Many Victorian gaols provided schooling for their inmates, decades before it was mandated in wider society. So what, asks Rosalind Crone, drove this great educational crusade?
On 26 February 1848, 19-year-old Thomas Sumpter appeared in the dock at Berkshire Assizes, accused – and quickly convicted – of stealing a sheep. Nothing unusual in that, given the times: livestock theft was hardly uncommon in the first half of the 19th century. What was more curious was the apparent motive behind Sumpter’s offence. Having been recently released from Reading Gaol, he committed the crime with the express intent of ensuring his prompt return to the prison where he had been memorising sections of the Bible. He’d been receiving lessons in reading, and he didn’t want to stop.
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 place
