In 1872 a Buckinghamshire teacher protested that he was “the parson's fag, the squire's doormat, church scraper, professional singer, sub-curate, land surveyor, drill master, club collector, parish clerk, letter writer, librarian, washerwoman's target, organist, choirmaster, and youth's instructor” (60). The Anglican schoolteachers of Victorian England often felt, as this one certainly did, grossly exploited. They sometimes worked for a pittance and yet the expectations imposed on them were huge. Their resentments were voiced against their superiors, the parish clergy. The illustration and explanation of this tension is the subject of this book by John T. Smith, a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Hull in England. The theme has not previously been addressed at book length, and the discussion is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of the Roman Catholic and Wesleyan Methodist experiences for the sake of comparison.

It is established in the first place that the clergy of each of these bodies were strongly motivated to provide and sustain schools for their flocks. The occupants of the pulpits commonly also ran the schools. In practice, though not in theory, even in the later years of the nineteenth century a parish clergyman was the sole manager of a rural Anglican school. Catholic priests, whose duties could include the distribution of “endless varieties of sweetmeats” (33), equally controlled the parish education, though the power of the Wesleyan minister was constrained by his being moved on to another circuit every three years. The teachers were expected, and often contractually required, to contribute their labor to the ecclesiastical affairs of the area such as the running of the church choir, whose voices were drawn from their schools. Wesleyans, however, were again an exception, not imposing additional duties on those who taught in their schools. In the middle years of the century, Anglican clergy were overwhelmingly educated at the English universities, so they enjoyed a high social status that was supported by a substantial income. The teachers, by contrast, were of lower social origin, lacked a university education, and were poorly paid (Wesleyans again excepted in the last respect). The resulting social gulf created its own problems, with those responsible for nurturing the young objecting to being treated as dependants. Over time, however, the gulf narrowed. On the one hand, the clergy were less commonly university-trained and, as agricultural depression affected incomes from the 1870s, less well remunerated. On the other hand, the teachers were better prepared, and teaching was turning into a profession. The creation of the Association of Church Teachers in 1854 to challenge clerical dominance was an early symptom of the resulting friction that lasted down to the end of the century and beyond. Among Roman Catholics, the clergy had never enjoyed high status, so there was less scope for combat, but nevertheless the inexorable advance of professional standards meant that in 1892 a National Union of Catholic Teachers held its first annual conference. The Wesleyan Methodists, by contrast, suffered no more than occasional brushes because the ministers were transient and the schoolteachers more autonomous. After 1870, with the creation of school boards by the state to provide public education wherever the churches had failed to supply it, the clergy of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church played prominent parts, especially in the countryside, in order to defend their own denominational interests against the upstart educational institutions. Once more the Wesleyan ministers did not stay long enough to participate in a similar way.

So the overall picture is of persistent problems between clergy and teachers among Anglicans and Catholics, but not among Wesleyans. The case is made out on the basis of extensive trawling through the surviving records of schools of the three denominations, though it is noticeable that they are nearly all in the north of England, together with Lincolnshire, the areas closest to Hull. It is doubtful, though, whether a wider geographical spread of primary sources would have yielded a different perspective because in the south of England the tensions in the agricultural areas would have been, if anything, more acute. There is, however, a gap in the coverage. The Wesleyan schoolmasters were often not career educationalists but young men waiting for admission to the denomination's ministry. They were more at the beck and call of the resident minister—whose report on their behavior could determine their future—than this book suggests. Yet the analysis is cogent and supported by ample quotation from the primary sources that give an admirable feel for the period. Here is a portrayal of a significant missing piece of the social reality of Victorian England.