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Home›James Booth (1806–1878) [dates to check]

See also: John Charles Buckmaster

James Booth and the “Wandsworth network”

Notes on Mary Tasker’s review of Frank Foden’s The Examiner (1990)

A summary of the review in my own words, with short quotations; the review itself is in copyright and can be read in full on JSTOR. The reviewer is the same Mary Tasker whose 1974 thesis on John Buckmaster is on this site. See also Frank Foden on Buckmaster.

Who was James Booth?

Tasker credits Foden with rescuing Booth – mathematician, cleric, industrial educator and, for a time, chairman of the Council of the Society of Arts – from obscurity, and with making a convincing case that he was the founder of Britain’s public examination system.

Booth was an outsider: a Protestant Irishman, passed over for a Fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin. He came to England in 1840 to make a new career. His first post, as Principal of Bristol College, a non-denominational college offering a “modern” scientific education to the sons of local tradesmen, lasted barely a year: local religious opposition to the “Godless institution” in Park Row closed it in 1841. Booth took holy orders that year and became Vice-Principal of the firmly Anglican Liverpool Collegiate Institution, where teaching the tradesmen’s sons of its Middle School let him develop his ideas on scientific and industrial education.

“Examination the Province of the State” (1847)

Booth’s most important work was this pamphlet, written at Liverpool. On Benthamite principles – making the most of aptitude at the least expense – it argued for competitive examinations, open to all and run by the state. Booth listed twenty-two advantages, from the efficient selection of talent to the calming of sectarian conflict, and proposed dividing the country into “educational circuits” under Boards of Examiners. Much that we take for granted began here: annual examinations, written papers, classed results, and anonymous examiners drawn from eminent academics rather than teachers. Tasker calls the pamphlet “enormously influential”.

London and the Wandsworth network

In 1848 Booth moved to London as an Anglican priest and joined the Wandsworth circle. At its centre was the Rev. Henry Moseley: Cambridge mathematician, Professor of Natural Philosophy at King’s College, London, later a canon of Bristol Cathedral and founder of the Bristol Trade School, and in the 1850s an inspector of schools and a champion of Richard Dawes’s radical ideas on science teaching. With them was John Buckmaster – Tasker’s “epitome of the 19th century autodidact” – who from 1859 was Organising Master of the Government’s Department of Science and Art.

Their struggle, Tasker argues, mirrored the nation’s: Britain was the first industrial nation but among the last in Europe to see the need for scientific and technical education. There was no way to train science teachers, schools like Wandsworth got little money from government or support from their neighbourhoods, and the new Department of Science and Art (1855) relied on encouraging local initiatives rather than any central policy.

The Society of Arts examinations

Booth turned to the Society of Arts (now the RSA). He joined in 1852, founded the Journal of the Society of Arts within weeks, was soon on its Council, and by 1855 was its chairman and chairman of its Committee of Examiners. In 1853 he chaired its Committee on Industrial Instruction, an enquiry among industrialists, scientists and heads of schools into how working-class education related to working life – a step which, Foden notes, twenty years later would have needed a Royal Commission. Tired of waiting for the state, Booth put public examinations at its heart.

The Society asked its affiliated Mechanics’ and Literary and Scientific Institutes whether they wanted examinations; they did. It adopted the procedures of Booth’s 1847 pamphlet, drew up simple syllabuses, appointed twenty-five eminent examiners (seven of them Fellows of the Royal Society) and arranged sponsored prizes. The first Society of Arts examinations were held in 1856.

What the examinations led to

Foden argues that examinations then spread through English education “like an epidemic disease”, and that they drove reform rather than following it. They underlay Robert Lowe’s payment by results in elementary schools (1862); their syllabuses shaped the curriculum and the textbooks written for it; and their question-and-answer style shaped teaching, for the worse, well into the next century. Their bookishness also exposed how poorly the elementary schools were teaching working-class children to read and write.

In 1859 the Society handed its examinations in science and technical subjects, with their committees and local centres, to the Department of Science and Art – a great gain for the Department and for Buckmaster, Booth’s friend and colleague, whose job was to extend its network of local science classes and examinations.

Booth’s fall

Booth’s haste cost him his place. Foden believes he pushed the Society too far, too fast, and a bitter row led to his resignation in 1857. In 1859 he left London for Stone, in Buckinghamshire, where he spent the rest of his life isolated from his former friends and colleagues. Foden admires his energy, Tasker observes, but shows little affection for this driving, irascible, self-righteous Victorian cleric – who nonetheless left behind the foundations of English examinations for a century, a damnosa hereditas (a ruinous inheritance) only then beginning to crumble.

Dates

Do you know where the Wandsworth Trade School stood? Please let me know.