ENGL 4325/5325- Victorian Literature

Charles Dickens and Victorian Education
Leon Litvack
The Queen's University of Belfast
Extracted from The Oxford Reader's Guide to Dickens
By permission of Oxford University Press.

Since the 18th century, parents had been sending their children to notoriously brutal Yorkshire boarding schools. Here Professor John Sutherland examines the depiction of these schools in Dickens’s ‘social problem novel’, Nicholas Nickleby.

Ragged Schools provided free education for children too poor to receive it elsewhere. Imogen Lee explains the origins and aims of the movement that established such schools, focusing on the London’s Field Lane Ragged School, which Charles Dickens visited.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote ‘A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London’ in 1854 after her sister, Arabella, asked her and Robert Browning to donate two poems to be sold at a fundraising bazaar for ragged schools.

Thomas Guthrie, the author of this pamphlet, established the Ragged School movement in Scotland. A Plea for Ragged Schools sets out to persuade readers of the necessity and value of the cause, in the hope that it will gain both their financial and moral support. It was written in 1847, during the movement’s burgeoning decade.