‘I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith,’ thundered Carlyle. Certainly there was a ‘crisis of faith’ produced by the whole cultural system. The early years of the century saw the Anglican church – associated with the existing social order, the upper classes and gentry, and neglectful particularly of the growth of the urban working classes – struggling against the Dissenting churches, such as Baptists and Methodists, and the Evangelical Revival, that emphasised the subjective experience of conversion, Bible-reading, preaching, and an active, ‘do-gooding’ laity. By the middle of the century, Roman Catholic numbers also increased (chiefly due to Irish immigration) and there were important defections by distinguished Anglicans such as John Henry Newman and Henry Manning, which all helped provoke anti-Popery anxieties. The Anglican church itself was divided, between the Low Church, evangelical party, the Catholic-sympathetic High Church, and the liberal Broad Church. A famous Sunday census in 1851 showed less than half the population attending church at all, of whom barely half were Anglican (and few of those from the lower orders). Considerable efforts at reform were made, improving organisation, finances and stipends, and building and renovating hundreds of churches. The third quarter of the century saw a vigorous Revivalist movement, with American involvement, and hymn-singing becoming more important and popular (Hymns Ancient and Modern first appeared in 1861, and sold 3,000 copies each week for thirty-five years).
Nevertheless, two deadly, intellectual forces threatened faith. One was the development of scholarly analysis of Biblical texts, seriously questioning their authenticity, historicity and coherence. The other was the growth of science, especially geology, biology and archaeology, which seriously undermined Biblical accounts of creation and history. Most significant was, of course, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), followed by the populariser T.H. Huxley (‘Darwin’s bulldog’), and Herbert Spencer’s development of evolutionism into social analysis and theories of remorseless ‘progress’ and, in Spencer’s phrase, ‘the survival of the fittest’ (i.e., in social terms, ‘might is right’). Despite desperate rear-guard activity, scepticism spread widely, helping in the disabling of faith generally, and of the Church in particular; increasingly, the Church seemed a hollow social form.
Good God, what nonsense! As if anyone inquired what an English parson believed nowadays, so long as he performs all the usual antics decently.
Mrs Humphrey Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888)
* * *
FROM ‘ROYAL EDUCATION’
[On the Duke of Cumberland being voted £6,000 a year for the education of his son.]
I am a babe of Royalty;
Queen Charlotte was my grannam,
And Parliament has voted me
Six thousand pounds per annum,
To teach me how to read and write,
To teach me elocution,
To teach me how to feast and fight
For the King and Constitution,
As a well-taught Prince should do,
Who is taught by contribution. . . .
And when my coach and six shall jog,
With horns, hussars and banners,
To some gaunt German pedagogue,
Who teaches Greek and manners,
How very ready I shall be
To show that I’m fit for ruling,
By gaming and by gallantry,
And other kinds of fooling,
Which a well-taught Prince should learn,
Who costs so much in schooling. . . .
Winthrop Mackworth Praed, in the Morning Chronicle (1825)
A RAGGED SCHOOL
Among other institutions for the improvement of the juvenile poor, Ragged Schools rank deservedly high. That known as the Field Lane Ragged School has been established some years, in an extremely low neighbourhood in London. . . . We had the good fortune to pass an hour one evening in company with the Schoolmaster . . . It was on a week-night, and there were about 100 boys present. Some were very little fellows, with scarcely clothes sufficient to keep them warm; others were tolerably well clad. All the boys were engaged during the day in some kind of work, in the neighbourhood or not far away. . . . One Master teaches the whole; and he not only knows the names and faces of the regular attendants, but can detect the truants very readily. . . . They all work, however, and in school, though the discipline is mild, they are not idle. One group is arranged on one side of the spacious, warm and well-lighted room with slates in hand, engaged in attempts at writing. They sit and chat very agreeably together, as if they were under no severe restraint. When, however, any one raises his voice needlessly high, so as to distract the attention of the class, the eye of the Master is immediately upon him, and a mild but firm rebuke at once silences the delinquent. A large number of the boys write in Darnell’s copybooks, than which none can be better or cheaper. . . .
Hitherto we have been speaking of the Evening School. . . . The Day Schools, for boys and girls, present, perhaps, the most interesting feature of the establishment. The large room . . . is then generally occupied by about 300 or 350 of the most ragged and destitute children in London. Much skill is required in handling such a mass of degraded humanity. Skilful teachers have altogether failed in the attempt to conduct some of the classes into which the whole are divided. Mr Fraser never seems to fail. He picks out from the scholars some of the elder ones to act as monitors; and, with the aid of female teachers for the girls, he manages to get on very comfortably. . . . Need we say, that the boys and girls we saw there were mostly very ragged? A small knot of the girls were engaged in a corner at needlework. The girls were ranged on the left-hand side of the room, and the boys on the right and up the middle. Good order prevailed. There were, perhaps, 350 children present, many without shoes and stockings. Some of them can read and write well, particular attention being paid to those essential branches of education. Others were no mean proficients in arithmetic, considering their opportunities. The Master had a collection of twenty or thirty tops, balls, &c., &c., which the boys had found, and brought to the school to play with: these were scrambled for after school time.
Five little urchins who had played truant were imprisoned without food or drink till night – a punishment that is found more efficacious than the rod. Spare food which is left by the employés of a firm close by, is distributed to the hungry children twice a week.
Edwin Utley, ‘Old Jonathan’ (1860)
A DAME SCHOOL
To every class we have a school assigned,
Rules for all ranks and food for every mind;
Yet one there is, that small regard to rule
Or study pays, and still is deemed a school:
That, where a deaf, poor, patient widow sits,
And awes some thirty infants as she knits;
Infants of humble, busy wives, who pay
Some trifling price for freedom through the day.
Her room is small, they cannot widely stray –
Her threshold high, they cannot run away;
Though deaf, she sees the rebel-heroes shout; –
Though lame, her white rod nimbly walks about;
With band of yarn she keeps offenders in,
And to her gown the sturdiest rogue can pin.
Aided by these, and spells, and tell-tale birds,
Her power they dread and reverence her words.
George Crabbe, ‘Letter XXIV’, The Borough (1810)
UTILITARIAN EDUCATION
‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!’ . . .
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined pl
ane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim. . . .
‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’
‘Sissy Jupe, Sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.
‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia. . . . Give me your definition of a horse.’
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.’ . . .
‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy country, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
‘Now, girl number twenty,’ said Mr Gradgrind, ‘you know what a horse is.’ . . .
‘Very well,’ said [the third] gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. ‘That’s a horse. Now, let me ask you, girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?’
After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, Sir!’ Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, Sir!’ – as the custom is, in these examinations.
‘Of course, No. Why wouldn’t you?’
A pause. One corpulent boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.
‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.
‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it. What do you mean, boy?’
‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality – in fact? Do you?’
‘Yes, Sir!’ from one half. ‘No, Sir!’ from the other.
‘Of course, no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘Why then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
PRACTICAL EDUCATION: YOUNG FARM-WORKERS
Scarcely any of these got any education before the establishment of Sunday schools – how few of them do yet, compared with the working population of towns. The girls help their mothers – the labourers’ wives – in their cottages, as soon almost as they can waddle about. . . . As they get bigger they are found useful in the house – they mop and brush, and feed the pig, and run to the town for things; and as soon as they get to ten or twelve, out they go to nurse at the farm-houses; a little older, they ‘go to service’; there they soon aspire to be dairymaids, or housemaids, if their ambition does not prompt them to seek places in the towns – and so they go on scrubbing and scouring, and lending a hand in the harvest field, till they are married to some young fellow, who takes a cottage and sets up day-labourer. This is their life; and the men’s is just similar.
As soon as they can run about, they are set to watch a gate that stands at the end of the lane . . . They are sent to scare birds from corn just sown, or just ripening, where ‘They stroll, the lonely Crusoes of the fields’ – as Bloomfield has beautifully described them from his own experience. They help to glean, to gather potatoes, to pop beans into holes in dibbling time, to pick hops, to gather up apples for the cider-mill, to gather mushrooms and blackberries for market, to herd flocks of geese, or young turkeys, or lambs at weaning-time; they even help to drive sheep to market, or to the wash at shearing-time; they can go to the town with a huge pair of clouted ankle-boots to be mended, as you may see them trudging along over the moors, or along the footpath of the fields, with the strings of the boots tied together, and slung over the shoulder – one boot behind and the other before; and then they are very useful to lift and carry about the farmyard, to shred turnips, or beetroot – to hold a sack open – to bring in wood for the fire, or to rear turfs for drying on the moors, as the man cuts them with his paring shovel, or to rear peat-bricks for drying. They are mighty useful animals in their day and generation, and as they get bigger, they successively learn to drive plough, and then to hold it; to drive the team, and finally to do all the labours of a man. That is the growing-up of a farm-servant. All this time he is learning his business, but he is learning nothing else – he is growing up into a tall, long, smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ankle-booted fellow, with a gait as graceful as one of his own plough-bullocks. He has grown up, and gone to service; and there he is, as simple, as ignorant, and as laborious a creature as one of the wagon-horses he drives. The mechanic sees his weekly newspaper over his pipe and pot; but the clodhopper, the chopstick, the hawbuck, the hind, the Johnny-raw, or by whatever name, in whatever district, he may be called, is everywhere the same; he sees no newspaper, and if he did, he could not read it . . . He is as much of an animal as air and exercise, strong living and sound sleeping, can make him, and he is nothing more.
William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (1840)
ACADEMIC EDUCATION
Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by Doctor Blimber, he might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze. The Doctor only undertook the charge of ten young gentlemen, but he had, always ready, a supply of learning for a hundred, on the lowest estimate; and it was at once the business and delight of his life to gorge the unhappy ten with it.
In fact, Doctor Blimber’s establishment was a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew before their time. Mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Dr Blimber’s cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs of boys under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other. . . .
Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft violence to the gravity of the house. There was no light nonsense about Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore spectacles. She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead – stone dead – and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a ghoul. . . .
As to Mr Feeder, B.A., Doctor Blimber’s assistant, he was a kind of human barrel-organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation to bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber’s young gentlemen. The young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew no rest from the pursuit of stonyhearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three weeks. He had all the cares of the world on his head in three months. He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians, in four; he was an old misanthrope, in five; envied Quintus Curtius that blessed refuge in the earth, in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterwards depa
rted, that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the world.
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848)
A PRIVATE SCHOOL CURRICULUM (WITH EXTRAS)
‘When we were little,’ the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, ‘we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle – we used to call him Tortoise –’
‘Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?’ Alice asked.
‘We called him Tortoise because he taught us,’ said the Mock Turtle angrily, ‘really you are very dull!’
Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times Page 10