As the patron was owner of a living,and the officer of his commission,the keeper of a prison was owner of his establishment.The paralysis of administration which prevailed throughout the country made it natural to farm out paupers to the master of a workhouse,and prisoners to the proprietor of a gaol.
The state of prisoners may be inferred not only from Howard's authentic record but from the fictions of Fielding,Smollett and Goldsmith;and the last echoes of the same complaints may be found in Pickwick and Little Dorrit.The Marshalsea described in the last was also a proprietary concern.We shall hereafter see how Bentham proposed to treat the evils revealed by Oglethorpe and Howard,III.EDUCATIONAnother topic treated by Colquhoun marks the initial stage of controversies which were soon to grow warm.Colquhoun boasts of the number of charities for which London was already conspicuous.A growing facility for forming associations of all kinds,political,religious,scientific,and charitable,is an obvious characteristic of modern progress.Where in earlier times a college or a hospital had to be endowed by a founder and invested by charter with corporate personality,it is now necessary only to call a meeting,form a committee,and appeal for subscriptions.Societies of various kinds had sprung up during the century.Artists,men of science,agriculturists,and men of literary tastes,had founded innumerable academies and 'philosophical institutes.'The great London hospitals,dependent upon voluntary subscriptions,had been founded during the first half of the century.Colquhoun counts the annual revenue of various charitable institutions at £445,000,besides which the endowments produced £150,000,and the poor-rates £255,000.(44)Among these a considerable number were intended to promote education.Here,as in some other cases,it seems that people at the end of the century were often taking up an impulse given a century before.So the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge,founded in 1699,and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,founded in 1701,were supplemented by the Church Missionary Society and the Religious Tract Society,both founded in 1799.The societies for the reformation of manners,prevalent at the end of the seventeenth century,were taken as a model by Wilberforce and his friends at the end of the eighteenth.(45)In the same way,the first attempts at providing a general education for the poor had been made by Archbishop Tenison,who founded a parochial school about 1680in order 'to check the growth of popery.'Charity schools became common during the early part of the eighteenth century and received various endowments.They were attacked as tending to teach the poor too much --a very needless alarm --and also by free thinkers,such as Mandeville,as intended outworks of the established church.This last objection was a foretaste of the bitter religious controversies which were to accompany the growth of an educational system.Colquhoun says that there were 62endowed schools in London,from Christ's Hospital downwards,educating about 5000children;237parish schools with about 9000children,and 3730'private schools.'
The teaching was,of course,very imperfect,and in a report of a committee of the House of Commons in 1818,it is calculated that about half the children in a large district were entirely uneducated.There was,of course,nothing in England deserving the name of a system in educational more than in any other matters.The grammar schools throughout the country provided more or less for the classes which could not aspire to the public schools and universities.
About a third of the boys at Christ's Hospital were,as Coleridge tells us,sons of clergymen.(46)The children of the poor were either not educated,or picked up their letters at some charity school or such a country dame's school as is described by Shenstone.A curious proof,however,of rising interest in the question is given by the Sunday Schools movement at the end of the century.Robert Raikes (1735-1811),a printer in Gloucester and proprietor of a newspaper,joined with a clergyman to set up a school in 1780at a total cost of 1s.6d.a week.Within three or four years the plan was taken up everywhere,and the worthy Raikes,whose newspaper had spread the news,found himself revered as a great pioneer of philanthropy.Wesley took up the scheme warmly;bishops condescended to approve;the king and queen were interested,and within three or four years the number of learners was reckoned at two or three hundred thousand.A Sunday School Association was formed in 1785with well known men of business at its head.Queen Charlotte's friend,Mrs Trimmer (1741-1810),took up the work near London,and Hannah More (1745-1833)in Somersetshire.Hannah More gives a strange account of the utter absence of any civilising agencies in the district around Cheddar where she and her sisters laboured.She was accused of 'methodism'and a leaning to Jacobinism,although her views were of the most moderate kind.She wished the poor to be able to read their Bibles and to be qualified for domestic duties,but not to write or to be enabled to read Tom Paine or be encouraged to rise above their position.The literary light of the Whigs,Dr Parr (1747-1825),showed his liberality by arguing that the poor ought to be taught,but admitted that the enterprise had its limits.The 'Deity Himself had fixed a great gulph between them and the poor.'A scanty instruction given on Sundays alone was not calculated to facilitate the passage of that gulf.By the end of the century,however,signs of a more systematic movement were showing themselves.