ABSTRACT
Wilderspin wrote his first three books - published between 1823 and 1825 - at a time when general principles of education were of limited public interest and when the view that viable classroom practice needed to be guided by a coherent theory had hardly been established. He had, moreover, set himself the task, in these volumes, of acquainting the world with the actual working of a new system of education more or less as he was devising it. He was well aware of the situation. He felt that his books would be more readily acceptable if he played down the theoretical side of his work; "dry philosophical detail", he believed, "would neither be received nor read". But, he added, this did not mean that "I was unacquainted with the philosophy of my own plans, merely because I preferred the doing of the thing to the writing about it". 1
His "philosophy", of course, had its roots in the educational ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, about which he found it expedient to remain silent during his periods of employment with Joseph Wilson and the Infant School Society. During the 1830s, however, after his acquaintanceship with philosophically-inclined educationists - Greaves, Combe, Simpson and others - who introduced him to the ideas of Pestalozzi and the phrenologists, he wove these several strands of thought into a developmental theory of early childhood education which anticipated many twentieth-century ideas.
