Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century

W P McCann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135031015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1977, this volume analyzes aspects of elementary schooling in the nineteenth century and the ways in which it prepared working-class children for life in industrial Britain.

The book examines:

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• The procedures and practices of different types of schools.

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• The ideologies guiding elementary education
• The social implications of curriculum content and pupils' and parents' attitudes to the education provided by the church and state.

Chapter 1:

Popular education, socialization and social control: Spitalfields 1812–1824.

Phillip McCann

The vulgar are the subjects of phaenomena, the learned explain them.

William Wilberforce

On 28 March 1819, the Rev. Daniel Wilson, a rising star in the Evangelical party, preached a sermon on behalf of the new Spitalfields National School to a congregation of two thousand in Hawksmoor's lofty Christ Church, a few yards from the house in which he had been born. Wilson took as his theme the importance of the instruction of the children of the poor in the doctrines of the Bible; a knowledge of the Scriptures, he pointed out, not only made children ‘wise unto salvation’ but also equipped them, should they find in their homes ‘prophaneness, irreligion, violation of the Sabbath, evil passions or discontent’, to lead their parents into better ways. The religious education of the poor was thus of great social importance:

In every country, but especially in this free state, the mass of your Poor, like the base of the cone, if it be unsteady and insecure, will quickly endanger every superincumbent part. Religious education, then, is the spring of public tranquillity. It not only cherishes the interior principle of conscience; but by infusing the higher sentiments of penitence and faith and gratitude and the love of God, communicates the elements of a cheerful and uniform subjection to all lawful authority.¹

Wilson spoke with a frankness that would be unacceptable today, but the sentiments were a commonplace of both Anglican and Dissenting thought in the early nineteenth century; their significance lies in their application to Spitalfields, the centre of the silk weaving industry, where nearly all the social problems which accompanied the birth of popular education, and left their imprint upon it, were concentrated: a high and increasing density of population, great numbers of ‘the poor’, economic distress, a high incidence of juvenile delinquency, and a decline in allegiance to the Church. But in Spitalfields, in the period under review, the establishment of schools was part of a large-scale programme of the charitable provision of food, clothing and money and the distribution of Bibles and tracts, undertaken by the largely Evangelical and Dissenting upper and middle class with the aim of controlling the populace in the interests of social and economic stability. A study of Spitalfields at this date thus throws into relief one of the most important aspects of the early history of popular education – its function as a means of countering social change and as an agent of the socialization of the children of the poor for life in a stratified, exploitative industrial society.

Spitalfields was the name given to the densely populated and overcrowded mass of narrow streets and small houses to the north-east of the City beyond Bishopsgate, with the modern Petticoat Lane market forming more or less its south-west boundary; more precisely it consisted of the parishes of Christ Church Spitalfields and St Matthew Bethnal Green, the ‘hamlet’ of Mile End New Town and the ‘liberties’ of Norton Folgate and the Old Artillery Ground, which abutted the western border of Christ Church.² Spitalfields had been the centre of the silk weaving industry since the seventeenth century when the Huguenot weavers had settled there following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

In the early nineteenth century it was one of the fastest growing districts in the metropolis. Between 1811 and 1831 the population soared from 59,000 to 90,000, most of the increase taking place in Bethnal Green. It was also one of the poorest. Per capita taxable income of the Tower Division, of which Spitalfields was a part, was only £5, compared with £16 for Westminster and £54 for the City of London.³ Spitalfields and the poor, in fact, were almost interchangeable terms; ‘we had a greater number of poor people congregating together .. . than in the same given space in any part of the British Empire’, declared William Hale, silk manufacturer, in 1828, looking back on over twenty years of public work in Christ Church parish.⁴ In 1813, no less than 67 per cent of the population, according to Schwarz's study of East End occupations and incomes, were manual workers; of these, only 10 per cent were skilled, the remainder semi-or unskilled. Six out of ten workers earned less than 40s. per week, the lowest fifth less than 20s.⁵ Hours were long; the chimes of Christ Church called people to work at 6 a.m., where they remained until the bells tolled the curfew at 8 p.m.⁶ Houses were small and badly built, without proper foundations or sewerage, and open drains were common, making the district notorious for fevers.⁷

The periodic incidence of economic distress and unemployment, notably in 1800–1, 1811–12 and 1816–17, combined with a population increase of some 25 per cent per decade, much of it by immigration of the poor, had gradually worsened conditions. Between 1800 and 1817 the number of inmates of the workhouse in Spitalfields parish had nearly doubled and the number receiving outdoor relief quadrupled, though the population had risen by only 20 per cent. In the latter year, 3,000 people were wholly or partly maintained from the poor rate, receiving only 5s. per week in relief.⁸ In the dreaded workhouse the inmates could expect only poor food, menial labour and sleeping four or more to a bed.⁹ life for the majority of the population was hard, brutal and often violent. Literacy among the poor stood at something like 60 per cent.¹⁰ The public house, the skittle alley and the occasional fair formed the main diversions, and the hunting of bullocks through the streets was popular until the mid-1820s.¹¹ The quality of life was not improved by the presence of a criminal population, attracted to the area by the cheap accommodation, though it confined its operations largely to the wealthier districts to the west; few people in Spitalfields, it was pointed out, had anything worth stealing.¹²

In this environment the children of Spitalfields grew up. The socialization of the children of the weavers, however, was somewhat different from that of the rest of the population. In 1813 the weavers formed 26 per cent of the labouring population, a decline from the figure of 55 per cent in 1770.¹³ Their earnings, except for those of the quarter engaged on fancy or figured work, were not high, averaging some 17s. per week.¹⁴ But weaving was a domestic industry and most weavers owned their own means of production, the loom; they were able to work at their own pace, free from the discipline of the factory and to associate with their families throughout the day. Most of their children were brought up in the trade and received what education they had from their parents. At six or seven years of age the children would be set to quill silk, at nine or ten to pick silk and at about thirteen or so would be introduced to the loom, learning to weave plain fabrics. Children would be fairly constantly under the eye of the mother and father from birth to adolescence, learning by doing, by example rather than precept,¹⁵ and weavers on the whole were said to be ‘remarkably attached’ to them, taking great ‘pains and patience’ in teaching them the trade.¹⁶ Weavers’ daughters were reputed to have a love of finery in dress and to know little of needlework, cooking, or other housewifely accomplishments, apparently on the presumption that skill at the loom would be more advantageous to a weaver husband.¹⁷ William Bresson, a velvet weaver and loom broker, was exceptional in having his son taught the violin and his daughter the piano.¹⁸ The domestic atmosphere was considered to be more favourable to morality, both for weavers’ children and apprentices, than that of other trades in which there was opportunity in a common workshop for contact with ‘idle and dissolute companions’.¹⁹ Nevertheless, however benign the regimen and however superior the environment of the home might be to that of a factory, the fact remained that the early age at which they started work robbed the weavers’ children of their youth and stunted their intellectual development.

The greatest difference between the upbringing of the children of workers in other trades and those of the weavers was that the children of the former did not see much of their parents. According to Samuel Wilderspin, master of Spitalfields Infant School in the early 1820s, the father in many cases had to get up before the children were awake to go to work in the City,²⁰ and often did not return until they were in bed at night. Among the poorer and unskilled labourers the mother had also to work to make ends meet; girl child-minders were sometimes employed, but as these often came from families poorer still and were totally uneducated, they passed on to their charges, in Wilderspin's words, ‘deceit, lying, pilfering, and extreme filthiness’. This forced neglect of children – and many poor parents were unable to take care of their children, however well-disposed they might be – had serious consequences. Left in garrets three or four stories high, they often burned themselves in fires or fell out of windows and downstairs. If, as often happened, they roamed the streets or nearby fields, they were run over by coaches or fell into ponds. The possibility of such accidents to their children, Wilderspin noticed, was a ‘dead weight of concern’ to parents, whose work was often affected by their anxiety. In addition to these hazards, poverty, overcrowding, poor food and lack of medical services led them to succumb in large numbers to measles, whooping cough, smallpox and various kinds of fever.²¹ For labourers’ children, menial work outside the home was common, particularly for girls, who we...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Editor’s Introduction
• 1 Popular education, socialization and social control: Spitalfields 1812–1824
• 2 Patterns of attendance and their social significance: Mitcham National School 1830–1839
• 3 Socialization and rational schooling: elementary education in Leeds before 1870
• 4 The content of education and the socialization of the working-class child 1830–1860
• 5 Socialization and social science: Manchester Model Secular School 1854–1861
• 6 Ideology and the factory child: attitudes to half-time education
• 7 Drill, discipline and the elementary school ethos
• 8 Social environment, school attendance and educational achievement in a Merseyside town 1870–1900
• 9 Socialization and the London School Board 1870–1904: aims, methods and public opinion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index