The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  A pupil named Bourne who was at the school in about 1800 was questioned about it in his old age. He replied:

  No writing was taught in the school in my time. We used to learn ‘Reading-made-easy’ Book, the Collects, Bible and Testament. That is those who could read … Mr Raikes used always to come to school on Sundays and inquire what the children had learnt and whether they had been ‘good boys’. If there had been extra bad boys then he would punish them himself … An old chair was laid on its two front legs, downwards so, and then the young ’un was put on so, kicking and swearing all the time … Then Mr Raikes would cane him. I knew a boy he could never draw a tear from – we used to say he couldn’t feel … Mr Raikes could do nothing with him and one day he caught him by the hand and pressed the tips of his fingers on the bars of the stove or fireplace.

  Q: Was he burnt?

  Bourne: Blistered a bit … What I think hurt [Mr Raikes] most was to hear boys cursing and swearing at each other in church. We were at church one morning and a boy named Philpotts (we called him Mugs) stuck a big shawlpin into a boy who was nodding. He jumped up into the air with pain and yelled and swore and flew at ‘Mugs’. The beadles came and turned them out. I saw Mr Raikes’s face and I have never forgotten his look.18

  After the establishment of the first Sunday School, others rapidly followed. In 1784 there were 1800 pupils at the Manchester interdenominational schools alone. By 1800 about 200,000 children were attending Sunday Schools; and by the 1820s nearly every working-class child had attended Sunday School at some time or another.19

  While the numbers and influences of Sunday Schools were growing, grammar schools were generally in decline. ‘Whoever will examine the state of the grammar schools in different parts of this Kingdom will see to what a lamentable condition most of them are reduced,’ Lord Chief Justice Kenyon declared in 1795. ‘Empty walls without scholars and everything neglected but the receipt of the salaries and emoluments.’20 A few grammar schools continued to thrive. Between 1740 and 1765 there were nearly 200 boarders at Manchester Grammar School – almost half of whom went on to university after a classical education there – and almost 500 day boys, mostly the sons of local tradesmen, who were given a good grounding in mathematics and science.21 Few grammar schools were in as parlous a condition as that at Shaftesbury, which was closed in 1780 for lack of pupils, or the one at Monk’s Kirby, Warwickshire, where the master claimed that he had ‘nothing to do’.22 Yet many found it difficult to attract pupils, particularly those that had had to increase their fees because inflation had so drastically reduced the value of their endowments. At Bath Grammar School in 1820, boarders were being charged as much as fifty-five guineas a year.23

  There were no local children at this school; and at others, too, local tradesmen were actively discouraged from taking up free places, for which the original statutes provided. Fee-paying boarders, taken in their place, allowed these schools to become indistinguishable from public schools.24

  Many parents were deterred from sending their sons to grammar schools by the continuing emphasis on the classics which in many schools were taught, in accordance with their statutes, to the exclusion of nearly all other subjects. A few grammar schools succeeded in changing their statutes by Act of Parliament, as did the school at Macclesfield which was consequently permitted to offer lessons ‘not only in grammar and classical learning, but also in writing, arithmetic, navigation, mathematics and the modern languages’. Others, while providing ‘a liberal education in Latin and Greek’, offered additional lessons for a fee. At Burnsall Grammar School, Wharfedale, for example, Latin was taught without charge, but 8d a week was required for lessons in writing and is for those in arithmetic. But there remained many schools that continued to offer nothing but the classics, and some were defiantly proud to do so. In the early nineteenth century the prospectus of St Paul’s School carried this warning: ‘At St Paul’s we teach nothing but Latin and Greek. If you want your son to learn anything else you must have him taught at home, and for this purpose we give him three half holidays a week.’25

  For a more general education parents turned to those private schools which offered suitable instruction for boys destined for the universities, the army or the navy, or for careers in business and the professions. The prospectus of the Islington Academy resembled many another:

  Youths are generally boarded, tenderly treated and expeditiously instructed in the languages, writing, arithmetic, merchants’ accounts and mathematics, with dancing, drawing, music, fencing and every other accomplishment required to form gentleman, scholar and the man of business upon reasonable terms.26

  All proper regard will be paid to the morals and Behaviour of the Pupils [promised the proprietors of Mr Pulman’s Academy at Leeds]. Such as are modest and diffident, will be treated with Tenderness … Those who, by an honest ambition, strive to excel will be regarded with peculiar Marks of Favour and Esteem; and such as are rebellious, obstinate or incorrigible, must be removed from the Academy.27

  At their academy for girls ‘over against the vicarage in Leeds’, Jane Stock and her daughter taught ‘all sorts of Needlework, and Patterns drawn on Cloth or Canvas after the newest Fashion, likewise Paistry, Huswifry, Pickling and Sweet meats’.28

  Most of these private academies were not expensive, but the advertisements for some hint at horrors later to be witnessed at such Yorkshire schools as Dotheboys Hall. For an inclusive fee of £12 a year for boys under fourteen, £14 for those already fourteen, £1414s for fifteen-year-olds and £5 15s plus a 10s 6d entrance fee for boys of sixteen and over, Ephraim Sanderson’s school at Aberford, ‘a very healthful Situation on the Great North Road betwixt Ferrybridge and Wetherby’ undertook in 1788 to look after the board, washing and tuition of any boy ‘all year round, without holidays if necessary‘.29

  If most private academies were careful to stress the tender treatment their charges might expect, no such promises were made by the public schools. The reputation of some public schools had, indeed, fallen so low by the late eighteenth century that many parents, who could well have afforded to do so, refused to send their children to them. In 1779 Oundle had only five pupils, Rugby in 1798 ‘scarcely a single boy’.30

  In his poem, Tirocinium, Cowper wrote:

  Would you your son should be a sot or dunce,

  Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once;

  That, in good time, the stripling’s finish’d taste

  For loose expense and fashionable waste,

  Should prove your ruin, and his own at last

  Train him in public with a mob of boys.

  In nearly every public school bullying and savage corporal punishment were rife. ‘Many a white and tender hand, which the fond mother had passionately kissed a thousand times, have I seen whipped until it was covered with blood,’ an Old Etonian recalled of the early eighteenth century; ‘perhaps for smiling, or for going a yard and a half out of the gate, or for writing an O for an A, or an A for an O.’31 In the 1790s parents of boys at Oundle wrote to complain of masters giving boys ‘violent Blows on the Loins with the fist doubled up’ and hitting them on the head, occasioning lumps ‘as large as a Walnutt’.

  My eldest son had cause to complain … severely of his master beating him and the rest of the children unmercifully and setting them unreasonable tasks [one letter of complaint runs], for which he desired that I would not insist upon his going there any more as he declared to me he would rather go to Dung Cart or hard work than go to Mr Evanson’s School [Oundle]. He likewise declared that his master did beat William Kettle in such manner that the child when he was called up by him wou’d fall a crying, that his master wou’d knock him down with his fist … I saw his back very green eight days after his 111 treatment.32

  My dear Mother [a boy at Westminster School wrote home in the early nineteenth century], if you don’t let me come home, I die – I am all over ink and my fine clothes have been Spoilt. I have been tost in a blanket, and seen a ghost.

&
nbsp; I remain, my dear, dear mother,

  Your dutiful and most unhappy son,

  Freddy.33

  Another Westminster boy recalled, ‘I have been woken many times by the hot points of cigars burning holes in my face.’34

  There were frequent revolts against such treatment. In 1793 at Winchester there was a ‘Great Rebellion’ in which boys fired pistols and threw stones from the tower; in 1797 at Rugby pupils blew up the headmaster’s door and had to be read the Riot Act; in 1818 there was another riot at Winchester, this time so serious that it had to be quelled by soldiers with bayonets. There were also disturbances at Harrow in 1808 when senior boys paraded about with banners declaring ‘Liberty and Rebellion’, but on this occasion the protest was not against the brutality of masters but against the curtailment of the elder boys’ rights to flog the juniors.35

  The public schoolboy’s curriculum was dominated by the classics to an even greater extent that that of the grammar schoolboy. ‘His sole and exclusive occupation is learning Latin and Greek,’ wrote Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review in 1810. ‘He has scarcely a notion that there is any other kind of excellence; and the great system of facts with which he is most perfectly acquainted are the intrigues of the heathen gods: with whom Pan slept – with whom Jupiter – whom Apollo ravished.’36

  The 1798 timetable of the sixth form at Rugby shows how emphatic this domination was. The Iliad, Virgil, Tully, ‘Latin Authors’ ‘Greek Poetry’, Latin verses, Greek grammar, Homer, Juvenal, Horace, Ovid, these are the subjects that regularly appear, week in, week out.37

  Yet, despite the violence and the narrowness of the studies – and despite the temporary decline of some of the notoriously ill run – most upper-class children in the eighteenth century were sent to a public school. Two-thirds of the sons of peers attended one or other of nine famous schools, Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, Shrewsbury, Rugby, Charterhouse, Merchant Taylors’ or St Paul’s. Half of these attended Eton or Westminster, and 72 per cent of ministers of state had attended either one or the other.38

  Not all boys at Eton, of whom there were 380 in 1788, were unhappy there. Humphrey Senhouse, who came from a Cumbrian family engaged in trade with the West Indies, wrote home letters of the utmost contentment:

  Notwithstanding the School Exercises of which there are a good many, I find time to go to the playing fields and get my shins broke at football which I think excellent sport, for we have the best balls and the best ground for playing I ever saw … I like my new room exceedingly [he continued when in his second year] and think I should prefer it to any room in the House for it is both a very pretty clean and warm room and has so fine a prospect out of the window … I have a full view of the River Thames and can see barges going up and down the river … I am at present very happy at Eton for as I know all the customs of the school now I am not at a loss about doing anything as I was at first.39

  Yet these sentiments were not so common or so sincere, perhaps, as those expressed by a contemporary of Senhouse who wrote from Eton in 1791, ‘My Dame is as Damned a fool as ever; the Bitches (for I can’t with propriety call them Maids) as impertinent as ever and your humble servant as disatisfied as ever with this cursed place.’40

  In 1837, taking note of the gambling, cockfighting and drinking in the town that went on at Eton – and echoing the belief of Henry Fielding, himself an Old Etonian, that public schools were ‘the nurseries of all vice and immorality’ – the Quarterly Journal of Education declared, ‘Before an Eton Boy is ready for University he may have acquired a confirmed taste for gluttony and drunkenness, an appetite for brutal sports and a passion for female society of the most degrading kind.’41

  41 Universities, Academies and the Grand Tour

  It was widely agreed in the second half of the eighteenth century that the universities, like grammar schools, had fallen into discredit. They had also become much more expensive, the fees rising far faster than the cost of living. In 1720 it had cost about £50 a year to maintain a commoner; thirty years later £90 would barely cover his expenses, and this figure was to rise to between £200 and £250 in the middle of the nineteenth century.1 In writing from Oxford to his father for more money in 1727, William Pitt, after listing the prices he had had to pay for various items, added, ‘I have too much reason to fear you may think some of these articles too extravagant, as they really are, but all I have to say for it is humbly to beg you would not attribute it to my extravagance but to ye custom of this place, where we pay for most things at too high rate.’2

  The heavy cost of the universities, combined with the decline in their reputation, led to a gradual decrease in the numbers of undergraduates. There were 460 freshmen a year in the 1660s but less than 250 a year by 1800.3 The decrease was particularly noticeable among the poorer undergraduates, since inflation had much reduced the value of the endowments available to them, while the decline of the grammar schools had made a satisfactory preliminary education more difficult to obtain. Whereas in 1711, 27 per cent of Oxford freshmen were of plebeian origin, the proportion fell to 17 per cent in 1760 and to a mere one per cent in 1810.4

  The curriculum was still, of course, predominantly classical, so that Mr Parish of Magdalene College, Cambridge, who in 1794 gave lectures in the botanical gardens on such subjects as smelting and dyeing, bridge construction and the making of gunpowder, was a Fellow worthy of special remark.5 Benjamin Marshall, an Oxford undergraduate of the early eighteenth century, gave his former headmaster at St Paul’s an account in Latin of his day which, while apparently more conscientiously spent than were most days by his contemporaries, gives a fair indication of the kind of studies which one of the rare strict tutors might have expected of them:

  Rise before dawn.

  6 a.m. Public Latin prayers.

  Breakfast

  A walk with my friends, half an hour.

  Study of the Minor Prophets.

  Study of the poem of Tograeus.

  9 a.m. Study of Philosophy.

  10 a.m. To my Tutor, Mr Pelling, who expounds some portion of Philosophy to me and my friends.

  11 a.m. Luncheon.

  With my friends to coffee-house, where we discuss public affairs.

  1 p.m. Study of the Koran.

  4 p.m. Study of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

  6 p.m. Dinner.

  Read Horace’s Odes or Martial’s epigrams, or mix with my friends in a sociable way.

  9 p.m.

  Public Latin prayers. In the morning we pray for success upon our doings, and in the evening we return thanks for such success as has been secured.6

  Most undergraduates seem to have spent their days far less industriously. Edward Gibbon, who entered Magdalen College, Oxford, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, was flattered to receive a velvet cap and silk gown which distinguished a gentleman commoner from a plebeian student and which enabled him to ‘command, among the tradesmen of Oxford, an indefinite and dangerous credit’. He was given a key to the ‘numerous and learned library’ and was shown into ‘three elegant and well furnished rooms in the new building’. But the next fourteen months – until he professed himself a Roman Catholic and had to leave the college – were ‘the most idle and unprofitable’ of his whole life. The Fellows were ‘decent, easy men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder; their days were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common room, till they retired, weary and well satisfied, to a long slumber’. Gibbon’s tutor virtually ignored him, never summoning him to attend ‘even the ceremony of a lecture’, and receiving him but once in his rooms. ‘The tutor and pupil lived in the same college as strangers to each other.’7

  Evidently Gibbon’s idleness was far from exceptional. ‘They are perfectly their own masters,’ commented the Gentleman’s Magazine on rich undergraduates in 1798, ‘and they take the lead in every disgraceful frolic of juvenile debauchery. They are curiously tricked out in cloth of gold, of silver and of purple, and feas
t most sumptuously throughout the year.’8

  Looking back on his undergraduate days at Oxford in 1763–5, the Earl of Malmesbury considered that the two years he was up at Merton were ‘the most unprofitably spent of his life. The discipline of the University happened at this particular moment to be so lax that a Gentleman Commoner was under no restraint and never called upon to attend either lectures, or chapel or hall.’9

  The one rule which appears to have been strictly enforced was that against mixing with ordinary townspeople; and an undergraduate friend of Parson Woodforde was actually sent down for ‘carousing with some low-life People’, whereas a clergyman who complained of being attacked by a mob of drunken undergraduates shouting Jacobite slogans and other ‘Treasonable and Seditious Expressions’, was complacently informed by the Vice-Chancellor that ‘nothing could prevent young fellows getting in liquor’.10

  The rules of Merton College in 1747 enjoined tutors to ensure that ‘no pupil … do contract any Intimacies with Tradesmen or their Families; nor accept of invitations to their Houses, nor introduce them to Entertainments at his chamber’.11

  Otherwise, life was most comfortable and little regulated. At Hertford College, Oxford, in 1747 each undergraduate had three rooms and two servants; and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1748 Humphrey Senhouse was ‘very well pleas’d with [his] situation in every particular’. Senhouse’s meals were ‘very good and always well done’. Those of the Fellows were even better.12 Dining with the Warden of New College in 1774, James Woodforde had ‘a most elegant dinner indeed’: