Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools

Sumpter was one of three convicts who had been given early release from Reading Gaol in autumn 1845, following an unprecedented decision by the local authorities. Having been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment, each had served six to eight months – and in that time had become poster boys for the success of a new regime at the prison.

To aid rehabilitation, education was prioritised over labour: prisoners spent large amounts of time learning to read and write, as well as memorising passages from the Bible. Having each committed to memory the whole of the New Testament up to Ephesians, at the time of their release the three men were lauded as star pupils whose characters had been transformed.

That ‘transformation’, though, proved short-lived. All three soon re-offended, including Sumpter. Word spread about both the system and the unfortunate relapses, and the prison became known as the Read-Read-Reading Gaol.

This account is somewhat at odds with our idea of the Victorian prison as a place of ‘hard labour, hard board and hard fare’. Yet in the 1840s, when there was no universal elementary education and many working-class children were denied the opportunity to attend school, many prisons in England and Wales had schools in which inmates learned reading, writing and sometimes more besides. And despite the scandals sparked by those three ‘transformed’ inmates, prison schools were here to stay.

Smelly vessels

The first recognisable prison schools appeared in the unlikeliest of places: on board prison hulks. These decommissioned naval ships were used to hold men (and sometimes boys) who had been convicted of serious offences but whose transportation to the penal colonies had been delayed or prevented.

Moored in rivers and harbours, these damp and often smelly vessels were routinely described as “schools of vice”. Drinking, gambling and fighting were rife.

It is extraordinary, then, that on 1 January 1812, Thomas Price, chaplain for the Zealand hulk at Sheerness, reported that a school had been established in the ship and, as a result, that “some of the ignorant are beginning to read”.

Soon after, schools began to appear in land-based prisons, too. In 1814–15, the keeper of Warwick County Gaol set up a monitorial school for juvenile prisoners. From 1816, convicts at Millbank Penitentiary would gather in groups of 16 in the corridors between their cells, where they were taught reading, writing and arithmetic by the most educated among their number.

By 1821, there were schools teaching basic literacy in at least 24 prisons and hulks in England and Wales, with more in Scotland and Ireland. Their appearance was a consequence of perceived rising crime rates and the increasing use of prisons as places of punishment, not just secure custody, where convicted criminals would serve sentences of incarceration.

This was accompanied by a greater emphasis on reformation, or what we would now call rehabilitation: the idea that prisoners should be returned to society as law-abiding, productive subjects. Instruction in reading and writing, reformers hoped, would civilise and discipline a prisoner, support his or her evangelisation and, in some cases, help to secure employment.

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A religious core

These developments reflected those of the wider movement for mass education. In early 19th-century England and Wales, there was no national system of elementary schooling, and attempts to legislate for one routinely failed. Though MPs agreed that any state-funded education should have a moral (ie religious) core, they could not agree on who – effectively, which church – should provide it.

That failure, combined with the strength of penal reformers’ commitment to rehabilitation and the growing number of prison schools, led to a remarkable event. In summer 1823, MPs passed new legislation: a Gaols Act, which aimed to improve conditions and impose some uniformity on regimes in local prisons for inmates on remand and serving short sentences. Among other directives, it decreed that “provision shall be made in all prisons for the instruction of prisoners of both sexes in reading and writing”.

The legislation heralded the birth of state-funded education in England and Wales, pre-dating the establishment of universal elementary education for children by almost 50 years. From 1823, the number of prison schools continued to increase. By the late 1840s, every convict prison and hulk, as well as the majority of local prisons, had some sort of education scheme for prisoners. In the late 1860s, the proportion of local prisons with schools reached 90 per cent.

Most early prison schools were ad hoc initiatives. Prisoners were supplied with books, and sometimes pens and paper, then told to get on with it themselves. The authorities often relied on prisoners, philanthropic visitors or family members to teach for free or a small fee. In 1836, the chaplain at Devon County Gaol explained that he selected schoolmasters from among those convicted of smuggling because they “conduct themselves better than other classes of prisoners”. At Ely Gaol, the governor’s 11-year-old daughter taught the female prisoners.

Efforts were made to fill learning spaces with suitable fixtures. On the Defence prison hulk, slanting black desks with inkstand holes were arranged in the body of the chapel each morning. Blackboards were common, and lessons were often supported by textbooks published by school societies. At London’s Holloway Prison, journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew watched a class of female prisoners cluster “around a map of England... [they] appeared to take great interest in their geography lesson”.

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Soon, however, new systems of prison discipline ushered in more formal approaches. Prisoners’ lives were increasingly managed via timetables dictating hours for sleep, meals, labour and lessons. After the 1839 Prison Act, the adoption of the so-called ‘silent’ and ‘separate’ systems – which prohibited contact between prisoners – put an end to peer learning.

Many classrooms became silent, and in some separate prisons, such as Pentonville and Lewes County Gaol, partitions were placed between pupils. These were soon covered in graffiti as the increasingly literate prisoners found new ways to communicate with each other.

When visiting the school at Coldbath Fields, London, Henry Mayhew found that “all was silent as in a dumb asylum, the only sound being the rustling of copy books”. One pupil, “a lad with ruddy skin... [and] a defect in his speech”, was instructed to read aloud from his book. “‘Whatsoever is wight that shall ye weceive’, [he said].

“‘Do try to pronounce your ‘r’s’ better,’ said the master, kindly; and thereupon there was a shuffling of feet from the other pupils, as if the only method of laughing under the silent system was with the shoes.”

At the same time, volunteers were replaced with paid teachers under the direct control of the prison chaplain and governor. In convict prisons and large local prisons, qualified schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were recruited, but in smaller institutions the roles of teacher and warder were combined to save money, often retrospectively.

In 1858, Samuel Parker, former schoolmaster at Newgate Gaol, won an action against his employers for unreasonable dismissal after he complained about the new duties imposed on him. “A schoolmaster would be degraded in the eyes of his pupils,” the judge explained, “if, in addition... he officiated as turnkey and was compelled to clean out [water] closets.”

Embracing opportunities

Qualified teachers and, from 1835, prison inspections encouraged the expansion of the curriculum, with rote learning exposed as a futile exercise. “I have learned all the Galatians through by heart, and am now upon the Ephesians,” Prisoner 4429, a seven-time veteran of Reading Gaol, told the inspector, “[but] I cannot say I understand it.”

While instruction in writing and arithmetic became increasingly common, in some prisons lessons in history and geography were offered to vary and deepen learning.

“The school is our strength,” declared the chaplain at Shepton Mallet Gaol. “When prisoners begin to read, they begin to think.”

Many prisoners embraced the opportunity to learn. Attending school excused them from labour, while mastering the skill of reading provided relief from boredom, and writing offered the chance to communicate with others outside (and sometimes inside) the prison. But progress was dependent on time, and the majority of prisoners spent no more than three months behind bars. Often the learning acquired in prisons was lost amid the hard reality of the outside world.

During the 1850s and 1860s the penal aspects of incarceration intensified, fuelled by growing disillusionment with efforts to rehabilitate prisoners, the replacement of transportation by imprisonment, and the perception that prisons were too comfortable. Prison schools persisted, but provision was reshaped by a new emphasis on punishment and deterrence, and curricula were streamlined to focus only on basic competence in reading, writing and arithmetic.

“High teaching is wholly eschewed,” explained the chaplain at Millbank, “not only because there would not be time for it, but as inconsistent with the proprieties of a prison, and not at all necessary with reference to the well-doing of the prisoners [on release].”

Stages of learning

From 1853, convicts at Pentonville and Millbank serving long sentences spent their first nine months in separate confinement. Keen to increase the pain of isolation, in 1863–64 prison administrators introduced a system of cellular instruction. In each ward, one hour each week was set aside for education, during which prisoners would study alone in their cells. Those who were eligible would receive 10 to 15 minutes’ instruction from the schoolmaster or mistress.

At second-stage convict prisons, where some association was permitted, classes continued but lessons were limited to just one evening each week. “The mere attempt to read cannot interest a man fatigued by labour and bowed down with shame,” complained the chaplain at Portsmouth.

According to a former prisoner at Dartmoor, “by the time a dozen words of one syllable have been spelt, and often before a single line in the copybook has been filled, the bell rings... and the prisoners return to their cells about as wise as they left them”.

The nationalisation of local prisons in 1877 provided an opportunity to review education for short-sentence prisoners. Although the work of the commissioners ensured that a school existed in every prison, provision was reduced to the bare minimum: 15 minutes of individual tuition in cells twice a week for prisoners aged under 40 with sentences exceeding four months. “It is an inherent difficulty,” wrote a senior civil servant. “A place of short-term imprisonment cannot be made a place of education.”

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The advent of universal (1870) and compulsory (1880) elementary education for children in England and Wales gave prison administrators hope that prison schools could be abolished within a generation. But the reasons for illiteracy and innumeracy within the prison population were, and still are, varied and complex. At the same time, the idea of education as a panacea – a cure-all for society’s problems and an antidote to criminality – remains seductive.

Educational and penal policy combined in the 19th century to embed education deep within the penal regime and, as a result, prison schools continued through the 20th century and into the 21st. However, the difficulties of accommodating education within an environment in which punishment and deterrence routinely take priority persist. As a result, 200 years after they first appeared, there are still serious limits on what prison schools can achieve.

This article was first published in the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine