Geography in Eighteenth‐Century British Education

This article analyses the ways in which social change affected the sites and texts through which eighteenth‐century Britain facilitated a geographical education. Whilst geography was not an independent discipline at schools and universities, the wide variety of geographical texts available show that mathematical and descriptive geography were taught to a range of ages and social classes. The growth in children's literature produced several distinct types of geography book. At the school level, grammar schools continued to teach geography as part of a humanist training, while new commercial schools and public lectures educated people from less exalted backgrounds in the rudiments of mathematical geography for practical purposes. The universities taught geography, both descriptive and mathematical, as part of a continuing humanist education. In these various contexts, geography displayed a bifurcated structure: some sites developed a practical and commercial form of geography, which led to new types of geographical texts, responding to the commercialisation of society; other sites retained a traditional, humanistic conception of geography, derived via Renaissance education from Ptolemy and Strabo.