When a tooth was extracted it was often replaced with another healthy one taken from another person’s jaw, a method recommended by John Hunter who published his Natural History of the Human Teeth in 1771 and who advocated as a cure for toothache burning the ear lobe with a hot iron.8 Rowlandson’s Transplanting of Teeth (1787) shows a fashionable dentist performing this operation. He is Bartholomew Ruspini, self-styled Operator for the Teeth, Gums etc.’, who arrived in England in 1759, established himself at first in Bath and ultimately in St Alban’s Street, not far from the Prince of Wales’s mansion, Carlton House. Having become rich through his practice, and through his patent dentifrice which preserved the teeth and rendered them ‘perfectly white’, he married into one of the oldest families in Northumberland.9 Ruspini is shown extracting a tooth from a chimneysweep which he is about to place in the mouth of a lady who has had one of her own bad teeth pulled out for the purpose. A ragged boy and a girl, crying with pain, leave the room, holding their cheeks in their hands. A placard on the door reads, ‘Money given for live teeth’.10
Some poor people sold all their teeth for the benefit of the rich in need of a sound set; and a dentist would pull them out one after the other, trying each one for size in the holes in his patient’s gums. Some dentists, following the lead of Charles Allen, author of the first book in English which dealt exclusively with dentistry, The Operator for the Teeth (1685), disapproved of the transplantation of human teeth, which was likely to transmit disease, particularly syphilis. But Allen considered it ‘very profitable and advantageous’ to transplant the teeth of sheep and dogs, goats and baboons into human jaws.11 Animal teeth were rarely used, however, and as the demand for human teeth from the living out-stripped supply, recourse was had to grave-robbers – who knew that, even when a corpse was decomposed, its teeth were saleable at up to £30 a set – and to dealers in teeth taken from the bodies of dead soldiers on battlefields. So-called ‘Waterloo teeth’ were shipped over in thousands from the Continent after the end of the Napoleonic Wars; and in the 1860s, so the Pall Mall Gazette reported, certain dentists no longer troubled to make artificial teeth, relying instead on the teeth sent across the Atlantic in barrels by tooth-drawers from the battlefields of the American Civil War.12
For those who could not bear the thought of any form of transplant and eventually became toothless there were masticators, which resembled nutcrackers and crushed hard food into an easily managed pulp. There were also sets of false teeth. These had been known for centuries, even in the ancient world: dentures of the bridge-work type have been found in Etruscan tombs of 700 B.C. But until recent years they were neither comfortable nor sightly, and often had to be removed for eating. Robert Herrick described a set which looked exactly as though they had been made from a bone handle:
Glasco had none, but now some teeth has got;
Which though they furre, will neither ake, or rot.
Six teeth he has, whereof twice two are known
Made of a Haft, that was a mutton-bone.
Which not for use, but merely for the sight,
He wears all day, and draws those teeth at night.
Eighteenth-century advertisements promised false teeth that appeared to be natural. John Watts, an ‘Operator’ who applied ‘himself wholly to the said business’ in Racquet Court, Fleet Street, offered in 1711, ‘Artificial teeth set in so well as to eat with them, and not to be distinguish’d from natural, not to be taken out at night, as is by some falsely suggested, but may be worn years together. They are an ornament to the mouth and greatly help the speech.’13
Most sets, in fact, impaired rather than improved the speech; and 150 years later they did not fit much better than they had in the days of Queen Anne. ‘That it is a much easier task to make artificial teeth ornamental than useful,’ a textbook on dentistry affirmed in 1846, ‘may be inferred from the fact that in by far the greatest number of cases, they are much too insecure in the mouth to admit of any attempt at complete mastication of the food without displacement.’14
Lord Palmerston’s dentures were so loose, indeed, according to Disraeli, that they would ‘fall out of his mouth when speaking, if he did not hesitate and halt so in his talk’.
Until the 1790s false teeth were generally made of bone, of hippopotamus or walrus ivory, or, in the most expensive sets, of silver, mother of pearl or enamelled copper attached to an ivory base. In 1753 Lord Hervey, hitherto toothless, though not yet forty, appeared before the Duchess of Portland with the ‘finest set of Egyptian pebble teeth you ever saw’. In 1792 dentures began to be made of porcelain paste supplied by the Wedgwood pottery company; and by 1804 the manufacturer claimed that 12,000 of his porcelain dentures were in use. Even these, however, were not very convincing, the teeth not being separated from each other, merely shaded; while the gold coil springs which were used to hold them in were not at all easy to manage. Later false teeth were made of vulcanite and celluloid which, being inflammable, was liable to cause such accidents as that which overtook Sydney Dark, editor of the Church Times, one day in the Savile Club.
He had dozed off in one of the armchairs with a lighted cigarette [Sir Compton Mackenzie recalled]. Suddenly he leapt up with fumes coming from his mouth; that lighted cigarette had set fire to his false teeth. This is not just one more Savile story; I saw those fumes with my own eyes and I heard Sydney Dark’s shout of dismay as he leapt up and hauled the denture out of his mouth.15
Dentures sometimes rotted in the mouth, as did those of a lady who had had a set wired to her remaining sound teeth. ‘Having been called in to examine the mouth of a lady of quality who felt herself gradually declining in a slow fever,’ wrote the medical man whom she consulted, ‘I found that the artificial teeth of animal substance which she had were become black and exhaled a fetid and insupportable smell. I did not hesitate to declare that the fever was occasioned and continued by the absorption of the infected matter which came off the infected teeth.’16
Throughout the eighteenth and for much of the nineteenth century dentists remained a rather despised group on the fringes of the medical profession. Some earned large sums of money. The Prince Regent’s dentist, Charles Dumergue, was paid a regular fee of 100 guineas a year by that one royal patient alone;17 and by 1859, so an American dentist calculated on a visit to England, certain practitioners were earning £25,000 a year.18 Yet in 1817 a dentist was defined as ‘an artisan who confines himself to the extraction of teeth and to several operations required by their defects, redundancies, accidents or disorders … The head surgeons of London deem this branch of their art beneath notice and generally decline interfering in it.’ In 1838 it was complained that: ‘dentistry, as we find it called, is growing into a profession which numbers nearly as many members as surgery. Great rogues many of them are.’ And as late as 1849 a dentist was described simply and dismissively as one ‘who cleans and extracts teeth’.19
Soon afterwards, however, the reputation of dentists began to improve. In 1856 both the College of Dentists of England and the Odontological Society of London were founded; and in 1860, after an amending clause had been added to the Medical Act of 1858, the first examinations were held to determine the fitness of male candidates to practise dental surgery: women were not eligible for diplomas in England until 1912. In 1878 a rather inadequate Dentists Act was passed establishing a register of persons entitled to practise dentistry under the control of the General Medical Council and providing for improved dental education. And at last in 1921, since previous Acts had not prevented unqualified people from continuing to set up ‘dental surgeries’ and ‘dental consulting rooms’, a new Dentists Act was passed which, while allowing those already practising to continue doing so, made dental practice a profession which was in future open only to those who had passed the requisite examinations.
40 ‘Youth are Expeditiously Instructed’
She was very fond of me, and I was always good with her, though perhaps naughty enough at home [wrote William Hore, recalling the
dame school to which he was sent in the 1780s]. She lived in one room, a large underground kitchen; we went down a flight of steps to it. Her bed was always neatly turned down in one corner. There was a large kitchen grate and in cold weather there was always a good Are in it, by which she sat in a carved wooden armchair with a small round table before her on which lay a large Bible, open, on one side, and on the other a birch rod. Of the Bible she made great use, of the rod very little, but with fear we always looked upon it. There, on low benches, books in hand, sat her little scholars.1
This pleasant scene is offset by others less attractive. According to Thomas Holcroft, the novelist, who was the son of a shoemaker, children were sent to dame schools ‘rather to keep them out of the way than to learn anything’.2 And many children did not learn anything, even how to read: in the parish of Islington between 1767 and 1814 about 75 per cent of poor boys and 76 per cent of poor girls were illiterate.3 The Rev. George Crabbe, the Suffolk poet, describes two infants’ schools which were perhaps more representative than the one attended by William Hore:
Yet one there is, that small regard to Rule
Or Study pays, and still is deem’d 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 …
Poor Reuben Dixon has the noisiest school
Of ragged lads, who ever bow’d to Rule;
Low is his Price – the Men who heave our Coals
And clean our Causeways, send him Boys in Shoals.
These schools were certainly cheap. Few charged more than 3d a week per child and some no more than 1½d. Even so, many parents could not afford them. James Lackington, born in Somerset in 1746, wrote, ‘As I was the eldest and my father for the first few years a careful hardworking man, I fared something better than my brothers and sisters. I was put for two or three years to a day school kept by an old woman … But my career of learning was soon at an end, as my Mother became so poor that she could not afford the mighty sum of twopence per week for my schooling.’4 The standard of teaching was generally commensurate with these low prices, and was usually undertaken by untrained women.
It is commonly thought so tiresome an undertaking to teach children to Spell and Read English, that a peevish School-master is not judged to have Patience enough to do it [one commentator observed in 1710]. And therefore they are sent to a Mistress, supposing she may be more fit to deal with them in their tender Years; where partly thro’ the Ignorance of many such Teachers, and partly Neglect, the Children often spend whole Years to little Advantage.5
One of those who could testify to these wasted years was William Lovett, who was born in 1800 and later became a Chartist: he was sent ‘to all the dame schools of the town’ before he could master the alphabet, and at one of them spent much of the time incarcerated in the coal cellar for misbehaviour.6
Some male teachers were very young, others cruel. John Collier, better known as Tim Bobbin, the dialect poet and caricaturist, became an itinerant schoolmaster at the age of fourteen. And at one of the schools Francis Place attended, he was taught by boys little older than himself. His first school, to which he was sent at the age of seven in 1778, was ‘kept by a tall stout well-looking man named Jones, proverbially “savage Jones”. This name he got … in consequence of the frequent punishments he inflicted on the boys and the delight he seemed to take in punishing them. There were about 120 boys in this school.’ They sat at desks in two large schoolrooms under the eyes of the master and the usher who were so placed that they could see all the pupils who were called up to be tested in groups of six. ‘If any one failed he was obliged to go out and stand at a short distance from the master holding out first one hand and then the other to receive on each a stroke with a stout cane, the strokes were from two to twelve, in extreme cases fourteen.’ Place confessed that he learned very little.
The whole Concept of even attempting to teach the poor was often called into question. Hannah More, writing in 1795, considered that ‘to teach good principles to the lower classes is the most likely way to save the country. Now in order to do this we must teach them to read.’7 But other, more insistent voices, were raised against this proposition. ‘Does it necessarily follow that the lower classes will become more industrious, more virtuous, more happy, by learning how to read?’ asked one opponent of education for the poor. ‘Certainly not … What ploughman whorould read the renowned history of Tom Hickethrift, Jack the Giant-Killer, or the Seven Wise Men, would be content to whistle up one furrow and down another from dawn in the morning to the setting of the sun?’ A Member of Parliament, Davies Giddy, agreed with him: ‘Giving education to the labouring classes of the poor … would be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments. Instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them fractious and refractory.’ ‘It is safest for both the Government and religion of the country,’ the Bishop of London concurred in 1803, ‘to let the lower classes remain in that state of ignorance in which nature has originally placed them.’8
Nevertheless, the work of the charity schools continued and expanded, it being generally held that ‘Children are made tractable and submissive by being early accustomed to Awe and Punishment and Dutiful Subjection. From such timely Discipline the Publick may expect Honest and Industrious Servants.’ As Eliza Cook put it in her ‘Song for the Ragged Schools’,
Better build schoolrooms for ‘the boy’
Than cells and gibbets for ‘the man’.9
By 1787, so it was estimated, there were about 250,000 children at charity schools in the country, most of them the deserving children of soldiers, sailors, petty tradesmen, servants and mechanics rather than those of the very poor. Their education was largely paid for by private subscribers, most of them middle-class people living in the area where the school was established. At a charity school in the parish of St Margaret’s, Westminster, the six initial subscribers were, typically, a cheesemonger, a draper, a bookseller and three general dealers.10
In these schools great emphasis was laid upon religion and moral teaching. Girls at Sheffield in 1789 were taught to pray: ‘Make me dutiful and obedient to my benefactors and charitable to my enemies. Make me temperate and chaste, meek and patient, true in all my dealings and content and industrious in my station.’ And they were instructed:
Do no wrong.
It is a sin to steal a pin.
Swear not at all, nor make a Bawl.
Use no bad words.
Live in peace with all as much as you can.11
There was much reading of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and, as in the industrial schools which became favoured foundations at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were also long hours of vocational training and the teaching of craft skills. Industrial charity schools were usually established in areas where there was little employment for children, as, for instance, at Lewisham, Epping, Kendal, St Albans, Bristol and Norwich. Pupils were taught to spin wool and flax, to put heads on pins and given training in domestic service. They earned from is to 2s 6d. a week.12 Vocational training at ordinary charity schools included such specialized crafts as shoemaking which was taught at the Blue Cap School at Nantwich, Cheshire.13 Arithmetic was usually taught only to those who could read and write, and, as in the seventeenth century, rarely at all to girls, who were put to needlework, spinning and knitting instead. Singing was discouraged as unsuitable from the 1820s onwards; while the reading of popular ballads and chapbooks was frequently forbidden. At the Wesleyan charity school at Leytonstone, where the day began at four o’clock in the morning for the children who had to light the fires, and at five o’clock for the rest, there were no toys and no times set aside for play.14
The teachers, whose social status was low, h
ad often drifted into the profession from other employment in which they had failed or been dismissed, or had perhaps, like Parson Woodforde’s relative, taken it up when invalided out of the army. They were in general as ill paid as they had ever been. Some were paid for each child they taught, others a low salary. In the 1730s John Collier earned £10 a year, an income he supplemented in the evening by teaching adults and taking on work as a ‘hedge-lawyer’, writing wills and indentures and giving legal advice. In 1744 Silas Todd, who had been appointed to his post by John Wesley, was paid 10s a week for a nine-hour day; he was assisted by an usher and four monitors but had no holidays. At a charity school in Soho the masters did slightly better with a minimum of £30 a year, rising to £36 in 1790, though female teachers earned no more than £26.15
The food supplied to their pupils was generally unpalatable and sometimes inadequate. Even at Christ’s Hospital – which in the 1780s had about 700 pupils of whom nearly a third, so Coleridge thought, were the sons of clergymen – the diet was ‘very scanty’.
Every morning a bit of dry bread and some small beer [so Coleridge recalled]. Every evening a larger piece of bread and cheese or butter … For dinner – on Sunday boiled beef and broth; Monday, bread and butter and milk and water; on Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread and butter, and rice milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Saturday, bread and butter and pease-porritch. Our food was portioned and excepting on Wednesdays I never had a belly full. Our appetite was damped; never satisfied and we had no vegetables.16
For some poor children the only education to be had was at Sunday Schools. These had been founded by Robert Raikes, a businessman and journalist from Gloucester, who had been concerned by the numbers of ragamuffin children employed in the pin-making trade who ran wild on Sundays, ‘cursing and swearing in a manner so horrid as to convey to any serious mind an idea of hell’. He paid a Mrs King is 6d a day to teach the catechism and reading in her house. At first it was stipulated that the children, who were to be between six and fourteen years old, should be clean; but when his school was firmly established it was found that many of the children who came were too destitute for proper cleanliness; and so, he said, ‘I now reject none on that footing. All that I require are clean hands, clean face and their hair combed. If you have no clean shirt come in what you have on.’17
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