ABSTRACT
The demise of the Infant School Society at the end of 1828 left Wilderspin facing an uncertain future. His response, however, was swift and positive; his recent successes in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and his growing reputation at home and abroad, convinced him that there might be a promising future for a practical exponent of the infant school concept working on his own. Something like a boom in infant schools was under way in Britain, Europe and America; it is probable that the international fame of New Lanark a decade earlier had paved the way, but Wilderspin could take satisfaction from the fact that nearly all the new schools, from Paris to Vienna, from Budapest to New York, had been inspired by the model he had pioneered. Historians of education have made us aware of the migration overseas of the monitorial systems of Bell and Lancaster, but nothing has been published on the rather similar spread of the Wilderspin system in the 1820s and 1830s; a beginning is made in the S(?Cond half of this chapter.
