A Phase of the Struggle for Catholic Education: Manchester and Salford in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Writing in theCambridge Historical Journalin 1956, G.F.A. Best introduced his article on the religious difficulties of national education in England from 1800 to 1870 with the comment ‘the peculiar problems and difficulties in the way of achieving a national system of elementary education in nineteenth-century England [had] long been so obvious and notorious that a new attempt at an objective and comprehensive view must seem surprising and rash.’ He then justified his own article on the grounds that none of the works available did the subject justice because none told the whole story. In giving only fleeting mention to the educational claims of Roman Catholics, however, even Best omitted an essential of the great educational debate that was waged over England for much of the nineteenth century and that in its earlier phases found some of its more powerful voices in Manchester.