‘Superior to the Rudest Shocks of Adversity’: English Jesuit Education and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688–1832

The years 1688 and 1832 were both years of crisis for the Society of Jesus in England. In December 1688, a recently opened and revolutionary network of free day schools for boys, conducted by the Jesuits in various locations across the country, was destroyed by the mob in the days immediately following the downfall and flight to France of James II. By 1832, the fledgling London day school of the newly restored English Province of the Society of Jesus, opened in 1824 and offering gratuitous education like its counterparts of 1688, was fighting for survival simply because of a principle: the long established Jesuit tradition of offering gratuitous education was no longer deemed socially acceptable to an emerging Catholic middle class which then associated such a practice with the provision of education for the poor. As will be demonstrated, the failure of the London school led, in large measure, to the relaxing in 1833 of the long-held and closely observed Jesuit principle of offering free education: from that time onwards, Jesuit schools and colleges in certain countries were given special dispensation to charge fees in certain circumstances.