Thomas Beddoes to Thomas Wilkinson, [1 April 1801]
Dear Sir
I am perhaps going to ask you to do what you may have already done or may be going about. It is to give me credit into your banker for the boys stay with me from 1st week of Sepr 1798 to do of March 1801 & the balance of John’s acct & made advances I find myself almost aground
I shd like much to converse with you on education – I shd like to know why you think a smaller school than Eton disadvantageous till the boys are 13 or 14 – It wd be equally tiresome & useless to discuss this point by letter – I remember their father most firmly resolving not to send them young to a public school – And I am persuaded that his esteem for the discipline of these seminaries would have daily declined – They are probably very ill-adapted for preparing young persons for those times in which J. & W. will have to live & act, for surely a person of your liberal spirit cannot suppose that to spend much of the best years of a young man on Hexameters & Pentameters & Alcaics and Sapphics is the proper sphere of the human understanding – I wd have these boys good classics, & I think they would be found to have the best classical taste of any boys in England of their standing, but they should surely be taught those sciences, which their father began to learn late in life & which he so much desired that they shd learn – sciences which are almost the principal hinges on which the world turns & which will every day overgrow mere Greek and Latin in importance –
I beg your pardon for this intrusion of my thoughts. I did not intend it – But as J & W will make two of the most useful & conspicuous <members of society> if (excuse me for repeating it) their father's ideas are followed, I cd not help pouring out my feelings, when writing to a person upon whom it so much depends whether they shall attain what they are capable of or not –
I hope you will not suppose that I despise classical attainments. No one has had the passion upon him more strongly, but, having studied other things, I can make a comparison – & certainly as a public man, one of the best scholars in Dr. Barnard’s time & a firm friend of Lambton, has just observed to me – ‘Our system of education is incredibly absurd. Upon leaving a public school, with reputation as a scholar a young man of any sense will feel that he knows nothing which can be of the least use to him. The idea in many minds must produce despair & dissipation, if the habit has not been already established’ – Once more begging your pardon for all this prosing, I remain
Dear Sir, with high esteem
Your obliged sert
Thomas Beddoes
Address: Thomas Wilkinson Esq
Endorsement: Dr Beddoes Ap 1 1801 / about the Boys
MS: Lambton Park MS
Published (in part): Durham, p. 49