The child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Some of Wordsworth’s greatest poetry deals with the relationship between the experience of the child and the experience of the adult—development of consciousness, modes of learning. The Prelude, or the Growth of a Poet’s Mind traces Wordsworth’s own progress in detail: the Immortality ode explores the philosophical and poetic implications of Wordsworth’s awareness of his own states of consciousness in childhood. The interest in the child as a child, not a miniature adult, developed generally in this period, but some of Wordsworth’s insights—and Coleridge’s—are much deeper than was usual amongst poets or educational theorists. The precision of the Immortality ode’s description of the child’s awareness of the unreality of the external world could not be bettered. Wordsworth’s own note on the poem describes his own experience of this state:
I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own material nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At this time I was afraid of such processes.
From this precise understanding of the way in which the child only gradually establishes an identity separate from the world around him—and thus only gradually becomes conscious that the world, and objects, and people are independent of his own consciousness—comes the famous passage in the Immortality Ode, where Wordsworth gives thanks for ‘our past years’ not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:
What Wordsworth is thankful for is
those obstinate questionings
Of sense, and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized—
Lionel Trilling has compared Wordsworth’s interest in the child’s changing sense of reality—literally the realizing of worlds—with Freud’s. And Wordsworth understood well enough the connection between his experience of the ‘abysses of idealism’ as a child and his adult sense of the tension between the adult conscious identity, the prisoner of mortality in the individual cell or grave, and the poet’s sense of the consciousness which expanded to relate to everything.
At this level where sensuality, instinct, emotions and mind are indistinguishable his awareness of childhood is rarely equalled.
It followed that he attached great importance to the education and upbringing of children. In The Prelude he contrasts the fate of the over-educated clever child with the free-running ‘natural’ boys who were his companions at Hawkshead Grammar School. Wordsworth’s bright child is rather like Coleridge’s image of Pitt. As with Pitt, virtuous conduct does not spring from feeling or from the whole human being:
This model of a child is never known
To mix in quarrels; that were far beneath
Its dignity; with gifts he bubbles o’er
As generous as a fountain; selfishness
May not come near him, nor the little throng
Of flitting pleasures tempt him from his path;
The wandering beggars propagate his name,
Dumb creatures find him tender as a nun,
And natural or supernatural fear,
Unless it leaps upon him in a dream,
Touches him not.
This child is replete with knowledge—‘a miracle of scientific lore’. He knows how to guide ships, ‘he can read/the inside of the earth and tell the stars’ he knows politics,
Can string you names of districts, cities, towns,
The whole world over, tight as beads of dew
Upon a gossamer thread; he sifts, he weighs;
All things are put to question; he must live
Knowing that he grows wiser every day
Or else not live at all, and seeing too
Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
Into the dimpling cistern of his heart:
For this unnatural growth the trainer blame,
Pity the tree.
Wordsworth deals with this ‘unnatural growth’ by placing it immediately next to one of his most famous and successful pieces of writing—‘There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs/And islands of Winander.’
This Boy is natural—his skill is to imitate the owls who halloo and scream back to him—but Wordsworth manages to convey the feeling that boy, owls and landscape are part of a spiritual experience all the greater for being unsought. The boy has, what the scholarly child has not, a sense of the unity of things. As he is the owls, so his mind and the water and sky are fused into one:
Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
And Wordsworth and his companions at school were, he felt
A race of real children; not too wise
Too learned or too good; but wanton, fresh
And bandied up and down by love and hate;
Not unresentful where self-justified;
Fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest, shy;
Mad at their sports like withered leaves in winds;
Though doing wrong and suffering, and full oft
Bending beneath our life’s mysterious weight
Of pain, and doubt, and fear, yet yielding not
In happiness to the happiest upon earth.
Whilst at Hawkshead, at the age of fourteen he wrote a school exercise in praise of Education, which he said himself was ‘but a tame imitation of Pope’s versification and a little in his style’.
But what he most remembered of his schooldays was his continuing relationship with ‘rivers, fields and groves’ and in The Prelude he addressed a sympathetic paragraph to Coleridge who in his days at Christ’s Hospital was educated in a very different way—more academic, more confined, and more stringent. He envisages Coleridge ‘yet a liveried schoolboy’ lying on the leaded roof of ‘that wide edifice, thy school and home’ watching the movements of the clouds, the only visible natural object, or using the ‘internal light’ of imagination to
See trees and meadows and thy native stream,
Far distant, thus beheld from year to year
Of a long exile.
Coleridge, in fact, was not as Wordsworth pictured him. He did take intense delight in natural scenery but it was not to him, as it was to Wordsworth, an inbred necessity—most of his great nature poetry and notebook descriptions come when he was living through Wordsworth. In fact he enjoyed city life and was peculiarly able to cope with the academic education system, since he was extremely gifted and much more excited by pure ideas—geometric, linguistic, philosophic—than Wordsworth would ever be. Sent away to Christ’s Hospital at nine years of age he was undoubtedly bewildered and homesick—Lamb uses his dreams of his native town in his picture of ‘a poor friendless boy’ at the school. But he was inventive and stimulated: in 1791 he sent his brother, the Reverend George Coleridge, an amusing poem on an equilateral triangle, written, he said, because mathematics ‘the quintessence of Truth’ had found few and languid admirers—this because it appealed to reason only—and ‘whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on in a dreary desert’. The result is grotesque but curiously memorable, and for all its heavy-headed humour does imagine the tension between lines and angles:
And from the point C.
In which the circles make a pother
Cutting and slashing one another,
Bid the straight lines a-journeying go.
From Lamb’s memories and Coleridge’s own we have a very vivid picture of Christ’s Hospital at this time. Lamb, writing under his pseudonym Elia about ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years ago’, describes how the diet of the child, Charles Lamb, was improved by gifts from home compared to the general school food:
He [Lamb] had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf—our crug—moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. Our Monday’s milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of ‘extraordinary bread and butter’ from the hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday’s mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant (we had three banyan to four meat-days in the week)—was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef on Thursdays (strong as caro equina [horseflesh]) with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth—our scanty mutton scrags on Fridays—and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion)—he had his hot plate of roast veal or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown to our palates) cooked in the paternal kitchen (a great thing) and brought him daily by his maid or aunt!
Lamb also records the story of a ‘gageater’, a boy who was thought to be gorging himself on gags—the fat of fresh beef boiled—but was in fact carrying them off to feed his starving parents in Chancery Lane.
Lamb gives a vivid picture of the inhumanities of punishments at the school. At the age of seven, on his first day there, he saw a boy in fetters—the punishment for running away. If a boy ran away a second time he was put in the dungeons—‘little square, Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket … with a peep of light, let in askance from a prison orifice at top, barely enough to read by’. Boys were kept there day and night—the porter brought bread and water but was forbidden to speak: the beadle came twice a week to administer the ‘periodical chastisement’. If a boy ran away for a third time he was expelled after a state flogging in front of all his schoolfellows. ‘Scourging was after the old Roman fashion, long and stately.’ Lamb felt, he says, very sick.
Monitors were tyrannous, lashing the younger children, keeping them from fires, exacting fines of bread for various trumped up crimes—one of them, a ‘petty Nero’, branded some little boy, and took his bread to feed a donkey which had been smuggled onto the leads of the roof. Masters, too, were tyrannous. Both Lamb and Coleridge have left records of the Reverend James Boyer, who deeply impressed them. Lamb’s picture deserves full quotation:
He had two wigs, both pedantic but of different omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old, discoloured unkempt angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made his morning appearance in his passy, or passionate wig. J.B. had a heavy hand. I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon his lips) with a ‘Sirrah, do you presume to set your wits at me?’ Nothing was more common than to see him make a headlong entry into the schoolroom from his inner recess or library, and with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out ‘Od’s my life, Sirrah (his favourite adjuration) I have a great mind to whip you,’ then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair—and after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context) drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some Devil’s Litany, with the expletory yell—‘and I WILL too.’ In his gentler moods, when the rabidus furor was assuaged, he had resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the boy, and reading the Debates, at the same time; a paragraph and a lash between; which in those times when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a veneration for the diffuser graces of rhetoric.
Lamb records that when Coleridge heard Boyer was on his deathbed he expressed the hope that he might be ‘wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities’.
But Coleridge’s encounters with Boyer, when he was a ‘Grecian’ in the upper school, working for a university scholarship were intellectually stimulating and left their marks on much of his later works. Boyer’s mind was clearly rigorous, complex and precise. He had no patience with the vague exclamatory phrases of the poetry of the time. Coleridge, twenty-five years later, wrote: ‘In fancy I can almost hear him now exclaiming “Harp? harp? lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your Nurse’s Daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose.”’ Coleridge the poet in his slacker moods was always given to rhetorical flourishes, but his great poetry and his precise responses as a critic to particular poems show that he had well learned Boyer’s lesson about the value of the real, the precise, the concrete. From Boyer too he learned something still more important; that poetry had its own coherence of form, its own mode of thought:
I learned from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes.
Even in Coleridge’s youth Boyer’s arbitrary harshness and the torturous punitive system at Christ’s Hospital were felt to be outdated. Views of education—and parenthood and child psychology—at the time were undergoing sweeping changes largely through the influence of one book—Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, first published in 1762. It was translated into English as Emilius and Sophia or A New System of Education: over two hundred treatises dealing with its views were published in England before the end of the century. It is generally assumed that what Rousseau recommended was a return to a ‘State of Nature’ because mankind was born free and good but became corrupted by social pressures and habit. It is true that, unlike many of his predecessors, Rousseau did not believe in original sin—that children were born corrupt. Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671) recommended that parents ‘take some time daily to speak to your little children one by one about their miserable condition by nature’ because ‘they are not too little to die; nor too little to go to hell’. Rousseau, on the contrary, wrote: ‘Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart; the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced.’ But Rousseau’s State of Nature is not primarily one of automatic virtue: he is more concerned with his belief that man is not essentially or originally a social being: his ‘natural’ impulses are self-regarding, his ‘natural’ desires in conflict with the society in which, unless he retreats into an artificially primitive seclusion, he must live. What Rousseau was concerned to demonstrate was that each modern man, like his savage ancestors, had to learn to be social, and that the learning process must be suited to the nature of the individual human being. Children, he believed, had no powers of reasoning before the age of twelve, no social needs or capacities before fifteen. It was therefore useless to teach them the usual ‘school subjects’ before they were capable of the mental processes which made them able really to understand them—book-learning was actually harmful. Rousseau’s ideas of a child’s actual capacities may have been a bit wild, but his general theory was illuminating and seminal. In the preface to Emile he wrote:
We are not sufficiently acquainted with a state of infancy: the farther we proceed on our present mistaken ideas, the farther we wander from the point. Even the most sagacious instructors apply themselves to those things which man is required to know without considering what it is children are capacitated to learn. They are always expecting the man in the child, without reflecting what he is before he can become a man ….
Nature, he argued, intended children to develop their bodies before exercising their minds:
Children are always in motion; quiet and meditation are their aversion; a studious or sedentary life is injurious to their health and growth; neither their minds nor their bodies can bear constraint.
This belief caused him to feel strongly about contemporary nurses as well as about the undesirability of books before adolescence. Mothers who unnaturally sent their babies away to wet nurses in the country perhaps did not realize how these babies were kept quiet:
How often is the little innocent, when its nurse is in the least hurry, hung on a peg like a bundle of clouts, there to remain crucified … Such children as have been found in this situation have been observed to be always black in the face; the stomach being violently compressed, preventing the circulation of the blood and forcing it into the head: in the meanwhile the poor little creatures were supposed to be very patient, because they had not the power to cry.
Rousseau remarked cynically that he did not know how long such children were likely to live—but, he imagined, not very long, and that this was one of the conveniences of swaddling clothes.
Emile, Rousseau’s model pupil, was to be brought up in isolation in a state of innocence and learn skills as and when they were appropriate to him. No books—except Robinson Crusoe—before the age of fifteen. Robinson Crusoe was excepted because it showed man learning social, economic and scientific skills practically and from scratch, as Emile must do. Emile’s natural talents were to be brought out of him, not imposed as ideas or technique from outside authority—the tutor was to run races with him and allow him to evolve his own methods of winning; walls were to be decorated only with Emile’s own drawings which were improved by critical comparisons with his own earlier work.
Rousseau’s views on education, like his views on politics, were simplified by being popularized. The idea of the Social Contract worked magically in France at the time of the Revolution: in the same way the idea of allowing a child to develop naturally without prejudicing influences led many people who had never read Emile to believe that Rousseau wanted to turn everyone back into a noble Savage. Rousseau was indeed pessimistic about man’s influence on things in general:
All things are good as their Creator made them, but everything degenerates in the hands of man. By human art is our native soil compelled to nourish exotick plants, and one tree to bear the fruits of another. Improving man makes a general confusion of elements, climates and seasons: he mutilates his dogs, his horses and his slaves: he defaces, he confounds everything, as if he delighted in nothing but monsters and deformity. He is not content with anything in its natural state, not even with his own species. His very offspring must be trained up for him, like a horse in the menage, and be taught to grow after his own fancy like a tree in his garden.
But this condemnation of art as opposed to Nature does not lead Rousseau to reject education and society:
Without this indeed, in the present state of things matters would be still worse than they are and mankind be civilized by halves. Should a man, in a state of society, be given up, from the cradle, to his own notions and conduct, he would certainly turn out the most preposterous of human beings.
Rousseau had a vision, an honourable vision, of what human beings should aim at—a kind of integrity of personality:
To be something, to be consistent with one’s self, and always the same individual, our words and actions should agree; we should be always determined in the part we ought to take; we should take it with a high hand and persevere. If such a prodigy could be found we might then know whether he be a man or a citizen or how he can so manage as to be, at once, both the one and the other.
But—contrary to the general view of Rousseau’s beliefs—this could not be achieved by having ‘man in the bosom of society, retain the primitive sentiments of nature’. If he did this he would be hopelessly torn between man and citizen, inclination and duty—not an integrated personality but defined by his place of origin or his function. Rousseau and Coleridge come together in their hatred of the abstract definitions of human nature. ‘Like men of the present time, the Englishman, the Frenchman, the citizen,’ Rousseau wrote scornfully, ‘he would be in reality nothing at all.’
But Coleridge the young man apparently took pleasure in mocking Rousseau’s more extreme attitudes: he had after all benefited himself from authoritative teaching. When his friend Thelwall, the notorious democrat, called to see him in Nether Stowey and announced his intention of ‘preserving the minds of his children from any bias in favour of notions which they could not appreciate or even understand’ Coleridge showed him his ‘Botanic Garden’. When Thelwall exclaimed that it was a wilderness of weeds and had so many capabilities that it seemed a shame, Coleridge replied that the weeds were indigenous and the garden was being educated on the Rousseau Plan, preserved from all artificial insemination—and therefore full of those natural growths, nettles, hensbane, nightshade, Devil’s Bit, Fool’s Parsley and Cox-Comb. The soil was not to be prejudiced towards roses and strawberries.
Despite caution and mockery Rousseau’s ideas had a deep effect on Coleridge and Wordsworth. Wordsworth and Dorothy, who were employed to look after little Basil Montague at Alfoxden, attempted to bring him up as a child of Nature, running about in the open: Wordsworth’s poem to Dorothy addressed ‘To a Young Lady’ who had been reproached for taking long walks in the country addressed her as ‘Dear Child of Nature’, and the concept of this child haunted both Wordsworth’s rural poems and Coleridge’s supernatural ones: the child symbolized innocence and youthful energy as a natural power. But association with Basil brought out a natural shrewdness about childish behaviour in Wordsworth. The poem Anecdote for Fathers recounts neatly and dramatically an encounter which is based on one between Wordsworth and Basil in which the father persists in demanding why the child would rather live at Kilve than Liswyn farm. Cornered and inarticulate, the child in the end happens to catch sight of the weathercock:
Then did the boy his tongue unlock
And eased his mind with this reply
At Kilve there was no weather-cock;
And that’s the reason why.
Wordsworth suggests gently that insisting that ‘there surely must some reason be’ produces wild answers and lies—for which less wise adults reproach the child.
In 1806 he wrote a long letter to a friend who had asked for his advice on dealing with a gay and selfish child who craved for sympathy. This letter shows the same shrewdness and is pompous and perceptive both at once. He points out the dangers of the new interest in children as children to their characters. ‘Formerly, indeed till within these few years, children were very carelessly brought up; at present they too early and too habitually feel their own importance from the solicitude and unremitting attendance which is bestowed upon them.’ Wordsworth is nevertheless very firmly determined that the child’s temperament is not to be mortified ‘which is the course commonly pursued with such tempers’. Nor should she be preached to about her own defects, or her infancy overrun with ‘books about good boys and girls and bad boys and girls and all that trumpery.’ He goes on to supply a fascinating list of educational matter chosen on the basic criterion of being ‘interesting for its own sake; things known because they are interesting, not interesting because they are known’. Behind his list again lies his vision of the human spirit and personality expanding through contemplation of images which contribute directly to its growth and can be assimilated as personal experience. It was Wordsworth who said ‘Two things we may learn from little children from 3 to 6 years old; that it is a characteristic, an instinct, of our human nature to pass out of self …. And not to suffer any one form to pass into me and become an usurping self.’ The volatile child in need of constant affection from outside will benefit from being left at liberty ‘to luxuriate in such feelings and images as will feed her mind in silent pleasure.’
There were two categories of things to learn which fed the mind. The first and most important was found in ‘fairy tales, romances, the best biographies and histories and such part of natural history relating to the powers and appearances of the earth and elements, and the habits and structures of animals as belong to it, not as an art or a science but as a magazine of form and feeling.’ Form and feeling—both necessary to the growth and integrity of the mind. The second group of laudable lessons consisted of those which combined the pleasure of exercising bodily and mental gifts and being praised for them—dancing, music, drawing, grammar, languages, botany probably. What was to be avoided at all costs was the acquisition of useless knowledge, interesting ‘almost solely because it is known and the knowledge may be displayed’—and this, Wordsworth believed, covered ‘three fourths of what, according to the plan of modern education, children’s heads are stuffed with’—minute, remote, trifling facts in geography, history, natural history, conventional ‘accomplishments’.
There is something essentially Rousseau-like in this opposition between what could be said to feed the mind and what was imposed from without. And much later in life, writing to the inspectors appointed by a committee of the Council on Education he was even more dogmatic. He asked whether the council placed too much value on knowledge inculcated by the teacher as opposed to their occupations out of doors, learning through nature. Also too little attention was paid to ‘books of imagination’—a common fault. ‘We must not only have knowledge but the means of wielding it and that is done infinitely more through the imaginative faculty assisting both in the collection and application of facts than is generally believed.’
Coleridge also believed that education should be a process of aiding natural development and natural curiosity. He used the organic metaphor in this instance too, defining education as ‘to call forth; as the blossom is educed from the bud’. Children should not be crammed with knowledge—a child must be child-like.‘Touch a door a little ajar or half-open and it will yield to the push of your finger. Fire a cannon-ball at it and the door stirs not an inch; you make a hole through it, the door is spoilt forever, but not moved. Apply this moral to Education.’ And he, like Wordsworth, believed that imaginative literature helped to develop a whole human being as pure information did not. A letter from Lamb to Coleridge illustrates their concern about this and dislike of the current compendiums of useful facts:
‘Goody Two Shoes’ is almost out of print. Mrs Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs Barbauld’s and Mrs Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs Barbauld’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learned that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if, instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history.
And Lamb’s picture of the ‘modern schoolmaster’ indicates mockingly some of the strains of instilling useful knowledge:
The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of everything, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He must be superficially, if I may say so, omniscient. He is to know something of pneumatics; of chemistry; … an insight into mechanics is desirable, with a touch of statistics; the quality of soils, etc.; botany, the constitution of his country, cum multis aliis. … He must seize every occasion—the season of the year—the time of the day—a passing cloud—a rainbow—a waggon of hay—a regiment of soldiers going by—to inculcate something useful. He can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object of instruction. He must interpret beauty into the picturesque. He cannot relish a beggar-man, or a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement. Nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe—that Great Book as it has been called—is to him, indeed, to all intents and purposes, a book out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting schoolboys …. Wherever he goes this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.
In this passage one can clearly see the realization of a problem increasingly pressing in the conduct of education—the growing quantity of possible subjects for learning, the growing impossibility of covering them all, of being a fully educated man. Coleridge himself seems a monumental figure in retrospect because he was still trying to bring together and synthesize enormously varying modes of knowledge—and had the intellectual capacity and the vast memory to achieve great things. But the idea of the ‘whole man’ growing through learning was already a bit of a dream—so emotional integrity and developed personality became more important.
Coleridge’s notebooks make it clear that he was a precise and loving observer of his own children’s development. He believed children should be happy—his own childhood anxieties had left marks on his character which he associated with his adult failures and illnesses. ‘The great importance of breeding up children happy to at least 15 or 16 illustrated in my always dreaming of Christ’s Hospital and when not quite well having all those uneasy feelings which I had at School/feelings of Easter Monday etc.’ Writing to his wife he suggested that she teach Hartley to read out of Practical Education—a joint work by Maria Edgworth and her father which appeared in 1798—but felt compelled to add that ‘J. Wedgwood informed me that the Edgworths were most miserable when Children and yet the Father, in his book, is ever vapouring about their Happiness.’ His own descriptions of his sons—the volatile Hartley and the staid Derwent—suggest a bliss and a capacity for joy which their later lives did not bear out. They represented to him the innocence of the Child of Nature:
The wisdom and graciousness of God in the infancy of the human species—its beauty, long continuance etc. etc. (Children in the wind—hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated Trees, below which they play’d—the elder whirling for joy, the one in petticoats, a fat Baby, eddying half willingly, half by the force of the Gust—driven backward, struggling forward—both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of Joy.)
Hartley in particular had inherited much of Coleridge’s own temperament, the brilliance, the excitability, the curiosity. Coleridge ‘sent him naked into a shallow of the river Greta; he trembled with the novelty, yet you cannot conceive his raptures’. Coleridge told Humphry Davy that this son was ‘a spirit that dances on an aspin leaf—the air which yonder sallow-faced and yawning Tourist is breathing is to my Babe a perpetual Nitrous Oxyde’. As the father experimented with laughing gas with Davy and became dependent on stimulants, so did the son. Hartley was dismissed from a Fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford for drunkenness and immorality and spent most of his short life wandering the Lake District cadging drinks. The precocious child and the philosopher father had long conversations about ‘Life, Reality, Pictures and Thinking’ in which the analytic Coleridge and the visionary operated together:
He pointed out without difficulty that there might be five Hartleys, real Hartley, Shadow Hartley, Picture Hartley, Looking Glass Hartley and Echo Hartley/and as to the difference between his Shadow and the Reflection in the Looking Glass, he said, the Shadow was black and he could not see his eyes in it. I asked him what he did when he thought of anything—he answered—I look at it and then go to sleep. To sleep?—said I—you mean, that you shut your eyes. Yes, he replied—I shut my eyes and put my hands so (covering his eyes) and go to sleep—then I WAKE again, and away I run—
That of shutting his eyes and covering them was a Recipe I had given him some time ago/but the notion of that state of mind being Sleep is very striking, and he meant more, I suspect than that people when asleep have their eyes shut—indeed I know it from the tone and leap up of Voice with which he uttered the word WAKE! Tomorrow I am to exert my genius in making a paper-balloon the idea of carrying up a bit of lighted Candle into the clouds makes him almost insane with Pleasure.
Coleridge’s passionate interest in the operations of consciousness and language made him a stimulating teacher. He tells how he tried to teach Derwent how his senses worked: Derwent had never connected sight with eyes, or speech with his mouth (he was 2 years and 10 months old within 8 days, Coleridge recorded). He was passive when his father held his tongue to show how he could not speak without it but when the experiment was repeated with Derwent holding his own tongue, ‘finding that he could not speak he turned pale as death and in the reaction from fear flushed red and gave me a blow in the face’.
Mixture of emotions—in himself and others—always fascinated Coleridge. He was as fascinated by Hartley’s reaction to pain as by Derwent’s fear and anger. ‘Pain with him is so wholly transubstantiated by the Joys that had rolled on before, and rushed in after, that often times five minutes after his Mother had whipt him, he had gone up and asked her to whip him again …’. And in the Conclusion to Part II of the unfinished Christabel—at first sight irrelevant to the central narrative of supernatural good and evil—Coleridge discusses the relationship between innocence and human destructiveness in terms of the relationship between father and son. It has been suggested that Coleridge left Christabel unfinished because he could not solve its central philosophical and moral problem—that of the relationship between innocence and the experience of evil. Blake presented the gulf between innocent goodness and the goodness based on the knowledge of good and evil, conscious goodness, in the opposed Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, which present two contradictory, if not mutually exclusive, modes of consciousness. Coleridge in Christabel seems to have intended that the dove-like innocence of the heroine should have prevailed over the daemonic serpent-woman, Geraldine, and her goodness have been strengthened by the knowledge of and contact with evil. In his description of the complex mixture of rage and delight in his own relationship with Hartley he is conducting the same kind of enquiry into the original forces behind human conduct that he made into his own opium dreams and sensual responses to Sara Hutchinson. In the imperfect world of human passions, which is not the pure and complete world of geometry or of heaven, love is inevitably distorted into bitterness—which in its turn creates love. Coleridge describes what is in fact a common experience of parenthood—the sense of delight in the child so intense that out of reaction one snaps at it. Hartley, like Christabel, is the Child of Nature,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks
That always finds and never seeks—
self-sufficient, living in the moment. The father’s heart is so overwhelmed with joy
that he at last
Must needs express his love’s excess
With words of unmeant bitterness.
As with the ‘streamy association’ which might have held a clue to the origin of evil, this forcing together of ‘thoughts so all unlike each other’ holds a clue to the nature of experience. The reaction is valuable:
Perhaps ’tis tender too and pretty
At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity.
And, even more deeply, perhaps the experience is an indication that in this life we perhaps can only know good through the distorting vision of anger and evil. The poetic simplicity covers a deal of profound speculation about pain:
And what if, in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
Such giddiness of heart and brain
Comes seldom save from rage and pain,
So talks as it’s most used to do.
Coleridge, long before modern psychological studies of innate aggression and its inextricable relationship with the positive emotions of love and protection, recognized the value of Derwent’s rage with him, and the nature of his own anger with Hartley. When nervous, or later guilty about neglecting his children, he could over-act the heavy Victorian father in an embarrassing way, lecturing Hartley on his tendency to show off and prevaricate as though this was a black sin, becoming wildly over-emotional about the children’s duty to their mother who had fed them with her blood and later with her milk. But, at his best, he was intelligent, relaxed, curious and shrewd, and his views of what ‘natural’ children and happy children should be were unusually complex.
Mrs Coleridge was as conventional as a parent as Coleridge was unusual. She was clearly a devoted and affectionate mother of babies—Dorothy Wordsworth was extremely scornful over the amount of time she spent on suckling Derwent and remarked that she was, to be sure, a sad fiddle-faddler. She was conventionally ambitious for the boys—touchingly overjoyed and uncomprehending at Hartley’s academic successes, shattered by his disgrace. When the Southeys came to Greta Hall the whole menage became an academic hothouse of which she was exceedingly proud. In 1814 she was explaining
we keep regular School from past nine until 4 with the exception of an hour for walking and a half-hour for dressing—Mrs Lovel keeps school in a small room for English and Latin—and the writing and figures—french—italian etc. are done with me in the dining room with the assistance of Aunt Eliza—and Southey teaches his wife and daughters to read spanish and his son Greek—should we not all be very learned!
Coleridge’s youngest child, his daughter Sara, perhaps benefited most from the parental combination of brilliance and thoroughness. She grew up to be beautiful, scholarly and extremely serious, married her first cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, and devoted much of her life to the editing and publishing of her father’s scattered works. She applied herself intelligently and energetically to the education of her small son, Herbert, and can be seen putting Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s educational principles into practice. Lessons were made into games—Latin was taught with cards, each with a Latin word on one side and the English on the other. Geography was made meaningful with stories and visual aids—Sara and Herbert traced Napoleon’s campaigns, or the journey of the Chosen People to the Promised Land on maps: Sara insisted sensibly on using maps of the whole world so that the child early developed a sense of relative distances and positions. When she was warned by a doctor that she might be overtaxing the mind of a child of four she replied that she never insisted on his learning—he looked at maps for sheer amusement and was allowed to run away the moment he was tired. Like the poets she appealed to the imagination: ‘Give him classical Fairy Tales instead of modern poverty-stricken fiction—show him the great outlines of the globe instead of Chinese puzzles and spillikins. Store his mind with facts rather than prematurely endeavour to prepossess it with opinions or sophisticate it with sentiment based on slippery ground.’ She published a romantic fairy tale called Phantasmion and Pretty Lessons in Verse for good children which made history easy with mnemonic rhymes. Bloody Mary is presented thus:
One thousand five hundred and fifty three
Began Queen Mary’s fiery reign;
The worst of counsellors had she
And an evil spouse in Philip of Spain.
The Wordsworths were less successful with the academic education of their children than the Coleridges. They seem to have left them free and hardy as toddlers—Dorothy describes John, the eldest son, in 1805, living all day in his great-coat and running in and out of the house in all weathers—‘he is the best endurer of wet and cold I ever saw—in the frostiest weather he never complains’. And there is a sense of real family unity and gaiety in Dorothy’s descriptions of all the neighbourhood children dancing in their kitchen to the music of the Grasmere Fiddler going his rounds. ‘It is a pleasant sound they make with their little pattering feet upon the stone floor, half a dozen of them, Boys and Girls; Dorothy is in ecstacy and John looks as grave as an Old Man.’ But the unfortunate John (and later the other surviving son, William) turned out to be academically very slow—and Wordsworth made the mistake of trying to teach him himself all through 1819. By then Wordsworth was morbidly anxious about the welfare of his three surviving children, and John’s slowness and the fact that he was, as Sara Hutchinson put it, ‘diseasedly shy’ drove Wordsworth into fits of irritability and impatience. This had a bad effect on John. Sara wrote ‘it was a sad error ever to despair of him as his father did at one time’. John and Wordsworth both recovered to some extent—John, responsible and conscientious, felt freer away from his anxious father and Sara was able to report: ‘Now even he has thrown off much of the fear that he had of his father—and does talk freely with him at times.’
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey all became involved in various ways in the great educational controversy surrounding the new teaching methods of Doctor Andrew Bell. Dr Bell’s system had been introduced at the Military Male Orphan Asylum at Madras, in 1795. The military male orphans were the half-caste abandoned children of British soldiers and Indian women. This system promoted self-respect and learning amongst the boys by introducing self-tuition: the more advanced boys taught the younger and slower ones, thereby increasing their own understanding and skill. They were self-reliant—they made their own pens and ruled their own paper and kept their own individual accounts of their progress, so that their work was their own achievement, not imposed from above. Punishments, too, were allotted by the boys, and Dr Bell said he ‘never had reason to think their decision partial, biased or unjust, or to interfere with their award, otherwise than to mitigate or remit the punishment, when he thought the formality of the trial and of the sentence were sufficient to produce the effect required’. He was determined to prevent occasions for punishment—the teachers were told to make the boys happy, and bad boys were assigned to care of particular good boys, who were instructed to ‘treat him kindly, reconcile him to the school, and render him happy like the rest in his situation’.
This emphasis on happiness, responsiblity and development of the whole personality appealed to the poets. Southey wrote a book, The Origin, Nature and Object of the New System of Education, to defend Bell against later copiers and rivals. Coleridge lectured eagerly on his work in Bristol—De Quincey accused him of talking endlessly about Ball and Bell, Bell and Ball.fn1 In 1811 Dr Bell visited Keswick with Southey and met the Wordsworths. ‘Johnson the Curate’ was running the Grasmere school on the Madras system—Bell took him to run one of the new Central or National Schools in London. Wordsworth himself taught at the Grasmere school regularly two or three hours every morning and evening. It was a low, dark, and poor building with a few tables and forms and a chair at the end for the master. ‘The children came up individually 4 times a day and managed some way or other to get through as many lessons.’ Later, he seems to have handed this work over to his devoted women. Dorothy indeed helped Bell to prepare a new edition of his book, but he later rejected her version and changes and reverted to his own. Wordsworth was anxious that his children should be educated at the Charterhouse largely because it practised the Madras system—William the younger did spend an unsuccessful time there after attending the Central School in London under Mr Johnson, the former curate of Grasmere. Wordsworth, writing to his brother in 1819 about William’s shortcomings, complains that a teacher who had rejected William did not seem to grasp the importance of the Madras system for slow Boys. ‘One Boy advances more rapidly than another, but all are made to advance according to their talents—I conclude then either that Mr Russell does not perceive this principle of the system, or he is content to have his school managed with as much of the new scheme as suits his fancy, and to fall below the point of its characteristic excellence, or that not questioning but my Son might benefit to a certain degree, he apprehends that striking a balance between loss and gain the account would be against the Boy.’
Another reason for the poets’ approval of Dr Bell’s Madras system was that Bell believed the schools should be Church-controlled, whilst his great rival Joseph Lancaster the Quaker believed in ‘free education on general Christian principles’. This battle between the Established Church and Dissent contributed to the delay of any plans for State education for two generations.
Southey’s New System of Education is sharply mocking about Lancaster, both as an ‘experimental’ teacher and as a theorist about the nature of children. Dr Bell in the Military Male Orphanage had taught children to write, economically, by getting them to trace letters in a tray of sand. Lancaster also introduced this innovation but used wet sand and skewers instead of dry sand and fingers. The result was messy, heavy and awkward. The sand ‘required great care in wetting; if wetted either too much or too little it was equally useless and inconvenient’. When Dr Bell told him it should be dry sand, Lancaster remarked that this fully showed ‘how essential a minute detail is to the ready practice of any experiment’.
Southey said that the same necessity for minute directions was shown by the English Christmas pudding cooked in France according to a receipt that forgot to specify it should be boiled in a cloth—‘the unhappy pudding made its appearance all abroad in a soup dish’.
Lancaster’s teaching methods did not entail the growth and grasp of knowledge provided by Bell’s self-tuition and exposition. Boys were gathered in groups round a monitor who dictated a sum which they wrote on their slates. He then dictated the answer, which they again took down by rote, and the slates were inspected for copying errors. Southey quoted an ‘Edinburgh critic’ who admired Lancaster for ‘enabling a boy to communicate to others that of which he is ignorant himself.’ If there was any merit, Southey wrote scornfully, in inventing an ignorant teacher surely ‘there would be much more in superseding him by a Teaching Machine such as Lord Stanhope could supply with much less ingenuity than was required for his reasoning one’.
Lancaster’s system of rewards and punishments also aroused Southey’s—and Coleridge’s—furious scorn. Rewards were competitive—boys received numbered leather tickets to wear, and pictures pasted on board to be hung on their breasts and surrendered to the boy who overtook them. Bats, balls, books of prints, were given to boys who received more than a certain number of prize tickets, and the highest reward was a silver medal on a plated chain. Southey thought this Honours system was a contradiction to Lancaster’s Quaker principles and bad for the desire for knowledge itself.
Lancaster’s punishments, as described by Southey, show a certain perverted psychological insight, and a horrible inventiveness. He believed in variety. ‘Any single kind of punishment continued constantly in use becomes familiar and loses its effect ….’ He was a kind of artist in devising punishments to suit crimes which ‘could be inflicted so as to give much uneasiness to the delinquents without disturbing the mind or temper of the master’. Boys were put in sacks or baskets hoisted onto the roof of the school in sight of all the other boys who ‘smiled at the birds in the cage'. Others were yoked by a piece of wood fastened to all their necks and made to parade the school, walking backwards ‘being obliged to pay very great attention to their footsteps for fear of running against any object that might cause the yoke to hurt their necks’. This instrument of torture was jokingly called the Caravan. Lancaster believed that the punishments should be made ‘a matter of diversion and laughter for the spectators’. Boys whose reading voice developed a singing tone were marched round the school ‘hung with ballads and dying speeches to provoke risibility’. Slovens were publicly washed and slapped in the face by a child of the opposite sex. Labels, like that worn by Jane Eyre, were affixed to children—they read ‘Idle’, ‘Noisy’, ‘Suck-finger baby’, and ‘tell-tale tit’. An idle boy had a feather pillow ostentatiously placed on his desk: a boy who wandered from his seat was caged in a hen-coop.
Southey, quite rightly, believed that the effect of all this was very bad on both audience and sufferers. Lancaster’s ‘diversion and laughter’ he compared to ‘the beneficial consequences arising to an English mob from regarding an execution as a holiday …’. Dr Bell’s boys judged cases of delinquency and were responsible for justice. Lancaster’s boys, as Southey put it, had the liberty of acting as executioners, which was bad for their characters—as it was bad for the ‘decency, reserve and modesty of the female character’ to be called on to smack boys’ faces in public. And all these punishments of exposure to ridicule and mockery would have a progressively worse effect on the best boys. Shame was a more severe punishment than pain, but, this was particularly true in the case of boys with a strong moral sense. Dr Bell’s system taught boys humanity in a practical way. Southey described Coleridge in a lecture at the Royal Institution hurling Lancaster’s book away from him in contempt, exclaiming that ‘No boy who has been subjected to punishments like this will stand in fear of Newgate or feel any horror at the thought of a slave ship’.
It was a time that led to the production of theories about how children should be brought up. The poets’ friend, Tom Wedgwood, Coleridge’s benefactor, at one stage decided that the most proper use for his riches was the finance of the education of a genius. His letter about his project written to Godwin shows a belief that a carefully devised educational theory must produce a perfectly qualified human being: beside Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s belief in natural growth his ideas suggest mechanical control. ‘My aim is high. I have been endeavouring some master-stroke which should anticipate a century or two upon the large-paced progress of human improvement ….’ His idea was to control the sense-impressions of the small child and the resulting emotions and ideas completely to avoid distractions and pain. To this end ‘the nursery should have plain grey walls with one or two vivid objects for sight and touch’. Children should acquire manipulation sooner—‘Hard bodies’ should be hung round them to ‘irritate their palms’. Uncontrolled exposure to Nature was dangerous—the child should therefore never go out of doors or leave his room. And productivity could be greatly increased by making the child think rationally during periods most human beings wasted on reverie and daydreaming. The education was to be planned by a committee of philosophers. The only people Wedgwood thought suitable for the job of actually superintending the child were Wordsworth and Coleridge. It is perhaps fortunate that the scheme came to nothing—neither poet could have liked its determinism and both were aware of the value of periods of lassitude, wise passiveness, reverie, to the creative mind. But it is indicative of a whole contemporary experimental atmosphere.
Wordsworth, in The Excursion, had written an eloquent plea for statutory universal education. The state should
admit
An obligation on her part, to teach
Them who are born to serve her and obey;
Binding herself by statute to secure
For all the children whom her soil maintains
The rudiments of letters, and inform
The mind with moral and religious truth.
But in his laters years he was more often to be found in opposition to practical plans to extend education. His comments on the subject show a mixture of the expected practical shrewdness about the actual effects of infant schools and adult education, as opposed to the ideal theory behind it, and that timid and narrow conservatism that made him unduly pessimistic and rigid in his social views.
In 1808 he was pointing out the difficulties of a uniform national system of education when the needs of the rural agricultural communities and the city workers were so different. His old political enemy Henry Brougham was campaigning vigorously for opportunities for education for working men—publication of cheap books, forming of book clubs and reading societies, the arrangement of public lectures, particularly in the sciences which required demonstration to be fully understood. He, with Dr George Birkbeck, was a promoter of the Mechanics’ Institutes (in Glasgow, in London and the large cities—the London Mechanics’ Institute became Birkbeck College), where working men for a fee of about £1 a year could come to lectures on Chemistry, Geometry, Hydrostatics, the application of Chemistry to the Arts, Astronomy, French and many other subjects. Brougham was also instrumental in forming The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1826. There is no doubt that these efforts transformed many lives. Wordsworth, however, was dubious. He attacked Brougham for thinking that ‘sharpening of intellect and attainment of knowledge are things good in themselves’—Bacon may have said knowledge was power, but it could be power for evil as well as good. He was dubious about the London College—University College, the new London University of which Crabb Robinson was a benefactor; Wordsworth argued that cheaper medical education was not required—‘we have far more doctors than can find patients to live by’. Lectures he thought an absurd mode of teaching except possibly in scientific subjects—there is perhaps some later truth in this, but less when students are too poor to afford books. He attacked the Mechanics’ Institutes and the London University with the favourite distinction, used politically by Coleridge and himself, between abstractions and living organic growth. There was in one case (the Mechanics’ Institutes where knowledge was imposed from above) ‘a sudden formal abstraction of a vital principle and in both an unnatural and violent pushing on’. This may be a half-truth—half-educated people do tend to flounder in unmanageable abstractions—but showed little knowledge of the real need for intellectual growth and information that existed. He added to this argumentative blow a snobbish and intolerant social judgment. ‘Mechanics’ Institutes make discontented spirits and insubordinate and presumptuous workmen.’
Religion was excluded, which made the instruction itself dangerous, and, more than that, the subjects taught were distasteful to Wordsworth. ‘I cannot look without shuddering on the array of surgical midwifery lectures to which the youth of London were invited at the commencement of this season by the advertisements of the London University.’ Hogarth, he said, understood human nature better than professors—he showed the dissecting room as the final stage of cruelty. And if poor people were encouraged to train as doctors they would naturally lack the qualities of the present class from which doctors were drawn—absence of ‘meanness and unfeeling and sordid habits’.
Infant education, too, he regarded with increasing suspicion. He was highly critical of the party of young ladies, ‘sour-looking teachers in petticoats’ who wanted to set up a Madras school for girls in Ambleside, ‘confidently expecting that these girls will in consequence be less likely to go astray when they grow up to be women’. Here, if not conclusive, his criticism of the Utopian idealists is perhaps valid. He asked whether the women’s new knowledge, far from improving their lot and character, might not be bad for it. They would be unsettled without any real change in circumstances. ‘What demand is there for the ability that they may have prematurely acquired? Will they not be indisposed to any kind of hard labour or drudgery? And yet many of them must submit to it or do wrong …’. In a long letter to the Reverend H. J. Rose, Wordsworth argues that infant education is destroying the ties of family affections and loyalties out of which, in the pamphlet On the Convention at Cintra he had argued that patriotism and many other virtues sprang. Rousseau, in Emile, had described how different societies produced different ideals of value in personality, and had cited the case of the Spartan mother who rushed to meet the returning army and asked eagerly who won. She was told that unfortunately her three sons had been killed, but she simply reiterated the question, who won. When told that it was Sparta she went away happy. Rousseau had argued that modern states had no ideal of behaviour in which individual value was so submerged, and Wordsworth followed him. ‘The Spartan and other ancient communities might disregard domestic ties because they had the substitution of country which we cannot have. With us, country is a mere name compared with what it was to the Greeks … as that passion alone was strong enough then to preserve the individual, his family and the whole State from ever-impending destruction.’ In his England infant schools destroyed family unity—and the natural instincts of motherhood:
We interfere with the maternal instinct before the child is born, by furnishing, in cases where there is no necessity, the mother with baby linen for her unborn child. Now, that in too many instances a lamentable necessity may exist for this, I allow; but why should such charity be obtruded? Why should so many excellent ladies form themselves into committees and rush into an almost indiscriminate benevolence, which precludes the poor mother from the strongest motive human nature can be actuated by for industry, for forethought and for self-denial. When the stream has thus been poisoned at its fountain-head, we proceed, by separating, through infant schools, the mother from the child and from the rest of the family, disburthening them from all care of the little ones for perhaps eight hours of the day ….
Wordsworth here in some ways anticipated the Dickens of Hard Times and Bleak House. In Hard Times Dickens satirized the optimistic Utilitarian exaltation of pure knowledge above everything—the useless definition of a horse as a ‘graminivorous quadruped’, the flattening out of the real boy in the docile student. In Bleak House his satire of the philanthropic Victorian do-gooders with their moralizing patronage of the poor reminds one of Wordsworth’s excellent ladies forming themselves into committees to impose unsuitable ideals and values on communities whose real life they ignore. There is a Dickensian note in the same letter on education where Wordsworth quotes ‘Out of the mouths of babes and children …’ and continues wryly: ‘Apparently the infants here contemplated were under a very different course of discipline from that which many in our day are condemned to. In a town of Lancashire, about nine in the morning, the streets resound with the crying of infants, wheeled off in carts and other vehicles (some ladies, I believe, lending their carriages for this purpose) to their schools and prisons.’ There is some real wisdom in Wordsworth’s objections to this acquiring of unrelated knowledge at the expense of family life, personal freedom, and natural growth of the personality, but his Romantic respect for the whole person, Rousseau’s individual consistent with himself, is always tinged by a ‘Victorian’ middle-class belief that the poor are meant by God to keep to their stations. Economically he was probably quite right that most women had nothing to expect but hard domestic work—but there is a note of lofty patronage in his statements that is not in accord with the passionate concern of The Prelude and The Excursion. ‘A hand full of employment and a head not above it, with such principles and habits as may be acquired without the Madras machinery are the best security for the chastity of wives of the lower rank.’
Coleridge, too, became suspicious of contemporary educational ideals. In his youth he argued vigorously that widespread diffusion of knowledge was socially necessary and listed the ways in which it was being brought about. Methodism, spreading among the middle and lower classes, he saw as a liberalizing and thought-inducing force; large manufactories produced societies where newspapers ‘and sometimes larger publications’ were regularly read; the growth of book societies in large towns was encouraging. In later life he was enraged by the argument that it was the spread of learning and argument that had caused the recent revolution and wars. The answer was not less learning but more. ‘The powers that awaken and foster the spirit of curiosity are to be found in every village: books are in every hovel. The infant’s cries are hushed with picture-books; and the cottager’s child sheds his first bitter tears over pages, which render it impossible for the man to be treated or governed as a child. Here, as in so many other cases, the inconveniences that have arisen from a thing’s having become too general, are best removed by making it universal.’
But Coleridge, like Wordsworth, was anxious to emphasize the abstracting and dehumanizing qualities in contemporary education. Reading and writing in themselves, he said, were not education—they were only the means of education. And he was also opposed to the introduction of infant-schools, at least in the country:
Is it found that an infant-school child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplication-table, or a verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its parents? Are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this system? In a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such schools may be a justifiable expedient—a choice of the lesser evil; but as for driving these establishments into the country villages and breaking up the cottage home education, I think it one of the most miserable mistakes which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made ….
Like their political beliefs, their educational theories at their best sprang from a mistrust of easy optimism and idealism; a desire to understand what children were really capable of and really in a position to achieve. The virtues of this realism, and the faults of the cautiousness which went with it both look well beside Lancaster’s ingenious systems and Tom Wedgwood’s theoretical approach.
I want to end this chapter with a description of a visit by Wordsworth to a school in Brixton in 1835, when Wordsworth was already a poet to be studied in schools. The description is that of Edward Quillinan who married Wordsworth’s daughter, Dora:
After wine and cake we were ushered into the schoolroom. The boys rose and bowed, sate and gazed; pencils and slates were brought out at word of command; pedagogue gave out, line by line, the Sonnet supposed to be written on Westminster Bridge. All the boys wrote it, one echoing the Master as the Clerk does the Clergyman. When finished several boys in turn read it aloud; very well too. They were then called upon to explain the meaning of ‘the river glideth at his own sweet will’. One boy, the biggest, made a dissertation on the influence of the moon on the tides, another said there was no wind, another that there were no water breaks in the Thames to prevent its gliding as it pleased; another that the arches of the bridge had no locks to shut the water in and out. One Boy said there were no boats. Poet explained: was then called on by Pedagogue to read the Sonnet himself; declined: Ped intreated: Poet remonstrated: Ped inexorable; Poet submitted. I never heard him read better. The Boys evidently felt it; thunders of applause; Poet asked for a half-Holiday for them: granted: thunders on thunders.