ABSTRACT
Wilderspin won national recognition for his work as an infant-school missionary; yet he became the travelling agent of the Infant School Society by default. His hopes were centered on becoming the superintendent of a model infant school in London where his system could be perfected and demonstrated and whence it could subsequently be extended to other places at home and abroad. He certainly had not envisaged for himself a future of perpetual travel. " .. .I was reduced to the necessity of doing this", he wrote later, "because the Society fell to the ground and never erected the model school they promised me; having no building, therefore, in London where I could bring my various plans to bear, I thought it a public duty incumbent on me to go round the country and try to get buildings erected, and when they were erected, to instruct the teachers and children at the same time". 1
This describes the essential pattern of his life from early 1825 until the late summer of 1836. The period falls conveniently into two parts: the first, from early 1825, when his travels for the Infant School Society began on a full-time basis, to the end of 1828, when the Society effectively ceased operations; the second from early 1829, when he settled in Cheltenham and continued his travels as a free-lance ed ucationist, until August 1836, when he became a salaried employee of the Liverpool Corporation Education Committee. The story, or most of it, is told in various editions of Earzy Discipline, one of the most colourful travel books of the early nineteenth century, but also, from a chronological viewpoint, one of the most confused. The book's title was originally intended to be The Progress of Infant Education, or Recollections of Journies Through Various Parts of the United Kingdom for Its Promotion (a wording which aptly describes its contents) with Wilderspin as author and Charles Williams as editor. 2 Before publication, however, Wilderspin, with his aptitude for picking inappropriate titles, changed it to Early Discipline and dropped Williams' name from the title-page. The latter, a young Presbyterian minister from Newark3, conceived it his editorial duty "to group in some instances the events which occurred at different visits", a reasonable procedure if adequate dating had been provided. But neither author nor editor provided a single date. This has made the task of unra veiling the chronology of Wilderspin's travels extraordinarily difficult, and there are gaps in the record, sometimes at critical points. Some aspects of Wilderspin's travels remain, and probably will continue to remain, problematical. But the main lines of the story are clear enough for us to follow Wilderspin quite closely on his journeys throughout the British Isles.
