Horrible Histories – the Victorians
I suppose we all know that in Victorian times in the second half of the 1800s children at school were beaten with canes and birches. But that wasn’t the half of it.
Horrible
Histories, a children’s television show that uses humour to educate, takes
us into a typical school of the era. Young children could have their feet
locked up in stocks, or have a log tied around their shoulders. It was also a
punishment to place a child in a basket and hoist it so that it hung from the
rafters.
Horrible Histories is produced for CBBC by Lion Television with Citrus Television and has been
running since 2009 to 2020.
You can see these methods in action in this clip.
Pictures and video credits: CBBC
The punishments shown in Horrible Histories were
championed by the educational “reformer” Joseph Lancaster who in 1803 published
Improvements in Education as it Respects the Industrious Classes of a
Community. At first he was focused on rewarding good behaviour and railed
against corporal punishment.
But he changed his mind over time. A
book prepared for a temporary exhibition at the British Schools Museum in
Hitchens, Hertfordshire, in 2019 recalls Lancaster believed that “few youth do
wrong for the sake of it”.
The book edited by museum curator Mark Copley reveals:
For repeat offenders, Lancaster proposed
that a wooden log weighing four to six pounds was placed around the pupil’s
neck making it hard for them to move around. Other punishments
included shackling legs of offenders
together with wood, linked together with rope. The shackled pupils had to walk
around the classroom until they were tired. If that didn’t work, a wooden stick
could be fastened behind the pupil, running elbow to elbow, with their legs
sometimes tied together. Worse still, boys were yoked together with wood around
their necks and then paraded around the school, walking backwards.
According to Lancaster’s book, occasionally boys were
even placed in a sack or basket and suspended from the roof in sight of all the
other boys. It is said they were terrified of this and that he rarely used it.
There were other cruel and unusual punishments. William Andrews in his book Bygone
Punishments (William Andrews & Co., 1899) and available to
download free here, writes about the “ingenious contrivance” the finger
pillory that was used in “dame schools” for very young children in the early
1800s
“It was kept on the dame’s desk, and when the children
went up to say their lessons they had to place their hands behind them, putting
their fingers into the holes of the pillory, and bringing their hands back to
back. When properly fixed, the hands were quite fast and the shoulders held
well back. This kind of finger-pillory was frequently used as a means of
punishment in schools.”
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