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Pauper education from the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 to the Education Act 1870: Three perspectives on pauper education Master thesis by Ingunn Irgens Department for Archeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion (AHKR) Faculty of humanities University of Bergen November 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of contents ................................................................................................ 2 Acknowledgements: ........................................................................................... 4 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 5 1.1 Theme and aim for the thesis .............................................................. 5 1.2 The period 1834-70 ............................................................................. 7 1.3 Earlier themed literature ...................................................................... 8 1.3.1 "Workhouse children" by Frank Crompton (1997) ............................ 8 1.3.2 "Poverty and Poor Laws Reform in 19 th Century Britain, 1834-1914" by David Englander (1998) ................................................................................ 11 1.3.3 "State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England" by Alan Kidd (1999) ................................................................................................ 12 1.3.4 "The English Poor Laws, 1700 – 1930" by Anthony Brundage (2002)……… ..................................................................................................... 14 1.3.5 "The Workhouse: The People. The Places. Life behind Doors" by Simon Fowler (2007) ......................................................................................... 15 1.4 The sources ....................................................................................... 17 Background ...................................................................................................... 19 2.1 The political Landscape in England and Wales during the Nineteenth Century……. ......................................................................................................... 19 2.2 The making of the New Poor Law ...................................................... 19 2.3 The workhouse .................................................................................. 26 The Proposal for reforming the education for pauper children in 1838 and 1841 ................................................................................................................................. 28 3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................ 28 3.2 James Phillips Kay’s report on the training of pauper children .......... 29 3.3 The Debate in 1841 ........................................................................... 47 2 3.4 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 58 Still Dissatisfaction with Pauper Education in 1850 .......................................... 59 4.1 A Letter to Sir George Grey, MP ........................................................ 59 4.2 Influence on the said Secretary? ....................................................... 74 4.3 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 75 Towards a new Law in 1869 ............................................................................. 76 5.1 Thomas Hawksley's report on education and training as State legislation…. ......................................................................................................... 76 5.2 Rounding up chapter five ................................................................... 89 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 90 Sammendrag .................................................................................................... 94 Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 95 Appendices ...................................................................................................... 97 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS : Bam! And the chair was kicked to the floor by my eight grade history teacher. This is how my sincere interest in history was sparked. The teacher’s name was Bengt Tvedte and I will like to thank him for his inspiration. Unfortunately, Bengt passed away last year, unbeknownst of what he had meant to me. May he rest in peace! I could never have completed this Master thesis without my supervisor Frode Ulvund. His feedback has been invaluable and his advices have always been of the highest quality. The members of the seminar “Individ, Kultur og Samfunn i Europa etter 1800” also deserves thanks for their valuable comments. I will also like to thank the rest of the Master students in History at the University in Bergen. It has been a wonderful experience getting to know all of you, and together we have given each other support and encouragement when times have looked dark and gloomy. I would like to say thank you to my mother and father for providing me a roof over my head the last two and a half years. Your encouragement and support have been priceless. I would also like to thank my two sisters, Nina and Lise. I would also like to thank the rest of my family for their support, especially my aunt Lise and uncle Tore. They took me in for two weeks this summer, which allowed me to really recharge my batteries. I would finally like to thank my friends, Martine, Signe and Anette. I would like to thank you for always being there for me! Ingunn Irgens November 2012 4 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Theme and aim for the thesis In Charles Dickens’ novel “Oliver Twist” we are being introduced to the workhouse. The children that were educated in the workhouse will be the main focus of this thesis, but I will also focus on the pauper children that did not reside in the workhouse. Simon Fowler opens his book “The Workhouse. The People. The Places. The Life Behind Doors” by saying that the workhouse had an unfeeling resonance over it. He said that it was bleak and horrid. 1 His first description of the workhouse fits quite accurate with the theme of this Master thesis. The children in the workhouses were not living the good life, rather the opposite. As you will see from my analysis, most of my sources agree that the education in the workhouses was flawed. The improper education had according to my sources many different reasons. Some of these reasons will be explored in the following chapters, along with the different solutions that are offered to these problems by my sources. Charles Dickens’ uses “Oliver Twist” to criticize the New Poor Law and the treatment of children, my research into reports and letters from the same era will show that he was not alone in doing so. “Pauper education from the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 to the Education Act of 1870” is the title of this thesis. In this first chapter I will present the theme and aim for this thesis, along with a brief discussion of the period that I have chosen. I will also present earlier published works by historians and social scientists on the poor laws and the poor. After I have presented the literature I will discuss the sources that I have selected for this thesis. The theme for this Master thesis will be pauper education in England and Wales during the nineteenth century. Pauper education is a theme that is very little explored by the historians. That is one of many reasons to why I chose this theme. My thesis will base itself on the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 that is more commonly known as the New Poor Law, and it is this name I will use in my thesis. 1 Simon Fowler: “The Workhouse. The People. The Places. Life Behind Doors” p. 13 5 This thesis will not tell what actually were going on in the workhouses at that time. This thesis will focus on texts of three very serious and dedicated well educated men that had taken a special interest in the education of pauper children, namely James Phillips Kay 2, C. Richson and Thomas Hawksley 3. In their reports and open letters they analyze the state of pauper education and suggest improvements to it. These texts are from two doctors and one reverend. These representing medical and theological standpoints and they also represent three different decades (1838, 1850 and 1869). The study of these will probably also show if there have been an historical development in the view of pauper education. I will come back to the sources and their origins later in this chapter (1.4). I will not write thematically, but I will write chronologically after the years the sources are written in. But it is my aim to sum up the thesis thematically in the conclusion. The reason for this has been that I want to show development from the first source to the last. The questions that I seek to answer by analysing these sources are: 1 a) How did Kay, Richson and Hawksley assess the pauper education in their period? b) What suggestions did they have to improve it? 2) To what extent were they able to influence politicians/public debates and what impact did they have on the pauper education? I want to answer these questions by analysing their reports and one open letter. I also want to see how these influenced politicians in the Parliament by looking at a few debates from the same era. 2 Later Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth 3 Not to be confused with the water engineer 6 1.2 The period 1834-70