Ragged School Research Articles

‘Girls are Wanted More Than Men’: A Gendered Experience of Child Migration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract On Christmas Day 1848 the Ramillies left England bound for Port Adelaide, Australia, carrying amongst its passengers a group of girls from London’s ragged schools and Marylebone Workhouse. An incidence of brutal punishment to which some of the girls were subjected on board ship went unreported in the British press at the time but became the subject of a heated debate in Parliament 12 months later. Through an examination of letters, press reports and official records, this article uses the journey of this one ship as a case study to illustrate the range of experiences, both negative and positive, faced by young poor female emigrants and demonstrates the ways in which those experiences were shaped by gender. It explores why emigration was seen as a particularly appropriate solution to the ‘problem’ of destitute girls and why the process itself was more challenging for them than for boys, using this analysis as a tool to bring into sharper focus some of the prevailing attitudes towards poor young women in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it shows how, whereas young women in similar situations are often portrayed as victims, some could, albeit operating within a restricted range of options, exercise at least some degree of choice. Early emigration schemes like this, operated by the Ragged School Union and others, have rarely figured in the historiography; this article will build on existing scholarship in gender, childhood and emigration studies and offer new insights into the life experiences of pauper girls in the mid-nineteenth century.

Interior Design: The Doll's House and the Working-Class Child

This article explores the unexpected relationship that working-class children had with doll's houses in the late nineteenth century. Placing texts by children's author Frances Hodgson Burnett alongside historical material concerning the manufacture of doll's house furniture by students in London's Ragged Schools under the supervision of housing reformer Octavia Hill, I argue that both women understood the educational or formative value of the doll's house as deriving from the object's ability to teach lessons in temporality. I examine this object and its deployment in contemporary object lessons to show that the spatial divisions of these miniature homes operate in relation to both short- and long-term cycles of time. This article also demonstrates that apparently universal models of selfhood and development were in fact contingent on class structures (both authors, for instance, connect developmental abnormalities in poor children to the fact that they grow up in one-room homes).

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

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...

They ‘Come for a Lark’: London Ragged School Union Teaching Advice in Practice, 1844–70

Ragged schools provided a free education to impoverished children in the mid-nineteenth century. Inspired by religious fervour and presided over by Lord Shaftesbury, that figurehead of evangelical Anglicans, the schools taught the most destitute to read and write, as well as about the God who loved them. By 1870 the London schools alone recorded an average attendance of 32,231 children. The missionary aspect of the classroom shaped the recommended character of the teacher. Teachers were to be benevolent, while corporal punishment was discouraged. Teaching advice demonstrates that the classroom could prove difficult terrain and suggests that the respect of scholars was hard-won and highly valued. With children attending freely, it was necessary that they desired to return. The children were consumers whom teachers sought to please; their responses determined the success or failure of lessons. This article responds to recent scholarship that interprets the teachers as imposed and powerful agents. By focusing on advice given to teachers, it highlights both how the children were perceived and the impact evangelical theology had upon ideas regarding the teacher's character. Largely overlooked by church historians, the ragged school movement embodies the profound impact of evangelical Christians on popular education in the nineteenth century.

Examining the Effects of the Ragged School in Literature

The ability to educate all children, despite social class was an important responsibility. However, some of these problems included social problems that had been faced by poor children during this Victorian Era. Charles Dickens encountered the ragged schooling, which made a lasting impact upon him and is said to have been a significant element in his writing of A Christmas Carol. It was through Charles Dickens’ legacy was using his novels and other works to reveal a world of poverty and unimaginable struggles. His vivid descriptions of the life of street children in the city, workhouses and Yorkshire boarding schools lead to many reforms. Although “Ragged” Schools began to grow and were seen as a movement. For many who would not have been able to have an education, authors such as Charles Dickens, was able to receive a free education and a betterment of life for the poor, that would and will, even today, inspire others to do something to help those suffering in oppression and poverty.

Examining the Effects of the Ragged School in Literature

Examining the Effects of the Ragged School in Literature

‘Give my love’: community and companionship among former ragged school scholars

By 1884, 40 years after its establishment, the London Ragged School Union estimated that 400,000 children had attended its schools. This article explores how former scholars perceived and engaged with their old ragged school community. Existing scholarship on the movement draws predominantly on its promotional literature or institutional documents, yielding limited access to the testimonies of the children themselves. As such, understanding of the children’s experiences and perspectives remains partial. Drawing on a collection of 227 letters from 57 former scholars of Compton Place Ragged School, this article offers new insights into the role that the school, its teachers, and its pupils could continue to play. The correspondence analysed here demonstrates the critical assistance teachers offered to those overseas by relaying messages and locating loved ones. Ragged school teachers acted as an important link to Britain, a source of stability during times of uncertainty. In the same way, correspondents connected their teachers and institutions to their peers by offering information as to their whereabouts and wellbeing. As such, the letters reveal the existence of ragged school networks in emigrant communities; friendships forged in the classroom continued and developed overseas.

Helping Self-Help: The potential of the street-child in ragged school literature. 1844–1872

Helping Self-Help: The potential of the street-child in ragged school literature. 1844–1872

Care and trauma: exhibiting histories of philanthropic childcare practices

This paper discusses two current exhibitions that offer new narratives of the history of poverty, childhood and philanthropy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – On Their Own: Britain's Child Migrants at the V&A Museum of Childhood and Ragged Children, Mended Lives at The Ragged School Museum, Mile End. Both exhibitions present the history of the development of philanthropic childcare practices that intended to improve the lives of poor children, providing unique insight into the individual experiences of children who passed through emergent childcare systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exhibitions make a significant and impressive contribution to public understandings of children's responses to and experiences of historical welfare practices, and highlight both the positive and negative outcomes of childcare practices. They offer a unique opportunity to reflect on the development of the out-of-home care of children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the legacies of which continue as resonant issues in child welfare debates today.

Reading Victorian Rags: Recycling, Redemption, and Dickens's Ragged Children

In Victorian Britain rags were not only associated with the inadequate clothing of the poor, they were also viewed as a valuable commodity, widely collected for recycling into paper. This essay examines rags as simultaneously despised and precious objects, tracing the connections between Victorian accounts of poverty, the industrial recycling of rags into paper, and the redemption narratives created by Charles Dickens about rescued children. A supporter of Ragged Schools and champion of rags recycling, Dickens drew on the idea of the transformation of dirty rags into clean paper in his representations of ragged children. To him, the recycling of rags indicated the civilizing forces of modernity, and reading Dickens's representations of ragged children in this context reveals how cloth recycling became a paradigm for society's duties towards destitute children. This essay explains Dickens's juxtaposition of ragged children with references to rag-dealing in his novels; by this means he suggested that street children, like their ragged clothing, were capable of being purified and transformed into social usefulness.

Front and Back Covers. Volume 20, Number 6. December 2004

Front and back cover caption, volume 20 issue 6VICTORIAN LEGACY'Miss Perkins', a school teacher during the reign of Queen Victoria, introduces this special issue on anthropology and education. She reminds us that the Victorian era gave birth to anthropology: though initially deemed a highly controversial, even sacrilegious, pursuit, it came to be seen as promising hope for the betterment and civilization of humankind in the British Empire.In this issue Paul Sillitoe traces the earliest dissemination of anthropology back to the activities of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the 1840s and 50s, which eventually formed a separate Section H of Anthropology in 1884. Brian Street, taking a post‐Victorian perspective, suggests that British anthropologists have lost their way with regard to education, and ignore the study of language and ethnography of communication at their peril. Paul Cooper examines how policy‐makers in government and in universities increasingly, but mistakenly, regard education as a consumer service, a commodity which can be bought and sold. Sue Wright highlights the role of education in forming the social subject, and the ways anthropology can both contribute to and analyse this process. Keith Hart argues that academics have been far too elitist about university education and moreover have failed to organize themselves effectively. Despite their own long schooling, many now earn less than school teachers. David Mills looks at what European anthropologists are saying about the Bologna Agreement, which seeks to standardize university courses and qualifications across Europe. In a separate c cccomment, Mills recollects past unfulfilled promises of anthropology's potential in schools, and how it is now anthropologists who are forced to sit in the educationalist's classroom.Miss Perkins, our Victorian teacher for this issue, is played by professional actor Karen Powell, who regularly introduces schoolchildren to the Victorian classroom at the Ragged School Museum, Mile End, London. Modern teachers today no longer enforce discipline through the dunce's cap, the cane or the backboard; the Queen's portrait is unlikely to be found in today's classrooms, and ink pens have been replaced by keyboards. Today's anthropology is not the same as that of Victorian times ‐ nevertheless, as contributors to this issue make clear, the hand of authority continues to be felt in education in various, albeit less visible, ways.

The origins and growth of ragged schools in Wales, 1847- c. 1900

(2002). The origins and growth of ragged schools in Wales, 1847- c. 1900. History of Education: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 227-243.

Voices of Hate, Sounds of Hybridity: Black Music and the Complexities of Racism

It is worth stating obvious. The music of African diaspora is not a recent import to Europe; rather, it has been an integral part of numerous European societies since eighteenth century. In England, these sounds were introduced through hands and voices of slave musicians, jubilee singers, jazz orchestras, reggae sound-system operators, and hip-hop DJs. It is--or should be--impossible to think about social history of Europe in general, or England in particular, without understanding place of black music within it. In Victorian England, sounds of jubilees and were assimilated across lines of class and political division. Karl Marx, who lived in London for over thirty years, would render German folk-songs and Negro spirituals while walking with his daughters in Highgate (Wheen 1999, 221). The Fisk Jubilee Singers enjoyed adulation from aristocrats and paupers alike. They entertained Queen Victoria and Prime Minister William Gladstone (Gilroy 1993, 90), and their memoir recounts a particularly eventful concert introduced by Earl of Shaftesbury at annual meeting of Freedmen's Mission Aid society, City Temple, London, on May 31, 1875: So great was gathering about building that to get even to doors was a formidable task, and chairman, Lord Shaftesbury, was delayed some minutes in reaching platform by difficulty of penetrating dense crowd that filled corridors. In ascending stand his eye caught sight of singers in gallery, whom he greeted with a cordial salutation, and in his remarks on taking chair he said: am delighted to see so large a congregation of citizens of London come to offer a renewal of their hospitality to these noble brethren and sisters of ours, who are here to-night to charm us with their sweet songs. They have returned here, not for anything in their own behalf, but to advance interests of coloured race in America, and then to what in them lies to send missionaries of their own colour to nations spread over Africa. When I find these young people, gifted to an extent that does not often fall to lot of man, coming here in such a spirit. I don't want them to become white, but I have a strong disposition myself to become black. If I thought colour was anything--if it brought with it their truth, piety, and talent, I would willingly exchange my complexion to-morrow. (Marsh 1900, 79-80). It is strange, a century later, to read that sounds of black gospel moved this peer of realm to indulge in a fantasy of self-transformation. Doug Seroff has documented a parallel story of infatuation with gospel singing at other end of social scale. He points out that another legacy of Fisk visit was formation of groups of white working-class jubilee singers. One such choir was formed in Hackney, in east London. Thirty young singers from local Ragged School toured London, raising money for Hackney Mission, in 1875--the same year that Earl of Shaftesbury introduced Fisk Singers on London stage (Seroff 1986, 48). Although Marx may have cheerfully lent his voice to spiritual melodies, reaction by twentieth-century European Marxists to black music was often less than positive. Theodor Adorno's criticism is perhaps best known, particularly for his denunciation of jazz and recorded music. Adorno's argument is easily misrepresented, in large part due to his own rhetorical excesses (for example, in one article entitled Uber Jazz, he wrote that jazz most closely resembled the spontaneous singing of servant girls [Adorno 1990, 53]). His objection is sometimes characterized as rooted in a racially loaded form of European aesthetics, but such attempts to read his position through some kind of implicit racial bad sense risk missing an important nuance in his argument. …

Curiosity as Didacticism in "The Old Curiosity Shop"

Charles Dickens was both frequent critic of didacticism in fiction and novelist widely perceived in his time as didactic writer. An anonymous reviewer for the monthly Metropolitan Magazine wrote in 1840 that Dickens now performing most efficaciously the office of moral teacher and related this impact to Dickens's provision of morally instructive for the newly literate among the poor: There are even millions who are just emerging from ignorance into what may be called reading classes; all of whom Mr. Dickens is educating to honesty, good feeling, and all the finer impulses of humanity. He is the antidote, and powerful one too, to the writers of the Jack Sheppard school [of popular Newgate crime fiction] (93-94). Just after Dickens's death in 1870, minor working-class satirical periodical, the Tomahawk, writing in serious vein, called Dickens only romancer but mighty preacher(qtd. in Ford 80). John Forster, Dickens's close friend, editorial advisor, and biographer, also attributes reformative effect to The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), particularly in its depiction of Little Nell's death, describing its impact in personal terms as a kind of discipline of feeling and emotion which would do me lasting good, and which I would not thank you for as an ordinary enjoyment of literature (Letters 187n4). These accounts of Dickens's moral impress as novelist suggest that it combined the different but analogous kinds of influence exerted by the educator, clergyman, and liberal parent. An even more pertinent analogue to Dickens's influence implied in these contemporary assessments was the project of moral tutelage claimed by the writers of religious tracts for the poor. In Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Dickens attacks the premises of didactic religious fiction for children, describing the kinds of stories read by Charley Hexam in London Ragged School:

The London Catholic Ragged School: An Experiment in Education for Irish Destitute Children

The London Catholic Ragged School: An Experiment in Education for Irish Destitute Children

The Last of the Voluntaryists: the Ragged School Union in the School Board era

The Last of the Voluntaryists: the Ragged School Union in the School Board era

The Superiority of the “Scotch System”: Scottish Ragged Schools and Their Influence

The Superiority of the “Scotch System”: Scottish Ragged Schools and Their Influence

Education for the Neglected: Ragged Schools in Nineteenth-Century England

The ragged school movement in England spanned the period from 1840 to 1870, but the number of years during which the schools were being founded and expanded is deceptively brief in terms of their contribution to the care of the neglected juvenile. Of the three types of institutions conceived for the children of the destitute and delinquent classes — reformatory, industrial, and ragged schools — only the last proved to be a temporary phenomenon and failed to secure permanent government recognition. Their aim was nothing less than the civilization and conversion of an entire segment of the urban poor, a task too large for the resources of private charity. The schools were intended for a class of juveniles as yet unreached by any other institution, an urban group brought into existence by the rapid and unplanned growth of England's larger cities. They were the children of costermongers, pig-feeders, rag dealers, part-time dock workers, in fact of all those whose work was menial, irregular, and ill-paid. Also included in this category were the offspring of those who laid claim to no job whatsoever, the lowest mendicants and tramps, and persons who get their living by theft, who altogether neglect their children; the children of hawkers, pigeon-dealers, dog-fanciers, and other men of that class. A great proportion of the children are those of worthless and drunken parents, and many others are the children of parents, who, from their poverty, are too poor to pay even a penny a week for schooling.