Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools: An Intimate History of Educating the Poor, 1844–1870 by Laura Mair

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools: An Intimate History of Educating the Poor, 1844–1870 by Laura Mair Monica Flegel Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools: An Intimate History of Educating the Poor, 1844–1870. By Laura Mair. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. xv + 256 pp. Cloth $282.00, e-book $120.00. Like many Victorian scholars, I am very familiar with the ragged school movement. Or perhaps more accurately, I have a strong sense of what it was and what it entailed, but I arrived at that knowledge via the writing of figures like Charles Dickens, Mary Carpenter, and Thomas Guthrie. My knowledge on ragged schools could therefore be likened to the treatment the movement has received thus far; as Laura Mair describes, "The ragged schools have received insufficient attention from historians; although much has been written, little has been said" (8). Fortunately, her own contribution to this field thoroughly addresses this lack. In an engaging history that is grounded in the journals and letters of Martin Ware, a volunteer ragged school teacher at Compton Place, Mair provides a well-rounded portrait of the ragged school movement through a microhistory of this one institution, its teachers, and its students. Her main aim is to provide a fuller sense of those involved, both teachers and students, so as to build upon past scholarship which, in its focus primarily on the institutional documents of the movement, has necessarily provided "limited access to the lived experiences of both scholars and teachers" (210). The image of the ragged school that emerges through her careful research is one of a complex institution that built upon, and displaced, existing informal schooling structures and that offered cross-class interactions marked by both conflict and affiliation. Mair's text is organized with the aim of providing a broad but detailed overview of the movement and an intimate understanding of the relationships between individuals in Compton Place. Her first chapter situates the emergence of the ragged school movement within dominant narratives and theories of childhood in the mid-nineteenth century, and within evangelical culture. She gives a brief overview of existing educational structures, such as dame schools and Sunday schools, demonstrating how ragged schools differed from, and were sometimes in tension with, these other models. She also explains the [End Page 447] organizational structure of the movement as a whole, arguing for a recognition that while each ragged school was inherently local, there were important ties between regions that gave the movement coherence. Her second and third chapters address the children and teachers of the ragged schools, respectively, delving into how each group was characterized in institutional literature, but also how they have been depicted in histories of the movement. In both chapters, Mair is careful to provide as many individual voices as can be accessed, so as to challenge assumptions about students and teachers alike. Her final two chapters focus specifically on Martin Ware, providing close readings, first of his own journals from his time as a volunteer teacher and then of his correspondence with former pupils. Her analysis succeeds in providing a vivid and complex portrait of Ware as a man of principles and prejudices who cared deeply for his students. The correspondence provides a fascinating window into the development of the teacher/student relationship within the classroom and into the pupils adulthood. Each chapter is fascinating on its own. Combined, the chapters provide an understanding of the ragged school as an important precursor to modern education systems. While my own understanding of ragged schools was of the religious indoctrination of lower- and working-class children by primarily middle-class philanthropists, Mair highlights how an "anti-sectarian" culture within the movement actually "set ragged schools apart and enabled them, for the most part, to avoid the interdenominational challenges that both Church and Sunday schools faced" (45). She goes on to describe the limitations of that anti-sectarianism in her discussion of conflicts between ragged schools and local priests and Catholic parishes. While ragged schools were clearly sites of cross-class association—between teachers, parents, and pupils, but also between teachers themselves—they were also on the front lines of class and sectarian conflict...