Despite recent interest in both the administration and conditions of prisons in England during the Victorian Period historians have neglected the study of Scottish prisons. It is the intention of this article to redress this omission by assessing the administration of the Scottish penal system between 1840 and 1861 as it developed under the supervision of the General Board of Directors. This Board was equipped with considerable powers over local prisons by the Prisons Act of 1839, and by the time it was replaced by the Managers of Scottish prisons in 1861, it had overseen the completion of an extensive building program to implement the separate system. Working in conjunction with county prison Boards, which had raised the necessary assessments, the Board of Directors attempted to impose uniformity and efficiency in local jails while separately maintaining sole responsibility for the management of the general prison at Perth. This form of administrative structure was unique, and differed from England where local prisons were not brought under close central supervision before 1865.

South of the border the Home Office possessed no authority to enforce sanctions, but through the efforts of the prison inspectors appointed in 1835, it persuaded a number of local authorities in England to remodel or rebuild their prisons in conformity to the separate system. Some magistrates resisted the official adoption of designs and rules which often involved large expenditures they were unwilling to impose on the rate payers. Consequently, throughout the period 1835 to 1865, in contrast to the situation in Scotland, local prisons in England were marked by a lack of uniformity in construction, diet, and discipline as standards were often dictated by the views of each prison governor appointed by the magistrates. This “quest” for uniformity continued in 1865 when a Prisons Act required local jails to provide separate cells commensurate with the highest number of prisoners held there, to follow a uniform code of rules, and to enforce hard and unproductive labor. Many magistrates were still able to avoid these regulations and the victory of uniformity came only in 1877 when legislation centralized all prisons in the country and placed them firmly under the control of the Home Office. Scottish prisons had, however, since 1839 experienced some degree of centralized control that had attempted to bring uniform standards to all the jails in the country.

Reform of the English grammar school system in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries owed much to the prestigious public schools of England. Institutional instruments of cohesion, control and status, proven in the public schools, were admiringly adopted. The evolution of the grammar school involved in large measure, imitation of its upper class superiors and segregation from its working class inferiors. In an accurate reflection of public school priorities, games and games fields were the expensive symbols of emulation, distancing, ambition, and success. The reason is not hard to find. Technological competence in an industrial era was less valued than an image of gentility in a strongly hieriarchical social system. The deferential absorption by grammar schools of the athletic mores of the public schools reveals a significant cultural hegemonic process at work. A bewildering variety of autocratic headmasters of differing persuasions and backgrounds served as agents of this diffusion, assimilation, and implementation of philathletic public school values. This fact, in conjunction with support at the higher administrative level of government for extension of the public school ideal of education into state secondary schools, ensured that the model for secondary education in the first half of the twentieth century was the late nineteenth century games-orientated public school rather than the technically-orientated late-eighteenth century dissenter academy.

Rudyard Kipling thought New Zealand “last, loneliest, least.” No so its historiography. New Zealand can claim an inspired corps of scholars who are probing various aspects of the past. Austin Mitchell, scholar and parliamentarian, whimsically wrote, “New Zealand is one of the few countries having more books than history.” Amusing as this perception is, the fact remains that historians of the New Zealand experience have been pouring out an incredible stream of work—in theses, articles, and books; and this flow is not likely to be dammed in the future, as more adventuresome scholars investigate aspects of class, race, ethnicity, community, health, and related matters. A glance at the available bibliographies provides proof of the swelling stream of writing. The New Zealand Journal of History, which began publication in 1967, ranks as the principal, but by no means only, periodical publishing New Zealand history. The maturity of this journal as a vehicle for New Zealand-related scholarship is a testament to how national history has come into its professional phase, and added sophisticated perspectives and techniques to previous studies which in times past, as in other nation-states, sometimes bordered on the antiquarian.

The recent, 1981, publication of the Oxford History of New Zealand, edited by W.H. Oliver with B.R. Williams and comprising contributions from sixteen scholars, has been widely praised as a new look at the national experience, though reviewers note an internal preoccupation and an inadequate attention to external relations. Neither Japan nor Pearl Harbor is mentioned. The preoccupations and progressions are with New Zealand's society, its anxieties, conflicts, and apprehensions. Gone is the day of lauding the British connection; independence and nationhood mean self-examination even at the possible expense of introspection.