Paradigm, No. 26 (October, 1998)

This is a study of nineteenth century Natural History and Physiology textbooks used by two elementary schools founded in the eighteenth century on opposite sides of High Pavement in Nottingham. The interest in their contents and approach extends far beyond the scientific knowledge they contain for they reflect closely some prevailing social concerns, movements and attitudes of the period.¹

In 1788 the Nottingham Bluecoat Charity School, in accordance with the terms of its 1706 foundation, more strictly confined its admissions to poor children of Church of England families recommended by the incumbents of the three inner city parishes. The school was funded mainly by subscriptions from Anglican philanthropists in the city and it was not surprising that at the end of the eighteenth century, in a period of intense religious ferment, the subscribers should reassert their right to refuse pupils from dissenting families. In response, the dissenters opened a charity school free of religious tests, although attached to the Unitarian chapel, on the opposite side of High Pavement. The comparative development of the two establishments makes a fascinating study in itself but this paper simply compares the provision of early science in the two schools and comments, in particular, on the relevant textbooks made available to their pupils.
 

Bluecoat school, Weekday Cross 1723-1853

Opening of the new Bluecoat School at Nottingham,  19th July, 1853

Both schools at their foundation were primarily concerned with the teaching of reading -- especially of the Bible -- to which were added some writing skills and attention to number. Sewing for the girls was also a common element and singing was an early introduction to the pupils of both establishments. Expectations of pupil employment on leaving school were centred on work in the city's thriving factories or in service. Two important aims of public education recognised by English society at that time -- to "civilise" the young and growing population and to ensure a literate and obedient work force -- were embraced by the founders of both schools.
 
 

Bluecoat boy and girl in original uniform

The first government grant given for public education was administered by the greatly influential religious societies -- the Anglican National Society and the nonconformist British and Foreign School Society. Bluecoat's trustees studied the National Society's position and even considered, in 1817, the adoption of their monitoring system of instruction as developed by Dr. Bell.² They did not in fact become a National School and the Trustees continued to inspect the curriculum, teaching and general running of the school themselves. High Pavement School, however, did accept the oversight of the British and Foreign School Society in 1849 and from 1851 was subject to inspection by the British Society and later by Government Inspectors.³ There followed a widening of the curriculum in both schools, who were now able to call on a variety of school textbooks being produced by established publishing houses such as Macmillan's and Blackie's and by the Church of England's own publishing houses the SPCK (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge).

Bluecoat's headmaster, 1826-50, Thomas Cockayne was a keen naturalist who reportedly introduced stuffed birds and a variety of fossils into the schoolroom. Certainly, by 1827, he had ordered for the first class pupils twenty copies of the SPCKs Natural History series by P. H. Gosse.⁴ Systematic Botany and Zoology were the main foci of professional biologists of the day and the editor of the SPCK series specifically employed the system of classification then in use by the British Museum. In this sense the texts were scientifically sound. The volume were, however, intended as Readers and were written as interesting narratives. This was an age of exploration and discovery and the author employed travellers' tales to enliven the script. An amusing example is taken from Gosse's account in Birds of the African tauracos which ". . . usually keep on the highest branches of lofty trees". He reports.⁵

. . . a keen traveller, trying to bring the Tauracos to ground, Le Vaillant stamped with rage and broke through into one of the covered pits which the Hottentots constructed for the entrapping of large ferocious animals . . .

Happily, the reader is assured that the traveller was rescued by "his faithful Hottentot attendants".

A more marked characteristic of the SPCK production was the awareness shown by the selected authors of the Society's Christian mission to their younger readers. In the Natural History series under discussion, descriptive parts of the text were interrupted regularly to remind the reader of God's hand in creating the wonders of the world or to reflect on life itself. For example, in Gosse's Birds there is, interpolated between the feeding habits of the woodpecker and the distribution of the birds, the following passage:

And here let us pause a moment, and turn our thoughts from the bird before us to Almighty God who created it for His praise; from the beautiful contrivances we have been admiring, to the Eternal Mind whose wisdom designed, and whose skill created them.⁶

A sombre reflection on death was occasioned by the author's review of the predacious habits of some fish, especially a frogfish, in whose stomach was found a "codfish two feet long in whose stomach again are contained the skeletons of two whitings . . . in the stomach of each whiting there lay numerous half-digested little fish." Gosse invites his readers to reflect that:

. . . death in this our world is the bitter fruit of human transgression. By one man sin entered the world and DEATH IS SIN! Yet the infliction is not to the animal kingdom an unmitigated evil. A far greater amount and variety of animal life is thus sustained than could be supported otherwise and life to them is happiness. They have no fears of futurity beyond death and probably no fear of death itself, beyond the apprehension which prompts the exercise of caution and sagacity. Death is the pang of a moment, and is rather the termination of a pleasant active life than an actual evil.⁷

These texts were probably used in Bluecoat School throughout the length of Cockayne's headship and into his son's short service that followed his father's death in 1850. However, 1861 saw the appointment of J. W. Curtin as headmaster, coming direct from his professional training at Kneller Hall under Dr Temple⁸ (later to become Archbishop of Canterbury) to the newly located Nottingham Bluecoat school where he stayed in post until 1908. He was a much respected man, infinitely more concerned with character training than with wide curricular experiences, and no further consideration of scientific subjects is recorded during his long reign. Only towards the end of his headship were there murmurings in the school community of the restricted nature of the curriculum and the need for more "modern" subjects.⁹

In marked contrast is the curricular direction taken by the High Pavement School in the same period. Unfortunately, textbook records are not available for this school until 1861 when, as for Bluecoat a decade previously, a new and influential headmaster came into post. W. Hugh too had been professionally trained for the teaching profession having qualified at the Borough Road Training College founded by the non-conformist British and Foreign Schools' Society in 1841.¹⁰ He was to develop his school to be the first "Organised Science School" in England¹¹ (so recognised from 1883) and from the day of his arrival sought to broaden the school's curriculum with exceptional introduction of science. He was particularly concerned with health education and by 1863 physiology had been timetabled for most pupils.¹² The subject had been advocated nationally by strong utilitarian, temperance and public health lobbies, including the Society for the Propagation of Useful Knowledge, and was included as a "specific" grant-earning subject under the government's Code for public elementary education. Several physiology texts in regular use by High Pavement pupils are listed in the school log book for 27^th April 1876.¹³ SPCK's Physiology by Le Gros Clark and the Macmillan science primer Physiology by Dr. Michael Foster, produced to accompany study for the government's Science and Art Department examinations, are both listed and present an interesting contrast in both content and approach.

The text of SPCKís Physiology by F. Le Gros Clark, Surgeon to St. Thomas's Hospital and Hunterian Professor of Surgery and Pathology in the Royal College of Surgeons of England, is greatly concerned with promoting healthy living but its treatment of underlying human anatomy is noticeably incomplete, is purely descriptive and includes no reference to first-hand observation of material of any kind. To illustrate Le Gros Clark's interest in health matters, his Section V on "Organs of Digestion" avers:

We may here pause for a moment to remind the reader of the practical lessons to be acquired from the simple facts of healthy diet: lessons based alike on scientific investigation and experience. A mixed diet in moderation is that which is best calculated to promote health. Excess is prejudicial in many ways; by overtaking the digestive powers with some element of redundance, or by overloading the blood vessels, and thus causing the excretory organs to perform unnecessary work to get rid of that which is not needed.¹⁴

This last phrase indicates a major concern for excess drinking, an acknowledged scourge of the poorer classes and a problem addressed seriously in High Pavement School, which organised a series of Temperance Lectures for its pupils in 1892. The temperance theme was reinforced further in Clarke's book where he asserts¹⁵ that

Habitual excess in eating, as certainly though more insidiously curtails life, as excess in the use of alcoholic drinks.

It would seem very likely that the health references in the textbook were its main value to High Pavement School, where the headmaster emphasised the importance of such issues. This was attested in 1880, when the Medical Officer for Health for the area wrote in a testimonial for Hugh "I desire to refer to one branch of Education which I know has always greatly interested him, and in which I believe him to be well qualified to give instruction. I allude to the teaching of Elementary Physiology, especially those parts that have an immediate bearing upon the 'Laws of Health'".¹⁶

The nonconformists at High Pavement school would have had no philosophical difficulty with this SPCK book for Clark makes no doctrinal references. It is interesting, for example, that in this publication the writer, a pathologist, does not allude to the deity in his discussion of death¹⁷ (contrast with Gosse in the Natural History series above) but defines it as ". . . a negative expression, signifying the arrest of functional activity in organs on which the continuity of life depends." "The spirit" he quotes extravagantly, is ". . . hurled from her throne of light". At the same time he reminds the reader that paradoxically "Molecular death is ever going on while life lasts". These were indeed deep thoughts on which to ponder but were probably beyond the understanding of the younger readers and the competence of the ill-prepared and struggling physiology teachers in the school. It may be noted that HMI in 1876 reported that textbooks in physiology at High Pavement School should be more age-related¹⁸ and that the three "standards" studying the subject were subsequently allotted more appropriate texts.

In common with other SPCK publications, the "Wonder of God's Creation" is an important theme. For example, Clark's treatment of muscle action in the thumb invites a philosophical approach which contrasts with that in Foster's "form and function" book later described. Clark muses,

It is wonderful to contemplate how much had been accomplished by this little piece of mechanism, how truly civilization is dependent on this minister of the designing brain of man, whose intelligence would be shorn of its practical fruits without aid of this, the instrument alike of toil and necessity, and of all the refining arts which are so interwoven with social happiness and enjoyment.¹⁹

In marked contrast to the SPCK textbook, Foster's Physiology, first published in 1872, is essentially a practical study of the subject. It incorporates that spirit of scientific inquiry promulgated by the Science and Art Department in South Kensington, itself set up by government in an attempt to redress Britain's scientific and technical inadequacies as revealed at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Physiology is but one of a series of primers edited by Professors Huxley, Roscoe, and Balfour Stewart and all aimed to engender a spirit of scientific observation and experiment Thus the study of Foster's book was to be accompanied by the first-hand study of mammalian dissection. This is made clear in the Preface where the author writes,

In my description and explanations I have supposed the reader to be willing to handle and examine such things as a dead rabbit and a sheepís heart. . .²⁰

Certainly the pupils at High Pavement School were presented with fresh material to look at in their lessons. The Boys' School log book entry for April 1878 records that ". . . the subject of the schedules (Science and Art Department) were taken successively in connection with the textbooks and the bones, viscera etc. were placed before and examined in the presence of each standard"²¹. Hence, pupils following Foster's approach to mammalian muscles are guided through firsthand observations of structure -- a different approach indeed to Clark's text. Assuming the acquisition of a dead rabbit, Foster instructs the reader,

Suppose you take one of the limbs, say a leg, to begin with.

First of all is the skin with the hair on the outside. If you carefully cut this through with a knife or a pair of scissors and strip it off, you in find it smooth and shiny inside. . .

This reddish flesh you must henceforward speak of as muscle. . .²²

Such differing approaches to the subject of mammalian physiology are further underlined in the study of the illustrations offered in these two contemporary volumes. The grey unattractive plate showing "Thoracic and Abdominal Organs" of a rabbit²³ printed in Le Gros Clark's book shows the lungs and heart in the thorax but only liver, kidneys and main blood vessels appear in the abdomen: all other organs have been presumably been removed! In Foster's primer, the animal thorax and abdomen shown in Figure I²⁴ entitled "The Viscera of a rabbit is shown as seen upon simply opening the Cavities of the Thorax and Abdomen without any further Dissection" are complete. The accompanying text encourages the pupils themselves to investigate the fresh animal material further and so discover all structures of the mammalian viscera that lie within the two body cavaties.

As a final reflection on the different attitudes to scientific advance that these nineteenth century textbooks reflect, it is interesting to record that it was the practical approach to the subjects that prevailed -- and this in spite of scarcity of science teachers, large classes, inadequate resources, religious apathy and even hostility. This is shown by further reference to the fate of the two physiology textbooks under discussion. There is no record of a second edition of Le Gros Clark's volume in spite of the eminence of the author. A copy of the original 1873 edition only is held in the reference section of the British Library.²⁵ Foster's primer, however, went into many editions²⁶ with reprinting in 1875, 6, 7, 8, 9; 1880, 3; January and November 1884; 1885, 6, 8; 1890, 1, 4, 8; 1903, 8; 1912; 1915; and 1926. It is not possible to know whether every class that used Foster's Physiology followed the practical instructions to the letter but the relative popularity of this volume must indicate the acceptance of the approach offered --"the logic of dirty fingers"²⁷ as it is described in the High Pavement School Prospectus for 1895-6-8. It is interesting that the chemistry and botany primers of the same Macmillan series similarly went into successive editions -- a fair indication that the scientific lobby of the time, whose energies had been harnessed by Government's South Kensington initiative under Lyon Playfair, had succeeded in influencing early science teaching in the nation's public elementary schools.

¹ Note: Archival references below refer to material in Nottingham County Archive (NCA) and University of Nottingham Archives (UNA).

² F. W. Taylor, History of the Bluecoat School Nottingham 1706-1956 (Privately printed 1956), p. 24.

³ Jean Russell-Gebbett, "High Pavement; Britain's First Organised Science School". In History of Science Society Bulletin 43 (Spring 1989), p. 17.

⁴ Minute Books of Bluccoat School Trustees, 18 October 1828.

⁵ P.H. Gosse. Birds, in Gosse's Natural History series (SPCK, 1849), p. 166-7.

⁶ Ibid., p. 204.

⁷ P.H. Gosse, Fishes (SPCK, 1851), p. 18.

⁸ Taylor, p. 42.

⁹ T. Selby, Report on "Old Boys' Dinner" in Nottingham Daily Express, 29 March 1901.

¹⁰ W. Hugh, 50 Years a Schoolmaster (1914), section on "Headmaster of the High Pavement Day School." NCA.

¹¹ Russell-Gebbett p. 17.

¹² Ibid., p. 17.

¹³ Log Books for High Pavement Boys' School, 27 April 1876. UNA.

¹⁴ F. Le Gros Clark Physiology (SPCK, 1873), p. 73.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 47.

¹⁶ Russell-Gebbett, p. 19.

¹⁷ Le Gros Clark p. 125-6.

¹⁸ Inspectors' Reports for High Pavement School. 1876. UNA.

¹⁹ Le Gros Clark, p. 28.

²⁰ M. Foster, Physiology (Preface), (MacMillan, 1874). One of a series of "Science Primers" edited by Professors Huxley, Roscoe and Balfour Stewart.

²¹ Log Books for High Pavement Boys' School, 27 April 1876. UNA.

²² Foster, pp. 7-8.

²³ Le Gros Clark, p. 55.

²⁴ Foster, pp. 10-11.

²⁵ British Library Catalogue OPAC 97 (Reference material only).

²⁶ British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books.

²⁷ High Pavement School Prospectus for 1895-6-7. UNA.

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