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‘Improvement, always and everywhere’: William George Spencer (1790–1866) and mathematical, geographical and scientific education in ninesteenth‐century England

Introduction Given the prominence in Victorian society of some of William George Spencer’s pupils, his development of an extended curriculum for both sexes, and the fact that his textbook on inventional geometry was considered to be the most Pestalozzian published in England, he remains a remarkably undervalued figure in the history of education. Despite a century or more of global Spencerian scholarship, no study of his life or assessment of his educational philosophy has ever been published. Yet, as Trompf has argued, an understanding of George Spencer’s ‘intellectual environment’ is ‘essential for the unlocking’ of his son’s mind, whilst an account of his ‘religious and philosophical position would greatly assist in understanding his son’s educational thought’. Herbert Spencer the evolutionary philosopher and educationist was, of course, one of the most famous intellectuals of the nineteenth century and his book on education became probably the most influential text on the subject in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, he was educated by his father and many of the ideas in the book and his later evolutionary philosophy were developed with his advice, whilst Spencer’s other pupils included the engineer Sir Charles Fox, journalist Thomas Mozley and biologist Thomas Rymer Jones. Drawing extensively on the accounts of such pupils, this study examines the career and ideas of Spencer as educationist, mathematician, experimenter and scientific activist using valuable and hitherto overlooked documentary evidence such as his teaching notebooks, whilst exploring his relationship with the local savant community in the context of England’s thriving provincial scientific culture. It also, again for the first time, examines Spencer’s published works and assesses their importance in the context of educational development in the nineteenth century. Although its primary focus is Spencer and not his son and the development of his synthetic philosophy, it does throw valuable light on the origins of Herbert Spencer’s educational ideas. It reveals Spencer to have been one of the great nineteenth-century educators and scientific activists, a pioneer in the reception and