ABSTRACT
Victorians looked to the past for inspiration to improve their character and there was nostalgia for an idealised chivalry of the medieval period. The Victorians also expected that the individual self-assertion of such persons, hard-working and conscientious, would be the most effective way to promote the general material welfare. Victorian education had conscious moral purposes, particularly in the economic and religious domain. The Victorian concern for the ‘education’ of the poor is best understood as a concern for authority over them. The perceived need for some form of character formation in schools was clearly evident from the alarm displayed by many eminent Victorians when they discovered the state of the social and moral conditions of the poor in the industrial cities. Character formation was a mixture of traditional beliefs and various distillations of modern science – schools were designed to discipline bodies and regulate minds together with the formation of conduct and beliefs.
