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James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth
was the founder of the English system
of popular education. He was born at Rochdale, Lancashire, on 20 July 1804,
was son of Robert Kay, and was brother of Joseph Kay, Q.C. and of the
Right Hon. Sir Edward Kay, lord justice of appeal in the supreme court. As
a youth he was engaged in the bank of his relative, Mr. Fenton, at Rochdale,
but in his twenty-first year, November 1824, entered the university of Edinburgh
as a student of medicine. Before long he became prominent as one of the most
earnest, able, and brilliant students in the university, and as an impressive
speaker at the meetings of the Royal Medical Society, of which he was elected
senior president at the commencement of his second session. While a student
he acted as clinical assistant to Dr. Alison and Dr. Graham during an epidemic
of typhus, and he resided for a year at the Royal Infirmary as clerk of the
medical wards. He also spent an autumn studying anatomy in Dublin. Both there
and in Edinburgh he had opportunities of observing the condition of the poor.
He was admitted to the degree of M.D. at Edinburgh in August 1827, his thesis
being De
Motu Musculorum. Shortly afterwards he settled at Manchester as a physician.
Although an unsuccessful candidate for the post of physician at the Manchester
Infirmary, he obtained for some years an ample field of medical experience
as medical officer of the Ancoats and Ardwick Dispensary, mainly instituted
through his own influence and exertions, in a poor and populous district of
Manchester. He was also secretary to the board of health at Manchester, and
during the terrible first outbreak of cholera in 1832 was most devoted in his
attendance on the sufferers at the cholera hospital. He thus became painfully
alive to the insanitary surroundings of the poor, and in 1832 published a valuable
pamphlet on The Moral and Physical Condition of
the Working Classes employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, which
drew attention to the evil conditions of life among the operative population,
and was followed by the local adoption of measures tending to sanitary and
educational reform. In a paper read before the Manchester Statistical Society
in 1834 on The Defects in the Construction of Dispensaries, and by the
steps which he took, in conjunction with William Langton, to establish
the Manchester District Provident Society, he made further endeavours to benefit
the poorer classes of society. In 1831 he had anonymously published A Letter to the People of Lancashire
concerning the Future Representation of the Commercial Interest; and
he threw himself heartily into the reform and anti-corn
law movements. During the early period of his residence at Manchester he resumed experimental
researches on asphyxia, which he had begun at Edinburgh, and in 1834 he published
his treatise on The Physiology, Pathology, and Treatment of Asphyxia,
which secured for him some years later the Fothergillian gold medal of the
Royal Humane Society. The work remains the standard text-book on the subject. His philanthropic efforts on behalf of the poor, his experience among them,
and his grasp of economic science, brought him to the notice of the government
as one specially well fitted to locally introduce the new
poor law of 1834.
He became in 1835 an assistant poor-law commissioner, and spent some years
in that capacity, first in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, and afterwards
in the metropolitan district, including Middlesex and Surrey. His valuable
reports on the training of pauper children were published by the government
in 1841. From that time forward his life was devoted to the introduction and development
of a national system of education. In 1839 a committee of the privy council
was nominated to administer such a grant as the House of Commons might annually
vote for public education in Great Britain, and he was appointed the first
secretary of the committee or department, retaining for a time the superintendence
of the metropolitan schools for pauper children under the poor-law board. Jointly
with his friend Mr. E. Carleton Tufnell, and from their private resources, he
established the first training college for teachers at Battersea in 1839-40.
Pupil-teachers were transferred from the Norwood pauper school and became the
first students in the college. He at first lived in the house and superintended
the whole working of the institution. The experiment proved eminently successful,
and the plan was afterwards adopted and its working extended by government
aid. The existing system of public education [i.e. in 1891] rests wholly on
Kay's methods and principles. Trained teachers, public inspection, the pupil-teacher
system, the combination of religious with secular instruction and with liberty
of conscience, and the union of local and public contributions were all provided
for or foreseen by him. Matthew Arnold, speaking of his suggestions and their
results, says that ‘when at last the system of that education comes to
stand full and fairly formed, Kay-Shuttleworth will have a statue.’ Owing
to a serious though, as it proved, temporary breakdown of health from extreme
overwork, he resigned his office of secretary to the committee of council in
1849, and on 22 December that year was created a baronet. The history of his measures must be sought in the minutes and reports of
the committee of council, and in the pamphlets published on the subject between
1839 and 1870. His own pamphlets on educational and other social questions
are numerous. The chief of them he collected in the following volumes:
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12 January, 2016
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