Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young

Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850

Mary Hilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754657903
• eBook ISBN: 9781351872140
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Social Sciences

Researchers have neglected the cultural history of education and as a result women's educational works have been disparaged as narrowly didactic and redundant to the history of ideas. Mary Hilton's book serves as a corrective to these biases by culturally contextualising the popular educational writings of leading women moralists and activists including Sarah Fielding, Hester Mulso Chapone, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Catharine Cappe, Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Marcet, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Carpenter, and Bertha von Marenholtz Bulow. Over a hundred-year period, from the rise of print culture in the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of the kindergarten movement in Britain in the mid-nineteenth, a variety of women intellectuals, from strikingly different ideological and theological milieux, supported, embellished, critiqued, and challenged contemporary public doctrines by positioning themselves as educators of the nation's young citizens. Of particular interest are their varying constructions of childhood expressed in a wide variety of published texts, including tales, treatises, explanatory handbooks, and collections of letters. By explicitly and consistently connecting the worlds of the schoolroom, the family, and the local parish to wider social, religious, scientific, and political issues, these women's educational texts were far more influential in the public realm than has been previously represented. Written deliberately to change the public mind, these texts spurred their many readers to action and reform.

Chapter 1

Manners, patrimony, gender: education in mid eighteenth-century England

Such were the counsels by which Mrs Norris assisted to form her nieces’ minds; and it is not very wonderful that with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility. In everything but disposition, they were admirably taught. Sir Thomas did not know what was wanting, because, though a truly anxious father, he was not outwardly affectionate, and the reserve of his manner repressed all the flow of their spirits before him. To the education of her daughters, Lady Bertram paid not the smallest attention.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1813), Chapter 2.

Whether the remote and seemingly indifferent parenting depicted by the ironic Austen in the character of Lady Bertram was ever typical of ruling class behaviour is debatable. However, by the time Mansfield Park was published in 1813, the belief that gentry mothers should take a close and personal interest in their children’s moral development was commonplace. Lawrence Stone’s argument that a whole-scale restructuring of affect took place within higher-ranking families during the course of the eighteenth century, resulting in an ‘invention of childhood’, has been both elaborated and contested.¹ Nevertheless, during the course of the nation’s transition from a pre-industrial, aristocratic culture in the early modern period to an industrial, commercialized bourgeois culture, a plethora of advice on family mores, including strictures on the responsibilities of gentry women for their children’s education, had been widely disseminated. In that massive transition, wealth itself had become redefined. The growth of mercantile capitalism from the early seventeenth century onwards had not only produced a bewildering number of new trades and professions within an increasingly complex and mobile society, but had created new forms of material riches, of income, capital, liquidity and inheritance.² These long drawn out economic changes had, by the late eighteenth century, given rise to widespread controversies as to the natural rights and roles of children, particularly of girls.³ From the 1750s onwards any number of tracts and treatises, novels and stories, had contributed to the development of the concept of sensibility, and by extension to that of individual subjectivity. Through this burgeoning print culture women had entered the public realm as educators, displaying a new feminine authority with regard to the rearing and teaching of young children.⁴ By the end of the eighteenth century, women, particularly mothers, had become represented as the primary source of taught morality within the gentry family, an institution whose values now challenged older notions of idle irresponsibility embodied by Lady Bertram.⁵

The bourgeois family

Patterns of domestic culture had begun to change from the late seventeenth century. The growth in many sectors of the economy after the Revolution Settlement of 1689 had increased the number of minor gentry and of mercantile and professional families, thereby forming a new wealth-owning bourgeoisie.⁶ The accumulation of wealth by these genteel families now took place within a wider public sphere ruled by distant economic imperatives such as international markets, fluctuations in commodity trade and new patterns of consumption. Endlessly increasing growth in commerce, capital and markets, as well as in the invention, production and consumption of goods, slowly caused a series of changes in bourgeois domestic lives. As the household economy, which had been the basic unit of wealth production under feudalism, became a part of much larger and more complex economic systems, there was a corresponding increase in family privacy. The internal affairs of all families, which in the early modern period had been of legitimate interest to relatives, neighbours, the parish, and even the state, increasingly became a realm of private domestic relations. No longer were families public institutions, or as Patrick Collinson describes, the original ‘bricks and molecules of which the commonwealth was composed’.⁷

By the end of the seventeenth century, the huge Jacobean mansions of the aristocracy where rooms opened off each other and familial privacy was unknown, were vastly outnumbered by new ‘Queen Anne’ houses built for the minor gentry and the flourishing mercantile bourgeoisie. In this new domestic architecture of private rooms, passages and lobbies, public spaces such as the great hall, in which the routines of social intercourse had taken place, were now replaced with smaller private rooms for the conjugal couple and their children alone.⁸ However, not only did the lives of these bourgeois families become less openly sociable, at the same time they became more economically vulnerable to soured or hostile familial relationships. Although a family’s disagreements now seemed to belong in what appeared to be a totally private realm, its self-image, and the attitudes and relationships within it, could damagingly undermine its functioning in the new money economy.⁹ While on the one hand the family still provided a continuity of personnel that was conducive to the accumulation and transmission of wealth, on the other hand, within mercantile capitalism the capricious behaviour of individual members could now threaten its economic survival and enrichment.¹⁰ The education, both practical and moral, of different family members, particularly its sons and heirs, was no longer only a religious or enlightened imperative, it had become an accepted form of economic prudence.

With the intensification of print culture from the mid-eighteenth century came a plethora of fictions that explored the dangerous ambiguities of bourgeois family life; a whole new literature that dwelt on the tensions between human desire and intimacy on the one hand and the requirements of economic rationality on the other. This conflict was felt with particular acuteness in respect of the marriage of daughters.¹¹ So a further tension emerged. Because of the complex growth in discursive practices, mainly within print culture, but also in conspicuous consumption, in increasingly variegated social mores, and in the arts, the newly privatized and intimate sphere of domestic relations became, paradoxically, more publicly conscious and vulnerable to collective opinion.¹² Sir Robert Vyner (1631–88), Lord Mayor of London in 1674, was a typical minor gentry figure. Here in this family portrait by Michael Wright, the Vyners’ young son gestures naturally towards his sister. Such representations of the bourgeois family were beginning to become more playful and affectionate, with hints that children have their own individual personalities.

Figure 1.1 John Michael Wright, The Family of Sir Robert Vyner, 144.8cms × 195.6 cms, oil on canvas, 1673, National Portrait Gallery, London.

The roles of women in the family, hitherto hidden from legal view under coverture and set about with traditional mores, became more open to public scrutiny. As Chapter 2 traces, the roles and the controversies they gave rise to were shared by members of the literary milieu surrounding Samuel Richardson, and explored in print by Richardson himself. They articulated a new fascination, amounting almost to obsession, with the ambiguous moral ground rules, the instability, and the crucial processes of education within the contemporary bourgeois family.

Visible culture

The growth of mercantile capitalism also brought about a perceptible transformation in the nature of traditional schooling and apprenticeship. Although throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries traditional crafts, trades, conduct and manners were increasingly described and explained in print, such knowledge was interwoven with older ways of learning, those of practice and demonstration. Skills and trades were still substantially transmitted by apprenticeship, and most manufacturers were small in scale, situated in rural areas using simple machinery.¹³ Elementary schooling had been available at all levels of society from the introduction of printing in the late fifteenth century. Across England, boys who showed particular aptitude at tiny local schools could pass on to town grammar schools and from there into a network of fairly humble professions, but this schooling had not hitherto produced much social mobility.¹⁴ John Opie’s genre picture The Schoolmistress, painted in the early 1780s, expresses the universal familiarity of that figure in her timeless role of instructing children in their reading.

The practices of literacy, such as the reading of chapbooks, Bible and prayer books, and even such higher-order skills as casting accounts and making lists and wills did not change traditional social and political hierarchies. Outside the gates of the mansions and manor houses of the gentry, humble children learnt the rudiments of literacy and the essential crafts of their prospective livelihoods through the interweaving of school knowledge with an apprenticeship in the embodied habits and practices of the adults around them. Inside the gates wealthier families had mirrored this form of learning, providing for their children a closed arrangement of social apprenticeship in conduct and letters, all tailored to provide a steady reproduction of the social order. However, in spite of the continued ubiquity of these practices, by the mid-eighteenth century this traditional pattern of schooling and learning was being reconfigured and a new idea of education had become widespread. Education – e duco, a leading out from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge and wisdom – was increasingly considered as an intellectual activity between minds, one in which was inscribed social mobility, theoretically available to all in the new commercial society.

Figure 1.2 John Opie, The Schoolmistress, 99.1 cms × 124.5 cms, oil on canvas, ca 1784, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

How did this new idea of teaching and learning relate to the growing capitalist economy? In his study of the growth of European nationalism, the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner conceptualizes the structural changes that transformed the traditional modes of instruction and demonstration for apprenticed learners into a more visible and generalized definition of education by contrasting a traditional-agrarian model of society with an industrial-modern model. In Gellner’s first model the main work is the production of food, so that the division of labour, although elaborate, shows consistent patterns in the fixed ways skills are handed down from generation to generation, and where recruitment to the many specialized positions is by birth. ‘Though the skills required are often considerable, they are best transmitted on the job, by a kinsman to the junior member of the group, sometimes a master to apprentice. They do not presuppose an initial generic training by an unspecialized centralized educational system’.¹⁵ Gellner’s second model of a modern industrial society, by contrast contains a literate, economically and socially mobile population, with a sophisticated division of labour. Food production has ceased to be the main employment of the population but is only one industry amongst many. Modern industrial society contains a more fluid, continuous, ‘so to speak atomised inequality’, and ‘a shared, homogenous, literacy-carried and school-inculcated culture’. The most important feature of this model is the essential visibility of personal culture. ‘In such an environment, a man’s culture, the idiom within which he was trained and within which he is effectively employable, is his most precious possession, his real entrance card to full citizenship and human dignity, to social participation’. So, Gellner points out, as the economic world of the individual changes ‘culture, which had once resembled the air men breathed, and of which they were seldom properly aware, suddenly becomes perceptible and significant. The wrong and alien culture becomes menacing. Culture, like prose, becomes visible, and a source of pride and pleasure to boot’.¹⁶

The drive to a new visibility of individual culture can be traced in the transformation of conduct literature throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The early conduct books of the Puritan tradition had concentrated on the central business of organizing the family for godly education so that children could enter the covenant. This was an arrangement with God that active faith demonstrated by good works was essential to the predestined salvation of the elect. The quest for salvation, purification of the household, the reform of the Church and an immediate dedication to active faith had been the hallmarks of this tradition since the Reformation. In such households parents were expected to read, pray, catechize and instruct their children in acceptable patterns of Christian behaviour with an intense dedication to the building of the New Jerusalem.¹⁷ For a century, the Puritans had had a virtual monopoly on advice books for parents and stories for children. Although these demonstrated a range and versatility far from the psychopathic obsession with original sin attributed to them by their critics, seventeenth-century Puritans believed that the younger generation was the best hope for a better England to come. Shaped by moral advice and careful instruction, it was to be the spearhead of reform.¹⁸ Not surprisingly therefore, the central concern of these advice books since the Reformation had been the regulation of the roles and duties of parents and children within the religious household, and the tripartite relationship between God, conduct and salvation. However, these concerns were replaced by newer ones in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The Young Citizen: Issues of enlightenment, gender, and virtue
• Part II Vice and Misery: Educating the young in the counter enlightenment
• Part III Childhood Contested: Social and educational reform in the mid-nineteenth century
• Conclusion: The Long Conversation
• Bibliography
• Index