Nineteenth Century England: Education of Women
In 1811 the first meeting of the National Society for the Promotion of the Education of the Poor in the principles of the established Church took place. This body went onto ensure that education in England had Christian input for the rest of the century and still exists today. The first schools that had been set up for the poor were the Ragged schools. These originated in the Sunday School founded in 1780 by Robert Raikes in Gloucester, who taught children to read so that they could read the Bible. Then a Portsmouth cobbler, John Pounds, gathered groups of children to play with his disabled nephew, and by 1818 had a class of thirty or forty children who he was teaching to read from the Bible because it was the only book easily available. The idea spread to London. In 1844, 19 Ragged Schools joined to form a Ragged School Union, headed by Lord Shaftesbury. By 1861 they were teaching over forty thousand children in London, including the children of convicts, drunks and abusiv...