Britain developed a public education system in 1870 but eliminated alternative schools for poor children on the basis of their poor quality. In 1855, Denmark prioritized expanding access over quality standards, by supporting private evangelical schools serving rural populations. Cultural frames informed these struggles over education. For British authors, education would build character and social stability, and the left endorsed workers’ rights to schooling; yet even sympathetic Victorian social reform novelists worried about the culture of poverty and missed the social investment benefits of workforce training. Their depictions of quality problems helped to close schools and reduce access. Alternatively, Danish authors supported education as a means of producing useful citizens and did not worry about a culture of poverty. Danish authors depicted a government in benign terms and affirmed the importance of local government self-determination. British and Danish authors participated in movements to expand schooling to underserved populations. British writers Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote heart-wrenching stories that stirred charitable impulses toward the poor; Matthew Arnold directly shaped the 1870 legislation. Danish authors such as NFS Grundtvig and Bernhard Severin Ingemann inspired the free school and folk high school movement that greatly expanded education among rural peasants.

During a soirée commemorating the third anniversary of the Beechworth Athenaeum in the colony of Victoria in 1859, the society’s secretary acknowledged the ‘immense influence exercised by the ladies in the success or decline of an institution of this nature’. Mechanics’ Institutes emerged in nineteenth-century Britain before proliferating in the colonies to become thriving social, literary, and cultural hubs. While they were ostensibly male-focused institutions, women were critical in securing the mechanics’ institutes’ social and financial success, especially on the Victorian goldfields. Although they were originally unable to serve on the committees and only allowed ‘associate’ or ‘lady’ membership rights through their husbands or fathers, women attended lectures, participated in soirées, bazaars and popular readings and were frequently encouraged to do so by the institutes. Through its analysis of surviving committee minute books, institutional correspondence, and gold-rush era newspaper reports, this chapter demonstrates how the social respectability of colonial women and the Mechanics’ Institutes could be mutually constitutive, providing women with opportunities and platforms for public and political engagement, while also revealing the acts of resistance to institutional forms of surveillance and moral policing.

This chapter focusses on the early years of the first Mechanics’ classes, instituted at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These classes were formed out of well-meaning paternalism, aimed at educating, and reforming, disenfranchised labouring class people. Institutional leadership quickly dictated what was suitable, or not, for the men and women who became members of these institutes. Denied agency in what they read and discussed, members agitated for more say. Some split to form their own institutes, as in Glasgow in 1823 and Manchester in 1829. These new institutions, led by members, enabled the concerns of working-class communities on industrial pollution, breadth of education, and aspirations for goods, to emerge as subjects for discussion. Mechanics’ institutions therefore became places where political engagement, denied by an unreformed parliament and the Six Acts, took place. This is evidenced in the content of the new unstamped Mechanics’ magazines that were closely tied to Mechanics’ Institutes. These institutes were faced with much conservative opposition, particularly from the established church, fearing radicalism. Indeed, some mechanics were involved in publishing details on how to make bombs and bullets on the eve of the Reform Bill in 1831.