Reading the Regency

Education - part 2

"When I was sent to a public school, I found among my companions so many temptations to idleness, that notwithstanding the quickness of my parts, I was generally flogged twice a week. As I grew older, my reason might perhaps have taught me to correct myself, but my vanity was excited to persist in idleness by certain imprudent sayings or whisperings of my father."
[To-morrow, Tales and Novels, vol. 2., by Maria Edgeworth]

The larger boarding schools were called Public Schools instead of private schools because they were publicly operated by a board of trustees. Although they were fee-paying, scholarship places were available in some schools for a small number of boys to be taught for free.

While at school, the boys might be taught by a Grinder, (shortened from Gerund-Grinder) which was a slang term for someone who instructed students in Latin Grammar by rote, or mind-numbing repetition.

Depending on the school and its facilities, during term time the boys might live in school dormitories, within the school grounds. Other times they were accommodated in local boarding houses, which provided bed and board for anything between five and fifty children in each house. The boys could return home to their families during the school holidays at Christmas and Easter and for a longer holiday during the summer months.

Public schools were considered by many to be better than a personal tutor, as there were fewer distractions away from home:

"Successful private tuition requires a coincidence of circumstances not often found. It is exceedingly difficult, in a private family, to resist the continual temptations to break through plans, which might have been judiciously laid, and, had they been practicable advantageously followed: one omission leads to another, and insensibly to the overthrow of the whole system. To ensure success in a course of private tuition, the active co-operation of all the household must be obtained. The attention of the pupil is dissipated by association with servants, interruption from acquaintances, or immoderate indulgence of parents. In a school no such hinderances occur; for there all the evils of a desultory and irregular course of studies are avoided."
[Scholastic education: or, A synopsis of the studies recommended to employ the time, and engage the attention of youth, pub 1824]

It was also thought that a boy might study harder in school than he would in solitary lessons, as working alongside the other boys in his class encouraged competitiveness.

Two of the best known boarding schools were Eton College, Berkshire, and Harrow School, Middlesex, but other similar establishments at the time included Charterhouse School in Surrey, Westminster School in London, Shrewsbury School in Shropshire, Winchester College in Hampshire, and Rugby School in Warwickshire.

These schools all taught the classical languages like Latin and Greek that the boys would need to understand before they could attend university. However, some also taught other socially beneficial subjects, such as French, drawing, and fencing.

In 1807 it was said that Eton had "seldom less than 300 noblemen and gentlemen's sons who board at the master's houses or within the bounds of the college". There were also 70 King's scholars; the name given to foundation scholars who were given free places based upon academic merit.

Spencer Percival, the British Prime Minister who was assassinated in 1812, attended Harrow school, as did Lord Byron and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the Irish playwright, who studied there between the ages of twelve to eighteen years, and made a less than brilliant impression on his masters:

"He was inferior to many of his school-fellows in the ordinary business of a school, and I do not remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself by Latin or English composition, in prose or verse. Nathaniel Halhed, one of his school-fellows, wrote well in Latin and Greek; Richard Archdall, another school fellow, excelled in English verse. R. Sheridan aspired to no rivalry with either of them. He was at the uppermost part of the fifth form, but he never reached the sixth."
[from The Mirror of Literary Amusement & Instruction, October 1825]