Children in Victorian Britain: Henry at boarding school

We taught these two lessons midway through the Victorian Britain Study Unit. In earlier sessions we had investigated the conditions of children working in the coal mines (see Children in Victorian Britain: Down the Mine). Now we turned to schools.

The class's Victorian topic books all focused on day schools, so I decided to deal with a very different kind of school: boarding school, since many children have read well-known stories about this. I had a copy of an 1822 letter written by an unhappy boarder named Henry to his father. The letter could illuminate for the children that in the 19th century working class children were not the only ones to suffer miserable living conditions. It also formed the first clue in a personal story that unfolded over the two lessons.

Henry's boarding school flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby fictionalised such Victorian boarding schools in the graphically-described Dotheboys Hall. His publicising such school conditions helped to improve them as the century progressed.

by Jacqui Dean