The City of London itself, with all its great industrial benefactions, abounded with private schools and with tutors for special objects. Some of them were authors, not only of school-books for the use of their own pupils, but of translations from the classics and from foreign writers; and they had their quarters in localities long since abandoned to other occupations, such as Bow Lane, Mugwell or Monkwell Street, Lothbury Garden, and St. Paul’s Churchyard, where accommodation was once readily procurable at rents commensurate with their resources. Some of these men had originally presided over similar establishments in the provinces, and had come up to town, no doubt, from ambitious motives.
Two of them, in Primers which they published in 1682 and 1688, when such distinctions were important, call their volumes the Protestant School and the Protestant Schoolmaster, in order to reassure parents, who distrusted Papists and Jacobites. A few years before, Nathaniel Strong, dating from the Hand and Pen, in Red-Cross Alley, on Great Tower Hill, launched what he somewhat unguardedly christened The Perfect Schoolmaster. This part of the metropolis was at that time rather thickly sown with teachers of all kinds; as you drew nearer to Wapping, the schools of geography and navigation became more conspicuous. It was about the period when Mr. Secretary Pepys was residing in Hart Street.
In connection with these private schools on the east side of London, for the special advantage of those who desired to embark on a sea-faring, naval, military, or other technical career, there is a very characteristic and suggestive advertisement by one John Holwell at the end of an astrological tract published by him in 1683, where he states that he professes and teaches at his house on the east side of Spitalfields, opposite Dorset Street, next door to a glazier’s, not merely such matters as arithmetic, geography, trigonometry, navigation, astronomy, dialling, gauging, surveying, fortification, and gunnery, but Astrology in all its parts; which appears to be an uncustomary combination, and to bespeak a separate class or department.
Astrology, which was a sort of outgrowth and development from the judicial astronomy of the early Oxford schoolmen, had been a source of controversy since the time of Elizabeth, but had gained a footing in the following century through the exertions of several indefatigable advocates and writers, of whom William Lilly, John Partridge, and John Gadbury were the most eminent and influential. Lilly, during the Civil War, is said to have been consulted by both political parties; and he published a small library of pamphlets professing to see into futurity.
III. There was a host of rival authors, some bringing general treatises in their hand, others special branches of the subject handled in a new fashion, from all parts of the kingdom to the London publishing firms. Dr. Walker, head-master of King Edward the Sixth’s Grammar School at Louth in Lincolnshire, completed his monograph on Particles in 1655; it is the only work by which he is at present remembered; and it occasioned the joke that his epitaph should be: Here lie Walker’s Particles.
But even Milton could not desist from entering into the competition, and, two years after the appearance of Paradise Lost, when the writer was, of course, sufficiently well known both as a political controversialist and a poet, yet scarcely so famous as he became and remains, came out a little volume called Accidence Commenc’d Grammar, of which the main object was to reduce into an English digest the Latin Accidence and Grammar, by which the illustrious writer declared and complained that ten years of an ordinary life were consumed.
But advocates of particular theories had a very slender chance of success, even where their promoters were persons so distinguished as Ben Jonson and Milton, unless they possessed some adventitious interest or appealed to popular sentiment.
A Little Book for Little Children, by Thomas White, minister of the Gospel, had an astonishing run, for instance; there were at least a dozen editions; but it was embellished with choice woodcuts of the Catnach school, and enlivened by a string of stories which, if they are not vapid and silly, are simply outrageous and revolting. The sole redeeming feature is, that among the alphabets occurs what is sometimes called “Tom Thumb’s Alphabet,”—“A was an Archer, and shot at a Frog,”—which is not found in the earlier primers, so far as I know, and may have been specially written by White or for him.
But the numerous experimental essays of ambitious schoolmasters and other friends to the cause of learning which found their way into type at various times, were, as a rule, speedily consigned to oblivion; the production of a successful school-book was a task demanding a rare union of tact in structure with influence in initiative quarters; and Lily’s Primer, itself based on the labours of his predecessors, was generally adopted by the endowed schools throughout England, Wales and Scotland at first, and indeed till somewhere in the early years of the eighteenth century, with some modifications of detail and spelling, but at last in the form of the Eton or the Westminster Grammar, which Carlisle reports in 1818 as in almost universal use in this country. The exceptions which he names were then very few, and we see that they were nearly always in favour of some text-book introduced by local agency.
This was the case at Reading, where it appears that the system of teaching was founded on those of Westminster, Eton, and Winchester. At Aylesbury, Owen’s Latin Grammar and the Eton Greek Grammar used to be employed. At Bodmin, Valpy’s Greek Grammar, and at Faversham, Lily’s Latin Primer, edited by Ward, were preferred. At some minor schools, where a boy was intended for any of the great foundations, special books were placed in his hands to facilitate preparation.