The ‘New Hobby of Education’

Education was possibly one of the most pervasive, contentious, and frequently debated subjects of the Romantic period, so much so that Alan Richardson recently characterized it as almost an ‘obsession’. This ‘new hobby of education’, as Elizabeth Gaskell's Lady Ludlow rather disparagingly described it, was directly attributable to the emergence of the Sunday School movement, the increased popularity of didactic children's literature, practical applications of Locke's educational principles, the popularization of Rousseau's educational theories, and the emergence of ‘the first major feminist critiques of education’. Competing treatises expounding various educational techniques, priorities and restrictions abounded in this period, and as John Passmore has suggested, a pervasive confidence gradually emerged which lay claim to education as the key to man's ‘perfectibility’. Robert Owen, for instance, spoke for many when he confidently asserted, in typical liberal panegyric, that education ‘opens to the family of man … without single exception, the means of endless progressive improvement, physical, intellectual, and moral, and of happiness, without the possibility of regression or of assignable limit’ – a typical Enlightenment belief in the Socratic doctrine that vice proceeds from ignorance, and that as Mr Foster in Peacock's Headlong Hall (1816) puts it, ‘men are virtuous in proportion as they are enlightened and that, as every generation increases in knowledge, it also increases in virtue’.

One outcome of this ‘new hobby of education’ was a fascination with both philosophy and science.