ABSTRACT
All of the components of the visiting mode are visible in the campaigns for educational reform in Victorian Britain. Education emerged in the 1830s and 1840s as one of the raft of reforming measures required to address the social dysfunctionality of the Victorian city. Associations supporting the extension of education in the 1840s were inexorably drawn to recognition of the paucity of educational institutions in many of the poorer working-class districts. In the 1840s, all sides cited as the fundamental problem that there were whole districts in Manchester destitute of education. The educational controversy helped to undermine the ability of the Manchester Statistical Society to act as neutral ground. The Manchester Education Aid Society was a classic of Victorian philanthropic hybridity, an attempt at direct action to enhance educational provision, a large-scale social experiment into the limits of voluntary effort and simultaneously a mechanism of social investigation.
