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Abstract
The London Birkbeck Schools represent a hitherto largely unexplored episode in the history of British education. They embody the contradictory faces of mid-nineteenth-century radical Liberalism and are of interest, first, because they were determinedly secular and pioneered what was for their time a novel and progressive pedagogy. Second, they had an explicit social purpose. ‘Social economy’—the antithesis of the ‘political economy’ of the founders of the London Mechanics’ Institute in whose lecture theatre the first school was established by William Ellis in 1848—was a central element of the curriculum. The schools and their values were contested. Their curriculum was attacked by the Church for its godlessness. Their teaching methods, advanced for the times, were lampooned by Dickens for being little better than the rote learning they challenged. Following the 1870 Elementary Education Act, some collapsed or were incorporated in Board schools, but others went ‘up market’ in competition with them. Only one school building remains nearly intact today, reflecting in its architecture some of the most progressive elements of Ellis’s philosophy, but London streets and roads bearing Birkbeck’s name mark the locations of schools long gone and the curriculum issues are rehearsed in present-day debates.
Acknowledgements
I would like to record my thanks to my two anonymous referees and to a member of The London Journal’s editorial board for their full and helpful comments and for their encouragement in revising this paper for publication.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Henry Morley, ‘Rational Schools’, Household Words, 6.144 (December 1852), 337–340.
2 Phil Gardner, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England: The People’s Education (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 1.
3 Gary McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education (London: Routledge, 2011), 1.
4 Gary McCulloch, ‘Compulsory School Attendance and the Elementrary Education Act of 1870: 150 Years On’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 68.5 (2020), 523.
5 Robin Gilmour, ‘The Gradgrind School: Political Economy in the Classroom’, Victorian Studies, 11.2 (1967), 212–213.
6 Hodgskin’s first major political text, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, appeared in 1825, shortly after his proposal in 1823 (together with J.C. Robertson in the Mechanics’ Magazine that they had launched that year) for a London Mechanics’ Institute. A later 1832 pamphlet, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, specifically attacked the philosophy of Henry Brougham, a major suporter of the LMI and by then Lord Chancellor, whose earlier text, Practical Observations Upon the Education of the People, Addressed to the Working classes and their Employers (1825), was a precursor to Ellis’s own, more developed educational philosophy.
7 Richard Johnson, ‘“Really Useful Knowledge”: Radical Education and Working-Class Culture, 1790–1848’, in Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, ed. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 75–102.
8 Hodgskin’s Popular Political Economy, published in 1827 and subtitled Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution, provided the basis for Marx’s theory of surplus value and is quoted extensively in his notebooks, written between 1857 and 1858 in preparation for his ‘Chapter on Capital’ later edited by Engels as Volume 4 of Capital. Marx himself described Hodgskin as ‘one of the most important modern English economists.’ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (1867; London: Penguin, 1976), 1000.
9 An 1846 SDUK handbook declares that ‘Schools were originally attached to the London Mechanics’ Institution; they have, however, been given up.’ SDUK, A Manual for Mechanics and Their Institutions: A Complete Body of Information for that Useful and Respectable Class of the Population (London, 1846), 133.
10 Edmund Kell Blyth, Life of William Ellis (Founder of the Birkbeck Schools). With Some Account of His Writings and of His Labours for the Improvement and Extension of Education (London, 1892), 72–73.
11 Gilmour, ‘Gradgrind School’.
12 ‘Industry, knowledge, skill, economy, temperance, respect for property, and forethought’ of course needed vehicles for their expression. In 1851 a ‘third Birkbeck’ appeared in addition to the Institute and the Schools: the Birkbeck Freehold Land Society and the Birkbeck Building Society (BLBS) were established to provide a home for the savings of (and to provide access to the County franchise to) men of the same classes who were members of the LMI or whose children attended the Birkbeck schools. By the 1870s the BLBS was trading as the Birkbeck Bank and had become a major element of the UK property-based financial sector. Richard Clarke, ‘Self-Help, Saving and Suburbanization: The Birkbeck Land and Building Societies, Their Bank and the London Mechanics’ Institute, 1851–1911’, The London Journal, 40.2 (2015), 123–146.
13 Rüntz was also appointed to the Board of the Birkbeck Bank, becoming its Chair in 1868.
14 William Ellis, Education as a Means of Preventing Destitution with Exemplifications from the Teaching of the Conditions of Well-Being and the Principles and Applications of Economical Science at the Birkbeck Schools (London, 1851).
15 William Ellis, The Conditions of Well-Being as Taught in the Birkbeck Schools as They Ought to be Taught Everywhere (London, 1851).
16 George Combe and James Simpson, Prospectus of a School for the Secular Education of Boys (Edinburgh, 1848), 1.
17 Ethel Ellis, A Memoir of William Ellis (London, 1888), 70.
18 John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (London: Methuen, 1973).
19 Keith Flett, Chartism After 1848: The Working Class and the Politics of Radical Education (London: Merlin Press, 2006).
20 ‘Whitfield Street’, in J. Howard Roberts and Walter H. Godfrey, The Parish of St Pancras, Part 3: Tottenham Court Road and Neighbourhood (London: London County Council, 1949), 30–33.
21 William Sockwell, Popularizing Classical Economics: Henry Brougham and William Ellis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994).
22 First Annual Report of the Special Committee appointed to establish the Birkbeck School, to the members of the London Mechanics’ Institution, at a Special General Meeting held on Thursday July 5th 1849, and by adjournment on the 12th and 17th days of that month and year. Interestingly, in addition to congratulating the LMI’s management on the success of the first school and the opening of a second, the Report added their ‘wish to impress upon you the important fact that however successful the machinery of education already brought into operation may ultimately be, one half of your object only will have been accomplished, until the same educational privileges shall have been conferred upon both sexes of the community.’ At the meeting on 17 July the Committee abolished itself so that management of the school was directly controlled by the LMI.
23 T. F. T. Baker, ‘Bethnal Green: Education’, in A History of the County of Middlesex, Volume 11: Stepney, Bethnal Green, ed. T. F. T. Baker (London: Victoria County History, 1998), 242–260.
24 Shields, quoted in Ellis, William Ellis, 66.
25 A Literary and Scientific Institute—possibly a local branch of the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institute (as the LMI had been renamed in 1866)—is indicated on contemporary maps as having existed adjacent to the School.
26 Blyth, Life of William Ellis, 109.
27 Blyth, Life of William Ellis, 114.
28 ‘The Gospel Oak Schools, Kentish Town’, The Illustrated London News, 14 September 1867, 288.
29 Kingsland and Gospel Oak survive today, the former having a physical and the latter an institutional continuity with their predecessors.
30 Kelly Power, ‘The Influence of Changing Discourses of Childhood on 1860s Educational Policy’, History of Education, 51.1 (2022), 1–21.
31 Harold Silver, ‘Aspects of Neglect: The Strange Case of Victorian Popular Education’, Oxford Review of Education, 3.1 (1977), 57–69.
32 Jacob Middleton, ‘The Experience of Corporal Punishment in Schools, 1890–1940’, History of Education, 37.2 (2008), 253–275.
33 Blanchard Jerrold, The Threads of a Storm-Sail: A Little Book on the Benefits of Assurance (London, 1853), 61.
34 Baker, Bethnal Green, 248.
35 See, for example: David Layton, ‘Science in the Schools: The First Wave—A Study of the Influence of Richard Dawes (1793–1867)’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 20.1 (1972), 38–57.
36 W. A. C. Stewart and W. P. McCann, The Educational Innovators, 1750–1880 (London: Macmillan, 2000), 330.
37 Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, School (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).
38 Frederick Jobson, Chapel and School Architecture, as Appropriate to the Buildings of Nonconformists, Particularly to Those of the Wesleyan Methodists: With Practical Directions for the Erection of Chapels and School-Houses (London, 1850), 151.
39 Quoted in Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 144.
40 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (1844; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2009), 271.
41 ‘Mr Cobden on Education’, The Times 21642, 19 January 1854, 10 col A.
42 Philip Collins, ‘Dickens and Adult Education’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 3.2 (1955), 115–127. See also: Philip Collins, Dickens and Education (London: Macmillan, 1963).
43 Gilmour, ‘Gradgrind School’.
44 Henry Solly, The Life of Henry Morley (London, 1898).
45 William Kennedy, ‘Lord Brougham, Charles Knight, and the Rights of Industry’, Economica, n.s. 29.113 (1962), 58–71. Hodgskin’s Labour Defended (1825) was followed in 1832 by The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (London, 1832). The response, not least from establishment figures associated with the Mechanics’ Institute, included a counter-pamphlet from Knight published anonymously and often wrongly attributed to (by then, Lord) Brougham. Charles Knight, The Rights of Industry Addressed to the Working-Men of the United Kingdom, Volume I: Capital and Labour (London, 1831).
46 Silver, ‘Aspects of Neglect’.
47 Flett, Chartism After 1848, 117.
48 Richard Johnson, ‘Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England’, Past and Present, 49 (1970), 96–119.
49 Stewart and McCann, Educational Innovators, 315.
50 Ellis, William Ellis, 123; Blyth, Life of William Ellis, 170–171.
51 Joan Ronald, Family Connections: Birkbeck Building Society and Bank. Law Guarantee and Trust Society (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986).
52 Quoted in W. A. Shields, Peckham Birkbeck Schools for Boys, Girls, and Infants, etc. Willow Brook Road (London, 1853), 2. Socinianism—strictly a rejection of the Trinity, but by this time used to refer to dissenting beliefs in general—had been a charge levelled against the LMI from the start. On the LMI’s foundation, the Minister of Laura Chapel, Bath, had used its temporary location in a chapel in Monkwell Street, Finsbury, to label both the LMI and the Chapel’s pastor, Dr Lindsey, as Socinian. Edward Grinfield, A Reply to Mr. Brougham's ‘Practical Observations upon the Education of the People’ etc. (London, 1825), 29.
53 The Peckham episode was recounted (and Shield’s pamphlet reprinted as an Appendix) in Ethel Ellis’s biography of her brother. Ellis, William Ellis, 197–200.
54 William Lovett’s Sunday School in Holborn, in which William Ellis first taught, offered education ‘to all who came cleanly in clothing and person.’ Frank Smith, A History of English Elementary Education, 1760–1902 (1931; London: University of London Press, 1966), 207.
55 Shields, Peckham Birkbeck Schools, 2.
56 George Christopher Bartley, The Schools for the People: Containing the History, Development and Present Working of Each Description of English School for the Industrial and Poorer Classes (London, 1871), 421.
57 Bartley, Schools for the People, 422.
58 The Commission was formally established in 1859 and reported in 1861. It concluded: ‘Much, therefore, still remains to be done to bring up the state of elementary education in England and Wales to the degree of usefulness which we all regard as attainable and desirable.’ Hansard HC Deb, 11 February 1858, 148, 1184–1248.
59 William Ellis, An Address to Teachers on the Laws of Conduct in Industrial Life, and on the Method of Imparting Instruction Therein in Our Primary Schools. Being the First of a Course of Four Lectures on that Subject, etc. (London, 1870), 14.
60 ‘The Association For Promoting Social Science’, Leeds Mercury, 10451, 9 October 1871, 8.
61 William Ellis, A Few Questions on Secular Education, What It Is, and what It Ought to be, with an Attempt to Answer Them. Preceded by an Appeal to Richard Cobden Esq, MP and the Members of the Late Anti-Corn-Law League (London, 1848).
62 Ellis, William Ellis, 175, 177.
63 However, the Finsbury School Board maps of 1881 and 1886 indicate the Southampton Buildings site to be still occupied by the ‘London Mechanics Institute and Birkbeck School’, suggesting that some form of provision remained beyond this period.
64 The longest-lived school established within a Mechanics’ Institution appears to have been at the Liverpool Mechanics’ Institution (established in 1825, shortly after the LMI). As a grammar school, the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, it finally closed in 1985, was re-opened in 1996 (behind the façade of the original building) as the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts with major support from Paul McCartney. It is now part of Liverpool John Moores University.
65 Blyth, Life of William Ellis, 110.
66 Joseph Fletcher, Education National, Voluntary, and Free (London, 1851), 16.
67 Harold Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1973), 180.
68 London Metropolitan Archives, CABG/073, ‘Birkbeck School Workhouse Committee: Signed Minutes 1889’. See also: Peter Higginbotham, The Workhouse Encyclopaedia (Stroud: The History Press, 2012).
69 Elizabeth Gargano, Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 2008), 20–21.
70 Edward Robson, School Architecture. Being Practical Remarks on the Planning, Designing, Building and Furnishing of School-Houses (London, 1874), 321.
71 Mary Sturt, The Education of the People: A History of Primary Education in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 130. The Gospel Oak School included ‘a large lecture-room for lessons illustrated by apparatus and experiments; three class-rooms for boys, and two for girls’.
72 Elain Harwood, England’s Schools: History, Architecture and Adaptation (London: Historic England, 2010), 39.
73 ‘School Planning’, Building News and Engineering Journal, 23 (1872), 25–27.
74 Jobson, Chapel and School Architecture.
75 Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 1: The Cities of London and Westminster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 377.
76 Knightley’s best-known building is probably Queen’s Hall, built 1891–1893 in Langham Place and the home of London’s Promenade Concerts until it was destroyed by a bomb in 1941. Knightley’s Birkbeck Bank was demolished in 1962.
77 Blyth, Life of William Ellis, 111.
78 T. D. Wickenden, William Ellis School, 1862–1962 (London: William Ellis School Governors, 1962).
79 William Ellis, ‘Classical Education’, Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, 53.2 (1850), 393–409.
80 Most surviving ‘Birkbeck’ place names in London, however, derive from the activities of the Birkbeck Land and Building Societies (BLBS), later known as the Birkbeck Bank, which was co-located with the first Birkbeck School in the premises of the LMI and played a significant role in the development of the then London suburbs between 1851 and 1911. The Birkbeck Primary School in Sidcup, Kent, and the Birkbeck School and Community Arts College (renamed the Somercotes Academy in 2015) near Louth, Lincolnshire, have no connection with William Ellis, the former deriving its name from the BLBS that initially developed the estate in which it stands. Clarke, ‘Self-Help, Saving and Suburbanization’.
81 Joseph Lancaster, Improvements in Education, as It Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community: Containing a Short Account of Its Present State, Hints Towards Its Improvement, and a Detail of Some Practical Experiments Conducive to that End (London, 1803), 137.
82 Gordon Batho, ‘The History of the Teaching of Civics and Citizenship in English Schools’, The Curriculum Journal, 1.1 (1990), 91–100.
83 Stewart and McCann, Educational Innovators, 340.
84 ‘The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill’, The Times, 27843, 10 November 1873, 6.
85 Charles Dickens, ‘Hard Times’, Household Words, 9.229 (August 1854), 601–602.
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Richard Clarke
Until 2012, Richard Clarke taught ecology and countryside management at Birkbeck, University of London, where he was Director of the Centre for European Protected Area Research, Staff Representative Governor, and joint President of the University and College Union. He is presently Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck and Visiting Scholar at Westminster Business School, University of Westminster. His current research and consultancy includes mentoring and evaluation for National Lottery Heritage Fund-supported projects.