This book is a study of the education of upper and middling class boys and girls in the long eighteenth century in England. It compares their education by investigating the pedagogies of the subjects constituting their instruction and presents a different perspective on the role of gender in their education. Although my aim is comparative, this comparison can only be uneven, because the amount of research has been unequal. While the education of young and older women in the middle and upper ranks of society has been the subject of decades of critical and biographical research, apart from major studies such as Anthony Fletcher's Growing up in England and Henry French and Mark Rothery's Man's Estate, there have been few equivalent studies about young and older males’ education in the eighteenth century.1 In one sense, it could be argued that the history of ideas about education has been about male education but this history has conflated the education of men with the norm or the ideal. One consequence, French and Rothery remark, is that for boys ‘it is extremely difficult to disentangle the experiences of schooling from … the normative stereotypes according to which the subjects themselves often judged or criticized their own school days retrospectively; and the stereotypes by which historians have subsequently assessed and interpreted these accounts’.

Historiography of male and female education

While the history of female education has also been subject to specific constraints and stereotyping, a now substantial historiography has produced a wider field of reference for women and girls’ education in the period under discussion than is available for boys. In 1996, historian Susan Skedd could conclude that in the late eighteenth century, women had better opportunities for education than ever before, and that her evidence contradicted the ‘prevailing historiographical view of neglect and inadequacy in women's education’. Why then has female education continued to be presented as inferior to male education, reproducing a narrative which assumes that the generality of girls obtained an inadequate, superficial, accomplishment oriented education?