ABSTRACT
Biographical reference books began to record details of schooling, and (for example) Oxford University matriculation registers suddenly, for the first time, began in the 1890s to take note of entrants' previous schooling. The head of another gentry family in the North East, Admiral Collingwood, wrote thus of his daughters' schooling, 'Being in London, the author hope, will correct their language'. The distant origins of this newly established standard form of English pronunciation are well known to linguists: they can be traced to the late Middle English period, especially around the time of the change-over to the use of English in central government records in the 1430s. The degree of prescription of English pronunciation exercised first by the public schools and then by their imitators in the rest of the school system for at least a century after 1870 has been one of the great unexamined aspects of our social history.
