This thesis analyses the experiences of ragged school pupils in England and Scotland between 1844 and 1870, focusing on the interaction between scholars and teachers and exploring the nature of the social relationships formed. Ragged schools provided free education to impoverished children in the mid-nineteenth century; by 1870 the London schools alone recorded an average attendance of 32,231 children. This thesis demonstrates the variety of interactions that took place both inside and outside the classroom, challenging simplistic interpretations of ragged school teachers as unwelcome intruders in poor children’s lives. In analysing the movement in terms of the social relationships established, this thesis counters the dominant focus on the adult as actor and child as passive subject. Wherever possible the focal point of the analysis builds on the testimony of ragged school scholars, shifting emphasis away from the actions and words of adults in positions of authority towards those of the poor and marginalised children who were the subjects of intervention. By concentrating on the voices of those who received ragged schooling, this thesis highlights the diverse experiences of ragged school scholars and underscores their agency in either rejecting or engaging with teachers. As such, it demonstrates the integral contribution of children’s testimonies when seeking to understand the impact of child-saving movements more generally. This thesis contributes to understanding on a variety of broader topics. It highlights changing attitudes towards children, education, and the poor. Through focusing on juvenile testimonies it investigates how children responded to poverty, disability, philanthropic work, and the evangelical religious message that ragged schools conveyed. The impact of Victorian philanthropy and the nature of the cross-class relationships it fostered are explored, and the significant contribution that women and working-class individuals made to such work is underscored. Finally, it sheds light on the experiences of working-class British emigrants, both their fortunes and their attachment to their homeland. A rich array of sources is used, including ragged school magazines and pamphlets, committee minutes, and annual reports. In using promotional literature in combination with local school documents, the public portrayal of children and teachers is contrasted with that found in practice. Most significant, however, are the day to day exchanges between scholars and their teacher explored through a microhistory of Compton Place ragged school in North London. Using the journals the school’s superintendent maintained between 1850 and 1867 alongside the 227 letters 57 former scholars sent him, this thesis pieces together a picture of the evolving and complex relationships forged. The journals and letters together enable an analysis that draws on the words of both ragged scholars and their teacher. Moreover, they provide rare access to how relationship developed over time and, in some cases, despite considerable geographical distance.

This thesis approaches the ways George MacDonald viewed and represented Victorian society in his novels by analysing select social issues which he felt compelled to address. Chapter One introduces the thesis. It contains a review of critical commentary on MacDonald’s work, as well as discussions on his non-fictional texts and essays, industrialism, and the great rural-urban divide of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two concentrates on MacDonald’s representations of the city in Robert Falconer (1868), The Vicar’s Daughter (1872), and Weighed and Wanting (1882) by underscoring parallels between Octavia Hill’s housing and environmental schemes and situations which he experienced firsthand. Chapter Three examines the influence of Nature on MacDonald’s theology and social views. Special emphasis is placed on Wordsworth and the development of MacDonald’s unique pantheism in his texts, such as the short story, ‘A Journey Rejourneyed’ (1865-6), Guild Court (1868), Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872), What’s Mine’s Mine (1886), and Home Again (1887). Chapter Four uncovers MacDonald’s involvement with the animal welfare movement during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Discussions on vivisection, vegetarianism, hunting, animal abuse, evolution, and degeneration are provided with a wide range of MacDonald’s texts, such as Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865), Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879), The Marquis of Lossie (1877), A Rough Shaking (1890), and Heather and Snow (1893). Chapter Five offers a short summation of the thesis. It affirms that MacDonald was deeply troubled by certain social issues that were raised within his society and would use his fiction to express his concerns. The conclusion also offers a few suggestive topics for ongoing research in the field of this thesis.

This dissertation critically examines why mid-Victorian fiction often dismisses or complicates monetary transactions and monetary charity, even as it negatively portrays differences in social status and wealth. I argue that the novel uses representations of failed charity to reconstruct, however briefly, a non- monetary and non-economic source of value. Further, I examine how the novel uses techniques of both genre and style to predict, form, and critique alternate, non-economic, social models. While tension surrounding the practice of charity arises in the late eighteenth century, the increasing dominance of political economy in public discourse forced Victorian literature to take a strong stance, for reasons of both ethics and genre. This stance is complicated by the eighteenth-century legacy that sees charity as a kind of luxury. If giving to the poor makes us feel good, this logic suggests, surely it isn’t moral. Thus, while much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature remains dedicated to the ethics of charity, the practice becomes immensely complex. By discussing the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, this project exposes a wide variety of responses to this deep cultural anxiety. These authors are, ultimately, strongly invested in redefining the meaning of benevolence as a valid form of social action by moving that benevolence away from monetary gifts and toward abstractly correct moral feelings, though their individual solutions vary widely. / text