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Friday 4 February 2011

University education 1800-1870

These were not glorious years for the ‘ancient’ universities. Cambridge[1] and Oxford[2] reposed in a social and curricular inertia that limited their value to society.[3] Their intake was socially remarkably stable and narrow: between 1752 and 1886, 51% of Oxford students and 58% of those at Cambridge came from two social groups, the gentry and the clergy. The future careers were even narrower: 64% of Oxford and 54% of Cambridge men went into the Church. The student body was limited by its connection with the Church of England and the requirement at both universities that graduates should subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles excluded Nonconformists. They were thus isolated from the new potential clientele of Nonconformist business families enriched by industrialisation. High costs, a course could cost over £300 per year also limited the social composition of courses. Oxford became socially exclusive in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. As a result many people needed scholarships, the bulk of which were in classics and mathematics. This had an impact of the school curriculum and led to a focus on and perpetuation of classical education in grammar and public schools. The provision of fellowships also had a similar effect. Most fellowships were tied to classics at Oxford and mathematics at Cambridge. In this way the whole financial scholarship-fellowship system locked the older subjects into the ancient universities.

This was also tied into the power struggle within the institutions between the university and the colleges. At Oxford and Cambridge the colleges were powerful and wealthy and the universities relatively weak as financial and administrative entities. This suited colleges that ran like private companies. They were aware the classics and mathematics were very cheap subjects to teach and did not entail research or expensive equipment or even rapidly growing libraries. The colleges were not only conservative about new subjects for financial reasons; they also feared a tilting of the balance of power in favour of the universities. More university power as, for example, in the building of common science laboratories, meant less college autonomy. Curricular conservatism was rooted in a defence of a private financial system and resistance to the growth of centralised power in the university.

What was the function of the university? The debate on the role of universities in society had several dimensions. There was an important argument about research as a function of the university. Advocates of research in the 1860s such as Mark Pattison and Henry Halford Vaughan were influenced by German universities and accepted the discovery of new knowledge as part of their obligations.[4] They wished to move Oxford and Cambridge away from being merely advanced public schools towards a more liberal education with more money on research on the sciences, history and archaeology. This viewpoint inevitably involved a clash with the established college position. The financial provision of scholarships and fellowships outside the classics and mathematics brought conflict with the curricular conservatism in college-based anti-research teaching. Until some changes were made to the autonomy of the colleges there could be no change in teaching and the colleges would continue to exert a stranglehold not just over university but also the schools that aimed to send their boys to Oxford or Cambridge.

Curriculum conservatism was defended as a positive virtue in a lively debate about ‘liberal education’ in relation to universities. This was an important argument against those who attacked the classics as a patently useless form of study on crudely utilitarian grounds. This argument had two basic propositions. There is a distinction between ends and means. Some activities and qualities are ends in themselves and cannot be justified by reference to some ends beyond themselves. This is the essence of the ‘education for its own sake’ case. As well as being ‘an end in itself’, the study of the classics fitted a man for no particular occupation thereby fitting him for all. This was a belief that was to become very influential in the 1850s when the general intellectual training given by classics was regarded as the most suitable for civil service recruitment through public examinations. The culmination of the old liberal education ideal was expressed by John Henry Newman in his Discourses on University Education that he gave in Dublin in 1852.[5] Liberal education made the gentlemen and was ‘the especial characteristic or property of a University and of a gentleman’. The end result of such education was ‘a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid equitable dispassionate mind’.[6] The purpose was not vocational training but the general development of the intellect and of moral and social qualities for their own sake. This expressed what the ancient universities thought about themselves and what many others conceived the purpose of a university education to be.[7]

From 1850, the ancient universities began a limited reform. Following Royal Commissions for both universities in 1852, an Act for Oxford in 1854 and for Cambridge two years later enabled Nonconformists both to matriculate and to graduate. This solved one problem but created another for graduated Nonconformists were still barred from becoming fellows of colleges throughout the 1860s and were not finally removed until the Universities‘ Religious Tests Act 1871, that also obviated the need for fellows to be ordained clergymen. There was also some curricular innovation. In 1848, Cambridge established new tripos in Natural Sciences and in Moral Sciences that included history and law. In Oxford two years later, the Schools of Law and Modern history and of Natural Sciences were established. Since both universities now claimed to teach science to degree level they both built laboratories: the Oxford Museum in 1855 and the New Museum at Cambridge in 1865. The watershed for Oxford and Cambridge came after 1870 with the Cleveland Commission of 1873 leading to the Act of 1877 and the revision of the statutes of colleges. The latter were obliged to release some of their funds for the creation of scientific professorships and university institutions. Only then, with this rebalancing of power between colleges and the universities was it possible to create an Oxford and Cambridge more oriented to research in science and scholarship, professional training, a widening curriculum and a strong professoriat.

Oxford and Cambridge had considerable defects that were only beginning to be resolved in the 1850s and 1860s but there was no effective civic university movement that could serve as an alternative. The Church of England had founded Durham University in 1832 but it became virtually a clergy training college with 90% of its students going into Holy Orders.[8] By trying to ape Oxford without having the latter’s resources it had very little success either with poor students or in the eyes of local industrialists who rejected it in favour of Newcastle as a centre of urgently needed mining education. Owens College, Manchester, fared little better. It began in 1851 with £100,000 left by John Owen, a local textile manufacturer. Yet its intention was not as a technological university to serve industry but a college to give ‘instruction in the branches of learning and science taught in the English universities‘. It was to be the Oxford of the north! The Manchester business classes were unimpressed and it was not until the 1870s when it acquired a new sense of purpose in service to industry that it began to take its place in the forefront of the civic universities movement.[9] A more vital root of the future civic universities lay in the emergence of provincial medical schools. The Apothecaries’ Act 1815 made it illegal to practise as an apothecary unless licensed by the Society of Apothecaries. This stimulated the creation of medical schools to prepare students for the examinations and, from 1831, those of the Royal College of Surgeons. Schools were founded in Manchester (1825), Sheffield (1827), Birmingham (1828), Bristol (1828), Leeds (1830), Liverpool (1834) and Newcastle (1834). Both Durham and Owens before 1870 were abortive provincial initiatives stifled by the ancient universities and channelled into the dead end of being deferential and unsuccessful imitations rather than challenging alternatives. The medical schools, by contrast, provided one of the strands out of which civic universities were to emerge after 1870.

The origins of the University of London, by contrast, were rooted in an open antipathy to the ancient universities and not with any concern to reproduce them.[10] Founded in 1828, it differed from existing institutions in three respects: first, it was free of religious tests and open to nonconformists and unbelievers; secondly, it was to be cheaper than the ancient universities to cater for ‘middling rich people’; and finally, there was a strong emphasis on professional training in the medical, legal, engineering and economic studies neglected at Oxford and Cambridge. It was to be useful and vocational. The Church of England did not regard the creation of the new University College in ‘Godless Gower Street’ with kindness and established their own rival King’s College in 1828 as an exclusively Anglican institution but also with a focus on vocational training. From 1836, the University of London became the body managing examinations and degrees for its now constituent colleges, University and King’s. From 1858, it became the examining body dealing not only with London institutions but providing external examinations for all comers. The chief criticism levelled at universities in this period was that their neglect of science meant they could contribute little to the needs of industrialisation. Oxford and Cambridge produced clergy, gentlemen and, after 1850, civil servants. They did not appeal to the commercial classes or to the new professions; nor did Durham and Manchester before 1870. Only the London colleges thrived on a close linkage with the new business and professional classes. Nor did the university sector keep up with rising population and during the decade between 1855 and 1865 only one in 77,000 went to university. Higher education was still accessible to only a small minority.


[1] Searby, Peter, A history of the University of Cambridge: Vol. 3: 1750-1870, (Cambridge University Press), 1997 and Brooke, C.N.L., A history of the university of Cambridge: Vol. 4: 1870-1990, (Cambridge University Press), 1992.

[2] Brock, M.G. and Curthoys, Mark C., (eds.), The history of the University of Oxford, Vol. 6: Nineteenth-century Oxford, part I, (Oxford University Press), 1997 and The history of the University of Oxford, Vol. 7: Nineteenth-century Oxford, part 2, (Oxford University Press), 2000.

[3] Anderson, R.D., Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800, (Macmillan), 1992, (Cambridge University Press), 1995 is a very useful, short summary of current research on the role of universities in nineteenth century society.

[4] See, Pattison, Mark, Suggestions on academical organisation with especial reference to Oxford, (Edmonston and Douglas), 1868, Sparrow, John, Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University, (Cambridge University Press), 1967, 2008, Jones, H. Stuart, Bill, Intellect and character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the invention of the don, (Cambridge University Press), 2007, E.G.W., University reform in nineteenth-century Oxford: a study of Henry Halford Vaughan, 1811-1885, (Oxford University Press), 1973

[5] Newman, J.H., Discourses on the scope and nature of university education: addressed to the Catholics of Dublin, (James Duffy), 1852.

[6] Newman, J.H., The idea of a university: defined and illustrated : I, in nine discourses delivered to the Catholics of Dublin : II, in occasional lectures and essays addressed to the members of the Catholic University, (Longman), 1891, p. 110

[7] Harvie, Christopher, The lights of liberalism: university liberals and the challenge of democracy, 1860-86, (Allen Lane), 1976.

[8] Watson, Nigel, The Durham difference: the story of Durham University, (James & James), 2007.

[9] Fiddes, Edward, Chapters in the History of Owens College and of Manchester University, 1851-1914, (Manchester University Press), 1937

[10] Harte, N.B. and North, John, The world of University College, London, 1828-1990, (London University Press), 1991 and Harte, N.B., The University of London, 1836-1986: an illustrated history, (Athlone), 1986.

Wednesday 2 February 2011

Educating the middle-classes 1800-1870

Before 1850, no one seriously argued the need for the state to provide schools for middle and upper-class children largely because it was thought the free market was functioning effectively. Certainly it seems there was considerable activity and formal schooling appears to have been becoming the norm for boys. This sense of activity had to remain an impressionistic one and is difficult to quantify.[1] In the early-nineteenth century, families who aimed to raise their sons as gentlemen and who could afford to do so employed tutors to educate their children at home. Home education was though to be more conducive to virtue than the public schools with their low standards of morality and harsh corporal discipline. Rising urban populations and living standards brought an increase in middle-class families able to afford modest fees for private day schooling in their home towns. It was these demands that were to revitalise the grammar schools and subsequently the public boarding schools.

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St Margaret’s School, Durham which was opened in 1861.

Durham University Library, ref Pam L372.9 Dur

Grammar schools responded strongly to demands for middle-class education. Endowed often in the sixteenth century to provide free education for the poor, it was unclear what ‘grammar schools’ were by 1800.[2] Many taught elementary subjects sometimes with classics, took all social classes, included girls and acted simply as the local village or parochial school. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a process of change in three areas. Grammar schools began to change their curriculum, often including commercial subjects alongside the classics. The new curriculum enabled the schools to charge fees. There was a decisive shift to a fee-paying middle-class clientele and away from the poorer former free pupils. [3] The move away from the original charitable intentions of the founders of grammar schools led to several disputes between trustees, who wanted to charge fees, and schoolmasters who did not. The most famous case was between the trustees and schoolmaster at Leeds Grammar School and led to a ten-year case in the Court of Chancery that resulted in Lord Eldon’s judgement in 1805 that grammar schools could not use their endowments to teach non-classical subjects free of charge. The Grammar Schools Act 1840 made it lawful to apply the income of grammar schools to purposes other than the teaching of classical languages, but this change still required the consent of the schoolmaster. Some schools pressed further along the road and turned themselves into boarding schools, Victorian public schools in embryo.[4]

In the mid-nineteenth century, three factors revitalised those grammar schools that had already made the change and those that had not. A new breed of headmaster seemed to appear at this time, of high Victorian moral purpose and strength of personality. Such men often took over ailing or mediocre grammar schools and made them centres of academic excellence: for example, Caldicott at Bristol (1860), Jessopp at Norwich (1859), Mitchinson at Canterbury (1859) and Walker at Manchester (1859).[5] The schools were stimulated by the creation of a system of ‘middle-class’ examinations from the 1850s. T.D. Acland in Exeter started these as a private venture in 1856 but so great was demand that their administration was taken over by Oxford and Cambridge in 1858 and they became known as the Local examinations. For middle-class boys not intending to go to university they were a valuable school-leaving qualification and gave grammar schools something to aim for, and a perception of how they measured up to a common standard. The Higher Locals began at Cambridge in 1868 and at Oxford in 1877. In 1873 the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examining Board was established.

The third factor was the Taunton Commission that investigated some 800 endowed schools between 1864 and 1867.[6] Its investigations revealed the poor provision of secondary education, its uneven distribution and the misuse of endowments. It also showed that there were only thirteen secondary schools for girls in the country. It addressed the problem of middle-class parents who could not afford to send their children to public schools but who wanted a local grammar school offering a curriculum that would provide entry to universities or to the professions for their sons. The Commissioners recommended the establishment of a national system of secondary education based on existing endowed schools. This solution led to the abolition of free education in grammar schools excluding free boys from the lower middle-class, artisan and tradesman classes who had no university or professional ambitions and enable the curriculum to be determined by the market demand of fee-payers. The Endowed Schools Act 1869 established three Commissioners who, by making schemes and regulations for some 3,000 endowments, created throughout the country the middle-class fee-paying academic grammar school.[7] Their defect was in failing to provide for the tradesman-artisan class who had to resort to the new Board Schools created after 1870.

Public schools differed from grammar schools because they catered for the upper and upper-middle-classes and were boarding establishments.[8] The body of Victorian public schools were made up of various groups. There were the ancient nine schools investigated by the Clarendon Commission in the 1860s (Eton,[9] Winchester, Harrow[10], Charterhouse[11], Rugby[12], Westminster[13], Merchant Taylors’,[14] St. Paul’s and Shrewsbury[15]). To these were added certain grammar schools that had changed their status like Sedburgh and Giggleswick.

There were also waves of new foundations: nine in the 1840s (including Rossall, Marlborough and Cheltenham) and ten in the 1860s (including Clifton and Malvern). Most were run as commercial ventures but many had wider purposes: schools at Lancing and Hurstpierpoint promoted high Anglicanism while those at Cranleigh and Framlingham stressed science and agriculture for farmers’ sons. The schools achieved cohesion informally by inter-school games playing and formally by membership of the Headmasters’ Conference that met first in 1869 initially comprising the non-Clarendon public schools.

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Rugby school c1860

Public schools also underwent a process of changing vitality after 1830. Increasing numbers of middle-class children survived infancy and they could no longer conveniently be taught at home. They had to be sent away to school. Improvements in transport facilities, fast road-coaches and then railways, made possible a national market in education. Newly founded schools or old town grammar schools could set out to attract a regional or even national catchment of clients who would reside as boarders. The growing empire meant that many more families lived abroad but for cultural and climatic reasons they preferred their children to be educated in England in institutions that provided a home environment. Public schools were sought by newly prospering social groups who wished to confirm their status by assimilation with existing landed and professional elites. Thomas Arnold‘s reforms at Rugby and the spread of his masters into other schools raised the moral tone of public schools making them attractive to those who cared for their children’s nurture and who had shunned the violence and neglect of welfare that characterised many public schools before 1830.

Important changes took place in the content of education in public schools. Science was accepted into the curriculum, especially in the 1860s. Various factors changed this situation: the introduction of science degrees in the 1850s; army reforms of the 1850s that placed an emphasis on competitive examining including two papers in science helped by the increase in the numbers of graduate science masters; and a new generation of headmasters with particular interests in science: for example, H.M. Butler and F.W. Farrer at Harrow and Frederick Temple at Rugby. Almost as important as change in the formal curriculum was a change in the value systems of the public schools.

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Thomas Arnold

Thomas Arnold raised the tone of the schools from the 1820s with ‘godliness and good learning’ with the aim of producing the Christian Gentleman.[16] From the 1850s, these ideals came to be replaced by a more secular and robust emphasis on manliness and character training. ‘Muscular Christianity‘, as advocated by Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, equated virile good health with Christian values and in the 1860s was expressed in a concern for organised games, athleticism and militarism.[17] Arnold had effected a change in the ethos of public schools and the changes of the 1860s matched them with secular needs outside.

These developments made public schools highly attractive to social groups of parents somewhat below the traditional clientele and there was a marked change in the social intake of such schools after 1850. In the first half of the century, the social class of parents at eight leading public schools showed that the gentry provided 38.1% of boys, titled persons 12.2%, clergy 12.0% and professional parents 5.2%. There was an expected and large predominance of the rural elites of gentry, titled and clerical families. From the 1850s, there is clear evidence of the rise of business families beginning to send their sons to Winchester and as more businessmen’s sons went to these schools so in turn more public school boys went into careers in business and industry. At Winchester this rose from 7.2% of boys born in the 1820s to 17.6% of those born in the 1850s. These upward trends in businessmen sending their sons to public school and in public schoolboys entering business were to be of great importance. There was a link between class, public school, education and business leadership in the larger companies from the 1860s. An extended public school network gradually replaced the older Nonconformist network that had characterised the early industrial entrepreneurs.

The strong expansion of middle-class education both in grammar and public schools after 1830 was a response to the demands for education from parents. The Royal Commission under Lord Clarendon, established in 1859, looked at the nine ‘ancient institutions’ that still focussed on the classics and which found themselves facing stiff competition from newer and more progressive institutions. Clarendon was concerned that these newer schools were giving the middle-classes a better education that the upper-classes did not have and that this was socially dangerous. The problem of the decaying grammar schools led the government to concede another Royal Commission in 1864, under Lord Taunton, to look at all schools not looked at by either Clarendon or Newcastle.[18] The two Commissions took as a given the stratification of schooling for the middle-classes as it had developed in the first half of the century and formalised it into a hierarchy. At the top were the ‘first grade schools’ modelled on Eton and its eight correspondents, mostly boarding, with a classical education, sending boys to universities. Next came the ‘second grade schools’, mostly day, teaching a Latin but no Greek, whose boys would leave at sixteen. Finally there were ‘third grade schools’, all day, teaching a little Latin, sending boys into employment at fourteen. The three grades were conceived as parallel, separate tracks, only the common study of Latin allowing mobility via scholarships from one track to another for the very bright. The Public Schools Act of 1868 and the Endowed Schools Act the following year greatly helped the process.

The three-grade division proved over elaborate. However, an increasingly clear distinction emerged between schools for gentlemen and schools for those who aimed at respectability not gentility. The problem was not the grading but the opportunities open to the educated. Too many public schoolboys were being produced between 1851 and 1871 when there were fewer opportunities in the Church, law and medicine and young men with middle-class aspirations also outstripped the availability of careers. The fastest growing occupations lay in lower middle-class employment such as clerks and shop assistants to which ex-public schoolboys would be unlikely to be attracted. The Empire provided a safety valve as products of these new schools sought in colonial lifestyles a status they would have been denied at home.


[1] For this area of education see Bamford, T.W., The Rise of the Public Schools, (Nelson), 1967 and Allsobrook, David, Schools for the shire: The reform of middle-class education in mid-Victorian England, (Manchester University Press), 1986.

[2] Timpson, Richard S., Classics or charity?: the dilemma of the 18th century grammar school, (Manchester University Press), 1971.

[3] Edwards, Edward, An inquiry into the revenues and abuses of the free grammar school at Brentwood, (C. Roworth), 1823 demonstrates the problems of turning a free school into a fee-paying one.

[4] Carlisle, Nicholas, A concise description of the endowed grammar schools in England and Wales, 2 Vols. (Baldwin, Cradock and Joy), 1818 provides a detailed description of the development and state of grammar schools.

[5] Hill, C.P., The History of Bristol Grammar School, (Pitman), 1951, pp. 78-107, Saunders, H.W., A History of Norwich Grammar School, (Jarrold and Sons Ltd.), 1932, Mumford, A.A., The Manchester Grammar School, 1515-1915; A Regional Study of the Advancement of Learning in Manchester Since the Reformation, (Longman, Green and Co.), 1919.

[6] Schools Inquiry Commission: report of the commissioners plus Minutes of evidence etc., Parliamentary papers, [3966] H.C. (1867-8), Vol. XXVIII, pt. 1, 1; Parliamentary papers, [3966-I to XX] H.C. (1867-8) and Vol. XXVIII, pts. II to XVII.

[7] Balls, F.E., ‘The Endowed Schools Act, 1869, and the development of the English grammar schools in the 19th century’, Durham Research Review, Vol. 19, (1967), pp. 207-218; Vol. 20, (1968), 219-229 and Goldman, Lawrence, ‘The defection of the middle class: The Endowed Schools Act, the Liberal Party, and the 1874 election’, in Ghosh, Peter and Goldman, Lawrence, (eds.), Politics and culture in Victorian Britain : essays in memory of Colin Matthew, (Oxford University Press), 2006, pp. 118-135.

[8] Chandos, John, Boys together: English public schools, 1800-1864, (Hutchinson), 1984, Huggins, M.J.W. and Rees, A.D.J., The making of an English public school, (Hiroona), 1982 and Simon, Brian and Bradley, Ian C., (eds.), The Victorian public school: studies in the development of an educational institution: a symposium, (Gill and Macmillan), 1975.

[9] Card, Tim, Eton established: a history from 1440 to 1860, (John Murray), 2001.

[10] Tyerman, Christopher, A history of Harrow School, 1324-1991, (Oxford University Press), 2000.

[11] Quick, Anthony, Charterhouse: a history of the school, (James & James), 1991.

[12] Bettinson, G.H., Rugby School, (printed for the author and publisher by Harold Saunders), 1929.

[13] Carleton, J.D., Westminster School: a history, (Country life, Ltd.), 1934, 2nd ed., (R. Hart-Davis), 1965.

[14] Draper, Frederick W.M., Four centuries of Merchant Taylors’ school, 1561-1961, (Oxford University Press), 1962.

[15] Oldham, J.B., A history of Shrewsbury School, 1552-1952, (Oxford University Press), 1952.

[16] Copley, Terence, Black Tom: Arnold of Rugby: the myth and the man, (Continuum), 2002.

[17] Many schools began cadet corps in the 1860s, notably Eton, Winchester, Harrow and Rugby. See, Money, Tony, Manly and muscular diversions: public schools and the nineteenth-century sporting revival, (Duckworth), 1997 and Neddam, Fabrice, ‘Constructing masculinities under Thomas Arnold of Rugby (1828-1842): gender, educational policy and school life in an early-Victorian public school’, Gender & Education, Vol. 16, (2004), pp. 303-326.

[18] Anon. Report from the select committee of the House of Lords on the Public Schools Bill [H.L.], Parliamentary papers, H.C. 481 (1865), Vol. X, 263 and Shrosbree, Colin, Public schools and private education: the Clarendon Commission, 1861-1864, and the Public Schools Acts, (Manchester University Press), 1988, pp. 73-134.