L o n g Room 47 (2002)

A P e d a g o g i c P a l a c e : T h e F e i n a i g l i a n I n s t i t u t i o n a n d i t s T e x t b o o k s

Christopher Stray

' I ' H E Feinaiglian Institution had an exotic beginning and a sad end. It was I founded as a progressive classical school for the sons of the Irish gentry in 1813.

J L Its eponymous founder, Professor Gregor von Feinaigle, had been bom plain Gregor Feinoegl in tjberlingen, near Lake Constanz, in 1760. In 1780 he entered the nearby Cistercian monastery of Salem as a novice and became a monk in 1785. The monastery was closed in 1801 after the Napoleonic invasion and Feinaigle soon sought his fortune as a travelling lecturer on mnemonics. Feted and mocked in Karlsruhe and then in Paris, in 1811 he arrived in London, where his lectures formed the basis of John Millard's T h e n e w art of m e m o r y (3 editions, 1812-13). Feinaigle gave lectures in Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh and reformed the Oirriculum of Ampleforth School in Yorkshire. In 1813 he crossed to Dublin, which was to be his home until his death late in 1819. '

When he reached Dublin, Feinaigle followed his usual procedure, first giving public demonstrations of his mnemonic method for charity (thus attracting distin­guished patronage), then performing before a fee-paying audience. Typically he would instruct a small group of children in a variety of subjects for a very short time (days or even hours), then invite his audience to interrogate them. A group of local gentry, led by Bindon Blood, were sufficiently impressed to ask Feinaigle to try his method in local schools; and the schoolmasters having declined to co-operate, to invite him to set up his own school with their financial support. Thus was bom the Feinaiglian Institution, which began in two adjacent houses in 1813 and soon moved to Aldborough House on the North Circular Road. This grand old mansion was the last of the great eighteenth-century houses of Dublin. Built for the Earl of Aldborough in the 1790s, it had never been lived in. Feinaigle added a wing and moved in, renaming the house 'The Luxembourg'. This was perhaps intended to veil his monkish past; certainly it was widely believed that he came of an aristocratic Luxembourgeois family. The building was known to pupils simply as 'The Lux'. It was surely Feinaigle's school that Charles Maturin had in mind when he made a character in his locally-composed novel W o m e n : or, p o u r et c o n t r e declare, 'Woe to the land where the mansions of her nobility have become the receptacles of office, or the palaces of pedagogues'.'

The Feinaiglian Institution prospered, although (or because) it charged far higher fees than any other school in Dublin -100 guineas a year for boarding, later reduced to 80 guineas. A girls' department was contemplated; a day school was opened in Kildare Street. It is clear from the half-yearly reports published by the governors from 1814 that local tutors resented the new school.^ But it seemed unstoppable, pupil numbers rose, and around 1820 a new classroom suite, based on Bentham's panopticon design, was opened.^ Feinaigle had died on the 24th December in the previous year; two of his staff were appointed joint headmasters, but one of them, John Hawkesworth, soon assumed sole authority. He seems to have retired about

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1837, and was succeeded by Tcesham Gregg, the son of Feinaigle's widow by her first marriage. Gregg, who had been Second Master since 1826, was a vitriolic anti-Papist controversialist and fundamentalist; a man who believed that the steam engine and the telegraph were mentioned in the Bible. After taking over the Institution, he decreed that classics should be taught only from translations of Holy Scriphire.' The school soon folded, and by 1843 Aldborough House was being used by the govern­ment as a barracks and store for use during political meetings.'

One way in which the Feinaiglian Institution asserted and maintained its elite status was by sending a stream of successful candidates to Trinity College.' Another was to produce textbooks for use in the Instihation. This armounced to the world that the school could afford to publish its own books; it also disseminated its reputation and advertised its teaching methods. In classics, there were obvious predecessors. William Lily's Latin grammar had been written for St Paul's School (whose first headmaster he was) in the early sixteenth century; a later revision became the book commonly known as the Eton Latin Grammar, first published in 1758. Eton College, since the later eighteenth century the leading school in England, published a large range of textbooks, and many other schools chose a reflected Etonian glory by adopting them.'

The first books published for use in the Instihition appeared in 1818. By this time the governors regarded their enterprise as firmly established. They had a consider­able number of pupils - Feinaigle had claimed in 1816 that he had 120-130 pupils of whom more than 80 were boarders;' by 1819 there were nearly 300 pupils in the Instihjtion, in a day school in Rossmore House, Kildare St, and a school at Clonliffe." It must have seemed a propitious time to build on this success by publishing their own textbooks. T h e G r e e k gospel of St John; with an a n a l y s i s of the f i r s t t w e l v e c h a p t e r s ; f o r the use of the F e i n a i g l i a n I n s t i t u t i o n L u x e m b o u r g , a n d din/-school R o s s m o r e - H o u s e [TCD, BL] " w a s printed by Graisberry and Campbell. S i x lives selected f r o m C o r n e l i u s N e p o s ; w i t h p a r s i n g a n d exercises, f o r the use of the F e i n a i g l i a n I n s t i t u t i o n , L u x e m b o u r g , a n d d a y -school R o s s m o r e - H o u s e [TCD, NLI] was also printed by Graisberry and Campbell. There seem to have been two issues, since the N L I copy, which is described as having one Life fully parsed, is iv+104 pages, while the T C D copy is a plain text throughout and is iv+61 pages. The N L I copy's title page has the misprint 'Ross m re House'. These two books were probably plarmed as a pair, since the Observations (pp i - ii) prefixed to the G r e e k gospel of St ] o h n refer the reader to the parallel section in S i x l i v e s . The former gives an impression of the plan of teaching and the strategy underlying it:

This Analysis of the Greek of St John is intended to facilitate the entrance of the pupils on the Greek language. A knowledge of the primary parts of the grammar is the only preparation necessary for commencing this first book of the course. When the teacher has explained the declensions and conjugations, and sufficiently exercised the pupils in giving every admissible modification with facility and precision, he conducts them through the Analysis, giving an exact account of every word, explaining the peculiarities in Syntax, and urtfolding by degrees the laws of derivation, on which the copiousness and beauty of the language so materially depend. In order to impress the meaning of the Greek words upon the memory, and to habituate the pupil to tracing derivations, the teacher enumerates the terms in other languages derived from

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the Greek, explains the general alterations which the words undergo in their passage into the L a t i a and into all the other languages taught in the Institu­tion, the English, French, Italian, &c. (p.i)

Apart from making it clear that these books were intended forbegiruiers, this exti-act also hints at a concern for an integrated system of language learning in which Latin and Greek were related to modem European languages.

A third publication of 1818 needs to be mentioned here, although it was hardly a textbook in the ordinary sense, despite its title: Grammar of the m e t h o d i c a n d m n e m o n i c art, as t a u g h t at the F e i n a i g l i a n I n s t i t u t i o n } ^ The book was referred to by Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh in their H i s t o r y of the C i t y of D u b l i n , where the author is given as Michael Sandford." Sandford was a minor artist who served in the Instihjtion's early days as its 'mnemonic draughtsman'. His work will have included painting mnemonic symbols on the walls, floors and ceilings of rooms in Aldborough House . " There are eleven illustrations of the visual symbols used by Feinaigle for memorising information; one of these was on a foldout whose bottom half has been lost. The surviving copy is a quarto of 32pp; it has no titie page, the first page begiiuiing with a short title and then plunging abruptiy in medias res with an account of the organisation of teaching in the Institution. Sandford moves on to a discussion of language teaching, first English, then Latin. He then discourses on the merits of the Feinaiglian and other mnemonic schemes, before ending with a brief account of the history of language and of memory systems." One of the most interesting aspects of this curious item is that at one point Sandford criticises his employers, the governors of the Feinaiglian Iiwtitution. He complains that they consistently claim that pupils coming to them from other Dublin schools knew little or no grammar: 'Such conduct has tended more than any thing else to the general belief that the genflemen of the Committee derive a considerable emolument from the profits of the Institution, and by the anxiety they evince to monopolize the instruction of youth. Depreciating the exertions of others, will not impress the world with any idea of their superiority' (p.24).« We may surmise that Sandford left the Institution's staff shortly before or after the appearance of the G r a m m a r .

After Feinaigle's death in 1819, his successor John Hawkesworth was responsible for a second wave of textbooks, begiruiing with A n I n t r o d u c t i o n to g e n e r a l g r a m m a r , published by Graisberry in 1826 [NLI] . As its title suggests, this belongs to the Port Royalist tradition of g r a m m a i r e g e n e r a t e . The approach echoes that adumbrated in the O b s e r v a t i o n s of the C r e e k gospel of St John of 1818: grammatical struchare is a uruversal feature of language, and so enables us to trace liiJcs and derivations among European languages. Latin and Greek were fundamental to the Feinaiglian curriculum, but it was less restrictive than that of contemporary English public schools in admitting modem languages, if not on parity, at least on more than sufferance.

Hawkesworth's next book, which appeared in 1829, was a remarkable produc­tion: probably the first book to be lithographed in Ireland. A key to some of the d i a l o g u e s of L u c i a n was almost certainly printed by M . H . and J.W. Allen of Dame Street, Dublin. ' ' A detailed discussion of the book was provided by Michael Tvvyman in an earlier issue of L o n g R o o m . " This was based on examination of the three copies then known to exist (TCD, BL, T w y m a n collection). Since then, however, three further copies have been located: University of Kansas (Kermeth Spencer Research Library, O'Hegarty Collection); Teachers' College, Columbia University (Special Collec-

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Long Room 47 (2002)

tions); and National University of Ireland, Maynooth (Russell Library). Examination of these copies amply confirms Michael Twyman's account of the pioneer litho­graphing of this massive (376pp) book." Both author and printer were inexperi­enced, and the result was far from perfect; all six copies have pages out of order or misnumbered, errors corrected, and warnings of erratic pagination inserted. The only point in which Twyman's coUatior\ are unclear concerns misnumbered pages. Listing page numbers alone does not distinguish misnumbered from correctly numbered pages. Thus '192,195,194,195' does not reveal whether the first '195' is a misplaced copy of page 195, or a misnumbered page 193.1 have specified below where misnumbered pages occur.

The Maynooth and Kansas copies collate exactly like those in the British Library and Trinity College Dublin: [1-5], 6-10,15,12-14, 11, 16-171, 173, 172, 174-192, 195 [193, misnumbered], 194-211, 213, 212, 214-249, 254-255, 252-3, 250-1, 256-290, 294, 292-3,291,295-376. The Teachers' College copy follows this collation except that page 109 is misnumbered 108, and it has different pagination errors between pages 248 and 257:214-248,252-256,249-252,257-290. Thus of the six copies located, four have identical collations, while the other two copies have additional errors of different kinds. The Twyman copy has six sets of four pages nussing between pages 26 and 215, but unlike all the others, runs perfectly from that point to page 290.

Al l six copies have the warning on page 171, 'NB The following page has been misplaced'. In the Teachers' College copy, the page number on page 172 has been corrected from 173, and the reference to Walker's text of Lucian from 38-9 to 38-8. The error messages on page 290 vary. The copies reported by Michael Twyman have 'NB Page 291 has, by mistake, been put 4 pages farther on'. In the Kansas copy this is supplemented by a pencilled note: 'Page 291 has by mistake been put 4 pages on'. The Teachers' College copy has a different wording: 'N.B. Page 291 has been misplaced 4 pages farther on'; different again is the wording in the Maynooth copy, 'p. 291 has been misplaced'.

Two of the newly-located copies have aimotations. The Teachers' College copy carries the signature ' W . C . Richardson 1844' on the front pastedown, and an ink-stamp ' W . H . Richardson' on the titie page. The date of the signature is too late for use by a Feinaiglian pupil, since the school had closed by 1844; and it is possible the book was not used for its intended purpose, since pages 66-7 and 306-7 are partially unopened. The Kansas copy bears the 1831 ownership signature of Maurice Cane, of 61Dawson Street, Dublin. There are no signs of use bey ond page 345; pages 353-4 and 355-6 are unopened. The back pastedown has, among many doodles, a note: 'Got a mark from Jack].] Conwal! said he would let me off if I was a good boy'. This refers to the Feinaiglian Institution's merit system, in which marks were counted weekly and termly: Jack [Hawkesworth] had given Cane a bad mark, and another master offered to remove it in return for good behaviour.

The front endpapers of the T C D copy have a manuscript annotation which was unknown to Michael Twyman, and so is not mentioned in his article. I b-anscribe it below both because of its intrinsic interest, and in the hope that the author may be identifiable:

18 J *

Stray A P e d a g o g i c Palace

(B. V. D.) Comments 7/5/1907

Never saw such a strange book before in 70 years. The nearest in idea was one written by that dear departed deeply devoted "Divine" J .N.D. 1 apologise for using Divine at all and he for one would abhor the phrase as profane. Then gave up the Reverend for Christs sake.

But for neatness and elegance of handwriting it surpassed even this so exquisitely in original Penhand and after was lithographed. I called the' attention of a clergyman R.C. to this particular Book and he was greatly interested & thankful for pouiting it out. I called it back again and secured the price. Have an idea of adapting this style if I should publish my Poems -someday.

There is nothing like the living hand. As in everything else "Hand-made" is best. Printing or typewriting is dead letters. Hand-writing is intensely inter­esting.

A n American Assurance Association wanted 1,000 letters of 100 words each written in facsimile - 1 remonstrated at expense while competing for the job, but no the Society said - a letter is read a printed Qrcular is cotisigned to Files or waste. He was right. A .D.

I have not been able to identify A . D . (presumably bom c. 1837) or B.V.D. (probably a relative). But J.N.D. is surely John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), a stormy petrel who after a T C D degree and Anglican ordination became the leading figure in the development of the Plymouth Brethren; and who was in the habit of signing himself by his initials."

As the reader might imagine, the investigation of erratically produced copies in widely scattered locations is not an easy task." Furthermore, in some cases it is difficult to tell if a word or letter is present, especially when it may have been scraped off the stone or removed from transfer paper. In the T C D copy, for example, Vincent Kinane saw no h-ace of 'STOP' at the foot of page 171, but I subsequently detected a trace of the letter ' O ' . The detection of such minutiae is important in such a case as this, since it makes it possible to reconstract something of the production history of the book. It is already clear that for the most part we are dealing with a fairly stable printing marked by a fixed set of errors. But the different aberrations of the Twyman and Teachers' College copies and the variation in the wording of error messages, point to instabilities and improvisations. I hope that the pattems described above may provide further clues to the book's production history.

Michael T w y m a n remarked on the book's 'extraordinary design, which in my experience has no precedent' (loc. cit. p. 27). It was the flexibility of lithography which made that design possible. The nearest approach I can find in letterpress printing can be seen in the school editions of classical poetry produced by T . W . C Edwards between 1822 and 1829. Here we find a bewildering array of material: the text; a metrical analysis of it; the text in 'synthetical order' [ie. converted into prose]; the text as a list of words, each translated; a free hranslation; and finally critical notes on the

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Long Room 47 (2002)

A t - - / - -

John Hawkesworth, A key to some of the dialogues of Lucian (Dublin 1829), p. 6.

Stray A Pedagogic Palace

M H 4 E I A . 2 9 7 . 1 9

1 -1 -

' E # Z r«e '»•**'"»• y t y * " * ' ? 9 3 0 1 -

1 -n»»T«. 1' Sir' i o ~ r ' .Vr^w;!,;-, <>i y i « , * n » I X i ' . 1 - h - i i - -

1 -1 -1 -

i - i i - i " 1 -

K^r TfT »yZf f^iyttrroi, v «««•» XaCttr, I -1 -

y v * « t { i * , a u f ata» r ' M t i f t A v - d a i irivit. 1 -2 1 0 1 -

1 - 1 - - 1 1 - -

«TM ; ^ A ^ i T B i { v v i c v t r n .

TIIF . OUORK, ANO B N U L I S H A C C E N T U A T I O N .

T w f w T H . At )tt WfiTTa fi.tr iirri^tXn XP^f*-*""^ - V f i i r J a i T * k^Cor U n r r m r ^ u u r r a f T a v T * y a f K U H i X y i n { T I »aK«u. K w t* Tmit fttyU^at " ^UiCfi* > a » f , n Xf^^*** « « i X X a y « i s u a lujtXMic y v t a f ^ t , -n oiih Ao* si^nttirdiu i T M - i i . A« «f^}r/>ini* tit

Afc M l W/wvc, J i t l U M ^ i r r . . , fj.3.Bai<rm.t tinpBtf, frwfw»iV«T>.ji**X/*T« ; ic/ii«Ta,.

T B A N 9 U T I O M .

Thi t disaster, however, which-has-befallen me unexpectedly, haa distracted my souL Vea, my friends, I am-driren-to-desperation. and havin^-relinquished the pleasure of life, I long to be dead. F o r my husband, in whom was ray all , you know it well, haa turned-out-to-be the worst of men.

Certainly, of all creaturea that are animate, and have intellect. We women are the moat wretched breed. O n whom it-is*incum-bent, first indeed, with exces* of wealth, to purchase a husband, and-then to receive him lord of our person: here is in fact a griev­ance, worse even than the loss. Betides, there ia in the affair the (greatest risk, whether to get a bad or a good man ; for divorces are' not creditable to women, and it is not the custom to repudiate the husband.

Wherefore, in-passing to new habits and laws, it is necessary to be a prophetess, not having learnt in ihe-house-with-hrm, what sort of yoke-mate one will most likely have-to-deal-with.

wftK. neiit . t. Mor. p a r i . a c t . of

* ? 9 . f ^ ^ t t r m , n n m . ting. fern. t. maw. p . r t . of , « 9 U ^ „ / dijmU*. — • r f . n - . , S . aor. inf. s e t . of^-rmBrH^.

*36. « « a S y i , x « ; V IT- i X y « , « « r . I ^ t c r j l l y . /mr ^ t k t n i l t k u t k t

M N H - M rati, but I uDderaUdd Ibe m e a n . Ing o f the pbrase to be u I have trans­lated i t . I , *

tS9. i*it^B*i, I . aor. inf. n i d . o<

« « . j c H " ^ " ' " » « • * •

T . W . C . Edwards, The Medea of Euripides (London 1821), p. 19.

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text. The books also include an index and a complete vocabulary. Their crowded pages lack only the dialectical interweaving of Hawkesworth's book - or of his blackboard, which was, 1 am convinced, the crucial 'precedent' for his book.^ It was his skilful and experienced use of blackboard and chalk which was trai^sferred to the page via the flexible medium of lithography (see sample pages from Hawkesworth's and Edwards' books on pp 20-21).

Hawkesworth's later books were conventionally printed by letterpress; two on Latin, two on English. Select s a t i r e s o f D e d u s [sic] Junius l u v e n a l [sic] with a p a r a p h r a s e a n d notes in E n g l i s h was published in 1830 by W. Curry in Dublin, Oliver and Boyd in Edinburgh, and Hurst, Chance in London [TCD, N L I , BL, Kenhjcky]. The contents are reminiscent of the Latin and Greek books of 1818, in that the text of Juvenal is handled in more than one way. Pages 1-161 carry the text of satires 1,3,4,7,8,10,13 and 14, with a running prose paraphrase, then notes on the text, on each page. Pages 163-204 then give the plain text of satires 3,10,13 and 14. The omission of some of the Satires is unsurprising (2,6 and 9 were commonly left out of school editions), but the addition of a plain text of satires already printed earlier in the book points to a pedagogic strategy in which at some point pupils were to be confronted in the classroom with a plain text without any helps to translation.

Hawkesworth's last two books can be taken together. Both were printed for John Cunmung; both survive orUy in second editions; both are described in their titles as 'progressive'. The word reflects the notion of developmental learning which increas­ingly informed textbooks in the first half of the nineteenth century; though in titles it was most common in instructional books on art and music. The second edition of P r o g r e s s i v e lessons in L a t i n , with r u l e s of c o n s t r u c t i o n , a n d a key f o r the use of the p u p i l s of the F e i n a i g l i a n I n s t i t u t i o n , L u x e m b o u r g , in three p a r t s [BL] was published in 1831. The book begins with Latin narratives modelled on the Bible and Aesop respectively (pages 3-15) - a strategy which reminds us of the C r e e k gospel of St John of 1826; the second part (pages 16-42) gives rules of construction; the third part (pages 43-65) passages from classical authors for practice. The Key (pages 67-120) reprints all the Latin from parts 1-3, with an interlinear translation. The book ends with a brief outline of Latin syntax (pages 121-4). Sbt years later, in 1837, appeared the second edition of P r o g r e s s i v e lessons on the g r a m m a t i c a l a n a l y s i s of E n g l i s h sentences [BL]. The book begins from the analysis of propositiorw; this is dealt with briefly, the author remarking (p. iv) that 'these principles are more fully developed'in the General Grammar printed for the use of the Feinaiglian Institution'. In his preface, Hawkesworth explains that

These exercises are designed for the use of young persons who are about to commence the reading of the Greek and Latin classics. The greatest difficulty in the study of the ancient languages consists in the inverted arrangement which the various forms of the Verb and Noun allow the writers to employ. As all languages necessarily abound in inverted constructions, I have thought it best to exemplify in our own, the rules by which the direct order of words might be restored.

Once again, we can glimpse a course of studies in which Latin and Greek are central, but where modem languages are taken seriously, and linkecl. to them through a 'general grammar' in the Enlightemnent tradition. Hawkesworth probably retired in

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Stray A P e d a g o g i c Palace

the year this edition appeared; nothing more is known of him after that, and one can only sumuse what his feelings must have been as the school for which he had worked for over twenty years was run into the ground by Tresham Gregg.

Conclusion What can be said in general about this littie corpus? First, that it shows signs of having been developed as a imified pedagogic repertoire. The cross references from one book to another - ' these principles are more fully developed in the General Grammar' - might be seen, within an open market for textbooks, as puffs for other books by the same author. But it would have made sense for Hawkesworth not to repeat himself, within an educational community where the books fitted into an overall curricular strategy. And that the Feinaiglian Institution seems to have had; though how the mnemonics, the Enlighteiunent universal grarrunar and other elements fitted to­gether remains something of a puzzle. The repetition avoided within the corpus as a whole is however to be found within some of the books, and this points to their being conceived for use in the classroom, where, as I suggested above, a pupil could be set to read a plain text of Juvenal without being able to look at the part of the book which had notes on that text.

It is difficult to know why the first editions of the later books have not survived. It is common for textbooks of the period to survive orJy in late editions; but here there is a clear shift from the previous survival of original editions of earlier Feinaiglian textbooks. It may seem paradoxical that the Lucian, the most 'in-house' of all the books, and unlike the others never published, has survived in more copies than they have. Perhaps its unusual status, as a privately printed lithographed book, made it collectable ( 'A.D.' clearly thought so). Another factor is of course the existence of faulty copies, which may have been protected from the destructive fate of classroom use by their unsuitability. Yet the inserted messages warning of mispagination and other errors suggest that they were amended and used, rather than being abandoned by Hawkesworth.

The Feinaiglian Institution was an exotic, bringing to Dublin continental theories of mnemonics, of grammar and of progressive schooling. Historians of nineteenth-cenhjry Irish education have been more interested in the massive experimental schemes of the period for the education of the poor than in the private schools which catered for the middle and upper classes." Historians of the book, for their part, have rarely devoted much attention to school textbooks. In both fields, the evidence is often scattered and scanty; we are lucky that in this particular case, there is sufficient material to assemble a picture of the school, its books and its teaching. In particular, it enables us to retrieve John Hawkesworth from obscurity, though we still know little about him. In the light of the relaxed and friendly relationship he seems to have had with his pupils, it is puzzling, for example, that when remijuscences of the Ir>stitution were published by ex-pupils in the 1870s, only a bare mention was made of Hawkesworth." But his voice can still be heard, however indistinctly, in the pages of his L u c i a n . ^

Notes 1. M. Quane, 'The Feinaiglian Institution, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sci-

Dublin', Du6(in Historical Record v. 19, no. ences 15 (1979), pp 18-28. 2 (1964), pp 30-44; A.B. Laver, 'Gregor 2. Women.or,pour«fcon(re,(Edinburghl818), Feinaigle, mnemonist and educator', v. 3 p. 298. Quoted by D. Dickson, 'Death

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of a capital? Dublin and the consequences of Union', in P. Clark and R. Gillespie, eds, Two capitals. London and Dublin 1 5 0 0 -1 9 4 0 , Oxford 2001, p. 117.

3. An almost complete set of these is held by the Royal Irish Academy (Haliday Col­lection). The only complete set I know of is in the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania.

4. It may be more than coincidence that among the striking features of Aldborough House are the large circular rooms situated at the centre rear (see illustration onp. 14). A ground plan of the new building is printed in the governors' 13th Report, 1820.

5. Gregg was the author of Protestant ascend­ancy vindicated (1840) and Free thoughts on Protestant matters (1846); he is remem­bered for his lengthy debate with Thomas Maguire: see A report of the nine days con­troversial discussion held in the round room of the Rotunda, Dublin between the Rev. Thomas Maguire and the Rev. T . D . Gregg, commencing on the 29th of May, and ending on the 7th of June, 1 8 3 8 , London 1838. Gregg was ordained in 1826, but in 1832 removed from office by Archbishop Whately because of his extreme views.

6. After a long and ignominious history as a warehouse, it is currently (July 2002) ad­vertised for sale to a corporate buyer.

7. In their A l u m n i Dublinenses: a register of the students, graduates, professors and provosts of Trinity College in the University of Dublin (1593-1860), London 1924, G .D. Burtchaell and T.U. Sadleir explain to the reader that the frequent mention of 'Lux­embourg' in admissions lists refers to' the then outstanding Dublin school', Burtchaell had himself attended the Feinaiglian Institution.

8. The tendency to use Eton schoolbooks is evident in the accounts of individual schools given in Nicholas Carlisle's Con­cise description of the endowed schools of England, 2 v., London 1818.

9. Feinaigle to Peter Baines, 15 March 1816, Baines letterbooks, 1816/49, Clifton Di­ocesan archives, Bristol. My thanks to Rev Dr John Harding and Dr Pamela Gilbert for their help and hospitality in Clifton.

10. The headmaster of the day school was Thomas Flynn. His A Greek grammar, on a new and systematic plan, according to the analytic method was published in 1827

[NLI; second edition of 1831 in BL]. I mention it without discussion, since it seems not to have been produced for use in the Institution. Even more tangen-tially, George Jones, 'Hebrew lecturer in the Feinaiglian Institution', produced in 1823 Moreh Talmidim, comprehending selec­tions in Hebrew from the Psalms and Genesis with a Latin translation and a lexicon, He­brew, Latin and English; also a pronouncing index with remarks ... on Fitzgerald's Hebrew grammar [TCD]. This was sold by R. Milliken, bookseller to TCD, and was intended as a textbook for the use of Trin­ity students. The Institution had a library for its pupils, and volumes with its book­plates survive. It also awarded prize vol­umes with bookplates; see B.N. Lee Pre­mium or prize ex-libris, London 2001, pp 28-9.

11. References in square brackets list all the locations I have been able to find; I should be glad to know of others.

12. The sole copy located is in the Russell Library, Maynooth (BR 342). My thanks to Permy Woods, who removed the book from exhibition so that I could inspect it, and subsequently arranged for a digital copy to be made.

13. J. Warburton, J.Whitelaw and R. Walsh, History of the City of Dublin, 2 v. (London 1818), v. 2 p. 883.

14. Sandford ran a drawing school and 'clas­sical academy' at 45 Henry Street, Dublin from 1814 to 1821. See W.G. Strickland, A dictionary of Irish artists, 2 v. (Shannon 1969) V . 2 p. 319. The final page of the Grammar carries a set of symbols ar­ranged to be folded up into a hollow cube; similar illustrations had been included in Millard's New art of memory.

15. On pp 6-7 Sandford refers to, and appar­ently quotes from, George Sampson's A n essay towards the ascertaining of English grammar, accommodated to those children, whom it may he usefid to instruct, by the easiest method, in the principles of their na­tive language, Londonderry 1790. No cop­ies are known: see Robin C. Alston, A bibliography of the English language from the invention of printing to the year 1 8 0 0 , v. 1, Leeds 1965, p. 453. The words Sandford quotes are however aU also quoted in the brief mention of Sampson's book in the Monthly Review (January 1792, v. 7, p. 94), so he probably did not see the book itself.

16. The somewhat wobbly syntax of the first

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Stray A P e d a g o g i c P a l a c e

sentence is not due to misquotation, but is all Sandford's own.

17. The dialogues are those in Walker's edi­tion of 1821, which remained a set text for TCD examinations for the rest of the cen­tury. In England, Lucian was less read, doubtless because of his subject matter and cynicism. It is rare to find him read in schools, though he clearly was at Felsted School in Essex: see Exercises from Lucian for the use of Felsted School, Chelmsford 1818 (BL; Cambridge University Library, supplementary catalogue, 18.8.1).

18. 'Ireland's first lithographed book?', Long Room 42, 1997, pp 26-33.

19. For the technological context of litho­graphic book production in the period, the reader is referred to Michael Twyman's discussion (see previous note), and to his pioneering and idiosyn-cratically subtitled Early lithographed hooks: a study of the design and production of improper books in the age of the hand press, London 1990.

20. I owe the identificarion of J.N.D. to Charles Benson. Dr Max Weremchuk kindly informs me that the references to 'divine' and 'reverend' point firmly to Darby. He adds that Darby's handwrit­ing was not especially dear or elegant, and that had he been tempted by lithogra­phy, it would have been in his youth. See M. Weremchuk, John N e l s o n Darby, Neptune NJ 1992. (Darby was in Dublin

as a young man in the early years of the Feinaiglian Institution.)

21.1 am grateful for the help given by Charles Benson (TCD), Richard Clement (Univer­sity of Kansas), the late Vincent Kinane (TCD), Charles Monaghan (New York), Michael Twyman (University of Read­ing), Bette Weneck (Teachers' College, Columbia University) and Penny Woods (NUI Maynooth). My thanks especially to Michael Twyman, who lent me his copy of the Lucian for study, discussed it with me and commented on a draft of this article.

22. The classroom suite built at the Feinaiglian Institution in the late 1810s had nine classrooms, each equipped with a blackboard. This predates the earliest mention in O E D (1823), though black­boards are claimed to have been used in Philadelphia from 1809.

23. For example, D.H. Akenson The Irish edu­cation experiment. The national system of education in the nineteenth century, London 1970.

24. See the reminiscences in The Irish Builder for 1874:15 September, pp 251-2; 1 Octo­ber, pp 268-71.

25. The half-yearly reports of the Institution's governors also enable us to visualise the classroom where Hawkesworth taught -its size, shape and fittings. I hope to dis­cuss this in a future publication.

25