This post follows on from the one on schooling for the poor. The photo shows the scholars’ dining hall at Eton College.

The middling sorts

Children of the comfortably off and moderately wealthy would have been initially educated at home by their parents or by a governess. Older boys would have a tutor (if the parents could afford one), or might have been sent to the local vicar for lessons in Latin and Greek, or sent to school. This may have been a grammar school where, even if the basic curriculum was free, fees would have been charged for extra subjects, or one of hundreds of small, fee-paying schools. Many of these were boarding schools. These catered for girls or boys, sometimes both.

James Hobson describes some of the schools and their fees in his blog.

There is also a short chapter on schools in Passengers, by the same author. The book is about stage coaches and travel, and the connection here is people sending away their children to boarding schools in distant parts of the country. Hobson suggests that this was a particularly attractive method of dealing with inconvenient children (dependent relatives, illegitimate offspring) when the school offered boarding all year round. Send off that annoying brat and you need not see them again until they were 18.

There was no regulation, so a school could be excellent, or could resemble the one Dickens described in Nicholas Nickleby, or the one in Jane Eyre (believed to be modelled on one that the Bronte sisters attended).

The upper classes

As for the middling sorts, children of the wealthy would initially be educated by a governess. For girls, this was sometimes all they got, although there were seminaries for women. There is an excellent article on this here, so I won’t repeat it.  But although women could be educated in ‘men’s subjects’ as well as ladylike arts such as music, painting and needlework, they were excluded from any kind of formal qualification and not allowed to attend university.

Boys would have a tutor from the age of around five. Families not wealthy enough to employ a dedicated tutor might send their sons to someone like a local vicar. Those who could afford it would then send their male children to a public school.

The first thing to say here is that a ‘public school’ is actually a fee-charging private school. They were public only in terms of being open to any boy whose parents could pay, and are not publicly funded in any way (although currently they are classed as charities and do not have to pay any tax on their profits).

The prestigious public schools in Regency times were Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Harrow and Rugby. They were not the only ones, but they are the best known. These schools were then, and still are now, associated with the ruling classes, their alumni providing many politicians and military leaders.

Attending such a school was an excellent networking opportunity (as we would say today). However it wasn’t always good. There was a fagging system to maintain order outside the classroom. Senior boys were given powers over the younger ones, but there were duties on both sides. The younger boys were expected to carry out tasks for the older ones (running errands, for example, or cleaning  boots), and the older ones were supposed to protect their fags. However this could lead to harsh punishments and bullying – as depicted in the 1857 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. This is set in Rugby school in 1830, and is largely based on the author’s experiences.

Donna Hatch has a good primer on ‘Education and other forms of child torture’ looking at the education for boys. Although the end of the post says there will be one looking at the education of girls, I couldn’t find it.

Regina Jeffers looks at Changes in 19^th Century English Schools