Cox, Miss. Address: Kensington. Not identified. A Miss Cox (no first name) is listed in Kelly's Post Office London Directory, 1850, as living at 3 Bullingham Place, Church St., Kensington.

"[Chip:] Easy Spelling and Hard Reading" [Miss Cox & W.H.W I, 561-62. Sept. 7, 1850] reproduces the letter of an illiterate Englishman who had emigrated to Australia. Introductory comment criticizes the "want of national means of education" in England, as a result of which the son of poor parents grows up without the schooling that would make him "a literate and useful citizen." The comment was probably written by Wills. In "The Schoolmaster at Home and Abroad," April 20, 1850, he had called attention to the "lamentable deficiency of the commonest rudiments of education" among the humbler classes in England, and the fact that a man too poor to pay for schooling could "get none of it for himself or his offspring."

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.