Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

Nor is it always necessary to speak in the masculine gender. University settlements are no more limited to a single sex than the tripos work of the Cambridge Senate House, or of the Extension lecture rooms, which enjoy the patronage of the Oxford schools. Nor is it the Universities only that are represented by these feminine settlements. The Cheltenham Ladies’ College, one of the earliest, if not the first, of that kind of public schools for English girls, has already made a sensible difference in hundreds of lives in the extreme East of the town. Among the special works of which the Cheltonians have set an example is that of enabling poor mothers to procure for their children at seasons of need not merely the conventional ‘day in the country,’ but a sojourn of weeks, or even months, in a healthy cottage home on the seashore of Sussex or on the fragrant uplands of Kent. The machinery for accomplishing this has now been brought to a very high point of efficiency and indeed perfection. The Cheltenham ladies and their colleagues, associated under the respective matrons of the institutions, have a long list of simple honest folk within a few hours’ journey of London who can be trusted to look after their little charges during their stay beneath their roof, and to send back to their homes the small boys and girls visibly better than when the children were first received by their hosts. Sometimes the Guilds of the different sexes may combine their efforts for hospitalities and entertainments, a magic lantern and lecture, it may be, or during the winter season a Christmas tree followed by supper and a dance, or to speak more correctly a general, though not uncontrolled, romp.

Most, if not all, of these East End clubs, which the University settlers aim at teaching their members to run for themselves, rather than indefinitely to leave their management to outside friends, are federated to a central association, that the late Lord Lyttelton took a prominent part in organizing. This was the body which, as has been already said, decided that stronger drinks than water should not absolutely be forbidden; but that central supervision should be exercised closely over all the establishments, and that prompt action should be taken when any breach of order, corporate or individual, was reported. The average standard of order maintained has improved, and is still improving. Generally and individually the club members have realized that their material interest lies in checking the first beginnings of misconduct, and in dealing with the offenders not only as guilty individually of a breach of order, but as violating the first principles of collective fellowship. Such a conviction indicates the progress made towards the creation of a healthy opinion upon social matters with those who, a few years ago, would have been pronounced by experts to be invulnerably proof against any sentiment of the sort. East End boys are no doubt mischievous, and even destructive creatures. So, for that matter, are all boys. If their brethren of the upper class do not break out in the same way as the urchin East Enders, that is because the march of refinement through the West End has trodden out the old race of small boys and girls, and has replaced them by little men and women whose only childhood will be reached in their dotage. The very interesting experiences recorded in the volume entitled: The Universities and the Social Problem³² do indeed include some rather alarming freaks of the East End waggishness. But to the small boy in rags the process of whose reclamation from Bethnal Green barbarism to Christian civilization had only begun a few weeks since, the trick of pouring a paraffin can over a sleeping foe, and then applying a match, did not seem more of an atrocity than to a West End boy of the same age might have appeared the joke, borrowed from the pantomime stage, of placing the baby on the floor by the door for the entering nurse to tumble over, or of putting a red hot poker too close to be pleasant or even safe to the nose of an unpopular housemaid. Men like Dr Barnardo or General Booth, who both know something of Whitechapel waifs and strays, have not thought that poor children in the East End inherit an exceptional amount of original sin. Nor have they, nor others, discovered that ragged boys, nurtured on fried fish and unspeakable pudding are incapable of being disciplined into habits of obedience, truthfulness, and humanity, even though their ideas of permissible humour be not bounded by the conventional limits of gentleness and good taste. The administrators of the People’s Palace, for some time after the fancy of Sir Walter Besant was translated into fact, were not always sanguine as to the feasibility of civilizing their young patrons, even through the agency of pictures or swimming baths, thick slices of bread and butter, buns, and fried haddock purchasable not much above, if not something below, cost price. To-day, though the social deportment in the pleasure grounds of Bethnal Green may lack the superficial polish, and the innate breeding, of the crowds at the Westminster Aquarium or the South Kensington Museum, a considerable advance is recorded on the part of the Harrys and the Harriets of Poplar and Whitechapel towards the carriage and conduct of the cynosures of less outlandish suburbs on Bank Holiday. There is no body of men who know unfashionable London better, or who deserve more honour for the service which they render to it than the members of the London City Mission. The work of these missioners, though undenominational, is religious rather than æsthetic. But they are shrewd observers of the social aspects of the neighbourhoods they visit. Their opinion of the practical results of the agencies that have here been described may be summed up in the words of a missioner to the present writer: ‘It marks an epoch in East End civilization of which ten years ago Christian charity would itself have despaired.’

The functions exercised by the controlling authority of the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union are educational as well as disciplinary. There is no reason now why any one of the affiliated societies, however impecunious it may be or however impoverished the district wherein it may exist, should be without as good a library as one of Mr Mudie’s subscribers, or should not know almost as much about the history and antiquities of the British capital as the late Dean Stanley himself. The controllers of the union often make liberal advances in money for the purchase of books by the local clubs. Should these funds not be forthcoming, book boxes with wisely chosen contents circulate among the members of a Home Readers’ Union. The volumes thus distributed are real literature. The subjects to which they relate are methodically mastered by the readers who themselves have selected them, and have not acted on the initiative of the more highly educated residents, Peripatetic encyclopædias like Mr Augustus Hare or Mr Percy Fitz-Gerald are ever ready to ‘take walks’ with them. Omniscient divines, such as Dean Bradley or Dean Farrar personally conduct them through their cathedrals into the heart of English history. Nor are the literary studies chosen merely because they are likely to help the student in his everyday work, and therefore improve his earnings. The biographies of the statesmen and soldiers of old Greece, the dramatic vicissitudes of the Republics of mediæval Italy, even the philosophy as well as the language of Dante or of Macchiavelli are taken up by men after a day’s manual work with an energy that would shame an undergraduate returning from a wine party to read for his Schools. This, too, seems to be the experience of American settlements as well, of Hull House, Chicago, or of Andover House, Boston. In their capacity of schools of citizenship, as well as of education, the American settlements have felt the immediate benefit of the Oxford influence and example, incarnated not only in Arnold Toynbee, but in the late T. H. Green, professor of mental and moral philosophy, whose pupil Toynbee was; while Green in his turn had been the disciple of Benjamin Jowett. Good citizenship was the ideal ever present to the late Master of Balliol in his dealings with his pupils, just as it had been present centuries earlier to Socrates in his discourses to Plato, or in his conversations with Alcibiades. Green probably made the most valuable of recent contributions to the speculative thought and science of his University, of his country, or of his generation. He was, also, a prominent and active member of the Oxford Town Council, and of other local bodies. By their lessons in the theory and practice of citizenship, taught more publicly than it fell to the lot of their master to teach, the Oxford settlers at the East End have improved upon Green’s example, with much of his zeal, and not a little of his success. More than twenty years ago the East End neighbourhoods now mentioned were first visited by the present writer, to inform himself for those portions of an earlier work, relating to that part of unfashionable London.³³ Thanks mainly to the influence and teaching of the Rev. S. A., since Canon, Barnett, great improvements in the domestic economy and material fittings of the humblest households had begun, even then to be visible. The later experiences and their social results, which have now been described, have made it possible for the writer to contrast the East End of the later eighties with that of the later nineties. The scale and the precise modes of manifestation are of course widely different, but if due allowance be made for the social disparity of Mayfair and Mile End, it is no exaggeration to say that the increased attention to the prettinesses of life shown in the boudoirs and drawing rooms of fashionable London is reflected in the parlours of those purlieus now spoken of. These though their civilization be still incomplete, have to a great extent under the agencies that have here been examined, ceased to be manifestly poverty-stricken or repulsively hideous. The discipline of character that the settlements provide for the settlers is at least as salutary as the consequences they involve for the district, whether it be in the East End, in Camberwell, or in Notting Hill, that the settlement is made. The social education for the West End club-man of his joint stock palace in Pall Mall is trivial in comparison with the training that will be administered to him by a few visits to the East End club, of which he may be made free, or of which perhaps he may himself have been a founder. The assistance of those in such a position as the University settlers is appreciated cordially by the working club-men. ‘We always need, to begin with, the help of some of you gentlemen of the Oxford Settlement. Afterwards if you look in upon us from time to time, we can keep things going pretty well for ourselves.’ Such is the common remark of the settler’s friends. Of its practical truth there seems little doubt. The University settler and his friends in his own station are not, however, on this account to suppose that within these clubs their society is courted as a favour or regarded as a compliment. On the contrary, the atmosphere and sentiment of the place are uncompromisingly democratic. If the West Ender, by his talk or manner contributes anything of pleasure or profit to the social pool, then he is welcomed just as he would be on the same terms in the coteries of Pall Mall, or at the dining tables of Hyde Park. If, on the other hand, there be, perhaps unconsciously to himself a suspicion of condescension in his bearing, or a too visible effort after edification in his talk, then as peremptorily as he could be among his own equals at the West End, he will be voted a bore, and shunned as a prig at the East End. The roughest specimens of Whitechapel or Ratcliffe require, not less, but rather more tact for their management, than other people need. If that be forthcoming, the youths, whose element is destruction, whose ambition is to be a professional pugilist or a champion strong man, but who seldom desert one to whom their loyalty has been given, and who are the raw material with which British officers win victories on the field against the heaviest odds, are perfectly manageable. The most aggressively republican of Arabs becomes the most gentle and gracious of fellow citizens. But if either of them detect signs of patronage among their politer visitors, their backs are at once up; metaphorically their bristles stand on end like hairs upon the fretful porcupine. Familiarity they neither expect nor wish. They would even resent it. Their view of the courtesies and proprieties of friendly intercourse do not in effect differ from those held by their superiors. They are abundantly content if these ideas are practically recognized. It is with those who are removed by a single degree in the social scale above these rough diamonds, but who consider themselves altogether their superiors, that the difficulty begins. No class of servants are so troublesome as the footman tribe. No section of the body politic proves more vexatious than the intermediate order between the lower and the very lowest division of the middle class. The genuine working man in the working man’s club causes none of those embarrassments which one encounters upon a level rather higher than that of the outcasts of Camberwell or Notting Hill, the waifs and strays of Whitechapel or Shoreditch. If the problem of association is practically to be solved to the satisfaction of all those concerned, there is one golden rule always to be followed. Postulating a common amount of tact and sense on the part of the University settler, or one who essays that position, let him begin by being natural, let him shun as the presage of failure any conscious effort to place his lowlier fellow creature at his ease. Above all, let him never offer his hand to shake. He himself may think the manual overture will gratify the person to whom it is made by showing that the maker ‘has no false pride.’ A greater mistake there could not be, as a well-born academic socialist found out when, to demonstrate his faith in the equality of all men, he shook hands with his brother’s footman on receiving his shaving water. These strained amenities are an effort to him who volunteers them, and an infliction to him who receives them, a failure and a mistake, in fact, all round. The secret of Edward Denison’s and of Arnold Toynbee’s influence for good with their inferiors was that they not only knew these truths, but always acted on them. Hence, by their own work, and by the generation of workers whom they raised up to follow them and at whose methods we have now glanced, so much was done to span the gulf separating ‘the two nations’ of the English people.

CHAPTER XI
FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS

State irresponsibility for national education on, and after, the Queen’s accession. Summary of early movements towards educating the people. Lancaster and Bell as pioneers of educational systems. Samuel Whitbread’s faint foreshadowing of W. E. Forster’s Education Act. Brougham as educational pioneer. First State grant to Church and Nonconformist schools. Increased in 1839. Education Department completed on the principle of State aid to all schools, Protestant or Roman, satisfying State examiners. Mr Lowe at the Education Office and the grant stationary. National education the law of the land by the Forster Act of 1870. Free education under Lord Salisbury 1891. Elementary education now organized. External change in the English landscape. Secondary education waits. Details of progress recently made towards this.

Those processes of organization which seem in all departments of national activity the special features of English life during the last half of this century have nowhere been more visible than in the educational arrangements for the long neglected mass of the English people. Slowly, with occasional relapses, yet upon the whole with sure and steady progressiveness, there is being prepared, there now seems within measurable distance of completion, the ladder that will enable any English boy and many English girls to accomplish the ascent from the gutter to the highest teaching of the University, and so to gain a position from which merit and industry, favoured by fortune, will command the highest career open to either sex. All this has been accomplished within little more than half a century. Till 1833, the educational responsibilities of the State practically were ignored. In that year there was made for teaching purposes a grant of £20,000. The sum with annual increments was thenceforth dispensed annually by the Treasury to the National Society in Broad Sanctuary, as representing the Church of England, and for the Nonconformists to the British and Foreign School Society. Till a twelvemonth after the passing of the first Reform Act, the most active of organizations for teaching the people had been the Church of England and the great Dissenting bodies as in the case of the School Society just named. The Roman Church on both sides of St. George’s Channel never neglected its educational duties. The Sunday School system, to which, on the eve of the Queen’s accession, thousands of working men and women owed practically all the teaching they had received, were started towards the close of the eighteenth century by a Gloucester printer, Robert Raikes. In the last year of William IV. there had died a Nonconformist, a member of the Society of Friends, Joseph Lancaster. To him and to the English clergyman associated with him, Andrew Bell, founder also of the Bell Classical Scholarship at Cambridge, were due the first beginnings of a scheme of instruction for the whole English people.

Two or three decades earlier than the grant of 1833, Parliament fitfully recognized its educational responsibilities. In 1807 Samuel Whitbread, the son-in-law of Earl Grey, tentatively anticipated the spirit of Mr W. E. Forster’s reforms, three score and three years afterwards. By his proposal of parochial schools throughout the Kingdom, Whitbread ranks as the earliest education reformer of the nineteenth century. Within a decade, in the year 1816, Brougham took up the question, obtained a committee to enquire into the educational resources of London, and in 1820 himself brought forward an early Education scheme of the nineteenth century. The project perished amid the denominational tempest of religious rivalry which it evoked. Nothing after this was done till the date at which we have already arrived, 1833. Then, in faint forecast of the £7,000,000 now spent by the State on the teaching of its youthful subjects, a grant for that purpose of, £20,000 was for the first time made, distributed as we have seen between the Protestant Churches of the country. After an interval of six years, in 1839, Lord Melbourne’s Administration excited much obloquy, and raised the ‘No Popery’ cry against them, by allowing a share in a grant, now increased to £30,000, to Roman Catholic schools. The House of Lords, in an address to the Queen, condemned this new policy of religious emancipation. The vote was only carried in the Commons by a majority of two (the figures being 275 for, 273 against). Together with certain other changes that endure to this day, it became law. Hitherto, the State grant had been administered by the Treasury. Now for the first time an Education Department was organized under the Lord President of the Council, and four other members of the body. The Vice-President was appointed in 1856. During Lord Palmerston’s long term of office, in 1857, the Education grant rose to £451,000. It became more expressly understood that henceforth the specific duties of Education Minister were vested in the Vice-President.³⁴ With the steady increase of the annual grant, its province of usefulness was extended also. Subject always to the principle of State inspection, where State aid was received, the grant was no longer limited to assist the erection of new schools. Even before 1857 it had been allotted in due proportion to help schools already in existence. Portions of it were also received by training colleges for teachers. The quality of the instruction supplied in the schools had not improved in proportion to the liberality shown by the State. In 1859-60, the grant was more than a million. A Commission reported most unfavourably as to the efficiency of the schools. Hence in 1862, the then Vice-President of the Council, Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, enforced the Education reforms which he had already drafted, and initiated the policy of payment by results; in other words, the regulation of the amount of the grant in schools by the success of the scholars in the yearly examination. The teachers grumbled, but the taxpayers were relieved. The rate of increase in the grant ceased automatically. In 1870 the Education Vote amounted to one and a quarter millions instead of, as, but for Mr Lowe’s drastic, if indirect, retrenchment, it would have done, to something like thrice that sum.

No fundamental change took place till the Education Act of 1870, always associated as that will be with the name of W. E. Forster. Dealt with as to its provisions, its working and its results, in elaborate detail in the author’s preceding work, England, the Measure now rather more than a quarter of a century old will here be summarized sufficiently by reminding the reader that this legislation empowered the election of School Boards throughout the Kingdom, but maintained the system of voluntary subscriptions, and only compelled the institution of School Boards where voluntary effort had failed, and in the Time Table Conscience Clause provided a security for individual liberty. Mr Mundella’s Act of 1880 made education absolutely compulsory throughout England and Wales, whereas before then the power of compulsion was left to the local authorities. In all State-aided schools, religion was to be taught either at the beginning or end of school hours, so that, without disturbance to the general curriculum individual children could be withdrawn from the sacred lesson at their parents’ will, without incurring any disability on that account. These provisions met with the usual fate of legislative compromises. They deeply offended many sections. They entirely pleased none. The battle between religious and irreligious training, between what have been called the National and the Denominational systems was not decided in 1870. It has been fought over again more than once since then. It remains unsettled to this day.

During the whole of that decade, the Education Acts were supplemented with detailed legislation of a consolidating or modifying kind. No organic change took place till in 1891, the Government of Lord Salisbury adopted the first of the three Fs, long since propounded by Mr Chamberlain, and by abolishing the School pence which scarcely repaid the trouble of their collection, made elementary education as free to all children in the land, as by the law of 1870 it had practically become compulsory. The proposal to free the schools was not universally popular with the party to whose lot it fell to execute that policy. So, notwithstanding its exclusive traditions, that party had, under Mr Disraeli a quarter of a century earlier by its Household Suffrage Bill, recognized and established the English democracy. The plea on which those who had begun by resisting free schools finally accepted them was the expediency of accepting the inevitable first, and secondly the practical wisdom of obtaining credit for Conservatism by doing well and wisely that which at some future time the opposite party would have ingratiated themselves with the masses by doing badly. The results of free education were speedily visible in the increase of the children educated throughout the land. The increase of children in schools during the five years preceding the Free Education Act of 1891 had been 269,903. During the quinquennial period after the Act the increase was 421,860, or, in round numbers, just double. The first rung in the educational ladder for the benefit of all classes of the Kingdom had been fixed firmly by the Act of 1870. It was not, nor was ever, regarded by its authors as a complete Measure. It provided no regular system of higher grade schools intermediary between the most elementary teaching, and the more liberal culture of the grammar schools. The only supplement that it received from the Government under which it had become law was the Endowed Schools Act of 1874 for re-arranging the funds and remodelling the curricula in secondary endowed schools throughout the country. Private effort and local enterprise usefully came in where Mr Foster’s Education Act had stopped short. In various parts of England, and especially in the great northern counties of Lancashire, Durham and York, School Boards, fortunate enough to possess controlling spirits of exceptional enlightenment, exercised their legal power to establish schools of a higher kind specially for the teaching of science or art, and generally for the tincture of the youthful mind with a more generous training. Such schools received additional grants from the Science and Art Department at South Kensington.

In this way the 1870 Act at once partially enabled the child of the poorest parents to mount through the elementary schools, to the secondary schools of the Kingdom and thence to those seats of learning at which the picked youth of the country enjoy the choicest opportunities of mental culture, or are qualified for the highest posts in after life to which English ambition can aspire. The problem now to be solved, which is in actual process of solution and of which a few years more may probably dispose, is the completion of the national ladder of learning by a more thorough organization of the agencies for advanced knowledge throughout the country, and for the passage of the pupil from schools of the lowest, to schools of the higher grade. Just as, during recent years of the present reign, successive Reform Bills have increasingly nationalized the legislative Chambers at Westminster; so the tendency and the result of the transformations undergone by the great public schools and by the Universities, that they feed, is to draw more closely together the bonds uniting these institutions with the nation as a whole, to widen their curriculum, to infuse a popular element into their governing bodies, and to make them not merely the instructors, but the representatives of the intellectual interest of the land. By remodelling the governing bodies of Eton, Winchester and Harrow, the Public Schools Act of 1868 appreciably quickened and deepened the sense of public responsibility inherent in these corporations. Nearly thirty years’ experience of the Endowed Schools Act justifies the statement that the work accomplished for the grammar schools of the country is analogous to the results which the earlier legislation has yielded in the case of the more famous seats of youthful study.³⁵ A wholesome spirit of competition now animates the governors of these old if often still obscure endowments,³⁶ and daily causes fresh usefulness to be extracted from money resources, long suffered to remain idle. Later legislation, whose general aspects have already received attention in these pages, has conspired to deepen the sense of obligation, and to stimulate to efforts, most salutary for the taught, alike the governors of and the teachers in the schools.

Shortly after the Local Government Act of 1888 was passed, important functions, educational and financial, were given to the new County Councils. The grammar schools were quick to perceive a new opportunity. In 1889, thirteen representatives of the Councils, in some cases at the instance of their older colleagues, received seats on the governing bodies of the Secondary Schools. The corporations thus reformed have already begun vigorously to deal with an abuse inveterate in their smaller schools. Where the value of the endowment, from charges on the property of which it consists or from a fall in the value of land, has fluctuated the governors have been in the habit of farming out the school to the headmaster. They have, that is, assigned to him the income of the trust, and such fees as he can charge. In return, the pedagogue takes upon himself the charges of working the school, and of the teaching of a fixed number of free boys. The tendency of this arrangement is, of course, to repeat in the present day the experiences of Do-the-boys Hall under Mr Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. The headmaster has upon him the burden not only of his educational work, but of the solvency of his daily business. His own stipend is too small to admit of his paying competent assistants. He becomes a pensioner on the caprice of well-to-do parents, and the instrument of their not generally very enterprising will, or of their too enlightened pleasure. The only chance for the small secondary schools thus circumstanced is their rescue by some of the more public-spirited and opulent of the governors. But this relief is forthcoming so rarely that the Commissioners generally recommend the closing of all schools existing under these conditions and the application of their endowments to purposes less obviously foredoomed to failure. Other instances of the waste of existing resources for secondary education are even more frequent and not less serious. Grammar schools of competent calibre are often geographically crowded so close together as to obstruct and paralyse their mutual efforts. Thus in South Devon there is at Chudleigh a grammar school of considerable repute. Within a radius of sixteen miles, e. g. at Ashburton, Totnes, and Bovey Tracey, there are similar schools capable of good work, but lacking a population of parents and children to fill their empty benches. A like experience has often occurred in the case of establishments which, not being endowed grammar schools have not come under the notice of the Commissioners. Bath, for instance, has long possessed more educational opportunities than most other cities in the West of England. The oldest of her proprietary colleges, that in the district known as ‘Grosvenor,’ to some extent became merged in the less ancient Sydney College. That in due time produced a successful offshoot, the Somerset College. These two latter institutions during some time were healthily stimulated by mutual competition. At last the rivalry became profitable only to the prestige and numbers of the secondary schools that, managed on the same principles, had come into existence first at Cheltenham, then afterwards on the Clifton downs, near Bristol. In 1885,³⁷ the Somerset and Sydney Colleges were amalgamated under a single headmastership by the title of the Bath College. This to-day is doing an excellent work. But it is the North and East of England where by the needless reduplication or ill-advised contiguity of schools of the same grade the most flagrant breaches are committed against the first laws of educational economy. Thus, in the West Riding, the grammar school of Ossett has a fair endowment but practically no scholars. Again, Walsingham in Norfolk, with less than 1,000 inhabitants, possesses a substantially endowed school, the boys attending which had decreased from 32 in 1884 to 11 in 1894. Not far off at Ipswich, Norwich, and Bury St Edmunds, are establishments of historic fame, and of present competence. As an alternative to the continued waste of such opportunities, and to promote the local completion of the educational ladder indicated in the beginning of this chapter, the Commissioners suggest that the Walsingham school should be transferred bodily to Fakenham, a prosperous and not distant town, or that the Walsingham funds should be converted into scholarships and exhibitions to be held at other places of education within the County. There are other small grammar schools which, while just paying their way, have evidently no considerable career before them. Here the spirit of commercial impatience is apt to suggest the conversion of these places of teaching into elementary schools of the better sort. But the places now spoken of often have honourable traditions, and resemble families that, through no fault of their members, have, by misfortune, come down in the world. Local patriotism dwells fondly on the creditable past of such institutions, and would be wounded by their irrecoverable degradation. Surely, therefore, these schools might have the chance of retrieving their position. That, in effect, is what the Commissioners say. Assign to the decayed grammar schools their exact place in a reorganized system of secondary education. On condition of their adapting themselves to the place thus appointed to them, assist them out of the public funds to regain full effectiveness, and, together with that, to renew their past prosperity.