The Advent of Sunday Schools

The birth of the Sunday School movement is the subject of my latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World.

Robert Raikes is often considered the ‘founder’ of Sunday schools for working class children, but there are several candidates for the title. Almost a century earlier, the Revd. Joseph Alleine held classes at Taunton, and there are more instances recorded elsewhere: in Pennsylvania (USA) during the 1740s, at Catterick (Yorkshire) in the 1760s, and at Macclesfield in Cheshire in 1778.

Many of the pin-makers of Gloucester were small children. One day in 1780, Raikes was ‘struck with concern at seeing a groupe [sic] of children, wretchedly ragged, at play in the street’. The children worked all week; Sunday was their only day off. Raikes was worried they would turn to crime unless they were taught right from wrong.
In July 1780, Raikes and the Rev. Thomas Stock, headmaster of Gloucester Cathedral school, set up Sunday schools for the children. This initiative was immensely popular, and spread like wildfire in Britain.
You can find out more about the lives of working children, and their schools, in The Children History Forgot.



Images: Robert Raikes’ house at Gloucester, now a pub.
Memorial statue of Rev. Thomas Charles (1755–1814) at Bala. Charles founded day schools for Welsh children, promoted Sunday Schools in Wales, and was one of the founders of the British and Foreign Bible Society. © Sue Wilkes.

The Queen's Visit to Liverpool

HM The Queen is said to have been much impressed by her visit to Liverpool this week. Of course, this isn’t the first time the city has been visited by royalty. Queen Victoria visited Liverpool on her tour of Lancashire in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition.
The event was covered by the Illustrated London News. It’s a tradition for the Queen to be greeted by schoolchildren, and 85,000 child workers assembled to see Queen Victoria. The only education these children had was at Sunday School, however. ‘How much of the manufacturing and commercial greatness of England is due to the labours of these babes, of these young attendants of that mighty worker, the steam engine?’ The reporter deplored the fact that despite reforming legislation, children were still wasting their strength and youth in the factories, and receiving insufficient education: ‘…no one can have looked on that vast assemblage of babes without the sorrowful conviction that an immense deal yet remains to be done by society before it can acquit itself of neglect of duty.’
Interestingly, the reporter indicated that the Queen wouldn’t have been as welcome if the Corn Laws (which kept the price of grain artificially high) hadn’t been repealed recently: ‘the Queen could not then have shown herself in Lancashire.’

Image: Illustrated London News, 18 October 1851. Author’s Collection.