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  • English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847–1902 by Eric G. Tenbus
  • Mary Heimann (bio)
English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847–1902, by Eric G. Tenbus ; pp. viii + 209. London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2010, £60.00, $99.00.

“Give me a child at seven,” the Jesuits are supposed to have claimed, “and he is mine for life.” Central to Victorian Catholic politics was the struggle to ensure that the English system of state-funded primary school education would meet the needs of the Catholic poor. The growth in state-funded Catholic schools that took place in England and Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century helped shape generations of Catholic schoolchildren. According to English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, increasing engagement with the political system also changed the nature of the English Catholic community, turning it from a weak and divided grouping into a formidable political lobby. Thanks to Eric G. Tenbus’s careful research into the Nicholas Wiseman, Henry Edward Manning, Herbert Vaughan, W. E. Gladstone, and other manuscript collections, thorough examination of the English Catholic bishops’ pastoral letters, and analysis of debates over education that appeared in the Victorian periodical press, we now have a serious, scholarly account of this important chapter in the history of Catholic education and politics.

English Catholics and the Education of the Poor traces the complicated story of English Catholic political participation in the Victorian education question. It begins with the entrance of Catholic schools into the state grant system in 1847, examines the controversy surrounding Forster’s Education Act of 1870, and charts Catholic involvement in the debates which culminated in the Balfour Education Bill of 1902. In so doing, it fills a glaring gap in the historiography and makes a useful contribution to our understanding of the English Catholic political scene during the half century of increasing denominational visibility that followed the restoration of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Tenbus’s volume does more than simply chronicle the ups and downs of the Catholic education political lobby and its constituents. It also suggests that the way this [End Page 514] particular political question was handled changed the nature of the community. Drawing on the work of John Bossy, Kester Aspden, and myself, Tenbus accepts arguments that the English Catholic community became more cohesive and confident, even militant, over the course of the nineteenth century; but he sets out to prove that it was above all the education question which made it so. Where I have argued that a distinctively English Catholic piety held an otherwise diverse community together despite divisions of class, ethnicity, and political outlook, Tenbus declares that “no other issue but education could have possibly served to bring together Catholics, rich and poor, cradle and convert, liberal and ultramontane, English and Irish” in the second half of the nineteenth century (6–7).

As Tenbus points out, the two arguments are not mutually exclusive. Traditional English Catholic piety, most closely associated with Richard Challoner’s prayer book The Garden of the Soul (1740), sought to provide, through successive editions, for the spiritual needs of those who, in the words of Challoner’s subtitle, “living in the world, aspire to devotion.” From an English Catholic perspective, the whole point of a denominational education was to train hearts as well as heads, to raise children as good Catholics who, as Robert Cornthwaite put it in a pastoral letter in 1869, would be fit for citizenship both “on earth and in heaven” (qtd. in Tenbus 23). Tenbus acknowledges that devotional practices may have “led to a new spiritual identity, one marked by greater homogeneity that helped break ethnic and socio-economic barriers between English Catholics” but suggests that “part of that new Catholic identity” also came “from the increasingly assertive and self-confident, some might even say aggressive, position on education that dominated the writings and agendas of the hierarchy and the Catholic press in the last half of the century.” Tenbus’s work seeks in effect to bridge the gap between the cohesive devotional community I imagined in Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (1995) and the defensively strident “fortress Church” presented...

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