Paradigm, No. 26 (October, 1998)

The 1820 pamphlet The Interrogative System is the work of Sir Richard Phillips (1767-1840), and is interesting for a number of reasons. From the perspective of the history of publishing it is an example of a speculative venture of considerable scale that exploited and developed a growing market for educational products. From the perspective of the history of education it is a lesser-known example of the early nineteenth century fashion for systems of education. From the perspective of the history of textbooks it is an important account of textbook production and marketing. My purposes in presenting it are twofold, firstly because it is interesting on all the counts given above, and secondly, because despite considerable searching and quizzing researchers in the field, I have not managed to find out how successful the ‘interrogative’ system was, who used it or how it was considered. I offer it therefore both for interest’s sake, and in the hope that members of the Colloquium may be able to offer some elucidation of its social history.

A complete biography of Phillips is long overdue and this introduction does not aspire to provide more than an anecdotal account of him. He clearly knew and worked with the publishers Longmans, and with Joseph Johnson with whom he had sometimes friendly, and sometimes hostile, working relationships. He was known by many in the London literary society which surrounded Henry Crabb Robinson and the Aikens, and he commissioned work from William Blake, Isaac D’Israeli and a huge range of authors for his literary productions and his Monthly Magazine. From 1796 onwards he built a considerable publishing empire which included the system of textbooks and associated educational products advertised in The Interrogative System.

He employed a number of authors and compilers including the science textbook writer Jeremiah Joyce (1763-1816), and it is his relationship with Joyce that lead me to encounter The Interrogative System and consider Phillip’s operation. Phillips used a variety of publishing and marketing strategies, one of which was to use the names of living or deceased authors, most of whom were church ministers, to develop ‘trade’ books of elementary education. William Axon lists eleven such names that were used by Phillips in the years 1798-1815.¹ Axon identifies all the works under the names Rev. James Adair, Rev. David Blair, Rev. J. Goldsmith, Rev. S. Barrow, M. L’Abbe Bossut, Miss or Mrs M. Pelham, and some of the works under the names Rev. C. C. Clarke, George Hamilton, Rev. John Robinson, D. Robinson and William Mavor, as Phillips’ productions. All of these names, many of whom are no doubt familiar to Paradigm’s readers, are to be found in the lists given in The Interrogative System.

For living authors whose names Phillips used, I have not been able to discover whether the author wrote the books themselves, or whether Phillips commissioned somebody else to write the work and came to an arrangement over the use of the name. For deceased authors however, Phillips’ tactics were simple and highly profitable. He would commission a writer on a fixed fee to produce a text and then either publish it himself or sell it on to another publisher. He would then produce ‘keys’ and ‘copybooks’ related to each work, therefore generating a range of related products, which, he claimed, constituted a ‘system’ of education. Once the textbook was purchased, the keys and the copybooks, which were fairly simple and cheap to compile, represented further highly profitable potential sales. Jeremiah Joyce wrote several Phillips productions under his own name and under the names of Goldsmith and Blair. The following is an example of the ‘Five Hundred Questions’ series of copybooks relating to Goldsmith’s Geography &emdash; note that it was printed for Richard Phillips yet published by Longmans.

Reprinted with kind permission of the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham.

FIVE HUNDRED QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES ON GOLDSMITH'S BRITISH GEOGRAPHY IN CONFORMITY WITH THE LEGITIMATE PRINCIPLES OF THE INTERROGATIVE SYSTEM  PRINTED ON WRITING PAPER WITH SPACES FOR THE ANSWERS _________________________________________ LONDON: PRINTED FOR SIR RICHARD PHILLIPS PUBLISHED BY LONGMAN, HURST, REES, AND CO., PATERNOSTER ROW AND SOLD BY J. ANDERSON, JUN., EDINBURGH; J. CUMMING, DUBLIN AND BY ALL BOOKSELLERS ______________________ Price Two Shillings ______________________ A Key to these Questions may be had. Price Ninepence, for the Use of Teachers

 

 Barrow’s Five Hundred Questions on the New Testament (1816) carries the following preface which suggests that the System evolved over a number of years. It claims to be unique in engaging the ‘Thinking Faculty’ and goes on to claim that the prospective student only needs to be able to read and write in order to acquire ‘an intimate acquaintance with the Divine Morality of the Gospel, and with the elements of the Christian Religion’.

One might easily be tempted to consider Phillips as an entrepreneur scallywag concerned to wring every penny of profit from the market for educational products and there is a plethora of comments about Phillips which cast him as a shrewd and ruthless operator. Cyrus Redding recorded Dr. Wolcot as saying ‘The Scoundrel [Phillips] shall never have another line of mine he would suck the knowledge out of authors skulls and fling the carcasses on the dung hill afterwards’.² It is claimed that Phillips, on hearing Coleridge talk, expressed the wish that ‘he had him in a garret without a coat to his back’,³ and that ‘He could squeeze more out of a hack writer than could be thought possible’ ⁴, Richard Southey called Phillips ‘One of the most accomplished rogues in his majesties domain’,⁵ and William Blake, who had considerable dealings with Phillips wrote in his notebook the embittered four-line stanza,

P ….. loved me not as he loved his friends
For he loved them for gain to serve his ends.
But he loved me and for no gain at all
But to rejoice and triumph in my fall.⁶

Suspicion about Phillips’s integrity has no doubt fuelled some of the humorous stories concerning him. There is the report that his name wasn’t really Richard Phillips but Phillip Richards.⁷ There is an account that Phillips bought the skull of Cardinal Wolsey from a gardener in Leicester Abbey for a shilling and then lost it in the fire at his print shop.⁸ The author of following account from Noctes Ambrosianae certainly held no respect for Phillips at all.

 O’Doherty. Sir Richard Phillips is another great genius, and yet he does not write a good magazine.

 Tickler. Why, Pythagoras, my dear fellow, is one of the most contemptible magaziners, in the world. He is a dirty little Jacobin, who thinks there is more merit in making some dirty little improvement on a threshing machine, than in composing an Iliad. He is a mere plodding, thick skulled, prosing dunderpate: and everything that he puts forth seems as if it has been written by the stink of gas in the fifth story of a cotton mill &emdash; a filthy Jacobical dog sir.⁹

Phillips has an intriguing and eventful biography which traces links between the Romantics, Painite radicals and the publishing world. As a young man he had many radical friends and was himself imprisoned in Leicester Gaol under the superintendance of the famously large Daniel Lambert for selling Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Whilst in Gaol he wrote to William Cowper who wrote him a sonnet whose first line reads ‘Phillips &emdash; the suff’rer less by law than by Pow’r’.¹⁰ He was a keen observer of the relationship between the government and the press and told John Quincy Adams that in his opinion Napoleon owed his downfall to the fact that he abstained from newspaper bribery.¹¹ He became a Sheriff of London both as a result of his publishing empire and his work to improve conditions in gaols. He claimed to have disproved Newton’s Theory of Gravitation. Strangely, he was declared bankrupt in 1809 yet managed to avoid the debtors’ prison and keep control of his Monthly Magazine and many of his other interests. He fell out with most of the publishing world in one way or another and had a lengthy and acrimonious dispute with Longmans.

In Phillips’s defence, he clearly contributed to the spread of literacy and not all views of him of been entirely negative &emdash; A. S. Collins wrote of him in the 1920s that he was a ‘Herald of the March of mind’.¹² At one level The Interrogative System was simply an advertising slogan which masquerades as an educational system and Phillip’s claimed intentions sound more like selling points than genuine pedagogy. At another level it is also possible to see some pedagogical sophistication in the system as a whole and a concern to extend knowledge of many subjects to the lower orders of society. There are even signs of what is today called ‘student-centred learning’ in which students actively learn under the guidance of their own interest. The student has to ‘furnish an answer to each question in his own phraseology’ (p. 2) and ‘to work at the subject of study’ (p. 4), which constructs the learning process not as one of rote learning but a process of active learning.

The system also has echoes both of Joseph Lancaster’s mechanical memorising system and Sarah Trimmer’s lectures in catechetical form (Teachers Assistant, 1815),¹³ and it certainly reflects many elements of catechetical pedaogogy. But the similarities are only partial despite Phillips’s attempts to establish differences between his and other systems (p. 3-4), and it may be that the Phillips ‘system’ is simply a variant of the long-established tradition of teaching through question-and-answer. Indeed it is possible that there never really was a ‘system’ in the co-ordinated sense at all, and Phillips merely collected a number of similar works, commissioned a few more, added a range of related products in the form of Keys, Copybooks and Maps and claimed it as a system.

 The Interrogative System provokes many questions and links many arenas of interest. What were the relationships between the publishers Phillips, Longmans and Joseph Johnson? For the first decade of the nineteenth century at least, he operated with Longmans and as friendly rival to Johnson, yet Phillips’ name only rarely appears as a member of the Congers of the period. The system used many names that had, or gained, a celebrated cultural value. Why were they selected and what does it tell us about the growing market for educational products. Whilst dearly a commercial endeavour, do the epistemological assumptions inherent in The Interrogative System reveal insights about how knowledge was presented to children. In age which saw the introduction of stereotyping and steam presses, when literacy levels were increasing, when the effects of the French Revolution were being accommodated and when radical pressures were influencing the evolution of the democratic state, how does this educational system which is both auto-didactic and ‘adapted for the use of schools’, fit in British social history?

The questions pile up on one another and there are rich sources to be mined which might provide some answers. The Longmans archive in Reading has a considerable collection of Longmans-Phillips letters. There are over 50 entries by Phillips in the Stationers Company registers in the years 1799-1813 alone, and searches for Richard Phillips on the on-line databases reveal literally hundreds of titles, editions and printings. Furthermore, a recent trip to British Columbia revealed that many of Phillips ‘products’ were heavily used throughout the Northern Americas. I have begun to collect titles that include the term ‘interrogative’ with the purpose of trying to get a sense of how the interrogative system might have been used and I would be very pleased to receive any snippets of information about Phillips and his System.

Perhaps Augustus de Morgan’s comment on Phillips is a fitting way to end this short introduction

Sir Richard Phillips had four valuable qualities: honesty, zeal, ability and courage. He applied them all to teaching matters about which he knew nothing and gained himself an uncomfortable life and a ridiculous memory.¹⁴

Notes

¹ William Axon. ‘Sir Richard Phillips’ in Stray Chapters in Literature, Folk&emdash;lore and Archaeology (London: Heywood, 1888), pp. 239-265 (p. 257).

² Cyrus Redding, Fifty Years Recollections (London: Charles Skeet, 1858), ii, p. 259.

³ A. Boyle ‘The Publisher Sir Richard Phillips’. Notes & Queries, cxcvi (1951), 361-366 (p. 366).

⁴ ibid., p. 360.

⁵ Quoted in Richard L. McGuire, ‘The Monthly Magazine (1796-1843): Politics and Literature in Transition’. Doctoral thesis, Rice University, 1968, p. 25.

⁶ G. E. Bentley Jr. (ed) William Blake’s writings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) ii. p. 946.

⁷ Axon, p. 239.

⁸ C. H. Timperly, Encyclopedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdotes (London: H.G. Bohn, 1842), 2nd ed. p. 250n.

⁹ Quoted in Axon p. 249.

¹⁰ James King and Charles Ryskamp, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, in a Letter to Samuel Rose. 18 June 1793 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), iv, p. 355.

¹¹ A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd, 1949), p. 103.

¹² A. S. Collins, The Profession of Letters: A Study of the Relation of Author to Patron, Publisher and Public 1780-1832 (Clifton: Kelly, 1973), p. 114.

¹³ I am grateful for discussions with Ian Michael and Eugenia Roldan-Vera on these issues.

¹⁴ Augustus De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes ed by Sophie E. De Morgan (London: Longmans, 1872), p. 145.

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