The Duty of the State

Abstract

Wordsworth’s lines, declaimed and transcribed by a generation of orators and pamphleteers, and proving at least as influential (it has been argued) as the educational writings of the economists and political philosophers, may remind us that Dickens was not a pioneer in using literature for educational propaganda.1 Rather, he was the first important novelist to do so, just as, in putting children into novels, he was doing for prose fiction what Wordsworth and others had already done for poetry and the essay. Nor was Wordsworth’s a lone voice: in 1808, six years before The Excursion, the first of the great religious societies was established, to promote the education of the poor, the Royal Lancasterian Society (later renamed the British and Foreign), soon followed by the Church of England National Society. A few years later, Brougham introduced into Parliament the first of his Education Bills. During the 1830s, when Dickens began writing, Parliament rejected four more Education Bills, but in 1833 took its first tentative step towards financing popular education by voting £20,000 in aid of the School Societies; and the same decade saw the establishment of the Committee of Council for Education (which grew into the Board and the Ministry), the Inspectorate, the first real training colleges in Britain, and an impressively-sponsored propagandist body, the Central Society for Education.KeywordsEducation BillTraining CollegeMoral CouragePopular EducationOfficial PersonThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.