Algiers.—Asks after the baby and her mother, and commends the choice of name. Outlines a scheme for the education of children, which he has partly communicated to Macmillan. Will write to Milady (Lady Pollock).
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Transcript
Algiers Monday June 26/76
Dearest Fred—Nous voici enfin les deux compères! et ça va comme vous voulez, cette petite mignonne et la femme chérie? I like the name well; you can shorten the first part into Belle or the second into Elsie which is very effective. We must come to an understanding with the Moultons about primary education. She has been marvellously successful with her children. I have a scheme which has been communicated in part to Macmillan and which grows like a snowball. It is founded on “Pleasant Pages”, {1} the book I was taught out of; which is a series of ten-minutes’ lessons on the Pestalozzian plan of making the kids find out things for themselves, history of naughty boys on Monday, animals on Tuesday, bricks on Wed[n]esday, Black Prince on Thursday, and so on. In the book it was very well done, by a man who had a genius for it; if you go to see Macmillan in Bedford St he will shew you the book which he got on my recommendation—he is also himself newly interested in the question. His partner Jack read part of it and was struck. Well, I first want that brought up to today, both in choice of subject and in accuracy; adding, e.g. a series of object lessons on Man (papa & mama, house, street, clothes, shop, policeman, “wild & field,”). Then I want it taught on the Russian system, in different languages on successive days; no direct teaching of language until there are facts enough to make Grimm’s law intelligible, for which English, German and the latin element in French would be enough; no grammar at all until very late and then as analysis of sentences and introductory to logic. This is the difficult part; it would require a French and a German teacher, both trained and competent, besides the English one. So far as the book is concerned it would of course be easy to print it in the three languages. Lastly, I have bought 12 volumes of the Bibliothèque Nationale for 3 fr.—Rabelais, 5 vols., and Montesquieu, Pascal, Diderot and Vauvenargues. They are 25 centimes each, admirable for the pocket—& of course you know them. There are two or three hundred volumes. Whereupon we must of course get the same thing done for English literature, and the setting forth of all literature in English (e.g. I have Les Maximes d’Epictète), but more particularly we must get published excellent little manuals at 2d or 3d for the use of Board & other primary Schools. I do not even know that penny schoolbooks would not be a successful move—the size of a Daily News, say, printed by the million in a Walter Press, folded and sewed by machinery to about the size of the Bibliothèque, indicated in the left-hand top corner of this page. {2} A Daily News would just make one of these volumes. Fancy the Pensées of Pascal, with the notes of Voltaire, Fontenelle, and Condorcet, a good Life at the beginning, etc. all well printed on a sheet of the Daily News! But of such a size could be made a very good elementary schoolbook of Arithmetic, Geometry, animals, Plants, physics, etc.—rather larger than Macmillan’s Primers, but of the same sort. {3} Now I must go to dinner, but I shall write to Milady an account of our adventures at Bougie and Sètif and of the Arab who had a gazelle in a basket that wanted to eat Lucy’s hat. Herein I have only been apostolic, moved by your account of the gathering, {4} and determined to support the general next year. Too long have I been absent from that august assembly.
All my love to you & George & the dear creature.
Thy
Willi.
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{1} Pleasant Pages, a periodical conducted by Samuel Prout Newcombe, was first published in six volumes (probably comprising weekly numbers) between 1851 and 1853 (London: Houlston and Stoneman). It was reprinted in one volume by Houlston and Wright in 1861 and again by Houlston and Sons in 1874. The work had previously been published in one volume in the United States under the title Pleasant Pages for Young People, or Book of Home Education and Entertainment (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853).
{2} A rectangle measuring 5½ by 3½ inches is marked out in the place indicated.
{3} ‘I have a scheme … same sort.’ This passage has been marked off by pencil lines in both margins.
{4} Possibly the Conference of Liberal Thinkers at South Place Chapel.
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