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

That is only to say that England is not Paradise. Meanwhile, socially as well as educationally, the progress made is so great that two decades since the most sanguine prophets would have pronounced it to be impossible. The Staffordshire miner, the roughest perhaps of his class, would no longer be represented, even by Punch, as proposing to ‘heave half a brick’ at a new comer for the offence of having a strange face. As for setting the bull-pup at the parson’s little boy, the suggestion is less likely to come, if at all, from the collier than from the mischievous undergraduate, the son of the collier’s employer who is home for his College vacation, and indulges a pretty canine fancy. The eighth Duke of Devonshire is not a social leveller. But on a public occasion he had the frankness to define the difference between the Sunday crowds in Hyde Park round the Reformers’ Tree, and the week day crowds in the Ladies’ Mile as being that the former were not nearly as well dressed as the latter. That implied compliment to the manners of a metropolitan mob at once showed the discernment of him from whose lips it fell, and emphasizes the truth of the views expressed in the present context. Even the carnival of Lord Mayor’s Day has felt the touch of those humanities that are said in the Latin grammar example to soften manners and not permit them to be brutal. The London crowd which, as Mr Disraeli knew, was the most emotional in the world, is to-day the best conducted, and incomparably the least drunken. As for its occasional rowdiness: what are these little outbursts in comparison with the horseplay of the prosperous gentlemen in glossy, silk hats, with high white collars, and deep wristbands, who, having placed a new rose in their button hole, drive high-stepping cobs to their suburban railway station every morning and who, if a stranger strays into their Stock Exchange deal with that unfortunate person as an Epsom mob treats a welsher. Continuation schools, lectures, universally accessible for adults who wish to carry on their education beyond the limit of their school days, the discipline of collective sight-seeing in museums and galleries; the habits formed at free libraries; these are the agencies that share with the teaching which the State provides the distinction of rearing a new generation, not merely veneered by a superficial decorum, but wholesomely controlled by a public opinion of its own quite as real as that which dominates Belgravia or Pall Mall.

Before considering the provisions necessary to complete the educational ladder, it will be well from specific instances to see what the facilities already established have done towards promoting the ascent from the Board School to the University. The following instances now published for the first time, are supplied by the courtesy of the Clerk of the London School Board. In 1879 a boy whose first learning was gained at a primary London Board School, obtained on entering a secondary school the Carpenters’ Foundation Scholarship, together with the Conquest gold medal. Shortly afterwards he became captain of the City of London School. Proceeding thence to Cambridge, he won a Foundation Scholarship at Trinity; eventually was placed in the first class of the Classical Tripos, became next a Fellow of Trinity; and subsequently held a high position in the Board of Trade. Another lad of equally humble birth in 1880 got a mathematical scholarship at Queen’s College, Cambridge, was among the Senior Optimes in the Tripos and in 1886 was appointed a mathematical master at one of the great public schools. In 1881, another Board School boy, having received the Greek and Latin certificate from the Universities Examining Board won a classical scholarship at St John’s, Oxford, and afterwards a First Class in Classical Moderations. A little later he was placed fourth in the First Class of Civil Service candidates. He has since developed into a useful official of the Local Government Board. Another boy of like antecedents won a scholarship at St John’s College, Cambridge; subsequently came out first class in one division, second class in another division, of the Theological Tripos; carried off the Jeremie Septuagint prize, open to the whole University, and afterwards became a successful parish clergyman. Other distinctions won by candidates of the same category are a scholarship at the City of London School; in 1883 a first place in the competition for vacancies in the India Office; in another case, and with the other sex, in 1885, the fifth place in the London Matriculation test, the Gilchrist and Reid scholarships, and later First Class Academic Honours for English. This instance is the more memorable because it is the earliest distinction of the sort won by a Board School girl. Since then the same young woman has become an assistant teacher at the Ladies’ College in Jersey. This example has often been repeated since. Three or four of the prize winners at Girton College during the later eighties were London Board School girls. The well-known senior curate of St Saviour’s, Everton, Liverpool, a High Honours Cambridge graduate, had been a Board School boy. His colleague had been enabled by a Fishmongers’ scholarship to enter at Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge. In the summer of 1880, F. J. Wild was the first London Board School boy who went to Balliol. Nine years afterwards, this lad entered the Indian Civil Service, and became Assistant Magistrate and Deputy Collector in the North-West Provinces. ‘Bachelor of Science, Bedford College, first division, 1891;’ ‘Recommended by Wesleyan Conference for training in their theological institutes and for the Home ministry;’ ‘Teacher at Diocesan Training College;’ these are comparatively common entries in the catalogue of Board School honours for this decade. In or since 1893, there have been some half dozen cases of Board School boys taking College and University Honours at Oxford as well as good places in the Indian Civil Service competition. The experience of the London Board Schools is not unlike that of similar institutions in the provinces. A decennial calendar after the Oxford precedent of distinctions academic or professional won by Board School pupils is a volume which it would really be worth while to prepare, and materials for which are accumulating on all sides. Pending the completion of the ladder for ascent in the normal way from the Board School to the University, private encouragement supplies many of the missing rungs. Thus, the vicar of a Herefordshire village noticed the quickness of his gardener’s son; helped him to enter the Hereford County School. From this the lad got a scholarship to Malvern College. Afterwards, one of the first Board School boys who won that honour, he carried off the entrance blue ribbon of a Balliol scholarship. In due course the gardener’s boy took a first class in Classical Moderations, and a first class also in Classical Greats.

Typical instances have now been cited sufficient in number and variety to show that, as seems to be the general opinion of the last Education Commission, notwithstanding incompletenesses and imperfections here and there, enough has already been done to enable every clever boy in whatever station he is born by his own industry and volition to secure the same opportunities of cultivating his gifts as the nobleman’s son who wins the Newcastle medal at Eton. The personal effort and initiative of the late Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, did more perhaps than has been done by any other individual to promote this work. Under him the College of Wycliffe not only maintained the prestige which it had acquired in the days of Dr Jenkyns, and which was greatly increased by the successor of Jenkyns, Robert Scott, but became at once the patron and the pattern of minor places of education throughout the country. Provided they showed ability and industry, the day labourer’s and the artizan’s son were welcomed from the provincial grammar school as warmly at Balliol as the Sixth Form boy from Harrow or Eton. The connection between secondary schools of all grades in the provinces and the University on the Isis had already been promoted by the agency of local examinations; it was rendered more intimate by the Socratic interest which Jowett took in the intellectual welfare of the rawest lad from the country if only he showed the slightest sign of mental promise. Jowett’s stimulating sense of citizenship was felt during his life in the remotest corners of the country. Its animating influences have survived his death; they still operate as an inspiring force wherever the domains of municipal and educational life converge. This good man and patriotic citizen did not live to witness the active assumption of educational responsibilities by the County and Borough Councils from which, not vainly, he hoped great things. An educational system in thorough touch with Oxford and Cambridge on the one hand and on the other hand with primary village schools; this was the ideal that Jowett, Lake and Stanley advocated to the earlier School Enquiry Commissions. Jowett lived long enough to see in the case of several great provincial grammar schools, notably that of Bradford, his ambition fulfilled.

In many, if not in most districts, the new provincial Councils have now added as many rungs to the educational ladder as could fairly be expected. The wants which still await fulfilment are definite. They ought not to prove very difficult to supply. Local endowments supplemented by a moderate amount of State help, will, if wisely directed, provide the larger facilities still needed for the promotion of higher grade elementary school pupils to grammar schools. In order that there may be no further waste either of the money or of the machinery for national education, a drastic scheme of reorganization seems to be a cardinal necessity. Secondary education is a phrase too mechanically interpreted as a synonym for technical or scientific education. If the Statutes be interpreted literally, the County Councils are empowered only to levy a rate for a higher school grant when the teaching which that grant defrays is to enable a boy or girl to learn the elements of some remunerative handicraft, and is thus expressly sanctioned by the Technical Education Act of 1890. If the Councils have gone beyond this, and pecuniarily ministered to the needs of a more generous culture, they have acted, so to speak, at their own peril, or that action has been rendered possible by the private liberality of their more opulent members. In addition to this need of a new definition of the ambiguous epithet and substantive employed so often in the foregoing text, a new educational authority which can officially survey every department of the entire field of teaching has become indispensable. Centralized at Whitehall this authority will to some extent inevitably be. Its operation, however, must be highly elastic. The conditions of its control must be adaptable to the infinitely varying conditions, social, geographical, material, sentimental, of the United Kingdom. The most recent enquiries show that there is much less dissipation of educational energy by the mutual overlapping of schools than might be expected. The single instance of this sort to which attention has been directed by the last Commission is that of Bolton, where there exists an unprofitable competition between the grammar school and the Church Institute Boys’ School. Elsewhere, however, as at Leeds and other great towns of the North, Mechanics’ Institute Schools, Higher Grade Board Schools, trench respectively on each other’s province, though each of them, by slightly varying its curriculum, does good work and is in great local demand. The explanation of the latter fact is the universality of the appetite for higher teaching created in the large centres of the English population. The most frequent, and with proper care the most easily remediable form of overlapping occurs when the higher divisions of a lower grade school retain pupils already ripe for a higher grade school. What are the exact limits to be placed respectively to the provinces of elementary schools of both grades? and what to the grammar schools on the one hand, or the University schools on the other with which the rudimentary institutions ought closely and cordially to co-operate? these are problems with which, in the fifty-ninth year of Her Majesty’s reign, there does not exist any single authority competent to deal. The confusion between the jurisdiction of the educational bodies now in being is comparable with that which existed in the relations of the various administrative authorities and areas in the case of local government before these functions were comparatively simplified by the legislation of 1874 and of 1888. The Education Department in London has no concern with secondary schools save so far as some of these are inextricably intermingled in their operations with the finance or the teaching of primary schools. The Charity Commission wherein the Endowed Schools Commission is now merged, can only take cognizance of the agencies for higher teaching for a special purpose and from a single point of view. This loose and very partially effective machinery of control has since 1890 received a new element of complexity from the educational power vested with such happy results as it has been in the County Councils. The educational branch of the Privy Council office in London has long attracted to it young men of industry and talents from the Universities as well as of considerable administrative ability developed at a later date by official experience.

Meanwhile the profession of the teacher becomes more highly organized each year. The value of its material interests is constantly increasing. It still remains without any direct representation in the official world comparable with that which is secured to the civil and military services by the Council of the Secretary of State for India. The headmasters’ annual conference has during the last few years supplied a useful medium for the interchange of opinions and experiences between the recognized chiefs of their vocation. The College of Preceptors has its occasional meetings. Certificated assistant teachers have formed themselves into a loosely coherent body of their own. None of these can, except in an indirect way, place their practical experience at the disposal of the central authority whose consent is necessary for any organic change in the teaching subjects of schools that receive a public endowment. In the case of schools whose speciality is a sound commercial education, proofs of late have multiplied that the object of this training may often be more faithfully accomplished, to say nothing of the intellectual gain to the learner if the boy who is going to stand behind a counter, and may sometimes be called upon to write a business letter for his employer, is instructed in something beyond the arts of summing and penmanship. Many boys of the humblest birth show a remarkable aptitude for applied logic and political economy when the elements of physical science fail entirely to attract their minds. The educational council which might be auxiliary to the Vice-President of the Council will perhaps number amongst its members men who, from their own practical knowledge, can give sound advice in cases where the teacher ought to be entrusted with the power of adapting the education, not merely in a general way to the vocation that is hereafter to engage the learner, but to the idiosyncrasies of the pupil as well. The stipends of assistants in secondary schools are often unwisely and wastefully low. Men and women who work so hard as these persons do are entitled to the assurance that their emoluments will be regulated by the consideration that comes of knowledge as well as the severer equities of commerce.

The first thing, therefore, as all who on this matter speak from experience agree, is to establish local councils for educational purposes which by the prevention of confusion and overlapping between schools of different grades, will directly promote the economy of educational force not less than of expenditure. As for the central authority which the interests alike of teachers, of taught, of children and parents, of the State, and of its subjects demand, substantial unanimity as to the composition of that body exists among those who are most qualified to give an opinion. Generally it is suggested that the new Council might be shaped after the model of the Indian Council. To come to particulars, there would be, in the first instance, a certain number of Crown nominees; secondly, the Universities, perhaps the great public schools or other public educational bodies, would be asked to select representatives of their own. Another element in the new central authority would be experienced members of the teaching professions. These might be chosen partly by the headmasters in conference, but to some extent by the assistant teachers employed in every variety of public schools from the highest to the lowest. It would seem on the whole advisable to select the teachers’ members by the direct vote of the class immediately concerned. The machinery for doing so would not be difficult. Voting papers, as in the case of London University in the choice of appointments to the Senate, or of professional representatives on the Medical Council, would be employed. In this way, every registered teacher would have a voice in regulating the details and rewards of his profession to the great increase, as cannot be doubted, of its esprit de corps. In the case of elections to the local authority for preventing waste and confusion between local schools an analogous method might be employed. The registered teachers, that is, would in each neighbourhood choose their proportion of the members of the local educational body.

Signs are sometimes visible of a reaction from the enthusiasm for educational progress that has engaged the national energies during the last half century. There is a danger, one is told, of educating boys or girls beyond their capacities, and above their station. The increased competition for the positions of governess and clerk, means misery and ruin to many of the candidates who would be more suitably, comfortably, and far more remuneratively employed in domestic service, or in manual labour according to their sex. The virtues of humility and respect for superiors are said to be crushed out in the scramble for knowledge that may enable its possessors to better themselves. Servant maids, one is told, no longer confine their demands to permission to wear a fringe, but stipulate for a pianoforte in the basement, or a bicycle with which to take their airing on their Sundays out. That upon the humbler levels of the community the progress from ignorance to education should be accompanied by real or apparent disturbances of the personal relations between classes was to have been expected. Seasons of transition such as the present always generate a certain amount of personal friction or of social displacement. Those just being emancipated from the illiteracy or semi-barbarism which have been the traditions of centuries have not yet overcome the agitating strangeness of their new and improved condition. Those above them in the social scale have not yet been able to decide whether to conciliate their educated inferiors as possible friends, or to stand on their guard against them as actual enemies. As the situation becomes more familiar, it will prove less strained. Common sense as a supplement to their zeal, seems the chief want of the educational reformers, official or private, of the day. The tendency is to postpone the development of intelligence to the acquisition of knowledge. The masters whom we are now educating are not in the habit of using their minds for the mere pleasure of intellectual exertion. Hence they often give an impression of being far less intelligent than they really are. The correct use of common words in the mother tongue ought orally, not out of any lesson book, to be taught all boys and girls. The difficulty experienced by the persons now spoken of in clearly answering a simple question is often insurmountable. The tendency is, not to digest the query as a whole, but to catch some word used in it and then to make a remark suggested by the association of the sound of the syllables, and so practically to evade the question put. The cheap diffusion of newspapers and magazines confirms rather than corrects these failures to concentrate the mind in the casual talk of everyday life. It is not beneath the dignity of the State educator to deal with the defect.40

CHAPTER XIII

THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE

Social importance of Eton, Harrow, and other great schools, as representing the social evolution of the epoch. The conventional mistake that the new wealth has been injurious to the social tone or scholarly studies of public schools. In the case of Eton the historic details and educational statistics prove the falseness of the statement. Progress of the school shown by success in the new as well as old examinations during the incriminated period of the last forty years. New social elements have increased the value but not the expense of Eton. The fourteenth Earl of Derby as a typical Eton product.

The whole region of public elementary and secondary education, whose improvement is so conspicuous an incident in the recent domestic or social annals of the time, has now been indicated at sufficient length and minutely enough to convey an accurate notion of the facts. One may, therefore, pass to those educational levels which stand a little higher, and up to which recent reforms of popular education are, as has been seen, gradually assisting the progress of Board School children. The sociological feature of the present reign has already been described in these pages as a process less of revolution, than of evolution; of the natural incorporation of new elements into an old fabric, of the harmonious assimilation on the part of a polity that is the growth of centuries, of the ideas and types that are the products of to-day. These processes can nowhere be witnessed more crucially in operation than at those little worlds, the great public schools such as Eton and Harrow, which, as they have ever been, are the faithful microcosms of the great worlds that lie beyond them. Many of the accounts of Eton which periodically find their way into print seem inspirations from Baron Munchausen. The school that during centuries has been the special training ground for the country gentlemen of England, which was once to such an extent the nursery of future lords spiritual and temporal as to enable Dr Keate to include among his titles to respect the fact of his having flogged in their youth the whole Bench of Bishops,41 is conventionally represented as corrupted at its heart by the predominating influence of the sons of the ‘new rich’ on its classic soil. The parent who wishes his son to be at the school where his sire, and his sires before him, had been, is disgusted by reading romantic accounts of the bank balances in Windsor town kept for their boys by the plutocrats, Saxon or Semitic, of the City. It may, therefore, be said authoritatively that thus far research has failed to bring to light a single instance of the new rich Etonian who possesses during his school days a banking account of his own. Now, not less than formerly, the lad who returns to his tutor’s or his dame’s with a £5 note in his pocket is looked upon by his comrades as in luck.

Forty years ago, when a Public School Commission was making its enquiry, the cry of the commercial Crœsus swamping the country squire was first raised. The most practical proof of its hollowness is that the expenses of Eton, if still prohibitive to many parents, have not increased of recent years. What has rather happened is that the school outlay has been remodelled. The charges are to-day inclusive. If comparatively fresh items figure in the school accounts, the incidental outlay on casual subscriptions and a long catalogue of extras is now superseded. The real cost of Eton and of other schools like it is what the individual boy chooses, or what his friends allow. The expensive habits of the Etonian are more a domestic, than a scholastic, growth. No advocate of the nouveau riche theory has ever asserted that the scale of living in the clubs of Pall Mall has become insufferably profuse since gentlemen enriched by commerce, prone, like Mr Mantalini, to despise details of petty cash, have been made free of these establishments. There is not, nor has there ever been, the slightest danger of the Etonian or Harrovian of the old aristocratic order being corrupted by plutocratic schoolfellows. The son of Sir Gorgius Midas in real life proves to be a quiet, sensible lad, with a just and shrewd sense of the value of money, and perhaps less likely to waste his father’s substance in the ‘sock shops’ under the shadow of Windsor Castle than his form comrade, the son of the squire whom Sir Gorgius could buy up half a dozen times over. At other places than the great public schools of England, a studious boy may find himself more in the way of amassing knowledge. Nowhere will he learn so many lessons useful for the daily conduct of life, which books do not impart. Nowhere will he have such opportunities for the acquisition, the development and the display of practical common sense. So far back as the later fifties of this century, an Eton master, the late Mr Durnford, the respected father of him who still represents the same family on the Eton staff, alluding to the decline in the manufacture of Longs and Shorts in pious Henry’s shades, could say: ‘Latin verses are with us things of the past.’ There is, however, no reason, as the list of Eton honours at Oxford or Cambridge will show, for imputing to Eton any decline in the essentials of classical scholarship. Since the new wealth is supposed to have contaminated the standard of plain living and high thinking among the old gentry, in 1851, the famous son of a famous father, a name venerable in the Law Courts and on the Thames, J. W. Chitty, an old Etonian, won at Oxford a first class Vinerian Scholarship, followed by a Fellowship at Exeter. About the same time R. G. W. Herbert the late Permanent Head of the Colonial Office carried off, as a scholar of Balliol, the Hertford and the Ireland, and a Fellowship at All Souls. The late Lord Carnarvon was not so infected by the plutocratic idleness of Eton as to miss when at Christ Church the highest honours of the Classical Schools.