Education, Travel and the 'Civilisation' of the Victorian Working Classes

Michele M. Strong

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137338082
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

Examining four major institutions, Michele Strong considers the experiences of working men and women, particularly artisans, but also young apprentices and clerks, who travelled abroad as participants in an educational reform movement spearheaded by middle-class liberals.

1

“A True Agent of Civilisation”: Travel and the “Educational Idea,” 1841–1861

The Continental tourist obtains something more than mere pleasure. He procures increased health and information. To him the world is no longer a sealed book [for] never before did the British people know so much about the early and modern history of their neighbours across the channel. … In this increasing familiarity of the British people with the nations of the Continent are to be detected the germs of results far grander, far more powerful, than even statesmen or philosophers have yet ventured to dream of. People are gaining experience and wisdom, and with these will come a day of better things. There is nothing like travel to remove the strong crust of prejudice which hardens around poor human nature. It expands the mind and teaches people to be more tolerant in their ideas. No wonder that the old brutal sports of the multitude are fast declining in popularity. When the masses are provided with the proper facilities, they are to be found preferring the romantic marvels of Matlock to a prize-fight, or the art-treasures of Chatsworth to a racing-match. Is not then the excursion system a true agent of civilisation? After all, the cause of social and intellectual progress does owe a little to Cook’s Excursions.¹

Thomas Cook, the nineteenth-century founder of the global travel agency, Thomas Cook & Son, is often celebrated as a pioneer of the modern package tour, an entrepreneur who contributed to the rationalization and democratization of travel by coordinating transport, food, and lodging before the era of nationalized railways or chain motels. Yet, as the quotation above illustrates, Cook also viewed himself as a cultural ambassador between Britain and the world, and between Britain’s past and its future. Working for “the cause of social and intellectual progress,” Cook’s excursions not only helped ordinary Britons become cosmopolites by introducing them to their continental “neighbours,” but they helped “the masses” discard the vulgar leisure attractions of a bygone era for more “elevating” pursuits such as trips to scenic sites, country estates, and art galleries.

Over the course of his career, Cook maintained these themes in sundry pamphlets that advertised his tours, offering potential excursionists the means of travel and promising that positive results would arise from the experience. In so doing, Cook contributed to an emerging discourse about culture and its utility that was allied with the “educational idea.” A feature of the Victorian climate of utilitarian reform, the “educational idea” was linked to the “statistical idea” of liberal governance in which members of civil society and state officials assembled “facts” in order to educate and regulate the populace using sound scientific knowledge. Thus the educational idea gave direction and coherence to seemingly diverse projects. These included public lending libraries, museums, savings banks, and even municipal sewage systems (the “sanitary idea”) that taught the “poorer population” the qualities of respectability, sobriety, thrift, and hygiene, qualities that promised to bring them within the pale of civilization.² Invested with these educational properties, travel also became an instrument of public instruction.

Cook’s excursions (along with the tours of other early travel entrepreneurs) should be counted among these educational projects in applying a utilitarian rationale to culture as a public resource. Travel organizers not only infused excursions with a moral purpose, but they developed technologies that permitted travel’s benefits to be distributed through the general population. Within this reformist climate of proliferating ideas, modern travel practices – or, the technologies that put travel (the travel “idea”) into motion – emerged as innovative pedagogical tools for individual and national improvement.

This chapter reconstructs the climate of educational reform and the ethos of improvement that will lead to the tour of over 3000 working men to the 1867 Paris exhibition. A colossal event that required the resources of civil society and the state to realize – Cook, prominent men in civil society, state bureaucrats, and working people, each had a role to play in making the Workingmen’s Paris Exhibition Tours come to pass. Ultimately, their actions contributed to the formation of educational travel as a form of power that served different interests, from the state’s effort to regulate the population to labor leaders’ struggle for inclusion in the civic and political life of the nation. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to explain how the largest mass tour of British workers to the continent became invested with an educational and moral imperative and the different meanings it assumed as a “true agent of civilisation.”

From “Pests” to “Citizens”: Education, Rational Recreation, and Liberal Governance

Steam and steel – the twin pillars of modern industrial progress – helped give rise to nineteenth-century mass travel, with steamboat voyages across the Channel in the 1820s, and passenger rail service a decade later. However, for labor leaders, reformers, and eventually the state, these engines of change also signaled the human and governmental costs of industrialization, costs that called into question the welfare and governance of an expanding and increasingly impoverished and alienated urban proletariat. Responses to these problems varied. Many urban workers addressed the question of industrialization in the 1830s and 1840s through Chartism, a series of protest movements that sought, with either “physical” or “moral” force, to eradicate economic hardship, political disenfranchisement, and social inequality. Middle-class reformers and government bureaucrats took a different approach to the welfare crisis of industrialization. They conducted statistical inquiries that identified and quantified social problems, and they legislated solutions, such as the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and the 1835 Municipal Reform Act, which would make the population knowable, manageable, and productive. They had thus begun collecting the bricks and mortar that would constitute, in Michel Foucault’s terms, the “carceral city.”

As Foucault writes in describing the mechanisms of modern social governance, reformers assembled a “multiple network of diverse elements – walls, space, institution, rules, discourse” that were “intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort – but which all tend[ed], like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization.”³ These “elements” included culture, which in the form of education and recreation became a means for the governance of extended populations. As such, reformers’ views on culture’s utility as a governmental technology deserve some scrutiny, for they influenced how travel – on steamboats and passengers trains – could be used to improve Britain’s increasingly industrialized society. In their hands, organized working-class travel, like mass education, would require trained guides and specially constructed environments to get the most educational value out of the travel experience and to effectively transform the urban working poor into productive citizens.

Drawing on Foucault, scholars stress the ambition of British reformers and the state to manage urban populations by guiding individuals into becoming self-regulating citizens.⁴ Education venues became the primary site for achieving this objective. Ian Hunter argues that the modern school system emerged in the late nineteenth century as a “hybrid of two radically autonomous ‘technologies of existence.’” The first was an “apparatus of government that sought the social transformation of the citizenry in accordance with the objectives of the state.” The second was a “system of pastoral discipline that operated by inculcating the means of ethical self-reflection and self-cultivation.”⁵ In one example, Hunter explains this duality with regard to the Scottish reformer, David Stow, and the historical formation of the “playground.” An important early proponent of national education to better control the poor, Stow was appalled by the criminality and immorality that he confronted each day in walking through Glasgow’s polluted and densely populated Saltmarket district. Determined to rescue a few Saltmarket children “for whose souls and bodies no one seemed to care,” Stow founded a popular school in which such “pests to society” would learn to behave themselves as moral beings.⁶ In observing these specimens of urban squalor and vice, Stow determined that their regulation required a purpose-built environment, one that included a playground where children would learn how to conduct themselves within a “free” space. While simulating the freedom pauper children experienced on the streets, the playground contained one crucial difference: specially trained teachers in pastoral governance, professional educators who would “incorporate the sympathetic demeanors of both the spiritual guide and the caring parent” to help steer (rather than coerce) their pupils into using freedom to make principled behavioral choices in any circumstances and conditions. Under the teachers’ supervision, therefore, children’s natural exuberance could be gently tamed and channeled into moral behavior.

Building on this concept, Stow’s disciple, Samuel Wilderspin, recommended that playgrounds include fruit trees as a way of “appeal[ing] to the child’s judgment.” Wilderspin argued before the Select Committee on the Education of the Poorer Classes in the 1830s that:

The child moves in a society of trained beings [the teacher and other children], and the next time he stops and looks at a fine cherry he looks about to see whether there is anybody within view. Doubtless he is restrained from taking the cherry by fear, but in process of time, by moving among restrained playfellows, he has that command over himself which enables him to resist temptation.⁷

This conceptual and pedagogical shift from coercion to conscience appealed to reform-minded, utilitarian bureaucrats. James Kay-Shuttleworth, a Poor Law Commissioner and first secretary to the committee of the privy council on education in 1839, endorsed these tactics, regarding such early ethical training as cost-effective means for securing state interests. Impressed with the new “sympathetic” role devised for school teachers who, in the eyes of their pupils, would be seen as kind friends rather than coercive tyrants, Kay-Shuttleworth argued that these methods could be expected to produce social and political contentment, empty out workhouses and prisons, and maximize the state’s human resources by nurturing productive, healthy, and, crucially, self-regulating citizens.⁸

Despite these early forays into disciplinary power at pauper schools, it would take three decades of subsequent parliamentary inquiries to establish national elementary schools based on this logic. In the meantime, however, reformers tackled the equally important question of adult education. If reformers felt that indigent children required expert guidance and special play environments to become self-regulating citizens, they believed that their parents were equally in need of instruction. Yet, devising environments for the social training of adults posed a special set of problems if reformers expected to maintain Britain’s liberal ethos of individual freedom and minimal government intervention. Compulsory adult education was out of the question except, perhaps, in the final instance when punishment concluded the disciplinary life cycle behind prison walls.⁹ Reformers approached this dilemma, therefore, by looking at culture in new ways that allowed the state, assisted by civil society, to govern at a distance through culturally elevating activities. Museums, libraries, and galleries – sites of “rational recreation” – provided the means by which working people would voluntarily and pleasurably learn to regulate themselves, often guided by unobtrusive pastoral agents, just as their children learned their lessons from sympathetic teachers and the school playground.

The middle classes had originally constructed the ideology of rational recreation with a concern for their own self-betterment. Peter Bailey writes that early in the century, the middle classes confronted the “process of developing a new culture within the unique matrix of a maturing urban industrial society,” in which recreation played a significant part in their daily lives and identities. This process was particularly evident by the mid-Victorian period, when economic affluence matched a proliferation of new goods and services, and the leisure time to enjoy them.¹⁰ At issue, however, was that “in a work-oriented value system leisure represented the irresponsible preoccupations of a parasitic ruling class or the reckless carousing of an irrational working class.”¹¹ Moralists resolved this tension with the ideology of rational recreation, a concept and practice that managed to reconcile work and leisure.

Steeped in the work ethic that had made them prosperous yet uncomfortable with the very concept of a holiday, middle-class Victorians viewed rational recreation as a justification for productive, improving play. In this line of thinking, enjoyment and relaxation were understood as necessary companions to work, as they restored the mind and body for even greater exertions. Phrased another way, “work and play were antithetical in form only; in purpose they were part of a single natural process in which work was sovereign.”¹² What mattered most, then, was how and where leisure time was expended. Quiet employment at home with book or needle, restful days spent at holiday health spas, and self-improvement at literary and scientific clubs became acceptable mediums for productive leisure. And what was good for the middle classes was good – even an imperative – for the working classes.

In seeking to establish liberal governance, reformers assessed the utility of culture to achieving this goal, particularly its deployment among the working classes through diverse forms of rational recreation. Tony Bennett’s analyses of government and culture, for example, show how reformers throughout the Victorian era applied a utilitarian calculus to culture in determining its positive civilizing effects. This eventually led to the bureaucratization of culture in the establishment of public libraries, galleries, museums, and exhibitions in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹³ These “set of educative and civilizing agencies,” as Bennett remarks in his influential study of the “exhibitionary complex,” were crucial to modern state formation.¹⁴ An important champion of culture and its governmental utility was the brilliant and energetic civil servant, Henry Cole. Bennett lists Cole’s influence in a number of capacities. As a member of the Society of Arts, Cole was the “architect” of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the “founder” of the South Kensington Museum, and the first “effective” head of the Department of Art and Science. Through such agencies, Cole envisioned a positive role for government in society by virtue of its “multiplying the circuits” in which ordinary people would have access to culture and its benefits. Indeed, Cole’s vision extended to all of Britain, not just the metropolitan center. Thus, Cole wanted objets d’art housed in London museums to circulate in provincial museums, further multiplying their civilizing effects. The passing of the Museum Bill of 1845 and the Libraries Act of 1850, which enabled town councils to construct public institutions for the “instruction and amusement” of their citizens, demonstrate how persuasive the discourses surrounding rational recreation and the utility of culture had become, although such programs would still require ideological support to maintain their viability late in the century.¹⁵

Justifying government expenditure on these agencies of civilization, reformers insisted that they would more than pay for themselves, just as Kay-Shuttleworth had argued in promoting his concept of the elementary school. Even as late as the 1880s, as Bennett explains, these arguments persisted. The political economist, William Stanley Jevons observed, in a discussion of public libraries, that such investments would:

Not only [be] repaid many times over by the multiplication of utility of the books, newspapers, and magazines on which it is expended, but it is likely … to come back fully in the reduction of poor-rates and Government expenditure on crime. We are fully warranted in looking upon Free Libraries as an engine for operating upon the poorer portions of the population.¹⁶

Jevons, like earlier reformers, clearly articulated the relevance of culture in social reform projects from a standpoint that considered both the moral and fiscal outcomes of public institutions, and regarded it as a power, an “engine,” in which to develop the population’s “capacities.”¹⁷ Viewing culture as a powerful governmental resource to effect social change and the inner transformation of individuals, Jevons and his ideological forebears hoped to transform the idle poor into an industrious poor by turning to the “exhibitionary complex,” the links between museum, library, art gallery, and exhibition, rather than to the workhouse or prison alone, to create governable populations.¹⁸ Thus, while the middle class originally developed the ideology and practices of rational recreation in defining their identity in opposition to the ruling and working classes, their concerns over the growth of unregulated urban masses made opening culture to working people a necessity, inspiring new techniques of liberal governance.¹⁹

This, then, was the context of the educational idea, which would intersect with travel, becoming, for people like Cook, the “travel idea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Grand Tours and Workers’ Tours: Rethinking Victorian Travel and Education
• 1 “A True Agent of Civilisation”: Travel and the “Educational Idea,” 1841–1861
• 2 Turning the Educational Idea on Its Head: The Lib–Lab Alliance and the Organization of the Working Men’s 1867 Exhibition Tours
• 3 “The Lessons of Paris”: The 1867 Working Men’s Exhibition Tours and the Artisan Imagination
• 4 “High Attainments”: The Artisan Exhibition Tours and the Campaign for Technical Education, 1867–1889
• 5 Class Trips and the Meaning of British Citizenship: The Regent Street Polytechnic at Home and Abroad, 1871–1903
• Conclusion: Goody, Gordon, and Shilpa Shetty “Poppadom”: The Politics of Study Abroad from the New Liberalism to New Labour
• Notes
• References
• Index