IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 304

In the summer of 1819, Britain was in a volatile mood. The long wars against France had ended four years earlier, and peace had brought a slump in trade, falling wages and a sharp rise in the price of bread. The Corn Laws of 1815, which restricted the import of grain to protect the incomes of landowners, kept food expensive while the manufacturing districts struggled. Political representation had scarcely changed for centuries. Great industrial towns such as Manchester had no members of Parliament of their own, while a handful of voters in a few small boroughs elected two members each.

Radical reformers had campaigned for years for a thorough reform of Parliament, and in 1819 they took their message to the industrial north. A group of Manchester reformers invited Henry Hunt, a celebrated orator from Wiltshire, to address a mass meeting. It was arranged for 16 August, on St Peter's Fields, a large open area to the south of the town. Its declared purpose was peaceful: those attending were asked to come unarmed and in their best clothes, and contingents from neighbouring towns were to march in orderly columns behind their own banners. Women and children were among the tens of thousands who came.

The authorities saw something very different. The local magistrates, who governed the district from a house overlooking the field, believed that a revolutionary conspiracy was being assembled under their noses. Rather than allow the speeches to proceed, they decided to arrest Hunt and the other leaders for unlawful assembly. For the arrests they used special constables and a troop of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a part-time cavalry formed from local merchants, shopkeepers and manufacturers, few of whom had any experience of dealing with crowds.

Shortly after one o'clock the yeomanry rode into the field and pushed towards the platform where Hunt was speaking. Accounts of what followed differ in detail, but the broad outline is not in dispute. Packed together and unable to manoeuvre, the yeomanry drew their sabres and began to cut their way through a crowd that had no room to escape. Within minutes they had seized Hunt and several of his companions. The magistrates then called in the 15th Hussars, a regiment of regular cavalry, who cleared the field at a gallop.

The cost was appalling. Eighteen people died, a few on the field itself and others in the days and weeks that followed, from sabre wounds or from injuries received in the crush. More than 650 were injured. Those who died included a small child and several women. Contemporary accounts describe the field afterwards as strewn with abandoned banners, hats and shoes, while the wounded were carried into nearby houses and public buildings.

News of the attack spread quickly, helped by the radical press. Within days a Manchester newspaper had coined the name by which the event is known: Peterloo, a bitter pun on the battle of Waterloo, fought four years earlier, where the cavalry had been the heroes. The parallel was deliberate. Soldiers who had defeated Napoleon were being celebrated, while soldiers of the same kind had charged unarmed civilians at home. The name stuck.

The government's response was to support the magistrates. The Prince Regent wrote to congratulate them, and the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, sent his approval. Parliament, meeting in the autumn, passed a group of laws known as the Six Acts, which were intended to make radical activity much harder. They restricted public meetings, gave magistrates the power to search homes for weapons, raised the stamp duty on newspapers, and provided for quicker trials. Taken together, the measures amounted to the most severe restriction of civil liberties in Britain for a generation.

Legal proceedings followed. Hunt and nine others were tried at York in March 1820 on charges of conspiracy and seditious assembly. Hunt was convicted and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and several of his companions were also imprisoned. No member of the yeomanry, and no soldier, was ever punished for what happened on the field. For radicals, the episode became an emblem of a legal system that protected the powerful and punished the poor.

Peterloo brought reform no closer in the short term. The years that followed were marked by government surveillance and by the prosecution of radical publishers, and many contemporaries concluded that the cause had been set back. Yet the memory of the field proved durable. When the Great Reform Act was finally passed in 1832, Manchester was among the towns given the right to elect its own members of Parliament.

The site itself was built over. St Peter's Fields became St Peter's Square, and for most of the twentieth century a plaque was the only public reminder of what had happened. A memorial was unveiled in 2019, two hundred years after the meeting. Long before that, the name had entered the language through songs, prints and a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1819 but not published until 1832.

Historians continue to argue about the day. Estimates of the crowd have ranged from 30,000 to 150,000, with most modern accounts settling somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000. The magistrates' motives have also been debated: some scholars accept that they genuinely feared an armed insurrection, while others maintain that they were panicked by a crowd they did not understand and used a force that no credible threat could justify.

The magic lantern was the first device in history that could throw a picture onto a screen, and for more than two centuries it was the only one. It began as a philosophical curiosity in the hands of seventeenth-century scholars, became a form of mass entertainment in the nineteenth century, and ended its life as a modest teaching aid in classrooms and parish halls.

Every lantern, from the simplest to the most elaborate, depended on the same arrangement of parts. A light source burned inside a box: a candle at first, then an oil lamp, and later the far brighter limelight and electric arc. Behind the flame stood a concave mirror, which collected rays that would otherwise have been wasted and reflected them forwards. In front of it, a condensing lens concentrated the light on the slide, a small pane of painted glass held in a wooden frame.

At the front, an objective lens threw an image of the slide onto a white screen or a wall. Because that lens inverts the picture, the slide had to be inserted upside down, so that it arrived on the screen the right way up. Ventilation mattered as much as optics: a flame inside a closed wooden box could crack the glass, so every lantern had a chimney to carry the heat away.

The first clear description of a lantern for projecting images appears in the correspondence of the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens, who set out a design around 1659 but never made it a commercial product. Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar in Rome, added a description of the lantern to the 1671 edition of his book on light and shadow, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, and was long credited with its invention, though others had certainly built the device before him.

During the eighteenth century the lantern left the study and took to the road. Showmen travelled from town to town with a wooden box, a few lenses and a bundle of slides, hiring a room at an inn or a booth at a fair and charging admission. Their audiences were country people who had never seen a painted picture of a foreign city or an elephant, and the lantern gave them both for the price of a few pence.

In the 1790s the machine acquired a new purpose: frightening people. A showman named Étienne-Gaspard Robertson opened a phantasmagoria in a disused convent in Paris in 1798. He projected his images from behind a translucent screen rather than onto a wall, and wheeled the lantern about the room, so that skeletons and ghosts seemed to rush at the audience or shrink away into the dark. A figure could be enlarged simply by moving the apparatus, so one slide might swell from a distant speck into a looming face.

The slides themselves grew more ingenious. A single painted slide could show only one scene, but a slide made of two pieces of glass could show movement. In a rackwork slide, one picture was mounted on a small carriage that the showman moved with a long lever, so that a ship rocked on the water, a windmill turned or a figure walked across a room. Rotating discs of tinted glass, spun by a handle at the side of the lantern, produced rippling patterns of colour that had no subject at all.

The most celebrated trick of the Victorian lantern was the dissolving view. Two, sometimes three, lanterns were aimed at the same screen, each fitted with a shutter that could be opened and closed by degrees. By dimming one while brightening another, the showman made one scene melt into the next. Henry Langdon Childe, working at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, refined the technique and made it the climax of the programmes given there. The Institution, which opened on Regent Street in 1838, was the most famous lantern venue in Britain.

Until the middle of the century every slide was painted by hand, which made it costly and limited what could be shown. In the early 1850s two brothers, William and Frederick Langenheim, began producing glass slides from photographic images in Philadelphia, and within a decade photographs of architecture, scenery and distant peoples were appearing in the catalogues. A photograph could record a place that no painter had visited, and it carried an authority that a drawing did not.

The lantern had always been used for instruction as well as amusement. Lecturers on astronomy and anatomy projected diagrams, missionary societies showed congregations pictures of the Holy Land, and temperance campaigners used before-and-after slides to warn of drink. Schools bought lanterns and sets of slides on history, geography and natural science, and with electric light and a slide changer worked by the lecturer, the lantern became standard classroom equipment.

Then, within a few years, everything changed. From 1896 moving photographs were shown to paying audiences in music halls and cinemas, and the novelty of pictures that moved by themselves made the lantern, in the public mind at least, old-fashioned. Lanternists adapted for a time, combining slides with short films on the same programme, but the entertainment industry moved on. The old projector survived longest where it had always been most useful, in the classroom and the parish hall, until the filmstrip and the slide projector displaced it in turn.

Every few years the proposal returns: that a visit to a castle, a cathedral, a battlefield or a museum should be an entitlement for every pupil, and that schools should be obliged to provide it. The arguments in favour are easy to state. A historic site is the past made physical; it has size, texture and smell, and it survives in a way that a chapter in a textbook does not. Yet the case for compulsion is weaker than the case for visits, and the two are not the same thing. Nor is it obvious who would enforce such a duty, or what would count as a visit.

Begin with what a good visit can do. A child who has walked round the walls of a castle, ducked through its gatehouse and looked down from its battlements has a sense of scale that no diagram supplies. The past stops being a list of dates and becomes a place where people lived and worked. English Heritage, which looks after hundreds of historic properties, admits school groups free of charge and produces teaching material to accompany a visit, on the grounds that a site can engage pupils who respond poorly to classroom work. UNESCO has promoted education about World Heritage sites since the 1990s, arguing that learning about them encourages young people to value both their own inheritance and that of other cultures.

The objections are practical. A visit costs money: coach hire, insurance, entrance fees, cover for the teachers who go and for those who stay behind, and the paperwork of risk assessments. It costs time, both in the planning and in the lessons that are lost. The staff who organise them do so in addition to a full teaching timetable. It depends on the willingness of staff to take responsibility for other people's children on a motorway. None of these difficulties is imaginary, and all of them fall hardest on schools with the fewest resources.

Then there is the question of fairness, which cuts both ways. The Sutton Trust, a charity that studies social mobility, has reported that children from lower-income families are less likely than their better-off peers to take part in cultural activities outside school. If visits are optional and paid for by parents, the pupils who would gain most are precisely those least likely to go. Compulsion alone, however, does not solve this. A compulsory trip that families must pay for is a charge on the poor, and a school that cannot afford a coach will simply be in breach of a duty it cannot meet.

The educational value of a visit also depends on what surrounds it. A day out with no preparation and no follow-up is a pleasant change of scene and little more: pupils remember the coach, the shop and the rain. Visits work when the site is prepared for in class beforehand and when pupils are given something specific to do while they are there — a sketch to make, a question to answer, a comparison to draw. Specialists in museum education make much the same point, and none of this says anything about whether attendance should be compulsory.

The strongest argument for compulsion is cultural rather than educational. The American educator E. D. Hirsch has maintained for decades that schools should deliberately transmit a shared body of knowledge, because it is the common currency that allows people from different backgrounds to understand one another and to take part in public life. On this view, a pupil who has never stood in a Norman nave or walked through a Victorian mill is missing a piece of the culture that the rest of the country assumes. The argument is powerful, but it proves less than it appears to. Hirsch's case is about what pupils should know, not about where they should learn it, and a well-taught lesson with good photographs can supply much of what a visit supplies.

There is also a question of who decides. Teachers know their classes, their budgets and the sites within reach, and they can judge whether a visit will support the work of the term or interrupt it. A national requirement fits awkwardly with local conditions. A school in rural Northumberland has Roman walls and empty moorland within an hour's drive; a school in central London has museums, docks and a palace. A single obligation to visit a historic site would mean very different things in the two places.

What, then, should be done? The sensible policy is an entitlement rather than a duty: a guarantee that every pupil will make a small number of visits during their school career, paid for from public funds so that no family is charged, and chosen by the schools themselves. Where a site is too far away, or a pupil cannot travel, a virtual tour is a poor substitute but better than nothing.

The memory of a place is a powerful thing, and it is worth giving to every child. But compulsion is a blunt instrument. A compulsory march round a ruin in the rain, organised to satisfy an inspector, may do less for a pupil's interest in the past than no visit at all. The aim should be that every pupil has the chance to stand somewhere old and look up; the means should be money and trust, not a legal duty.