ABSTRACT
‘There cannot fail to be a relationship between the successive systems of education, and the successive social states with which they have co-existed.’ 1 So begins ‘Intellectual Education’, the first pedagogically substantive essay in Herbert Spencer’s seminal work Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861). Setting in train a reconfiguration of educational theory and practice, Education took Victorian culture by storm, appealing to Britain’s sense of anthropological privilege and purpose as a model of civilized human development. Education was read all over the world, and through it evolutionism entered the nineteenth- and twentieth-century educational bloodstream. Like other facets of Victorian culture, music embraced Spencer with open arms. Numerous writings attest to his manifest influence, but within the literature of musical education his influence is generally indirect. Henry Keatley Moore’s unassuming little primer The Child’s Pianoforte Book (1882) is no exception in this regard, recapitulating in its way the general educational values of its time in much the way that systems of education more broadly recapitulate their social states.
