A visit to a ragged school, by Thomas Hustwick
An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this newspaper feature, published in 1852, a journalist visits a free evening school for very poor children in London, known as a ‘ragged school’.
The ragged school in Paradise Court is not easily found by a stranger, and I suspect that its founders intended it so, for the children it serves would not willingly go near a building with a respectable front. It occupies two rooms over a cooper’s workshop, reached by an outside stair so worn in the middle that it is more like a slope than a flight of steps. On the evening of my visit it held, by my count, sixty-three scholars, from a boy of perhaps five, who slept through the whole of the proceedings with his head upon a slate, to a lad of seventeen who told me, quite without shame, that he had been twice in prison.
Few of the boys owned a collar, two brothers shared a single cap and wore it by turns, and one small girl wore what had plainly been a man’s waistcoat, buttoned to her knees. The smell of the room, when sixty-three such children sit for two hours beside a single stove, I will not attempt to describe.
The master, a Mr Quennell, is a carpenter by day. He receives nothing for his evenings here but his supper, and he has given them for four years. I watched him take a class of twelve through the alphabet with a patience I have not seen equalled in any endowed school in the kingdom. One boy could not make his letter S stand upright upon his slate: it lay down, or turned the wrong way like a hook. Mr Quennell took a long curl of pine shaving from his coat pocket, twisted it into the shape of the letter, and laid it in the boy’s palm, closing his fingers over it. The boy went back to his slate, made his letter, and held it up for the room to see.
Afterwards he showed me his ledger. In it, in a careful carpenter’s hand, he has written the name of every child who has come to Paradise Court in four years, and beside some of the names a line of later news: ‘at sea’, ‘in service at Clapham’, ‘apprenticed to a printer’. Beside many there is nothing at all, and beside a few there is a single word which he did not read aloud. He turned back to a page on which one surname, Tidmarsh, stood five times, one beneath another. ‘They came one after the other, as each grew big enough to climb the stair,’ he said, ‘and each stayed longer than the last.’ The youngest now brings her mother on Tuesday evenings, and the mother, who is past forty, lately read to him, slowly and without help, the whole of a handbill from the new washhouse.
I left at half past nine, when the lamps were put out and the scholars dispersed into the courts and alleys from which they had come. It was impossible not to wonder how many of them were going home to anything that could fairly be called a home, and how much of what they had learned in two hours would survive the other twenty-two. There are, the master told me, perhaps four thousand children in this parish alone who never see the inside of any school. Sixty-three of them came to Paradise Court tonight. It is not enough; it is not nearly enough. But I have seen Mr Quennell’s ledger, and I cannot think it nothing.
“The writer is confident that the ragged school can change the lives of the children who attend it.”
To what extent do you agree with this statement?
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.