ABSTRACT
No great methodological insights are required to demonstrate the limitations of using a single case history as an explanatory contribution to the study of late nineteenth-century urban education, particularly one of a school that was rather larger than life. On the other hand, if it is considered important to redress some of the ‘aspects of neglect’ in the history of education of this period, then more attention needs to be given to the detailed happenings in schools and the communities they served. This study is therefore much more about experiences than events. Taking some of Harold Silver’s examples of neglect, the attempt is made to explore the reactions to and the quality of school experience and, more ambitiously, the complex interfaces in what Silver has described as the ‘total social relationships’ of schooling: the ‘ways in which schools, pupils, teachers, educational activities in general, related to wider social experience’.1
