ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a technical one, concerning range of difficulties which confront any enquiry into extent of schools and scholarship in the nineteenth century. It also focuses on the manner in which official statistics, upon which people rely so heavily, were originally produced. Much has been written on the subject of the total numerical extent of elementary schooling in the nineteenth century, but the collective result of such work has been disappointing. An obvious starting point was with the figures of local educational provision provided in the extensive tabular analyses of the Education Census of 1851. The value of the Education Census to the particular issue of working-class private schooling rests solely on acceptance that the elegantly constructed techniques and procedures formally set out in Horace Mann's Explanatory Notes coincide exactly with what actually happened in the real world.
