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Saving Souls on a Shoestring: Welsh Circulating Schools in a Century of Change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2019
Abstract
This article examines the phenomenon of Welsh circulating schools from those of Griffith Jones in the mid-eighteenth century, which over nearly fifty years brought the basics of religious education to thousands of poor children and adults, to their successors later in the century under Thomas Charles and, in the nineteenth century, the Bevan Charity. It compares Jones's success with the relatively limited impact of the later schemes and seeks to demonstrate the importance of his flair for publicity, his connections, his use of Anglican networks and his organizational ability. The article considers how the changed political and social climate in the last decades of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth affected the success of later schemes and describes how the schools had to adapt to changed expectations and new educational developments. It argues that the schools provide strong evidence against the view that the charity school movement was motivated primarily by the desire for social control.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2019
References
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34 Simon Lloyd to David Jones Charles, 8 August 1816, in Jenkins, Life of Thomas Charles, 3: 575.
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36 See, for instance, Yates, Paula, ‘Drawing up the Battle-Lines: Elementary Schooling in the Diocese of Bangor in the Second Decade of the Nineteenth Century’, in Yates, Nigel, ed., Bishop Burgess and his World: Culture Religion and Society in Britain, Europe and North America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cardiff, 2007), 135–44Google Scholar.
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42 I am very grateful to John Richfield of the Representative Body of the Church in Wales for this information. His role includes acting as clerk to the governors of the Madam Bridget Bevan Charity.