Innocence and Experience: Early Childhood Education as an Externality in Late Eighteenth-Century London

Louis Henderson, University of Oxford

In London, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the status of male artisans declined, accompanied by a rise in sweated piecework (Ball and Sunderland 2001; Schwarz 1985). This broad change was reflected in declining male wages relative to those of women in the city (Snell 1985), which I argue incentivized women to engage in more waged labour earlier in the household cycle and thus raised the demand for childcare during early childhood. Families turned to institutions with an existing role in childcare: schools. So-called ‘dame’ schools adapted to teach young children at low cost. It is likely through their work that poor children in London learned to read at progressively younger ages between 1760-1830, which I demonstrate using archival documents generated by the London poor law. Using a non-parametric estimator (Turnbull 1974, 1976), I demonstrate that the mean age at which poor children learned to read in London declined by almost two years between 1760 and 1830. I explain this trend using a formal model linking age of enrolment to women’s relative wages, which I show were rising over this period for the relevant population using time series data. Finally, using panel data derived from the same set of archival documents, I calculate how long it took children to learn to read. Children who began lessons aged between four and six learned to read in less time, by more than a year, than those who began to read between age seven and ten. I link this finding to contemporary evidence on ‘sensitive periods’ for language development to argue that changes in the distribution of education over the life-cycle represented a positive externality arising from women’s labour force participation.

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 Presented in Session 60. Economic Mobility