ABSTRACT
The establishment by the Education Act of 1870 of elementary schools maintained wholly out of public funds was long overdue. Its tardy achievement was due, in detail, to Palmerston’s unwillingness during his last ministry to sponsor a reform with which he came to agree in principle; but more general reasons for the delay were the sustained resistance of the Established Church and the survival of fears among the propertied and employing classes that almost any form of education would cause the labouring poor to become insubordinate. The issue, like almost all the issues tackled by
Gladstone’s administration of 1868-74, had first become a major topic of political controversy well before the 1830s, and that it was still a matter of controversy forty years later is further evidence of the essentially conservative character of the decades that followed the Great Reform Act.
