both Bell and Lancaster credit, but moved from Lancaster's non-sectarian religious stance to a secularism hostile to Anglicanism. The year 1808 saw the creation of "The Society for Promoting the Lancasterian System for the Education of the Poor". A major figure in it was William Allen, another Quaker, who acted as treasurer. It went by the name Royal Lancasterian Society. According to Henry Dunn, writing in 1848, the others on the initial committee were William Corston, Joseph Foster (of Bromley), Joseph Fox, John Jackson and Thomas Sturge. This group, without Sturge, raised £5600 for Lancaster's school. Lancaster, himself, travelled the British Isles to advise on his methods. Addressing a school committee in Belfast he appeared to reduce these to a question of economy. Lancaster described a "mechanical system of education" whereby "above one thousand children may be governed by one master only, at an expense reduced to five shillings per annum". He did, however, make a stipulation, critical in the Ulster context, that pupils should never be asked whether they belonged to "Church, Meeting, or Chapel". A year in advance of his visit in 1811, two schools on his model had already been established in Ulster: in Belfast, and in Lisburn. The merits of the system was debated at length in the pages of the Belfast Monthly Magazine. The editor, the former United Irishman and founder of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, William Drennan, prefaced the discussion with the observation that "notwithstanding the public benefit from making man a machine, we cannot help thinking that the personal enjoyment gained by knowledge of reading, and figures, with the uses to which such knowledge may in future be applied, is in itself a value worth a great deal of cloth, a great many scissors, and a great many pins". Opposition The context in England for the Lancasterian school was the array of elementary dame schools (typically fee-paying), charity schools, Sunday schools (such as those set up by Robert Raikes around Gloucester) and the Mendip Hills schools run by the evangelical Hannah More. Sarah Trimmer, involved in the London area in both Sunday school and charity school work, and concerned for the evangelical Anglican parent, attacked Lancaster's use of pupil monitors in A Comparative View of the New Plan of Education Promulgated by Mr. Joseph Lancaster (1805). "A Churchman", writing to the British Critic in October 1805, commented that Granting [...] that a