Could Do Better
The Report of the Newcastle Commission confirmed that there were no Dotheboys Halls among Yorkshire’s private schools.
1868
The Report of the Newcastle Commission confirmed that there were no Dotheboys Halls among Yorkshire’s private schools.
1868
The Newcastle Commission of 1859 was in large measure a response to allegations of educational malpractice in Charles Dickens’s novel ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ (1838). The Assistant Commissioner for Yorkshire, Mr J. G. Fitch, submitted a wide-ranging and often critical report, but he could not let Dickens’s allegations pass without comment.
THERE is a visible improvement in the character of private schools. Bad as many of them are, charlatanry is on the decline.
For example, I have wholly failed to discover any examples of the typical Yorkshire boarding-school with which Nicholas Nickleby has made us familiar.* I have seen schools in which board and education were furnished for 20l, and even 18l per annum,* but have been unable to find evidences of bad feeding or physical neglect.
As a rule, the children in the cheap boarding-schools are in good health, and are sufficiently though coarsely fed.* The accommodations in the houses are mean, and the sleeping arrangements often bad; but the domestic comfort obtainable is little, if at all, inferior to that which the boys would probably enjoy in the homes from which they come.
See Brimstone and Treacle. Fitch proposed many changes to the way schools were run, but had no enthusiasm for one-size-fits-all State intervention. “Nothing has become clearer to me during this investigation,” he wrote, “than the fact that any sweeping or Procrustean measure will do great injustice.” On Procrustes, see .
According to the calculators used at Measuring Worth, the equivalent value today in terms of income or wealth would be £1,839 and £1,655 respectively. Fitch wrote that “it is in the education that the pinching is felt. The starvation of the mind is less likely to be detected at home than that of the body, and good food is often paid for at the price of insufficient teaching.”
Fitch described the meals as “monotonous and unsavoury, and yet wasteful”, a criticism later made of Government workhouses by Emmeline Pankhurst: see A Woman’s Logic. He also added that the survey forms asking teachers about school meals too often came back blank or with evasive replies like “Good Yorkshire cheer” scrawled into the box.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.