Proposed University of London in 1647—TheMuseum Minervæat Bethnal Green—Its catholic character and liberal programme—Calligraphy—Shorthand—Bright’s system patented in 1588—Education in the provinces—The old school at Manchester—Shakespear’sSir Hugh EvansandHolofernes—William Hazlitt’s account of his Shropshire school in 1788.
Proposed University of London in 1647—TheMuseum Minervæat Bethnal Green—Its catholic character and liberal programme—Calligraphy—Shorthand—Bright’s system patented in 1588—Education in the provinces—The old school at Manchester—Shakespear’sSir Hugh EvansandHolofernes—William Hazlitt’s account of his Shropshire school in 1788.
I. It is a fact, probably within the knowledge of very few, that two hundred years and more before the actual establishment of the University of London, a project for such an institution was mooted by an anonymous pamphleteer, who may be considered as a kind of pioneer, preceding the Benthams and Broughams.
I hold in my handMotives Grounded upon the Word of God, and upon Honour, Profit, and Pleasure for the present Founding an University in the Metropolis, London, 1647. It purports tobe the work of “a true Lover of his Nation, and especially of the said City.”
The lines and object in this piece are purely clerical. The author maintains the insufficiency of the two existing Universities and the College in Ireland to rear as many “sons of the Prophets”—an euphemism for parsons—to attend upon the spiritual needs of the English and the Londoners.
He puts down on paper statistics of the number of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, and he argues that if the total were much larger—10,000 instead of 5900—there would be no means of raising the 20,000 preachers necessary in his view to carry on the business of religion. He pleads the fall of Episcopacy in support of his scheme, as “we cannot hope,” he says, “that so many will apply their studies to Divinity, and therefore have the greater need to maintain the more poor scholars at our Universities,” or, in other words, the absence of the prizes in the lottery had taken the best men out of the market. In fact, the writer himself does not shrink altogether from presenting the commercial side of the question, for he observes:—“Without injuryunto any, an University in London would increase London’s Trading, and inrich London, as the Scholars do Cambridge and Oxford, where how many poor people also are benefited by the Colleges, yea, the countries round about them.”
So far, so good; but he, in the very next paragraph, strikes a chord which jars upon the ear. We see that he is a partisan of that theory which flourished here down to our own day, and which contributed so powerfully to retard and cripple our scholastic and academical studies. Hear what he says: “If here in London there be a College, in whichnothing but Latinshall be spoken, and your children put into it, and from ten years old to twelve hear no other Language, in those two years they will be able to speak as good Latin as they do English, and as readily. The Roman children learned Latin as ours do English...;” and so he goes on as to Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, and Spanish.
The sole point here, in our modern estimation, is the admission of the three living languages into the curriculum, in order to qualify the students in later life to make themselves understood abroad either as merchants or asdiplomatists. But here he was before his time. Nothing of the kind was to be attempted in England for generations. For generations Englishmen were to be instructed only in the dead tongues, and were to have not an English, but a Latin Grammar put into their hands age after age.
He talks about the Roman youth learning Latin as we do English; but he failed, perhaps, to perceive that they did not learn British or Gaulish as we do Latin. His text is wealthy in Scriptural quotations and parallels; but whatever one may think of his notions regarding the details and advantages of such a plan, this unnamed “true Lover of his Nation” is entitled, at any rate, to the credit and distinction of having been apparently the first to suggest what we have now before us in the shape of an accomplished fact.
It is not too much to assert, probably, that if the appearance of this tract had been followed by the execution of the ideas enunciated in it, the force of opinion would by this time have spared very little of the work of the original promoters.
II. TheMusæum Minervæ, instituted by Sir Balthazar Gerbier d’Ouvilly at Bethnal Green in 1635, presents a thorough contrast to those philanthropic or eleemosynary institutions of which I have lately spoken, inasmuch as it was a novel and costly apparatus of Continental origin, calculated only for the children of rich persons and for those who desired to complete themselves in various accomplishments. Lectures were delivered on several subjects, and printed afterwards for circulation; but the enterprise did not succeed, and the outbreak of the Civil War probably sealed its doom. Yet as late as 1649 the management, or the founder himself, issued a prospectus of the different branches of learning and culture which were taught at this establishment. The language of this document, which is curious enough to append entire, portends the approaching collapse, and reads like a final appeal to public spirit and patronage:—
“To all Fathers of NOBLE FAMILIES and Lovers of VERTUE: Sir Balthazar Gerbier desires once more that the Publique may be pleased to take notice of his great labours andindeavours by the Erection of an Academy on Bednall Green without Aldgate. To teachHebrew,Greek,Latine,French,Italian,Spanish,High Dutch, andLow Dutch, both Ancient and ModernHistories, joyntly with the Constitutions and Governments of the most famousEmpiresandDominionsin the World, the true Naturall and ExperimentallPhilosophy, theMathematicks,Arithmetick, and the keepingBookes of AccountsbyCreditorandDebitor. All excellentHandwriting, Geometrie, Cosmography, Geography, Perspective, Architecture, Secret Motions of Scenes, Fortifications, the besieging & Defending of Places, Fire-Works, Marches of Armies, Ordering of Battailes, Fencing, Vaulting, Riding the Great Horse, Musick, Playing on all sorts of Instruments, Dancing, Drawing, Painting, Limning, and Carving, &c.”
It is at once apparent that the programme of the Bethnal Green Academy was too ambitious and expensive to suit moderate careers and limited resources. Perhaps if it had been so fortunate as to outlive the Restoration it might have proved a success, as the range was sufficiently capacious to accommodate those whocontented themselves with ordinary school or college routine; those who preferred a study of the sciences and arts; and, again, such as desired a special professional training.
The establishment of theMusæumin 1635 had been inaugurated by a dramatic performance, which the Court honoured with its presence; and in the following year theConstitutions, as they are called, were printed.
These give, but of course with more detail, the particulars which present themselves in the advertisement just noticed; and they also shew that there was a preparatory school attached to theMusæum, from which the pupils might be drafted into the higher one.
The subjects taught exhibit a diversity of character and a width of sympathy which are powerfully at variance with the meagre programmes of the old-fashioned public foundations. They comprised Heraldry, Conveyancing, Common Law, Antiquities (including Numismatics), Agriculture, Arithmetic, Architecture, Fortification, Geography, Languages, and Elocution, with many more matters.
It is worth remarking that now for the firsttime the German tongue was included in the list of those which were recommended and set down for study, while the Dutch also occurs in the list. Elocution or “the art of well-speaking,” as it is termed, was also a novel feature; and, in point of fact, Gerbier, who had travelled much abroad and observed the superior educational systems of foreign countries, sought to introduce here the same catholic and liberal spirit, instead of the imperfect and cramped course of studies with which Englishmen were forced to be contented, and which had scarcely emerged from mediæval simplicity and crudity.
TheMusæum Minervæ, of which a Shropshire gentleman, Sir Francis Kinaston, of Oteley, was the first Regent, collapsed about 1650; but its example and influence survived, and it was the forerunner of a broader and more enlightened educational policy and of the modern type of training colleges, into which even those ancient endowed schools which remain have been compelled by the force of public opinion, one by one, to resolve themselves.
These Academies present a very powerful contrast to the archaic school in the multiplicity ofacquirements, and in the breadth or variety of culture which they afforded and encouraged. They betoken a development of social wants and refinements, and the force of influences received from surrounding countries. It was a supply which responded to a demand; and it helped to create or extend a field of literary industry in the form of technical publications dealing with the principal subjects, which theMusæum Minervæand other analogous institutions included in their scheme. To the treatises on Riding, Swimming, Drawing, Writing, and a few other arts were added Manuals for the use of those who studied, at the College or under private instructors, the sciences of Fencing, Vaulting, Small Sword Exercise, Fortification, and the accomplishments specified in the programme of the Minerva Museum. A constant succession of text-books for pupils in nearly all these branches of a polite education kept the makers and the vendors of them busy from the age of Elizabeth downward; and long lists might be furnished of contributions to every department, both by professional experts and by amateurs of practical experience.
Ladies, who desired to learn anything special in excess of the narrow educational routine then deemed sufficient for the call of their sex, depended on private tutors, who usually waited upon them at their own homes. Thomas Greeting taught Mrs. Pepys the flageolet, for example, and the same lady had lessons in drawing from Alexander Browne, who made the diarist angry at first, because he was asked by Mrs. Pepys to stay dinner sometimes, and to sit at table with her husband.
The importance of calligraphy was recognised long before the date of any literary monuments of its development. The earliest professor of the art who appeared in print among us was a Frenchman, Jean de Beauchesne, who resided in Blackfriars, and published in 1570 his writing-book, in which he affords specimens of all the usual hands, English and French secretary, Italian, Chancery, and Court. Even the extant productions of this class, including those of the immortal Cocker, would fill a considerable space in a bookcase; and many belonged to the calling without the parade of authorship, while of such fugitive performances the remains are aptto be incomplete, and to present us with a list of names far from exhaustive.
In his “Pen’s Triumph,” 1660, Cocker, who is better remembered as an author on arithmetic, perhaps for no farther reason than the force of the adage, but who was also a lexicographer and a voluminous producer of writing-books, instructs his pupils and the public not merely in all the hands at that time employed for various objects, but how “to write with gold,” which was, of course, no novelty, but had been more in vogue on the Continent than here.
Entire works were executed in autograph MS. by experts, both in England and abroad, for the purpose of presentation to noble or royal personages; and Ballard gives a copious account of a lady, named Esther Inglis, who, in the early portion of the seventeenth century, signalised her talent and ingenuity in this way. Her work was remarkable for the minuteness and exquisite delicacy of its characters; but nearly all the professional writing-masters introduced into their copybooks bold and intricate designs, and figures of animals, for the sake of rendering thevolumes more attractive, and illustrating the capabilities of the goose-quill.
Among our foremost literary celebrities, Shakespear wrote the Court hand, judging from his signature, and Bacon and Ben Jonson the Italian.
Charactery, or the art of shorthand, was introduced into the Nonconformist schools as a taught subject for the sake of enabling youths or others to take notes of sermons and lectures; and some of the discourses from the pulpit in the time of Elizabeth purport to have been printed from shorthand notes. Dr. Bright, who was the writer of a work on Melancholy long antecedent to Burton’s, procured an exclusive right in 1588 to publish a system which he had invented for this purpose, and which we find described by him as “an art of short, swift, and secret writing.” He set in motion an idea which met with such numerous imitators and improvers, that a catalogue of the publications on Tachygraphy down to the present date forms a volume of respectable dimensions. Bright was nearly a century before the more celebrated Rich, who flourished about the Restoration ofthe Stuarts, and whose cypher was adopted by Pepys in the composition of his diary.
III. The public schools were not the first in emulating and continuing the policy which Gerbier had laboured so hard and so long to establish. On a less expensive and ostentatious scale certain private academies adopted the idea of supplementing the subjects taught in the great foundations by some, at least, of the manly or elegant arts which had figured in the old Bethnal Green prospectus.
At the end of a Musical Entertainment, prepared in 1676 for recitation by some school-boys in the presence of certain persons of quality, the master favours us with some particulars of the subjects which pupils might take up in his establishment, and it is also inferable that the hours of study extended to at least five o’clock in the evening. He says in a kind of postscript to the printed tract:—
“The Arts and Sciences taught and practis’d in the Academy are these.All sorts of Instruments, Singing and Dancing.French and Italian.The Mathematicks.Grammar, Writing and Arithmetick.Painting and Drawing.Fencing, Vaulting and Wrastling.”
“The Arts and Sciences taught and practis’d in the Academy are these.
All sorts of Instruments, Singing and Dancing.French and Italian.The Mathematicks.Grammar, Writing and Arithmetick.Painting and Drawing.Fencing, Vaulting and Wrastling.”
This was an unusually liberal choice, and the Academy was evidently one designed more particularly for the children of noble or wealthy people. He adds:—
“Or any young Gentleman design’d for Travel, there are persons of several Nations fit to instruct him in any Language.“Likewise any one that hath a desire to have any New Songs or Tunes, may be furnish’d by the same Person that serves his Majesty in the same Imployment.”
“Or any young Gentleman design’d for Travel, there are persons of several Nations fit to instruct him in any Language.
“Likewise any one that hath a desire to have any New Songs or Tunes, may be furnish’d by the same Person that serves his Majesty in the same Imployment.”
This is altogether worth attention. It is a pity that we cannot arrive at the name or locality of the college where all these advantages and temptations (in the way of buying your Songs of the King’s own purveyor) were held out to the aspiring gentry of two centuries ago.
IV. In all the great provincial centres there were, of course, educational institutes supportedby local or royal endowment; and in all these the method of teaching and general policy followed that pursued in the metropolis, except that, as we shall presently see, some of the establishments in the country trod in the footsteps of the Academy just described more promptly and more cordially than St. Paul’s or Merchant Taylors’, which modified their constitutions only to save themselves from ruin.
Of the seventeenth-century school at Manchester we gain an accidental glimpse and notion from theDelectus of Latin Phraseswhich was prepared for use there by a former scholar, Thomas Bracebridge. It is a MS. volume of no interest or moment, unless it is locally and personally regarded; but one is apt to cherish every added fraction of light as to the state of education in the Midlands in former days; and thisDelectuscarries us back precisely to the Restoration, so far as its mere date is concerned, but furnishes a fair idea of the sort of phrase-book which a Manchester teacher of 1660 thought suitable for the boys of his old school.
In Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson and schoolmaster, Shakespear has not improbablypreserved to us some fragmentary reminiscences of his own school-days at Stratford. The probation through which William Page is put by Sir Hugh at his mother’s instance might very well be a literal or close transcript from actual experience. With what mingled feelings the poet must have contemplated a class of men to whom such minds as his have ever owed so little!
Both Sir Hugh and the Reverend Doctor Primrose may be accepted as provincial types of the clerical preceptor, as they seemed to two excellent observers in their respective centuries. We easily remark the difference between them and such a creation as Holofernes.
The course of studies followed in the rural districts of England at a later period is illustrated by a letter from Hazlitt, the essayist, to his elder brother, the miniature-painter, when the former was attending a school at Wem in Shropshire in 1788. He was at that time ten years old. After stating that he had been learning to draw, he proceeds:—“Next Monday I shall begin to read Ovid’sMetamorphosesand Eutropius.... I began to cypher a fortnight after Christmas,and shall go into the rule of three next week.... I shall go through the whole cyphering book this summer, and then I am to learn Euclid. We go to school at nine every morning. Three boys begin by reading the Bible. Then I and two others show our exercises. We then read the Speaker [by Enfield]. Then we all set about our lessons.... At eleven we write and cypher. In the afternoon we stand for places at spelling, and I am almost always first.... I shall go to dancing this month.”
The glimpse which we here obtain of a small private seminary in a Shropshire village a hundred years ago affords a not unfavourable notion of the standard of provincial education. From another letter of Hazlitt a little later on (1790) it appears that the celebrated Dr. Lempriére, whose name the lad transformed into Dolounghpryée, was a visitor at the school; but he had not yet produced his Dictionary, of which the first edition was in 1792. It was still in use at Merchant Taylors’ in 1850.
The proprietary establishments for boys, which spread themselves by degrees over the land, formed a valuable succedaneum to the Edwardand other endowed schools, and useful nurseries for pupils who aimed at more than elementary learning. But they at the same time proved a source of emulation and material improvement; and during the last fifty years the distance between the two systems has sensibly decreased.
The great charities and other ancient foundations like St. Paul’s, Merchant Taylors’, Eton, Harrow, have only maintained their relative superiority by reforming and extending their prospectus; and there is scarcely a country town at the present moment without one or more private seminaries, where a better education is given than was within the reach of our grandfathers at any of the large public schools of the metropolis.
Even in the time of Carlisle, who wrote in 1818, some of the principal institutions in the provinces were treading closely on the heels of Christ’s Hospital and other endowments, and one or two, as at Dorchester, at Abingdon, and at Witton near Chester, seem to have been on a more liberal and enlightened footing.
Educational condition ofScotland—Beneficial influence of Knox and his supporters—Buchanan and other early writers on grammar—Thomas Ruddiman and his important contribution to the spread of elementary teaching—Decline of culture during the Civil War.
Educational condition ofScotland—Beneficial influence of Knox and his supporters—Buchanan and other early writers on grammar—Thomas Ruddiman and his important contribution to the spread of elementary teaching—Decline of culture during the Civil War.
I. When we turn to Scotland, we find the compendium of the Grammar of Ælius Donatus, of which I have already furnished some account, in use there from time almost immemorial. It appears that the Scotish seminaries adopted this favourite class-book in common with those of England at least as far back as the time of Andrew of Wyntown, who was nearly contemporary with Langland and Chaucer. In hisOriginal Chronicle of Scotlandhe speaks of the Barnys (bairns) lering Donate at their beginning of Grammar; which is a very interesting and important piece of testimony in its way, sincethere is so little to enable us to form an opinion of the rise and growth of elementary learning in North Britain, although there may be just sufficient light cast incidentally or indirectly on the subject to lead us to judge that Scotland, if not indeed the North generally, was in this respect, as in others, far behind the Southern English.
In Scotland, the influence of Knox and his supporters favoured the early institution of parochial schools throughout the country, where a class and range of instruction prevailed which, combined with native religious tendencies, had the effect of increasing, in comparison with England, the average of educated intelligence without developing much breadth of thought or much intellectual refinement.
The aims of the parish schools are humble, and beyond its limited possibilities there are its impediments and its snares. In addition to schools, the friends of education in the North, as early as the reign of William III., commenced an agitation for the establishment of parochial libraries even in the Highlands. The movement was set on foot by certain ministers of the Presbyterian Church, and its basis and scopewould have been narrow enough if the idea had been realised. But nothing beyond a discussion and some correspondence seems to have resulted at the moment.
Nor do we, even as time goes on, find much information obtainable on this part of the subject. But both the systems and the books employed were for some centuries of foreign origin; and the grammatical publications of an Aberdeen man, John Vaus, whose name seems to be the earliest on the roll of native authors, were, so far as we at present know, without exception published, as well as written, in France, to which Scotland perhaps owed, among other matters, her adoption of the Continental law of Latin pronunciation.
Vaus grounded hisRudiments, printed at Paris repeatedly about 1520, on the oldDoctrinaleof Alexander Gallus, which bespeaks a backwardness of information, since at this date Lily’s Grammar was already in use in the South, and even the systems of Whittinton and the other disciples of the Magdalen School method had been almost completely discarded there, except, perhaps, as occasional auxiliaries.
At a later period, the eminent Scotsman Buchanan wrote his little work on Prosody, and two others of his countrymen, Andrew Symson and James Carmichael, reduced to a simpler plan the principles of elementary learning and the outlines of etymology.
The first explicit attempt to produce a grammar in Scotland for the special use of that country is due, however, to Alexander Hume, who is known to us not only as an educational reformer, but as a philological student. HisNew Grammar for the Use of the Scotish Youth, 1612, was a popular compendium founded on Lily; it seems to have met with limited and brief acceptance, and his tract on theOrthography and Congruity of the British Tongue, which was a literary essay intended rather for the closet (to use the old-fashioned parlance), remained till lately in MS.
II. But books of instruction and for employment in schools continued, down to the days ofThomas Ruddiman, to be at once scarce and unsatisfactory, insomuch that, side by side with these and other unrecovered productions, it wasfound possible and convenient to keep in print the old text-books of Stanbridge, of which editions continued to be issued at intervals both here and in England down to the middle of the seventeenth century.
Ruddiman may be considered as the apostle of scholastic education and literature in Scotland; and as he was not born till 1674, this amounts to a proposition that his country was at least two centuries behind England in knowledge and culture. Even Ruddiman was brought up at the parish school, and was, moreover, for some time a parochial teacher. But, partly by force of character and partly by good fortune, he extricated himself from his early associations, and became the Lily of the North. HisRudiments of Grammarwere published in 1714, when he was already in middle life; they were little more than the St. Paul’s Primer calculated for the meridian of Edinburgh; but they proved eminently successful, and encouraged him to proceed with that more important philological enterprise theInstitutions of Latin Grammar, which, like the disquisition of Alexander Hume recentlymentioned, was an ordinary unprofessional piece of authorship.
But, notwithstanding the useful labours of Ruddiman, his country, from political and other agencies, remained yet for a considerable length of time in a very stagnant condition, nor had any sensible improvement been achieved in the educational machinery of that portion of the empire within the recollection of those still living. Mental training and culture, as they are now understood, are the growth of the last half century. But the cost of such accomplishments as were taught at Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St. Andrews was lower than in England, and the standard higher than in Ireland; and from both countries pupils were often sent in former days to complete their education, where their parents could not have afforded the means to maintain them at Oxford or Cambridge. From a hundred to a hundred and thirty years since, the fees at Glasgow University did not exceed £20 a year, and a frugal lad found seven or eight shillings a week sufficient for his board and lodging.
III. Many causes contributed, toward themiddle of the seventeenth century, to favour the disorganisation and decay of scholastic learning; but, above all, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the consequent disorder, depression, and inquietude, seem to have reduced the educational standard, and to have thrown the task of instruction, in a great number of cases, into the hands of the clergy, from the want of funds or the lack of inclination to support the former lay-teachers. The acute political crisis, which lasted without interruption from 1640 to the commencement of the Protectorate in 1653, affected even the ancient academical and civic endowments; and the two Universities, the noble foundations of Edward VI., and the public seminaries instituted in London and other great centres by private munificence, suffered a common paralysis.
The alliance between the Church and the schools was one formed or developed at a period of exceptional difficulty and pressure; but even when the immediate necessity for such a bond existed no longer, and affairs in England had returned to their normal state, the clergy saw too clearly the importance ofthe hold which they had gained on the national training and thought to allow education to pass back, farther than was avoidable, under lay control.
In the time of the Commonwealth, and when Cromwell assumed the supreme authority, there were all over the country, throughout England and Wales, men in holy orders and in the enjoyment of benefices who combined with their sacerdotal functions, as many do still, the duties of schoolmasters and lecturers. Doubtless, among them there were some fairly qualified for the trust which they received and undertook; but the majority is alleged, in an authentic official document before me of 1654, to have been far otherwise. This State-paper is called “An Ordinance for the Ejection of Scandalous, Ignorant, and Insufficient Ministers and Schoolmasters,” and was published in the autumn of the year above named.
Two singular features it unquestionably possesses: the intimate association between the parson and the pedagogue, and the striking picture which it presents to our view of the lax and profligate condition of the class which Cromwelland his advisers saw thus clothed with the twofold responsibility of mental and spiritual tuition.
The points on which the Commissioners of the Protectoral Government were authorised to inform themselves, and to exercise the discretion vested in them by the ordinance, reveal a very unsatisfactory and corrupt state of things, and the existence of abuses for which neither the Civil War nor the Republican administration can be thought to have been answerable. There is scarcely a vice or irregularity which is not named or implied in the instructions delivered to the Commission; and the encouragement of “Whitson-ales, Wakes, Morris-Dances, Maypoles, Stage-plays, or such like licentious practices,” strikes one as relatively a very venial offence against good morals and professional decorum. But the antipathy to sports and dramatic exhibitions was an inheritance from the more rigid Puritans, and the Articles of Inquiry in the archidiaconal visitations of this period never forgot such profane infringements of clerical morality.
The persons who were selected to sit on these committees for the several urban and provincial districts included many God-fearers of theprevailing type; but at the same time the choice was evidently made with some judgment and impartiality, and the printed lists exhibit a notable proportion of divines and others not likely to sanction or recommend too violent a course.
In fact, so considerate was the temper of the Administration itself, that an express proviso was inserted in the ejecting ordinance, by which some of the stipend of the cure was to be set apart, where the minister and schoolmaster was judged incompetent, for the support of his family.
Samuel Harmar, in hisVox Populi, or Gloucestershire’s Desire, 1642, represents the want of proper maintenance for teachers, although many persons of moderate resources were willing to contribute liberally to the object; to the burden on families by reason of the gratuitous instruction of children, who, if they were but in the way of earning even twopence a day, might help themselves and their parents, whereas they wasted their time in playing about the streets, and acquired the habit of swearing and other immoral practices. The restriction of educational management, for the most part, to theclergy accounts for the dearth of literature shedding real and valuable light on the condition of the young and the state of schools in very early days; and Harmar’s pamphlet is principally occupied with vapid theological ineptitudes. His main proposal was excellent; it declared for the establishment of schoolmasters in every parish throughout the country; but even this was merely what Knox and his supporters had long before advocated, and partly accomplished, in Scotland.
There is a little volume by Richard Croft, Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, being a sermon preached by him at the opening of the Free School of Feckenham in 1696, throughout the sixty-eight pages of which there is not an iota worthy of citation, nor a hint serviceable to my inquiry. How different it might have been, had a layman been the writer!
Female education—Women of quality taught at home—General illiteracy of the sex—Strong clerical control—Ignorance of the rudiments of knowledge among girls—Shakespear’s daughters—Goldsmith’sPoems for Young Ladies—Rise of the Ladies’ School—Political importance of the training of women.
Female education—Women of quality taught at home—General illiteracy of the sex—Strong clerical control—Ignorance of the rudiments of knowledge among girls—Shakespear’s daughters—Goldsmith’sPoems for Young Ladies—Rise of the Ladies’ School—Political importance of the training of women.
I. The neglect of female education in the United Kingdom down to a recent date proceeded from an absence of any adequate or organisable machinery for the purpose, and from the complete monopoly of learning by men in early times. In Scotland this mischief was remedied to a certain extent much sooner than in England, owing to the institution of Academies, where both sexes received instruction under one roof from the same masters; and this circumstance may help to explain the general superiority of the Scots, within certain limits, to theSouthern Britons in this respect, the better upbringing of the mother communicating itself to her children.
Common academies for boys and girls were not wholly unknown in England, however, but they were of very rare occurrence, and have now become still rarer, as they barely exist at all except as dame-schools.
Now-a-days, of course, the most elaborate and costly apparatus is provided for the mental cultivation and training of girls of all ranks; and the daughter of a citizen may acquire accomplishments which were long beyond the reach of daughters of kings. Formerly the lower classes of females remained as illiterate as the corresponding rank of men, and the studies of the gentlewoman were superintended by her parents and her tutor or her governess. But in the Middle Ages, and long after the revival of learning, the only persons capable of conducting the education of a lady who had emerged from the nursery and passed the rudimentary stage were ecclesiastics; and the laymen who gradually qualified themselves for the task, such as Ascham and Buchanan, were scholarsof a scarce type, who had gained their proficiency in the gymnasia and universities of Italy, Germany, or France. The Italian influence was doubtless the earliest, but the German was the most powerful, and has proved the most lasting.
In France from a very remote period the dame-school appears to have existed in some measure and form, for a fourteenth-century sculpture, already mentioned in the remarks on scholastic discipline, depicts an establishment of this kind—a petty school for boys kept by a woman. If there was any such thing among us, I have met with no record of it; but the practice, from the early intimacy between those countries, would be more apt to find its way first of all from the French into Scotland.
To such as have had under their eyes the letters and other literary monuments which reveal to us the condition of the more cultivated section of the English female community in the old days, it seems superfluous to insist on the strange ignorance of theprincipiaof knowledge, and on the fallow state of the intellectual faculties which these evidences establish. The Pastonand Plumpton Correspondence, Mrs. Green’sLetters of Illustrious Ladies, and Sir Henry Ellis’s three Series of Original Letters, may perhaps be quoted as affording an insight into the present aspect of the question before us; and I think that the most striking proofs of the inattention to female culture in this country are to be found in documents previous to the Reformation, when the influence brought to bear on the sex was almost exclusively monastic or clerical.
The great political and religious movement which Henry VIII. was enabled by circumstances to carry through undoubtedly imparted a large share of lay feeling and prejudice to the educational system; and this tendency was promoted and strengthened during the short reign of Edward VI. by the foundation of chartered schools throughout the kingdom for the instruction of youth in grammar and other primordial matters.
II. But the progress thus made did not sensibly affect the other sex. Girls still depended, as a rule, on the old methods and channels oflearning; the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic formed the ordinary routine and limit, unless an acquaintance with French, or even with Italian, happened to be added as a special accomplishment. Very occasionally a maiden of studious character was permitted to avail herself of the tutor maintained at home for her brothers, as was the case of the Honourable Mrs. North, a younger daughter of Lord North of Kirtling, who learned Latin and Greek in this manner; and from Margaret Roper to Mrs. Somerville, or indeed in the cases adduced by Ballard in hisMemoirs of Learned Ladies, there were from time to time even in the old days splendid exceptions to the prevailing low level of female culture. But under any circumstances, until the period arrived when ladies were competent to undertake the tuition of ladies, all these matters necessarily devolved, in the first place, on the mother, and finally on a preceptor, who was necessarily a man, and most probably in holy orders. His contribution to the development of character was exceedingly preponderant, and was beyond doubt a most important factor in maintaining and extending the power of theChurch, and indemnifying the clergy for the direct political influence of which the Reformation dispossessed them.
The Ladies’ School or College may be considered a product of the acute political distempers which accompanied the Civil War. Mistress Bathsua Makins, who had been governess to one of the daughters of Charles I.—the Princess Elizabeth—set up, after the fall of the King, an establishment at Putney, to which Evelyn mentions that he paid a visit in company with some ladies on the 17th May 1649; but I find no reference to this institution in Lysons. A similar case existed somewhat later at Highgate; and the admirers of Charles and Mary Lamb, at least, do not require to be told that in the little volume called “Mrs. Leicester’s School,” 1809, there are some interesting hints, both historical and autobiographical, in relation to the old-fashioned seminary at Amwell. But, as a rule, these agents in our later civilisation and social refinement, important as they were, have left behind them few, if any, traces of their existence and management. They bred those who were content to become, in course of time,the wives and mothers of England, and to study the arts of domestic life. In such are centred the strength and glory of the country; but their careers, like “the short and simple annals of the poor,” have escaped literary commemoration.
“A Gentleman of Cambridge,” as he styles himself on the title of an English adaptation of the Abbé d’Ancourt’sLady’s Preceptor, 1743, defines the qualifications then thought necessary and adequate for a young gentlewoman. He does not go beyond a thorough knowledge of English, an acquaintance with French and Italian, a familiarity with arithmetic and accounts, and the mastery of a good handwriting; and yet how few probably reached this moderate standard a century and a half ago—nay, how few reach it now!
In the time of the early Stuarts, the training of girls in English country towns, if it is to be augured from that of the Shakespears at Stratford, even where the parents were in good circumstances and the father a man of literary tastes and occupations, was still extremely primitive and scanty. The poet’s elder daughter,Susanna, seems to have just contrived to write, or rather print, her name; but Judith used a mark, and Mrs. Quiney, whose son became Judith’s husband, did the same.
Both the Quineys and the Shakespears were persons of substance and of local consideration; and in this case, at any rate, the explanation seems to be that such ignorance was usual, and did not prejudicially affect the position and prospects of a gentlewoman.
The institution in England of elementary schools for girls only dates back to the neighbourhood of the Restoration; but the number of establishments long remained, doubtless, very limited, and the scheme of instruction equally narrow. The frontispiece to Anthony Huish’sKey to the Grammar School, 1670, presents us with an interesting interior in the shape of a girls’ school, where the mistress is seated at a desk surrounded by female pupils.
Goldsmith’sPoems for Young Ladies, “Devotional, Moral, and Entertaining,” 1767, partly arose out of Dr. Fordyce’sSermons for Young Women. The editor assures his fair readers that the Muse in this case is not a syren, but a friend;and there is plenty of the religious element in the volume. But there are, on the other hand, extracts from Pope’sHomer, stories from Ovid and Virgil, Addison’sLetter from Italy, and a selection from Collins’sOriental Eclogues. The source from which it came was a guarantee that its pages would be agreeably and sensibly leavened with matters not divine; it surpasses the average intellectual nutriment provided for women a century ago. Dr. Goldsmith was a decided improvement on Dr. Watts, and he could scarcely escape from being so, whether he offered them his own poetical compositions, or, as in the present case, merely exercised his judgment in selecting from the works of others. No one can object to Pope’sMessiahor hisUniversal Prayer, which constitute the prominent features in the devotional section, when they are in such excellent company as Gay, Swift, and Thomson. But there is nothing in this volume to have prevented the editor offering a copy to either of the vicar’s daughters.
The universal and unchanging aim of the ecclesiastical authority is manifestly temporal, and Henry VIII. and his coadjutors, and theirimmediate successors in the foundation of Protestantism, acted wisely in making it part of their scheme to furnish the realm with public seminaries based on an improved footing in the earliest endowed grammar schools, which set the example to private individuals and corporate bodies.
These schools, which, as we know, had been preceded—and doubtless suggested too—by that at Magdalen College, Oxford, and others framed on a humbler scale or (like the City of London and St. Paul’s) under different auspices, opened the way to a partial secularisation of teaching throughout England. The preceptors employed were more often than not academical, unbeneficed graduates with a certain clerical bent; but the Statutes laid down rules for the management of the Charity and for the limitation of the subjects to be taught; and the scheme was assuredly at the outset, and continued down to the last thirty or forty years—in fact, within the recollection of the present writer—so narrow and imperfect, that it supplied what would now be regarded as the mere groundwork of a genteel education.
III. But a farther and still more important step toward the emancipation of scholastic economy and discipline from Church control was taken when, first in Scotland, and subsequently, and also in a more limited degree, in England, after the union of the kingdoms, proprietary establishments were opened for boys or girls only, or for boys and girls, where the religious instruction, instead of being, as under the archaic conventual and Romish system, the primary feature, became a mere item on the prospectus, like Geography or History. This was the commencement of an entrance upon modern lines, and struck a fatal blow at the monastic and academical ideas of instruction, by widening the bias and range of studies, and liberating the intellect from religious trammels.
The success and multiplication of these new institutions obliged the old endowments to reform themselves, and to meet the demands of the age; and the pressure was augmented, of course, by the concurrent rise of large public gymnasia of a novel stamp, as well as by the development of some of the already existinginstitutions conformably to the great changes in political and social life.
The proprietary system, which had started by adopting, as a rule, the mixed method, or rather by the reception of pupils of both sexes under the same roof, was eventually, and, except so far as dame-schools were concerned, finally modified in favour of the dual plan, and independent colleges for young gentlemen and for young ladies were the result.
In these latter the drift is certainly more and more lay; and as knowledge and culture spread, and the influence and fruits of masculine thought make themselves more and more appreciable, the Church in England will gradually loosen its grasp of the national intellect, and will probably owe to the higher education of women its collapse and downfall.
The ladies of England have propped up the tottering edifice long enough, and no one whose opinion is worth entertaining will lament the inevitable issue. But whether the consequences of this vital movement will be otherwise beneficial, it has scarcely yet, perhaps, been in active operation a sufficient time to enableus to judge. If it involves the sacrifice in any important measure of feminine refinement and dependence, we shall be forced to confess that the help to be rendered by our daughters and grand-daughters to the cause of intellectual enfranchisement and victory will have been bought at a cruel price.
As the old foundations discovered it to be imperative to comply with the growing philosophical temper in order to enable them to exist side by side with the improved types of school and teacher, so the successful conduct of ladies’ colleges will become impossible in the future unless that liberality of doctrine and sentiment in all matters connected with theology which breathes around them and us is cordially recognised.
A spirit of disaffection to clerical guidance and clerical imposts has for some time shown itself in Great Britain among those who are becoming, in the natural course of events, husbands, fathers, and ratepayers; the revolt of the other sex has also commenced; and the wise initiative of the Board School in excluding the Bible and Catechism from theirprogramme must be ultimately obeyed by every school in the three kingdoms.
The Bible is for scholars, not for school-folk; and, as Jeremy Bentham demonstrated nearly a century ago, the Catechism is trash.