscriminately bookish; Darwin, considered a dunce, but clearly – as he excitedly learned to shoot, to fish and to bird-watch – beginning his revolutionary relationship with the natural world; Newman, imagining himself an angel; Dickens, escaping the ignominy of his circumstances through theatrical and comedic internalized role-play – they were lucky to have been born before the Age of Control. For the well-meaning educational reforms of the 1860s were the ultimate extension of those Benthamite exercises in control which had begun in the 1820s and 1830s. Having exercised their sway over the poor, the criminals, the agricultural and industrial classes, the civil service and – this was next – the military, the controllers had turned to the last free spirits left, the last potential anarchists: the children.
As Woodard had realized from the first, in creating his hierarchy of boarding-schools with their bogus traditions, faked-up slang, and imitations of the older public schools, education was a necessary part of the new class system which capitalism had brought into being. To be truly effective, it was necessary not merely to set up new middle-class schools, but to deprive the poor of the education which had been provided them for generations. The original founders of the public schools had all meant them to educate the poor. In 1442, Henry VI had instructed that ‘no one having a yearly income of more than five marks’ was eligible to attend his foundation at Eton. In the early nineteenth century, however, the public schools had begun the process of social segregation on which Victorian England very largely depended. Thomas Arnold, for example, closed the free lower school at Rugby so that, without hiring a tutor to teach their children, the poor could not reach the standard necessary to pass into the upper school. Winchester in 1818 claimed that its pupils were the ‘poor and needy’ specified by the founder William of Wykeham: it was only their parents who were rich. The Public Schools Act of 1868 took over any remaining endowments dedicated to poor pupils and gave them to the rich schools. In Sutton Coldfield, for example, whose poor were educated free by virtue of an endowment, £15,000 was plundered from the old charitable foundation in order to provide a ‘high school for well to do children’.
The independence which education provided was thus removed from the poor, as was the element of choice. After 1870, and W.E. Forster’s Education Act, it was to become compulsory for everyone to attend schools, but to do so in places strictly assigned to them according to income and social status.25
For the first time in Protestant history, even females were not exempt. Here is in fact the central, the classic example of the rule that, in order to find liberty in the Benthamite controlled world, you had to submit to its slavery. Education, first at schools, a little later in the century at university colleges, was the key means by which women were to enter upon a professional world on terms with men. Florence Nightingale founded a school of nursing in 1857 and provided others with a template of how women might, independently of men, establish a professional identity – hence, eventually, a political one. But in order to compete with boys, girls had, from the very first, to fight for such dubious privileges as the right to sit for public examinations.
F.D. Maurice had been the chief inspiration behind the setting-up of Queen’s College, Harley Street, as an adjunct to the University of London, and from that institution emerged two of the most important educationalists of the nineteenth century:26
Miss Buss and Miss Beale
Cupid’s darts do not feel.
How different from us,
Miss Beale and Miss Buss.
The lines, invented by a Clifton schoolmaster when Miss Buss insisted on attending a Headmasters’ Conference to discuss public examinations, rebound upon their own masculine limitations. The glory of Miss Beale and Miss Buss is that they established, for educational purposes, that women are not ‘different from us’.
Frances Mary Buss opened the North London Collegiate School for Ladies on 4 April 1850 at No. 46 Camden Street. Her great triumph, apart from the establishment of the school – and with it an inspiration to other ‘Girls’ Public Day Schools’ – was to battle for the right to sit public examinations. The Cambridge Syndicate in 1863 was at first fiercely opposed to girls sitting exams. Through the influences of her friends Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies she was able to win this vital concession. (In 1869 Miss Davies opened, at Hitchin, the college eventually known as Girton – it moved to Cambridge in 1873.) Miss Buss was a tiny woman with an extraordinary flair for teaching and an intelligent fervour for the rights of women. In a long career, and a violent century, she never raised her hand against a child, though pupils, like the men who attempted to check her reforms, quailed in her presence.27
Her friend Dorothea Beale had witnessed, as a teacher, the rough end of school life. While Buss left Queen’s College, Harley Street, to esta
blish the North London Collegiate, Beale was appointed, at the age of twenty-six, head teacher of the Clergy Daughters’ School, Casterton, Westmorland. This establishment, which had been founded in 1823 by the Reverend Cairns Wilson at Cowan Bridge, was destined, by the hand of its most famous pupil, to become the most notorious girls’ school in European history: for it is none other than the Lowood of Jane Eyre (1847).
Patrick Brontë, himself born in a hovel in Northern Ireland and educated entirely by the local parson, is one of the many brilliant men and women who, not having been to school themselves, inflicted school on their offspring. In the case of the Brontë sisters, poverty decreed that they should be trained as governesses, and a training meant to endure Mr Wilson – Mr Brocklehurst in the novel.
‘If ye suffer hunger or thirst,’ he exclaims, to the housekeeper, ‘happy are ye. Oh madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!’28
Lowood was, Jane Eyre tells us, ‘the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence … Semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection; forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at one time.’
There was, for the Brontë sisters themselves, a bitter and truthful reality in Mr Brocklehurst’s catechism:
‘No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,’ he began, ‘especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?’
‘They go to hell,’ was my ready and orthodox answer.