For many poor children in Victorian England, going to school was not a matter of just turning up each morning.
Some had no suitable clothes. Some had no shoes. Others spent their days working, begging or trying to find enough food to survive.
Ragged schools developed to provide free education for children living in severe poverty who might otherwise receive little or no schooling. Some also provided food, clothing and practical training as well as lessons.
In 1849, Lord Ashley - later the Earl of Shaftesbury and one of the movement’s strongest supporters - described an investigation involving 33 young people living in extreme poverty in London.
Twenty-four had no parents. Twenty had no shirts. Nine had no shoes. Some had already been imprisoned. When Ashley privately questioned several of them, they admitted surviving through begging and stealing, with picking up old bones providing their only legitimate way of earning a penny.
Ragged schools were deliberately established in some of the poorest districts, where they tried to reach children who were unlikely to receive an education elsewhere.
Lessons could include reading, writing, arithmetic and religious instruction. Some schools also taught practical skills such as tailoring or shoemaking, particularly for children who needed a way of earning a living.
Evening classes were particularly important because many of the children spent their days working, begging or simply trying to survive.
These schools were not a complete answer to Victorian poverty, but they filled an important gap. When the ragged-school movement expanded during the 1840s and 1850s, England and Wales still had no national system of compulsory elementary education.
By the 1860s, Parliament was openly discussing the work being done by ragged schools in places including London, Manchester and Salford. In 1869, more than 10,000 children in Manchester and Salford were described in Parliament as regularly attending them.
What stays with me is that Ashley’s evidence described children who had already been repeatedly imprisoned, while elsewhere in the same evidence he described destitute youngsters who could not even read or write.
The ragged schools could not change every part of their lives, but for many children they offered something they had previously been denied - an education.
Had you heard of Victorian ragged schools before?
Image: The Lambeth “Ragged School” (Boys), London, wood engraving published in The Illustrated London News, 11th April 1846. Public domain. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons
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