ABSTRACT
Pre-industrial recreations, such as cock-fighting and bull-baiting, still survived, though sports involving cruelty to animals were increasingly abhorred, certainly by the middle class. The passion of some aristocrats and working men for boxing and the turf upset the sensible and prudent. Certainly, the more brutal public spectacles were coming to an end. Educational provision throughout the United Kingdom was as varied as its games, dialects and eating habits. The 1870 Education Act was designed to provide school accommodation for children in districts where there was insufficient provision for their elementary education. The education of women was becoming an increasingly contentious matter, involving, as it inevitably did more general questions about their status. For upper-middle-class girls, however, the provision was changing, and the Bryce Commission in 1895 singled out the increased availability of secondary education for them as perhaps the single most important educational development since the Taunton Commission.
