ABSTRACT
As enhanced economic success in the 1850s ushered in the mid-Victorian ‘age of equipoise’ the theory and practice of education received a large amount of public attention. In contrast to the mechanical disciplines and general ineffectiveness of the monitorial schools there was, as we have seen, a different tradition of education that stemmed from the works of Locke and Hartley. The importance of early sense impressions on the moral development of the infant child had been further articulated and legitimized by the most famous Continental educational reformer Johannes Pestalozzi. Soon the setting up of private kindergartens provided several German exiles and British middle-class women with respectable work and with important international networks of like-minded friends, all interested not only in a progressive vision of children’s education but concomitantly in women’s higher education.
